I for one think that the newsroom of the future is data driven! Optimization is not about driving towards the lowest possible common denominator, and better performance could as easily push relevance, as compared to the general idea of pushing everybody toward easy digestible celebrity news.

I’m pleased to announce that today we add a considerable resource to our existing support and self-serve channels! Yahoo Web Analytics Product Training on-Demand.

Further to this we have also added an Interactive Q&A section (Adobe Captivate) for each of the training sections. This will enable users to check their knowledge at each stage of the training, or go back and check it further down the line.

Tracking mobile activity has become, not just a nice to have feature, but a necessity in any mature Web Analytics tool. You of course know this already. Find below a set of entertaining custom Mobile reports from Yahoo Web Analytics. The numbers themselves are rather exciting actually, even though my point is, just to show you some of the Dimension you can use when doing you mobile analysis with Yahoo Web Analytics. Enjoy! :-)

The universal tag should not be an agreement in between web analytics vendors or even a forced through Web Analytics Association standard, neither should it be a vendor independent tag, developed by consultants. I suggest that web analytics vendors adopt the most popular Microformats, so that the plain vanilla tracking scripts presently in place are able to read already semantic tagged elements.

Hello everybody. Stratigent (a YWACN partner) is doing a Yahoo! Web Analytics event in New York City (actually in MY office on 18th street) next week, 1st December. Here is some of the official wording…

It seems fair to debate whether or not search engines and other content aggregators extract too much the webs value, leaving less for the content creators (originators) - if this is true, one should introduce tactics such as Search Engine de-Optimization to destress the dependency!

I have been very focused on the nirvana of e-commerce actions, the sale, but I am sure you agree with me that there are many steps and many actions before getting to this point. You can track any number of steps and any number of activities with Yahoo! Web Analytics. The tool has a few hard-coded events, however, that come right out of the box—one of them is the unique action value called PRODUCT_VIEW. The Product View variable provides you with the opportunity to expand your merchandising knowledge to activities, very close to the top of the sales funnel. In this way, you can see how often potential customers view your products, which products are the most popular, and whether a positive connection exists between product campaigns and product views.

So today sees further expansion to YWACN and I’m extremely pleased to announce an additional 20 Consulting firms have been accepted into the network - taking the total YWACN membership to 71!

Measuring and reporting on the impact of a Microsite without taking into consideration how it uniquely differs from the expected and somewhat associated parent website is an error! This white paper points to a number of analysis items which will facilitate the right mindset for Microsite analysis and reporting - if this type of thinking is not applied, you will at best provide flawed reporting to your customers and at worst suggest actions that will negatively impact the Microsite.

I am adding the finishing touch to my Microsite Analytics White Paper and I would love any feedback I can get.

Should you have the time to flip through a twenty something pages draft (let’s call it v0.95), let me know, and I’ll send you a draft-copy to look at - especially if you are at an agency and report on the effectiveness of client Microsites.