Web Analytic Matt

What Makes a Good Web Analytics Consultant?1
Matt Hopkins posted in Web Analytics, Consultancy on June 22nd, 2007

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I have been a web analytics consultant for some time now and during my consultancy engagements I have learned a lot which I thought would be quite useful to someone wanting to enter into the market as a web analytics consultant. Recently I have seen the web analytics market explode with independant consultants, mainly US based but I know that there is certainly a growing demand for independant consultancy.

What Makes a Good Web Analytics Consultant?
In my opinion a good consultant needs the following skills:

• Be able to listen - this is a key skill that will save you many hours or back tracking, just listen to what the customer wants, not what you think they want. Assumptions are the root of all evil.
• Take into account other people’s suggestions - being thrust into a company that you don’t know means that you will need to take other suggestions on board. you may know best practises, but company employees know their business and are more likely to understand the ramifications of major process changes.
• Be able to take control - as a consultant people look to you to lead and so you must be able to manage projects and small teams of people when the time calls for it.
• Communication to all levels of people - being able to speak to someone on their wavelength is a great ability, whether they be top level management or at the day to day operations level.
• Present - web analytics consultants must always be able to present themselves, their company and most importantly their solution in a manner that is well understood by the entire audience. Rarely simple task.

These are my thoughts on what it takes to be a web analytics consultant, but for general consultancy take a look at another great article on how to be a consultant.

SEM Magazine: Search Marketing Standard1
Matt Hopkins posted in Search Engine Marketing on June 20th, 2007

I recently received my first copy of Search Marketing Standard, a hard-copy magazine about the issues of search engine marketing. After reading it from cover to cover I knew that I should share the very existence of this magazine to you, my blog readers.

Now, I receive a number of magazines on a monthly basis about online marketing and computing in general but this one stood out for me. Where all the other magazines would comment on whats happening in the industry and basically take a ’sitting on the fence’ view, Search Marketing Standard actually contains real content. I’m talking about articles like ‘Think before you link…bait’ which talked about link baiting (the process of writing content with the aim of lots of people linking to it), but there was an actually methodology in there not just someone saying “Yeah, link baiting is good because blah blah blah”. The article on optimising your pay-per-click campaign was equally informative, giving real information that you could take away and use instantly to improve your PPC marketing efforts.

And its because of this great content that I think they deserve a special mention in this post. However I did notice that there is no section on Web Analytics, which I think is becoming an integral part of any online marketing strategy. So maybe I might be able to write a column for them on Web Analytics in an upcoming issue???

Either way I think it’s certainly worth getting hold of a copy.

Web Analytics as a Marketing Tool: Scorecards0
Matt Hopkins posted in Web Analytics, Visitor Segmentation on June 16th, 2007

We should all know that to do web analytics for web analytics’ sake is not a good thing, all those numbers, a few words, but without meaning they are pretty useless.

As a web analytics consultant I like to find ways in which web analytics data can be used in new and interesting ways to assist in making better business decisions.

This is where I introduce the concept of scorecards, banks and lending institutions use a method called credit scoring to identify people who they consider to be eligible for receiving credit. The way this scoring works is to take a number of factors about each person, such as their gender, age, employment status and where they live. They then apply a value to each factor, so if the person is below 25 years old then they get a score of 1 for age. If they are employed and have a salary of over 30K pounds then they may get a score of 15 for employment status. Add all these scores together and you get a scorecard per person.

Each person’s scorecard then has an overall score which determines how eligible they are for credit and how much credit. Now, currently in web analytics we have the concept of visitor segmentation which takes different visitor behaviours as differentiating factors but I’m not aware of a product that allows scoring of these factors in a similar way to scorecards.

So, what is the benefit of scoring website visitors and what should we score them on?
In my opinion the main thing website visitors do is view pages, or on web 2.0 sites they may trigger events. So let’s say that we apply a score to certain pages or events. If we use the example of an e-commerce site where books are sold, a search result page could have a score of 1, a book description page may have a score of 2 and the sign up page for the latest books email newsletter can have a score of 5.

Now when we take a site visit that includes 2 searches, a view of a book description page and a sign up for the newsletter the total score for this visit is 9. If a visit consists of only 4 searches then the total score is 4.

In this example the same number of page views were present but because we score each of the page views, we know that the initial visit was worth more than the latter visit. This also means that we can group visits together by their score and find out commonalities between high scoring visits and also low scoring visits.

Also there is no reason why we can’t use this technique to filter out website spiders when using log file analysis, because spiders will want to visit every page so they will have outrageously high scores.

Whatever you decide to use this technique for, you will need to decide which pages to score, what the scores will be for each page and the thresholds for visit/visitor scores you are interested in.

Industry News: Web Analytics Research, New Book and Web Analytics Wiki2
Matt Hopkins posted in Web Analytics on June 6th, 2007

I felt the need to share some important stuff that’s happening in the web analytics industry at the moment.

The first thing is that a guy called Eric Peterson has put out a survey to the industry and the industry has responded. Luckily for us the results of the survey have been published.

Points of interest in this suvery are:

• 82 percent of respondents say web analytics is poorly understood in
  their organizations and that the majority of people interacting with web
  data do not understand what the data means
• 56 percent say web analytics is difficult, despite the majority of
  respondents having at least two years of experience with these technologies
  and 23 percent having more than five years of experience
• 50 percent of respondents report having considered looking for a new
  job in the last six months

The next interesting thing is the release of the long awaited web analytic book by Avinash Kaushik which you can purchase from all good online book shops or through my Amazon link.

The final thing of note is the new wiki which has been set up especially for web analytics. I’m not too sure about this as we seem to be splitting off web analytics from other Search Engine Marketing technologies more and more, not too sure if this is the right thing to do but this wiki may well become a source of good information on the topic.

Thats it for now except that there is a new girl in town calling herself the Web Analytics Guru, feel free to share your thoughts regarding this new wiki, is it the right thing to do???

Top 6 Ways To Identify Click Fraud3
Matt Hopkins posted in Web Analytics on June 5th, 2007

What is Click Fraud?
When you have a Pay-Per-Click online marketing campaign with an orgnisation such as Google Adwords, Overture or Miva you will receive visitors through these adverts and on to your website. Typically you will pay for every click that is made on your advert and the website that hosts your advert will receive a share of the revenue, along with the ad providor.

Click Fraud is when someone increases the number of clicks you get on your advert through fraudulent means such as creating a robot script or just getting lots of people to click the advert. The idea being that it can generate revenue for the website that is hosting your advert and/or cause the advertiser a fraudulent loss of income.

How to Stop Click Fraud
Below is a list of how you can identify when you are a victim of click fraud.

1. Install a web analytics package to monitor the traffic through your PPC campaigns
2. Track your PPC campaigns accurately in order to identify which ones are being abused
3. Look for spikes of traffic coming from each of your campaigns
4. Analyse the geographic location of our PPC traffic ensuring it is coming from the countries specified by your PPC campaign
5. Look at the bounce rate of your PPC campaigns, if you receive lots of traffic that mostly bounces then either your landing page needs work or you’re a victim of click fraud
6. Look at other measures of quality for your PPC traffic including total time on site and the page views : visits ratio

If you have an opinion on click fraud and how you identify it, please share your thoughts by adding a comment below.