Twitter and Web Analytics - @DennisMortensen

I am almost embarrassed to say, but I caved in! :-) ... and joined Twitter. You can follow my commentary on @DennisMortensen.
I will endeavour to tweet about:

• Web Analytics
• Online Marketing
• .. and my global whereabouts! :-)

But expect me mostly luring around and following others.

Cheers
Dennis

5 minute introduction to IndexTools (Yahoo!) Web Analytics

There’s a lot of positive talk about what IndexTools (Yahoo!) Web Analytics is capable of. I created a 5 minute introduction into the features of IndexTools as an appetizer of the look and feel and some of the basic features - for those who do not yet have an account. This is not comprehensive and I will endeavour to create more detailed videos later.

This is NOT a video in which you as a web analysts should expect to get new insight, but a video that demonstrates and somewhat educates on some of the technical features within IndexTools (Yahoo!) Web Analytics.

You will see features like:

• Control Panel
• Dashboards
• Last Visitor Details (including mark on 7 second latency only)
• First time vs. Returning visitors
• Time Zones (including real-time filtering)
• Search (including real-time dimension and metric customization, through our Custom Report Wizard)
• Search (including real-time filtering on customized report)
• Alerts
• Scenario Analysis (including real-time creation without tagging and on data in retrospective)
• Date Comparison (including dual funnel visualization)
• Path Analysis
• Campaign Summary
• Merchandizing
• Visits (including real-time segmentation with multiple overlapping segments at the same time)
• Notes (he he... a short story by Dennis)

There is a whole lot more to show, but this is what I could pack into a 5 minutes introduction. :-)

Download high quality version (where you can actually see what's going on):
http://visualrevenue.com/blog/video/5-minute-introduction-to-IndexTools-(Yahoo!)-Web-Analytics.wmv



http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yelzmWK64z0

IndexTools Parting :-)

Low priority (very low actually). I was seriously thinking about how we, post closure, should amalgamate IndexTools and Yahoo from a product marketing point of view. Not necessarily an easy thing to do. However; with an image from ad:tech San Francisco and a Twitter message from Jim Sterne – transitioning becomes crystal clear! :-)

Farewell
John from Viant Capital holds up an energy drink (they were out of Red Bull’s) in front of the empty IndexTools booth at San Francisco ad:tech last week.

Salutation
Jim tweets a greeting invitation for the NEW me at Emetrics San Francisco - shows up in the next couple of weeks.



Besides those two splendid (and one really hilarious) inputs – what more do we need?

See you all at Emetrics San Francisco, and if Jim isn’t applying enough persuasion for you to go... Red Bull’s are on me! :-)

Cheers
Dennis, COOish at IndexTools

IndexTools (Yahoo!) Web Analytics goes FREE!

Hi there, a bit of news for you who follow the Yahoo! IndexTools integration steps. But first, THANK YOU very much for all the positive feedback I received in blog comments, separate blog posts, emails, phone calls etc. I truly appreciate that.

Summary:
Yahoo! currently intends to provide the IndexTools Web Analytics service FREE of charge to clients and partners who accept the standard Yahoo! agreement.

Today we will communicate that we’ll require our partners and clients to accept a new standard Yahoo! agreement and that Yahoo! (we) currently intends to provide the service FREE of charge to clients and partners who accept the Yahoo! Agreement. It is however important to note that our clients and partners must accept this agreement to continue using the service.

I think this is a fair tradeoff for an Enterprise class Web Analytics system?

Further to this, it should be noted that Yahoo! (I should probably teach myself to say - we - at some point) does not intend to add any new partnerships or direct clients in the short to midterm, while we prepare for the next rollout wave. This means that our current partners and clients will be in a unique position to either provide a service or use a service to which the rest of the market will not have ready or immediate access.

Very exciting isn’t it? .. :-)

For those of you who know me or heard me evangelize IndexTools as essentially 80% of the functionality of Omniture for a fraction of the cost – have to get used to the NEW NEW; 80% of the functionality of Omniture for FREE! ;-) he he...

Cheers
Dennis R. Mortensen

Yahoo! acquires web analytics company IndexTools

Over the past almost 4 years, I have been fortunate enough to be able to make a lifetime's worth of announcements for IndexTools... Today however, is probably the most exciting of them all.

We (IndexTools) agreed to be acquired by Yahoo!. Wonderful news! :-)

A very big thank you to everybody who believed in us along the way, I honestly appreciate the trust and I am truly in debt (I will pay that back in free Red Bull’s when we meet up around the world)... and now it is obvious why we’ve looked a tad stressed lately.

I am personally VERY excited about our next steps and have positively agreed to stay onboard as the Director of Data Insights at Yahoo! – so there is no escaping me. My new function will very much be around driving and evangelizing the Analytics strategy for Y!, so envision a more commercial version of Avinash or a less British version of Ian or the nemesis of Omniture if you will... ha ha.

I will also keep blogging on this VisualRevenue blog (feed) and will return with more information on Analytics under Y! auspices as soon as the storm settles, but you are most welcome to leave me a comment, write me an email or give me a call if you want to chat.

AND finally - so that we all agree, this is definitely not a farewell, but an aggressive HELLO. However; the blue company colour is likely to change to purple though ;-)

Cheers ...

Dennis R. Mortensen
COO “IndexTools” ...


Links:

• How Yahoo! buying IndexTools changes Web Analytics (Eric Peterson, April 9th)
• The official Press Release

Recency Bias in Web Analytics

Summary:
Recency Bias in Web Analytics consistently lead to bad decisions and in worst case unfortunate overreactions! Overcome this widespread web analyst error in thought by first and foremost being aware of the bias existing - and install a rule set for critical thinking.

Biases are flaws in the way we reason and it cause us to make errors - and it is a verified fact that we place a disproportionate value on recent events (the Recency Bias) than to those events at the beginning or the middle of an observation. You know this in simple scenarios such as feeling really good about email as an online campaign channel, two days after the quarterly newsletter was sent out, which of course is a dreadfully biased feeling. This is not just a comical thinking defect, but a serious problem as the days of winging online marketing campaigns with great return on investments are long gone. The only way to win in online marketing today, being superior in comparison to your competitors, is to outthink them.

All that said, in a headline hungry society, people in general exacerbates the downside prospective of the recency bias, but it is even harder to beat this bias when we are presented with the positive effect of recency around the Internet as in e.g. Google Organic Ranking, Technorati Ranking etc. Therefore, more than ever, we should stress the importance of applying a rule set for critical thinking when working to overcome the Recency Bias.


Rule set for critical thinking
– overcoming the Recency Bias.

• Be critical
• Be empirical
• Be rational

Be critical
Be very critical towards your own conclusions, and this might sound undemanding and effortless, but it actually requires extensive experience in identifying the extent of one’s own ignorance. You become a whole lot less biased if you are intellectually humble – and if this is not within your character, practice this when you are by yourself. :-)

Note:
A great exercise is recalling previous beliefs that you once held strongly (and we all have that), but now reject and at best almost find embarrassingly naive. If you are out of suggestions, think about how you did online campaign attribution five years ago or how you did web site testing 5 years ago.


Be empirical
Let the data (the experiment itself) guide you, not the hypothesis you set to begin with. It is extremely important that you experiment where you do not know and that you make sure to read the numbers for what they are – we are all eager to force a complex situation (reality) into our somewhat simplified models.

Note:
A great way of building an empirical attitude is to simply ask your visitors what they think about a given hypothesis – it will also, quite interestingly conclude whether it was a question worth asking to begin with.


Be rational
Rationality and reason should be our key methods used to analyze any data set. And as a comment to that - the recency bias can result from an excess of information, disabling rational thought, where the solution should be to eliminate data that is not needed to conclude or cannot be acted upon. Information that cannot be acted upon simply distracts and should be avoided at any point. This is of course a general rule of thumb in Web Analytics.

Note:
Applying context is a fair initiative in being rational (not acting in a biased manner). And a great way to reduce the Recency Bias applying context is through data visualization like Sparklines - which you saw introduced with e.g. Google Analytics in the latest version. I wonder if this was to reduce the Recency Bias though – perhaps Avinash can elaborate on that when we meet next. :-)



Example on Recency Bias in Web Analytics
I honestly believe we on a regular basis are biases in our decision making, I also believe that we are unfairly presented with results in a biased environment, making it even harder to overcome. And a typical example of the Recency Bias in action is what we see in the use of Dashboards. Where my objection to most executive dashboards is that they tend to show only current values of a few metrics, taken completely out of context, and with little or no history applied to them.

Take the following Gauge (which to begin with, is a poor dashboard visualization form, in anything but real-time environments):



25% Paid Search visit to sale Conversion Rate (bear in mind, that this is in fact a real Dashboard item from a client of ours). To me - this sounds pretty damn fantastic – and it is presented in green and all, so it must be “good”. So what am I, as an executive, supposed to think now? Other than Paid Search is it!

Beyond the obvious – that this is clearly a way of presenting data in a recency biased environment - you as the analyst greatly intensify the recency bias and lets management feed on it by communicating at this level. Both the analyst and the executive are destined to overreact in an environment like that.

Now go back and apply critical thinking; be Critical, be Empirical and be Rational!


Conclusion
Awareness of the Recency bias is not always enough to stop us from making bad decisions or unfortunate overreactions, but by applying a rule set for critical thinking we provide an opening for us to be cautious in the conclusion we draw.


Side note:
Another really exciting bias (actually somewhat depressing though) is the one brought up by Nassim Nicholas Talib in his books Fooled by Randomness and in particular The Black Swan, where he concludes that we tend to focus on what we know, as opposed to what we do not know.


Cheers
Dennis

Alex Cohen interviews Dennis R. Mortensen on SEO and Analytics (+3 SEO Tips)

This being the third low priority post in a row, turning it from hello magazine for nerds, into a Danielle Steele miniseries and now into an Interview Saga... I did an interview with Alex Cohen over at Search Marketing Gurus on the matters of SEO and Analytics the other day; Titled (funny enough): SEO, Analytics and Dennis Mortensen.

If you do not have the time to click through, find my three SEO measurement and optimization tips from the interview below:



SEO Tips:

1.
Optimize towards true company objectives, whether that be Revenue, Profit, Customer Lifetime Value etc. Don’t do the #visit optimization, as that will very likely do more harm than good.

2.
Coordinate your SEO and SEM efforts and look at a combined ROI – as they are highly intertwined.

3.
Optimize beyond your own controlled site content, optimize on uncontrolled off site content as well. Essentially help good customer advocates rank better. This is a dangerous activity, but for those brand and service confident enough, it is a powerful activity.

dennis :-)