Increasing your website's conversion rate

This Blog Has (Finally) Moved

2007-04-18T11:02:00.000-04:00

It only took forever, but I moved my Conversion and Web analytics blog to www.lunametrics.com/blog. You can go there and read about all the changes we made at the same time to improve our conversion rate (which ironically, doesn't matter now that we are so busy. My spouse wants to know when I get a life again.)

I moved to WordPress because being on Blogger got more painful every day. I was getting all sorts of link love here, and really wanted it at the LunaMetrics site.

I have a ton of kinks to iron out. The biggest problem will be that Blogger doesn't support 301 redirects, so I will lose all that link love, and have to build it up again. I hope my friends will change my url in their blogrolls.

Just about everyone who has subscribed to the blog will automatically get the new blog (Thank you, John Zeratsky -- what do bloggers do when they don't have personal friends at Feedburner? And I really do plan on being in Chicago soon and taking you out for a drink again.) If by chance you subscribed using the very basic feed string (whatever that is called), lunametrics.blogspot.com/atom.xml, then you really do need to resubscribe, http://feeds.feedburner.com/lunametrics-blog. (But you can just click on the buttons on the blogsite, that will do the trick.)

Finally, late last night, I called my hosting company. "I think your Apache server is down," I said to them. "I can't get my new blog or my new site, just the old .asp one." Well, the guy said, I see it just fine. Ultimately, I had to reboot. I'm sorry. Thanks to Benry for pointing this out (I thought it was just me.) I'm sure that Steve will tell us why.

Robbin
Lunametrics

ps I really do have that next filters post written.

The Ultimate Hero Shot: Your picture

2007-04-14T13:49:00.000-04:00

Do you ever start to leave question and then delete it?

(Technically speaking, Bryan Eisenberg posed this question to me in a bar two weeks ago. But he was really talking about user engagement, and I am talking about getting customer service sites to convert.)

So it is Saturday, and I am supposed to be doing financial stuff for my company and my family. Quicken and Quickbooks are not always my friends, though. For the first time, I decided to leave a comment about how unhelpful the Quicken help can be. I was absolutely shocked to click on the "Did this help you?" button and get this picture:

... with the words, "Hi, we're responsible for your feedback." And it really made me feel like someone was going to read and care about it. I especially love the way they did the photography, it was just a group photo of colleagues. Prettier and more professional isn't always better, I think (would have loved to see the results of that test.)

Robbin
LunaMetrics

Filters for GA, part 2: What do we have here?

2007-04-12T08:14:00.000-04:00

Filters are hard when you don't know why to use them, when you don't know how to use them, and when you don't know which ones to use. I'll start with the end, which ones to use when. Even understanding what you have available can be confusing. Note: even though this may seem like an easy topic, there are some interesting things here.

At the "top level," are three predefined filters plus the ability to create custom filters:

Exclude all traffic from a domain

Exclude all traffic from an IP address

Include only traffic to a subdirectory

Custom

Then, within custom filters, there are five other kinds of filters:

Include

Exclude

lowercase

UPPERCASE

Search/Replace

Advanced

But wait! you are saying. What about Lookup table? Sorry, it is not supported at this time. Don't you think the idea of showing something you can't do is ridiculous? But no one asked me.

In any case, not all custom filters are advanced filters. (I can't wait to get to Custom Advanced filters, but that is not today.)

I put the first three in boldfaced to point them out. They are the most predefined (or if you like, out of the box) filters that we have, and the ones I will write about today.

Now, let me go through them and talk about when you would use them. (By the way, Michael Harrison at ROI Solutions wrote a nice summary of filters for GA in January.

Exclude all traffic from a domain and exclude all traffic from an IP address are two different ways to not include traffic. Mostly, I see them used to get rid of your own traffic, your web developer's traffic, your website marketing firm's traffic. So why use one versus the other?

Well, I'll use me as an example. Although my company is lunametrics.com, our domain is really our ISP, Speakeasy. And I don't want to exclude all Speakeasy traffic, because that means, I will have excluded everyone else from there.

So IP address would seem to be a better choice. (To get your IP address, type "what is my IP address?" into Google, and you'll probably get the answer in the first hit.) On the other hand, every time I log in at Starbucks, my IP address changes. And my domain still wouldn't be LunaMetrics, it would probably be T-Mobile. Or something like that.

So on the off chance that I haven't already given enough publicity to this workaround: my favorite answer for a small company is to use this workaround, called "Count me Out!.

However, the Count me Out! workaround is not where you want to go with large companies. It's hard to get 25 people to go to a site and type in a specific word (I even had a customer who reprogrammed it so that the word was already there and all they had to do was hit "enter", and I still don't think I have everyone out of the data. Imagine doing it with a 25,000 person company?) With a large company, you might as well get the IP addresses and take them all out of the data. (But wait, you are thinking, they are a large company, can't I just use domain name? Well, do a domain lookup [type in "domain lookup" to get a tool), and give the tool one of the big company's IP addresses. Do you get their company name or do you get Verizon?)

Finally, in the category of "out of the box" filters is: Include only traffic to a subdirectory. That enables you to see just the traffic that is going to just a part of your website. You could also achieve the identical results with a custom include filter, but that one has to wait until tomorrow.

Of course, you should try all your custom filters on separate profiles, like I wrote about earlier in the week. And a separate profile is just about required for the include all traffic to a subdirectory, because if you put it on your good, "prodution" profile, you will lose all the information about the traffic not going to that subdirectory.

Many thanks to Nick and Helen for their help. They didn't read any of this, so the mistakes are mine, mine, all mine. Coming next: when to use custom filters.

Robbin
LunaMetrics

Thank yous, blogging lunch and more

2007-04-11T17:28:00.000-04:00

Some quick notes: if you are going to be at the Emetrics Summit, we are having a table for WA bloggers on Monday. Any WA bloggers are invited, although we might need more than one table...

IE6 can be pretty bad for blogs with lines that go over the margins, I learned. Many thanks to Chris at Moody's Economy.com and Joe at More Visibility for pointing out the problem to me. I was just kind of lazy when Chris wrote me (because I go home every night and work on rethreading almost 300 posts on Wordpress, it is hard to worry about this blog too.) So Joe, you were just the fire I needed to fix the blog.

Coming soon, the next part of the multi-part series on GA filters. If you are having trouble with a filter, send it to me, I am doing so many tests that I might as well include yours too.

Robbin
LunaMetrics

SEO and Web Analytics

2007-04-10T10:57:00.000-04:00

Just imagine what it must be like to be the lone SEO working in a company that is devoted to conversion science and web analytics.

That's the situation that LunaMetrician Taylor Pratt faces. And wouldn't you know it, we have made him drink our Kool Aid. So he wrote his article for Marketing Pilgrim (they are having another SEO contest) about how much your web analytics can bring to your SEO/SEM.

I hope you will check out his article (especially because I think they rate based on traffic. I wonder if they include engagement. Comments? Diggs? Can't you wait to go to the Summit and talk more about visitor engagement? Ooh, but I digress, let's support SEOs who care about WA.)

Robbin
LunaMetrics

Filters for GA, Part I: Get Ready with Profiles and Regex

2007-04-08T23:13:00.000-04:00

I promised to write about Google Analytics (in this video). But first, I want to talk about profiles and Regular Expressions, because they will make your work so much easier.

Profiles. So you're learning about filters, and you'll probably make some mistakes. Join the crowd. But why make mistakes on the data that you've been using for a year now? Keep that "production data" holy, and experiment on a sandbox profile. Even if you think you are an expert at GA, always have at least once sandbox profile, and preferably two.

(Need to understand what profiles are? Well, certainly, you can use a profile within an account to measure a second website. But here, we aren't talking about profiles for a new website, we're talking about profiles for the same website. This is one of those concepts that is hard to understand at first, but is trivial once you get it. The idea is, you have multiple copies of your web analytics, all measuring the same thing, and if you set them up exactly the same, they will look exactly the same. However, you don't have to set them up the same -- you can keep one as your "good" copy, and the others can be used to learn. Need to learn how to configure a second profile?)

Having two clean (i.e. no filters) sandbox profiles will help you in a variety of ways: First, you don't need to worry that the other filters on that profile are messing you up somehow. Second, they both start (one with and the other without the filter) at the same time, so when you write me and ask me why your filter doesn't work, I promise I won't ask if you chose a time period that pulled in unfiltered data. Third, since you won't have taken yourself out of the data (because most people use filters for that, all except those who build special cookie workarounds), you can test it yourself doing all the strange things you'd like to check out.

Regular Expressions. Most filters require regular expressions. Now that I've gone through fourteen posts on Regular Expressions (RegEx) for Regular People (and specifically, for GA), I will be referencing that data. And if you already know it, you'll think that this filter stuff is easy, easy.

Robbin
LunaMetrics

Website Optimizer: 5 non-conversions required

2007-04-04T22:30:00.000-04:00

Did you know that you needed five non-conversions for each of your combinations in Google's Website Optimizer? Yeah, me neither.

When I was at Google last week, I was showing the results of a 72 way test to Eric, one of the engineers who is behind Google's Website Optimizer product. (In case you are not familiar with WO, it is Google's free multivariate software. It enables website owners to test multiple pieces of a page and even a funnel or series of pages to see which combinations of the variables convert the best. Read why multivariate testing is like a game of Clue.)

Well, anyway, I showed it to Eric, and he pointed out that even though we had a few combinations with greater than a 97% chance to beat the original, one variation was't even showing up in the Combinations tab. "And that's your best one so far," he said. It converted 14 out of 17 times, the dashboard proclaimed. The reason that the combination data didn't show, he explained, was that there needed to be enough data in general for that test, and there needed to be at least five conversions and (here is the part I didn't expect) five non-conversions. In the case of this particular combination, there were only three non-conversions. (17-14, right?)

So why the need for non-conversions? After all, the more conversions, the merrier, right? Well in fact, no. "It does best when the conversion rate is 50%" Eric emailed to me.

In order to begin to wrap your head around this (assuming you aren't a statistician), you have to stop thinking that conversions are good. Instead, there are two states here, a or b. Conversion or non-conversion. Heads or Tails.

So let's say that we take a finite, maybe only 20, visitors and estimate the conversion rate based on the fraction of the 20 that converted. Is that a good estimate of the true conversion rate? The holy "Law of large numbers" in statistics says that the average conversion of a finite set of visitors becomes a good estimate of the true value as the number of trials becomes large. But, the fine print in this law states that the number must be really large when the true mean (the true conversion rate) is very small (very few convert) or large (nearly all convert). In fact, for the estimate based on finite visitors to be good you need to have enough counter examples. "Counter examples" are non-conversions when the conversion rate is high, or conversions when the conversion rate is low.

I know, you want to know where they got the number five from, and why it's an absolute number and not a percent. Me too. I'm thinking that the issue is, it can't be a percent, because if you have only 20 visits, you need a high percent, and if you have 100 visits to that combination, you need a low combination. By fixing a specific amount, you make sure you get something, for both conversions and non-conversions. For both heads and tails. But that last part is speculation. Now if you want to learn something really cool about WO, go over to ROI Revolutions's blog and read Shawn Purtell's magnificent piece on the marriage of GA and Website Optimizer.

Robbin Steif
LunaMetrics

Google Analytics Training: Video

2007-04-03T11:16:00.000-04:00

Last week, I was at Google Analytics Approved Consultant training. It was so wonderful; I got all sorts of tips and tricks. As always, one learns the best stuff in between the sessions, from the other consultants. (Yet another reason to go to the Emetrics Summit.) A special thank you to Caleb Whitmore from POP -- if you divide his IQ by his age, he is absolutely the smartest yearly analyst around. (Did I just create my third KPI in the last six weeks??)

By the end of the training, we were so wiped that Justin and I just sat down to create this video. (You might have to click through to the blog site to actually see this. That's always been my own experience with other peoples' videos.)

Robbin Steif
LunaMetrics

Judah Phillips on Rich Internet Apps for Beginners, Part III of III: Unica

2007-03-31T01:19:00.000-04:00

This is Part III of a three part guest post series on how to measure Rich Internet Applications.

Judah Phillips, web analyst for Reed Publications, is joining us here to write about measuring rich internet applications (RIAs). In Part I, he wrote about what is Rich Internet? In part II, he wrote about measuring RIAs with Google Analytics. Tonight, he writes the final chapter, measuring RIAs with Unica. I pulled this into three pieces and so had to edit [see my notes inside square brackets like these] in case you hadn't already read his other pieces. Plus, I am somewhat comatose after taking the red eye back from Google Analytics training last night, so forgive me if I copy his work upside down. In any case - here is the famous Judah Phillips on measuring Rich Internet:

For those fortunate enough to have made a major investment in Web Analytics, you could [measure rich internet powerfully], if not as simply [as with Google Analytics], and within a much more focused context using a tool like Unica NetInsight. Unica NetInsight is an advanced web analytics tool for cross-channel data integration and current awareness of online behavior and demographics. It’s really neat!

Tracking RIA with NetInsight is straightforward; however, you need to page tag. What that means is that you’ll need some basic fluency in web programming or some geeks on your team. I’d recommend that you work with your developers from “phase zero” making web analytics endemic to the site development process. Ain’t that right, Eric Peterson?

A best practice for page tagging is to ensure that you have some way to centrally manage your tags, whether via a content management system (CMS), master template, include file, global footer, universal header, galactic widgetizing optimizer and so on. That way, you don’t have to manage change across the inevitable mess and disorganization caused by hard-coded page tags.

Here’s a glimpse of Unica’s page tag:

To tag a browser “event”, use a javascript function (MyEventHandler) and call the Unica NetInsight function ntptLinkTag() passing the name of the event (myevent) and any values you want (‘color” and “red” in ntptAddPair below), like this:

To track a Rich Internet Application (RIA) event, use the same procedure for tagging a standard JavaScript browser event. You’d call the ntptEventTag API function and pass extra event value information as parameter to ntptEventTag, using the ntptAddPair and ntptDropPair helper functions as necessary. Here’s what I mean:

Using NetInsight to track Flash is little more complicated. First you want to make sure the Flash is published with support for FSCommands. Talk to the geeks to find out. Then, add the Unica Page Tag to the HTML container. Now add the Unica FSCommand command handler logic to HTML. Check it out:

NetInsight enables tagging RIA in FLASH FLEX. First, call the ntptEventTag API function through fscommands. Pass extra event value information as parameter to ntptEventTag. If you want, you can use the ntptAddPair and ntptDropPair helper functions through fscommands. Here’s an example:

So there you have a few examples of measuring events and RIA using various methods in free and not-so-free software. Advanced web analytics stuff isn’t magic, it’s just the application of interdisciplinary concepts in action look magical.

To less technical web analysts, all the code may read like science fiction runes and hieroglyphics, but study up on this event tracking stuff for awhile. Ask questions to your geeky friends and colleagues. Contact your vendor (they all should be able to do something like this). Make event tracking and (and event pathing!) part of your web analytics practice and process. Use the data to reconcile engagement measures, understand content effectiveness, and drive user experience and strategy in the Web 2.0 world.

Judah Phillips on Rich Internet Apps for Beginners, Part II of III: Google Analytics

2007-03-28T07:31:00.000-04:00

Yesterday, famous guest blogger Judah Phillips of Reed Publishing wrote Part I of a three-part guess post for this blog. Part I was, What are Rich Internet Applications? Today, we have Part II, How to measure them with Google Analytics. (And the follow up will be, how to measure them with Unica.)

Before you read this post, you might want to read a post that Justin Cutroni published on Saturday night. He wrote about tracking clicks to pages where you make the name up, because you can't put the code on the page. Links that take you off the page, .pdfs, etc. It is a good basis for what Judah is going to talk about: creating page names out of thin air and then using the pretend pages to track events (and hence, rich media) in GA. So here we are, lucky again to have Judah Phillips:

Since we all know about page tags, let's get down to business with "the Google" and how it tracks "the Rich Media:"

Google Analytics enables tracking of any browser event, such as Javascript and Flash events. Those smart folks at Google have a little JavaScript function called urchinTracker() that enables event tracking. Use the JavaScript function with an argument specifying a name for the event.

For example, the function:

javascript:urchinTracker('/mysite/flashrichmedia/playbutton');

logs each occurrence of that Flash event as a page view of

/mysite/flashrichmedia/playbutton.

Some caveats:
1) Always use a forward slash to begin the argument.
2) Actual pages with these filenames do not need to exist.
3) You can organize your events into any structure or hierarchy you want.

Important: Google says to place your tracking code "between the opening tag and the JavaScript call" if your pages include a call to urchinTracker(), utmLinker(), utmSetTrans(), or utmLinkPost().

For example, if the page view is the major event and the "play" event a minor event; then, your hiearchy would be Page View > Event, where the page contains an event, such that:

/mysite/ria_bittons/playbutton
/mysite/ria_bittons/pausebutton
/mysite/ria_bittons/playbutton
/mysite/ria_clips/clip

Some example of the code (from Google Help):
on (release) {
// Track with no action
getURL("javascript:urchinTracker('/folder/file');");
} 
This one above tracks when you click and release (although technically, it just notices the release) of a flash button (and records the file you specify as a page view).
on (release) {
//Track with action
getURL("javascript:urchinTracker('/folder/file');");
_root.gotoAndPlay(3);
myVar = "Flash Track Test"
}
The second one is the same, but by using a function,
passing it a parameter, and
identifying the instance you want to track, you can measure when your file was used
in a specific scene in a little flash movie. So it is a more specific
method for handling event tracking in Flash.
onClipEvent (enterFrame) {
getURL("javascript:urchinTracker('/folder/file');");
} 
And the third one repeats the action throughout the movie so that each time the file is loaded, it gets tracked as an event. If you were to pass a unique file at the end of the movie, you could recognize it using this method (or the other methods) to know that the whole movie was watched (as long as your session doesn't time out).

Now wait until Google updates your analytics to see if it all worked.

Judah Phillips on Rich Internet Apps for Beginners, Part I of III: What is it?

2007-03-27T11:07:00.000-04:00

Before I introduce our famous guest blogger, Judah Phillips, let me explain why I wanted a beginner's intro to Rich Internet Applications.

Rich Internet (which will be defined below, I promise), is all the rage. But (IMHO) it seems like everyone says, "Here's what Rich Internet is - then some magic occurs -- now we can measure it." So I wrote Judah Phillips, one of the people who is making a name for himself in this space, and asked if he would do a guest post for this blog that really showed how to do the measurement. Today, we'll start with, what is Rich Internet? (and will get to real coding by tomorrow.)

Judah is Director of Web Analytics for Reed Business Information, an enormous publishing company. He is an active member of the Boston Internet and non-profit communities and a member of the WAA's marketing committee (that's how I know him). He will be speaking at the Emetrics Summit in San Francisco with ~~fellow analytics geek~~ Ian Houston. So here is Judah on RIA:

For Web Analytics beginners, it's not easy. All this talk about "the death of the page view," "AJAX," "rich media," "engagement," and "events" is enough to make even the most savvy Web analyst think twice about what we’re measuring these days.

So what is a Rich Internet Application (RIA) anyway, and why is it so important? RIAs are very interactive applications or web sites. Flash is a rich application. AJAX is rich. A familiar use of these kinds of technologies is Google Maps. And notice – when you use Google Maps, the name of the page doesn't change. (So now you see where all that page view death conversation comes from.) "Traditional" web analytics care about when the page name changes – they see that as an important event. Suddenly, that's changed.

It is true that with new client-side technologies, the page view is no longer the holiest of holy metrics anymore (personally I've always liked to see increases sessions and in "page views per unique visitor"). But the page view is far from dead. Rather the page view is evolving to become a type of "major" event in the Web 2.0 experience.

Now before I go on, let's remember that I don’t take the word "event" lightly. Everything that happens on a web site is an event. You click, it's an event. You fill in your name, that's an event. Measuring events is the heart of web analytics – and with Rich Internet, that event becomes harder to measure.

So, let's think of the page view as a "major" event. After all, for RSS consumers, an RSS "feed request" is just as important as a page view. The feed request is another "major event" providing our information-hungry audience with the content they need. In this "Event" paradigm, technologies like AJAX and rich media create "minor events" subordinate to the page view. These minor events could conceivably engage our visitors for longer durations (for example, the minor event of "play" on rich media video), thus maximizing opportunities for generating profitable revenue from a visit. And for maximizing our potential for analysis.

I'm hypothesizing that page views are major events in Web 2.0 and provide the context for understanding "minor events" created from widgets or AJAX or Flash or whatever.

In other words, in Web 2.0, it could be said: the page view is dead, long live the page view!

Coming tomorrow: Part II, measuring rich applications using Google Analytics.
And the next day: Part III, Part III, measuring RIA with Unica

How to Get a Job in Web Analytics

2007-03-24T10:41:00.000-04:00

Everyone knows that there aren't a lot of web analysts out there, so the idea of having to write a great cover letter to land a job might seem ridiculous. On the other hand, since there aren't a lot of web analysts out there, we want to find some great people and train them. One of our customers did that, I am so jealous of him; his analyst is incredible, with just the "teach it to me" attitude I look for.

But to cut to the chase - I am reading cover letters and resumes all the time. And, as you might guess, I write job descriptions just like I blog. Same tone. That's why I am awed at the stilted prose that comes back to me, mostly from the intern wannabes. Like this: "I am confident my experience, educational background and career goals will be an asset to your organization in achieving its objectives." The writers, especially the young ones, try so hard to act professional that it truly backfires on them, and they just end up looking ridiculous. Or perhaps just as bad, they look identical to the rest. (How do you sort out which of the many people who are sure will be assets to your organization will actually be assets?)

However, I got one cover letter that was just so great, I had to share it. This particular job description describes a for-credit summer internship where the student doesn't need to already have an analytics background (who does?). You should know that in the job description, I wrote, "In your cover letter, please explain why you love analytics and point to something in your background that makes it clear what a 'measurable marketing person' you are." So here is what the student wrote:

A personality trait of mine that I think would suit this job is my habit of analyzing everything. I like to analyze things for fun and I analyze everyday life without a choice. I usually don't like to make a decision about anything unless I have every detail I need and I can weigh out my options properly. When I was a kid I used to read the stock market section of the newspaper with my dad and compare his mutual funds, individual stock prices, their 52 week highs, and so on. ... I used to have a girlfriend that constantly complained that I over analyzed everything about our relationship. The point I am trying to get at is I pay close attention to detail and have the ability to compare and analyze information provided.

What a breath of fresh air. I hope the interview goes well. I'll keep you posted.

Robbin Steif
LunaMetrics

Your best conversion (and SEO) resource

2007-03-22T17:07:00.000-04:00

Your best conversion resource may be just one person, or an enormous group of people. Perhaps you are a tiny company with an admin who answers the phone (or you answer it yourself). Perhaps you are Lands' End, with a room the size of a football field, filled with CSRs talking to customers. Either way, you have an amazing resource that you may not have tapped.

Your customer support staff knows what keywords people use when they call, looking for a product. They know what products customers love. They know what things about your website drives customers crazy (both crazy good and crazy bad.) They understand why people can't convert and abandon carts, preferring to pick up the phone.

Hey, I did it when I made the reservation for Starwood Hotels. I already blogged once about the problem with that shopping cart, but the really awful problem was, the cart didn't recognize my Starwood number, which I had cut and pasted from Starwood's email. "Oh, it always misbehaves on the weekends," the CSR told me. Well gosh, why doesn't her boss ask her opinion?

Not that long ago, I was working with a customer on some multivariate testing. "Why don't you ask the customer service reps what they think needs to be fixed?" I asked. "We're really good about being an inclusive company," he replied (and they are, they just won an award for some kind of inclusiveness.) But after he asked them, he was suddenly snowed with ideas from the front lines.

Not only will your admin or your customer service reps have a lot of ideas (free for the taking) -- they will probably love that you asked for their help. Oh sure, someone will say, "That's your job, not mine." But I bet that for every one person who has that attitude, ten more will be flattered that you care. Just about everyone likes to know that they make a difference.

I sure do.

Robbin Steif
LunaMetrics

Regular Expressions question and GA: Search/Replace

2007-03-20T17:37:00.000-04:00

This weekend, someone send me a Google Analytics Regular Expression (RegEx) question. The answer is pretty basic but interesting, and there is something to be learned about one of my favorite tools, the Epikone RegEx Tester.

Q: Hi,

I've read most of your posts about RegEx, but I still can't manage to find the right RegEx for one of my filters in GA.

I'd like to use a "search and replace" filter for all the pages whose URLs are either / OR /index.asp (which are in fact: www.my-domain.com and www.my-domain.com/index.asp). Basically, I'd like to have all the pages with both URLs displayed as "the page name I gave" in GA reports. This is why he wants to use the search and replace filter - to give the pages his chosen name. Robbin

I have tried several expressions on the RegEx filter tester but none of those seem to work. Note to Epikone: Notice that your tool is now elevated to "the" tester of choice. Robbin

I tried this one below, but I'm not sure that what the RegEx filter tester tells me means the filter is correct or not (I don't fully understand how this tool works, especially for the "input string" and "result" fields). Here is the RegEx he is interested in:

^(/|/index\.asp)$

When I enter / in the input string, then click submit, the displayed result is Match: /,/

When I enter /index.asp in the input string, then click submit, the displayed result is Match: /index.asp,/index.asp

I don’t know what this result does mean exactly.

Could you tell me if this RegEx (^(/|/index\.asp)$) is correct regarding what I’m after, or if it’s wrong and then could you suggest me a working one ?

And here is my answer:

Robbin: Why don't you first change your default page to be just index.asp. You can do this in settings > edit > then edit again. Telling GA that your default page is index.asp will stop you from getting a page like this / . This will help you with the search and replace AND help you read your analytics more easily.

Then you can do it the simpleton's way: ^/index\.asp (You really don't need the dollar sign unless you have urls that end aspx, for example.)

I think if I were wanting to keep both / and /index.asp (a bad idea), my regex would be ^(/index\.asp)|/

It is really the same as yours, just a little simpler and easier to read.

The reason that the Epikone RegEx tester acts the way it does when you write it with parenthesis is that parenthesis tell GA, "I've created a variable." And here, you can read what Justin the Man said about their RegEx tester and creating variables, I found this in old email from him:

Justin's email: "Why our reg ex tester behaves the way it does. Our tester is pretty smart. If your expression matches the input string, then the tester will return the word 'Match' along with the part of the string that the expression matched. Now, if you are using parenthesis to store some part of the expression in a variable, the tool will return the value stored in the variable in addition to the part of the string that the reg ex matches."

There is at least one other way to do this, too. You could go into the part of the code that reads urchinTracker(), on the homepage and make it urchinTracker('homepage').

In the process of writing this, I found that there is a whole piece on the Epikone blog about how to interpret their results.

Robbin Steif
LunaMetrics

US Politics and conversion analyses

2007-03-19T20:32:00.000-04:00

After I saw this Wall Street Journal article, I decided it was time to find out what web analytics packages all these US presidential candidates and non-candidate were using. (Apologies to non-US readers.) I just used the candidates that were in the center column of the WSJ article, so that I didn't have to make decisions about who is really running and what order to put them in.

On the red side:

John McCain: No pagetagging WA
Tom Tancredo: No pagetagging WA
Rudy Guiliani: Google Analytics
Mitt Romney: SiteCatalyst

On the blue side:

Hillary Clinton: Google Analytics
Barack Obama: Google Analytics
John Edwards: Google Analytics
Dennis Kucinich: No pagetagging WA
Joe Biden: No pagetagging WA

Joe Biden gets really low marks for having a splash page. (If I hear one more customer say, "But they can click past it," I am going to be sick.) Rudy gets low marks for requiring too many fields in the email sign up (and who ever heard of a horizontal email signup?) He also wins the "hardest to find his navigation" award. Obama wins the "busiest web site" award, although he is the only person pushing social media, besides John Edwards. (Edwards has a feed on his site but Obama doesn't on his. That I could find.) Hillary's "en espanol" is very nice, and I do like her homepage (I didn't go past homepages. Too much time for no money.) I couldn't figure out why her GA was in the head if she wasn't doing anything interesting on the page. I thought it was very nice that John McCain had different sized typefaces on his site, for everyone who doesn't know that you can change your type in your browser. It didn't help change the size of his tiny, thin navigation, since it is a picture.

I went out of my way not to show my own colors on this post. Apologies if I slammed your candidate, I tried to slam them equally. And speaking of slamming -- while I can pick on little things, I was surprised at what a good job they did of making their specific values come through. Whether you like those values or not, of course.

Robbin Steif
LunaMetrics

Conversion Analysis: Shopping carts that create doubt

2007-03-11T19:29:00.000-04:00

Shopping carts should make customers feel secure about more than just their credit cards. One of the jobs of a shopping cart is to make the customer feel that he is actually paying for the product he thinks he selected.

I continually have this same problem (i.e. website-induced doubt) with shopping carts -- either they don't tell me what I am buying (so I wonder, "Gee, did I click the right button?") or they give me just enough extraneous information to put some doubt into my mind.

For example, about a month ago, I got the Quicken 2007 upgrade in the mail. It was time to upgrade, and so I started to. But when I got to the last screen, I got this screenshot:

I probably would have been okay with the "unlock" of Quicken 2007, if it weren't for the free download they threw in of Quicken Willmaker. As soon as they called Willmaker a download, I knew that the other -- the one I really cared about -- wasn't a download. In fact, only when I started writing about it that day did I figure out that I was only getting an "unlock" because I already had the software in my hands. I had to think too hard -- they needed to call it an "unlock code for your software upgrade" or something more descriptive.

Here, this one is even worse. I was making my registration at the hotel for the Emetrics Summit. It looks like a gorgeous hotel on Nob Hill, so I really wanted to stay there. I just didn't want to spent $900. So I'm going to share a room with someone, to cut costs. But, when I got to the last screen, I was told that I would pay $40 per extra person per night. Eventually, I made my reservation the old fashioned way, and the customer service rep told me that the extra person charge applied to rooms with three or more people. So either the hotel needed to remove that information, or make it clear that the information only applied to rooms with 3+ people.

Robbin Steif
LunaMetrics

Google Sprawl, and My Big WA News

2007-03-07T22:55:00.000-05:00

My company, LunaMetrics, became a Google Analytics Authorized Consultant (GAAC) last week. When I told the news to Jim Sterne, he wrote back something like, "Is that the sound of your phone ringing off the hook?" Which pretty much sums up the situation.

So it seems only appropriate that I talk about one of my favorite topics tonight (and soon it will be, this morning): Google Sprawl. (Stephen Colbert, I just want you to know that this is MY Word.) Google Sprawl is when you have way too many Google Accounts, and they are all intertwined. This happens a) because you started with Analytics back when it was hard to get an account. Now, you are measuring your customers using profiles on your own account instead of on their accounts. Then, you let one of those customers invite you into his AdWords using that email account. Oh what a mess. b) Google Sprawl also happens when your customers have a My Client Center (MCC) on Google AdWords and they invite you in to their Client Center before you get one of your own. Then, you take the test to become an AdWords professional using that Client Center (all the while thinking, "I don't remember thinking ahead and setting this up!") Suddenly, you are stuck with the task of kicking one of your best customers off of her own account. ("You can still get at the data," and "MCC is really for consultants" don't feel like great excuses when confronting that kind of task.) c) It happens when you stupidly tell Google to put your Website Optimizer in your MCC (it doesn't work there). d) It happens when the customer invites you into their AdWords using one email name, but you, unfortunately, change the email address you want to use. Which may make it hard to access their Website Optimizer.

So take it from someone who has made every Google Sprawl mistake in the book. There is an easy way, three-step way around this all if you plan it out. Step #1. Use one, not-very-well-known email account and put all your own Analytics, AdWords and Website Optimizer under that account. #2) Use your well-known email name to create a My Customer Center (MCC) where you can invite customers in and access both their Analytics and their AdWords. Step #3) When your customer gets Website Optimizer, always use his account instead of your own, because then you can both look at the data. But you won't be able to use your MCC (see Google Sprawl Mistake C above), so go create another gmail account, like customername@gmail.com, and get a "hard" addition to their account. The better to access WO.

Robbin Steif
LunaMetrics

Read my guest post (on Eric Peterson's blog)

2007-03-06T08:02:00.000-05:00

I loved Eric Peterson's recent excellent post about the gradual building of context, but disagreed with his conclusions. I worked with him on the phone to discuss the issues and then tried to write something here. However, it required too much background for any of this blog's readers who might not already be following what he writes about.

So, I hope you will read my guest post on Eric's blog. (We even named a metric in my honor...)

Robbin Steif
LunaMetrics

Anatomy of a Conversion

2007-03-05T23:51:00.000-05:00

Whenever a potential customer converts into a lead, I always look to see, how did they find out about us? (Well okay. Sometimes I am better than others. Especially when a lot of customers convert and then I just want to see trends.)

But it was a weekend. Quiet. So when one of the conversions came through, I went to my Google Analytics to learn who he was and how he found out about us. I started by looking at Marketing> visitor segment performance> geo location and saw that the conversion was in the US (go figure.) I kept drilling down by hitting the plus sign until I learned that the conversion came from Delray Beach. (Notice the 100% under the G1, Goal 1, next to Delray Beach.)

Then I segmented by Source to see where he came from, and it was a link from my blog! So I went into my blogalytics and did the same analysis, looking for the Delray Beach visitor, but this time, when I segmented by referring source, it was a search from Google.

Above you see how I do the segmentation, and below you see the result:

So I did the same keystrokes, looking at all the visitors from Florida, but this time, segmented the Delray Beach visitor by keyword. He had typed in, "website conversion funnel."

Hmm, I thought, I didn't even know that LunaMetrics ranked for that term. So I tried it in Google, and after I signed out, I saw that my blog (but not my site) came up on page one.

At this point, I felt like I was on a mission. I went over to ClickTale, which I installed on my blog but almost never use. (For those of you not familiar with it -- it tapes the user session.) I rarely use it because I don't learn much from it and it takes a lot of time. Mostly, I watch people scroll and it gets very tiresome, very quickly. But this particular one was fascinating, not because he did so much (he mostly scrolled), but I was able to see where he scrolled quickly (not interested) and where he took his time.

So now, I know that the customer is from Delray Beach, Florida, he is concerned with website conversion funnels, he read my six most recent posts on my blog as well as my post on "What Do Web analysts Do All Day Long?," he completely skipped all the fun parts in my "Dear Sexy Web Analyst" post and went right to the Google Analytics. What he read was interesting enough to check out my site, and what he saw on my site was interesting enough to submit a form. And then I met him on the phone today. Sort of like Phil Kemelor's 2x2 matrix -- here was someone that I know both online and offline.

Robbin Steif
LunaMetrics

eBook: Intro to Web Analytics

2007-03-03T14:14:00.000-05:00

Eric Peterson's free webcast for Web Analytic beginners is coming up, this Tuesday, March 6. So this also seemed like a good time to (finally) write about Phil Kemelor's almost free ($25) e-book, Intro to Web Analytics. Phil, remember that most PR is good PR. And then when you get to the end of this post, remind yourself again.

I couldn't get ten pages into the .pdf without strongly disagreeing with some of Phil's basic premises:

1) I disagree when you write: "For your organization’s Web site, there is only one metric that matters: How much money is it making?"

Yes, Phil, you are often right -- most websites are ultimately about making money or saving money, directly or indirectly. But more and more, people create websites just to change the world. Look at Wikipedia. Sure, you can argue that they accept donations now and need to measure that. But their donations are ancillary to their real goals. I'll bet that their website's most important metric is, "Did we help people today?" or "Did more Wikipedians feel like they are a member of our community?" OK, maybe you don't like that example. So, how about Mozilla? Sure, they have a few revenue streams too, but I'll bet that they use them only to stay afloat and pay for their server and executive directory. Like Wikipedia, the vast majority of their "employees" are volunteers, and their goals are not financial. So, Phil, when you write, "The purpose of your web site is to make money or save money," I just have to disagree.

2) I disagree when you give a list of ten lousy reasons for people to avoid measuring and testing their site.

Yes, you are right -- there are no good reasons to avoid measuring your site. At a very basic level -- with the server side analytics package provided by your web hosting company -- it is simple and free. But testing is different. I created this post on Increasing your Conversion rate for $1524, and the largest cost went to testing. Sure, you can do user testing for an hour or so (one day I user tested a landing page through three airports and two plane rides). You get awesome qualitative data and it helps you locate major problems. On the other hand, there are lots of things people just won't tell you. Plus, how significant can it be when you are doing user testing with five people?

So when someone says (and now I am quoting from your e-book), " "It will cost us too much to measure and analyze site use," they are really saying, "We don't get enough value from our website to invest a thousand (or ten thousand) dollars in it." This is exactly how I feel about my company's brochure. Resources are always constrained, and companies have to invest where they get the highest return. Websites make your business happen. Websites make my business happen. But one size doesn't fit all.

On the other hand, I read all the way to page 70 without disagreeing again, and by that time, it was just a technicality. So, for twenty-five bucks, pick up a copy of Phil's ebook and see if I am wrong.

Robbin Steif
LunaMetrics

When your AdWords don't talk to your Analytics

2007-03-02T18:08:00.000-05:00

So you did everything Google told you to do, but you can't get your AdWords to talk to your Google Analytics.

This question came our way this week, and it was interesting, because I just went through the same problem myself. So here is some advice.

Problem #1) You want to link AdWords and Analytics, but when you follow their directions, you don't get an "I already have Analytics" option.

I learned this one the hard way. Because you can only have one AdWords account associated with your GA account (even though you might have multiple Analytics profiles and even be able to look at multiple Analytics accounts), you have to unlink the old AdWords account so you can get the one you really want. However, unlinking is fraught with problems. (Thanks Justin, for teaching this one to me.) In fact, Google even says, if you want to unlink, contact us (use their contact form, they are pretty responsive.)

Problem #2) You successfully linked AdWords and Analytics, but you don't see your campaigns.

This can be caused by autotagging turned off. You might have your autotagging turned off so that you can tag your AdWords just the way you want, but you have to tag them all. If you want to turn it back on, it is in AdWords, under My Account > Account preferences.

Problem #2a) You successfully linked AdWords and Analytics, you have autotagging turned on, but you still don't see your campaigns. Or maybe, you see some of them, but not all of them.

When you see some but not all (and you have autotagging turned on), that's a red flag -- you don't have Google Analytics installed on the landing page. "But wait," I can hear you say, "I have my Analytics in a file that automatically gets copied to every page on my website." Yes, I work with a customer like that, and two (count 'em, one-two) of her campaigns landed on very specific landing page, stripped of all navigation and include files. Hence, stripped of Google Analytics.

Problem #3) No, none of those are the problem. Your account was never linked to another AdWords Account, you have auto-tagging turned on, you have analytics on your landing pages. This was the problem that came to me this week. Finding the problem was real gumshoe work and it was exciting to discover it.

Here's what happen. I was getting ready to send it to someone on high, but decided to have one last look. I wanted to be sure he had GA on his landing pages. And then I noticed that he did have code installed -- but he was running two different Google Analytic accounts. The account that was used from his landing pages was nothing like the account for the rest of his site. (I mean, the numbers, like this: uacct="UA-10005-8") So yes, there is a Google Analytics account somewhere, someplace, that is reading the AdWords, but the other account, the main one, can't see that the clicks are coming from AdWords. And isn't the whole idea to be able to see it in one place and then make decisions based on your data?

Robbin Steif
LunaMetrics

Wanted: WA jargon and acronyms

2007-02-27T23:01:00.000-05:00

I recently had this conversation with a friend who doesn't do the Internet for a living -- reminding me that I have to do a post on jargon (and need your help -- read on):

Robbin: You know that whole series of posts I wrote on Regular Expressions and Google Analytics?
Friend: Right, I remember you telling me about it.
Robbin: I just got the nicest email, telling me how helpful the posts were to learn about RegEx.
Friend: What's RegEx?

So, I am going to create a lexicon of web analytic words. Not real words, like "conversion" and "page views" and "hits." No, you can get all that in Web Analytics Demystified. Instead, I'd like to put together the phrases you hear all the time and just don't understand. They should make sense, they just don't... (For example, one person sent me "WOW" and told me that it meant "Week over week." Someone else sent me "clickstream analysis" vs. "pathing analysis." That kind of stuff.)

So please send me any gobbledygook (sp?) that you hear. I'm especially interested in slang, or two ways of saying something that sometimes seem the same and sometimes seem different. Acronyms. You don't have to show off what you don't know in public; you can just send email to my last name at lunametrics.com or to info.

Robbin Steif
LunaMetrics

"Dear Sexy Web Analyst"

2007-02-26T23:12:00.000-05:00

Even web analytics have "their moments."

When I got to work today, I turned on my laptop and started reading my email. The subject line was very tame, "Status: miniFEA users." (FEA stands for Finite Element Analysis.) But this is how the email message went:

Dear Sexy Web Analyst,

I will be submitting a report to the National Science Foundation. If I could include a sentence or two on the use (and growth of use) of the miniFEA program that would be great.

Can we look at it briefly tonight?

I am sure that appropriate compensation can be found.

Your appreciative client.

Professor Paul S. Steif

I spent quite a few minutes trying to come up with a response that was equal to his email message. Finally I wrote, "Yes, we can do both of those things tonight."

However, the analytics took longer than I thought. As soon as I got into them, I saw that the page I had designated as a goal page looked like this over time:

Clearly a broken tag -- it broke on August 8, six months ago. I had to do all sorts of Excel exporting and graphing of less important pages to get a proxy for the traffic.

From this we learn, look at your web analytics fairly often (so that you can catch stuff like this.) Lecture your web developer that you will one day care about your WA, so please don't break tags, and be especially careful (dear web developer) with sites and pages that don't allow you to just throw the analytics into an include file. And finally, don't send email like this to your wife if she is a blogger.

Here was the final comment of the evening:

My spouse: I can't believe you are going to publish that. I am supposed to be a serious academic. My cover will be blown. That wasn't even what I was shooting for.

Gotta go --

Robbin Steif
LunaMetrics

Regular Expressions for Google Analytics: OK, I did it

2007-02-23T22:26:00.000-05:00

I was finally inspired by Alan, who reads this blog using his Blackberry on the Paris Metro. (Truly a world wide web.) Also inspiring were the comments of an anonymous poster, who wrote that all the Regular Expressions (RegEx) posts were incredibly helpful, but couldn't I please make them easier to access? So I did it, they are all beautifully threaded now. I even fixed awful typos in the Summary/Intro post and the ^ post (and you know, typos are the worst when you are a newbie learning a technical topic, you can spend hours trying to understand a topic, only to finally learn that the author was just lazy.)

Backslashes \
Dots .
Carats ^
Dollars signs $
Question marks ?
Pipes |
Parentheses ()
Square brackets []and dashes -
Plus signs +
Stars *
Regular Expressions for Google Analytics: Now let's Practice
Bad Greed
RegEx and Good Greed
Intro to RegEx"

Robbin
LunaMetrics

Web Analytics for Beginners, Part I

2007-02-21T12:24:00.000-05:00

I wrote an article for the Pittsburgh Technology Council on WA for Beginners -- it was just published. Even though I wrote it, I think they own the copyright, so I will just start it here and let you click through if you are interested:

Use those Boring Web Analytics to Improve your ROI

Web analytics are the statistical packages that measure your Web site traffic. You may think of them as boring or useless. However, data-smart companies are using their analytics to increase their Internet traffic and to turn more browsers into buyers (or into leads).

Where do I get Web analytics from? Chances are, you already have them.... {Read the rest of the article on their site.}

Robbin Steif
LunaMetrics

11 Reasons you should go to the Emetrics Summit

2007-02-17T15:00:00.000-05:00

I could have spent the whole day writing about why one should go to the Emetrics Summit in San Francisco, May 7-10. But life calls, and so I have limited myself to the first eleven that came to mind.

1. Lifetime Supply of Altoids. I was never an Altoids fan before I started to go to the Summit, but they give them out at least twice, and now I have them on all my desks and in my car.

2.To quote Eric Peterson, "I think the most important thing [for a new web analyst to do] is to go to the Emetrics Summit. Anywhere in N. America or Europe, you have a great conference where you can go and learn. Book learning is good, really talking to people about the challenges you face is better. It's the hallway conversations, the dinner parties that specifically helps people who are new to this -- as long as they are willing to put themselves out there and say, 'Hi, I'm [name] and am new to web analytics.'" Most people actually think the Summit is for advanced analysts, which is a sure sign that it is for all analysts...

3) Those free Omniture flashlights. They cast a curiously strong beam.

4) You get to meet Chris Gemignani from Juice Analytics. (If you aren't reading Juice's blog, you should be.) I personally plan on cornering Chris at lunch
one day, where I will force him to give me advice on the visualization of free body diagrams for the mechanical engineering textbook that my spouse is writing. (How was that for one long run-on sentence?) And for those of you who don't live with a professor, go hear Chris speak so that you can present the data to your boss in a boss-friendly way.

5) You might get a free Visual Sciences thumb drive. I used to have two, one from each Summit, but my daughter (she of the Smashing Pumpkins poster) stole one.

6) To quote Dave Rhee off the Web Analytics Forum, "I tell others that eMetrics is the one conference they *must* attend, even if they have to take vacation days and pay for the travel and conference costs out of their own pockets."

7) You'll learn more about customer profiling from Microsoft. They are a great company to be doing this seminar, since they have created so many wonderful free profiling tools.

8) You get to hear both Ian Houston from Visioactive and Judah Phillips from Reed Business Interactive. In the same session. It will be like Web Analytics for ~~geeks~~ the most technical and sophisticated minds around. But don't worry if you aren't super advanced; during the same time slot, you can come hear yours truly talk about WA for beginners. (You know me, I hate using those polysyllabic words and the concepts that go with them.)

9) Web analysts are friendlier than SEOs. I have been thinking about this line for a long time, ever since a friend came back from PubCon and told me that it was like high school. BTW, I don't think this is true of all SEOs -- when I was at SES Chicago, I sure did get some great help from them, especially Rand Fishkin. But web analysts don't call themselves rock stars, and I think we work really hard to be inclusive. A couple of months ago, someone from the Emetrics summit called me to brainstorm about ways that new attendees can meet more established analysts. I don't know what they decided on, but if you are new, please come up to me and introduce yourself. Here, I'll include my picture. I love to connect people and will do my best to connect you, too.

10) You'll learn how eBay optimized their customer acquisition strategy and if you are smart, put some of those ideas to work for yourself.

11) The food is awesome.

12) You sit and talk to web analysts all day long, and then you have a group of friends that you can write for help. (Trust me, I do it all the time.)

Bonus: You'll come home with many more tools in your kit and the ability to do a better job of increasing your company's sales and the effectiveness of your organization's website.

But, don't register here yet -- first, go to the WAA membership page and become a WAA member. That way, you save 10% off the early bird price of $1990, and the $190 you save pays for the $129 in membership fees. Maybe your boss will let you pocket the extra $61 that your company saved altogether? Nah, didn't think so.

Robbin Steif
LunaMetrics

Response to a breakup: Blogbeat

2007-02-16T08:01:00.000-05:00

To my true love, Blogbeat:

I have always been in love with you. From the moment I set eyes on you, I knew that you were the one for me. I suppose it is poetically ironic that you should choose to leave me the week of Valentine's Day.

I've seen this coming for a long, long time. Ever since that day last July when Tracy Hailpern from Feedburner called me to be part of the press release, the one where Feedburner announced that it was buying you and your love -- I knew this day would come.

Oh sure, "We'll still be friends," you say. That's what all my other lovers have said, and where did that get me? Do you think they call me and talk to me, or measure my blog?

What am I supposed to do tomorrow morning when I wake up and you aren't there to tell me who visited my blog using the term "Price of Sitecatalyst" from King of Prussia, searching on Google even though this is his third visit? (I always thought King of Prussia was a shopping mall. You'd be awed at how many "price of SC" searches I get.) Do you expect me to use MeasureMap? No, I know that you expect that we really will be friends and that we'll be a threesome with Feedburner. But you know, I have my own special relationship with Feedburner and you don't really measure up, no pun intended. The one thing you did so well, matching up the geo-location with the browser string identifier with the referrer and the search term and permalinks visited -- that's gone. You were a real man with me, Blogbeat. Now that you've married Feedburner, I need a calculator to figure out how old those visits from 23,532 seconds ago really were. And just to make this hurt even more, you aren't offering cookies to exclude myself from the data.

Yes, I know, I could use Google Analytics. I've been readying myself for this breakup for a while; I installed GA on my blog last summer; I even coded onclick events for my feeds so that I could tell which buttons people preferred. (I found out that they like the big orange feed button the best.) Looking at aggregated analytics is wonderful for my customers who have large sites, but Blogbeat, you just don't understand. I only have about 235 subscribers and 100 visitors to the blogsite itself each day. I love to scroll through and look at who came and where they landed in an effort to figure out, did the reader find what s/he was looking for? Now that you've disaggregated the searches from the landing pages, those data are gone.

When you asked me to be part of your beta test, I knew this was the beginning of the end. I hung on to every word you said, ever chance I had to be with you. But did you care about me? Did you incorporate any of my suggestions into the gamma product (whatever comes after beta)? In addition to being your lover, I am a web analyst, but you never cared.

In fact, the only person I can say anything nice about here is Zach at Juice Analytics, who finally showed me how to express my misery. Of course, it's always easier when you are doing the breaking up, like Zach is.

Maybe I'll be better off without you. I won't check my analytics all the time. Sure, they'll be interesting, but they won't be fun anymore. Not without you.

Love Forever - I'll never forget you

xoxo

Robbin

Conversion: eBay, Amazon and PayPal aren't so great

2007-02-15T08:39:00.000-05:00

My daughter complains that I never blog about her. Well, here goes:

I watched her try to buy a Smashing Pumpkins poster. Actually, I wasn't really watching, I was just doing my work, all snowed in here in Pittsburgh, and listening to her yell at her computer.

First, she tried on Amazon (or more accurately, was led to Amazon at every turn.) "What happened?" she asked. "I just clicked on the button to go to my shopping cart and it says that I bought it, I don't even know what I paid." So I went over to her computer, only to see that she had accidentally used Amazon's 1-click. This would not have been a problem until I pointed out that she had paid as much in freight as she paid for the product. She started to scream (my kids get big allowances every month but have to buy all their own stuff - clothes, gifts, entertainment, so they really care what happens to every dollar.) We went to the FAQs and I showed her how to cancel her order.

"I don't want to buy it on eBay," she claimed, "I don't have money in my PayPal account." Well, I explained, PayPal no longer requires that you wait 4 days to transfer money in. So she started down the eBay road.

First, she had to register for eBay. Then she clicked through to PayPal, but PayPal insisted that she sign up for their credit card (you have to have really good eyes or use it a lot to notice the "continue without getting a PayPal card" link. Then she couldn't remember her PayPal password, so they emailed it to her. At that point, she either had no way to get back to her transaction or couldn't find her transaction. But it didn't really matter, she was so angry that she was ready to break the computer screen.

So what could everyone have done differently? Well, Amazon's famous one click may work well for them, I wonder how many customers they alienate. (You can turn it off but you have to know to do so.)

eBay definitely needs to find a way to keep your transaction "live" or in a separate window while you process all their stuff. And PayPal had better be doing one heck of a job signing up credit cards that people are actually using, or they should just get rid of that screen and improve their user experience.

Anyone have a new Smashing Pumpkins poster they want to sell?

Robbin Steif
LunaMetrics

Confessions of a Blog Whore

2007-02-14T09:31:00.000-05:00

When I used the phrase blog whore the other day, Taylor, our search analyst, and I both turned so red that I said, "Just go home so I don't have to be any more embarrassed than I already am." (And ironically, LunaMetrics has been getting ready to work with Prolasta, so we have no end of opportunities to be embarrassed.)

So the blog whore problem is about people who write and say, "Please feature my product in your blog." "Please mention my survey in your blog." Please, please, please. On the one hand, I'm flattered, on the other, I feel like ... well, you get it by now. (And I don't even get to make money at it...)

Now, whomever you are, reading this, don't think I am talking about you. I know you take it personally, but I get email a couple times a week asking me to write about something. Don't you want to rate my product? Don't you want to publish my new study? (At least all those investment bankers who call to talk about web analytics don't ask me to blog about them.)

Let me point to Eric Mattson as a shining example of how to market to bloggers. When he wanted me (and everyone else who participated in his first research study on Thinking Like a Blogger) to blog about it, he didn't write me and say, "Here's the study you participated in, please write about it." Instead, he made me feel really special. I can't find his original email, but it said something like, "I've just finished this study in conjunction with the University of MA, and normally the download costs money, but since you participated, here is a complimentary copy." And I thought, wow, this would be cool to blog about. He might have had that in mind all along, but he didn't make me feel ... well you get it.

So if you want someone to blog about your report/survey/article/whatever, woo them. Take the indirect route, which always works well in matters of the heart. Make that blogger feel special and loved, like s/he's getting a scoop.

Happy Valentine's Day.

Robbin Steif
LunaMetrics

When Websites look like Junk Mail

2007-02-13T13:00:00.000-05:00

So your website isn't converting enough visitors and you really aren't sure why. Is it the form? Is it the color of the buttons?

I think everyone should take a very big step backwards and say, "If I didn't know this business, would I buy from this website?" Like the movie Groundhog Day, I feel like I keep having the same experience: people who show me sites that don't convert well, but not for all these technical reasons. It's not the buttons, it's not the forms, it's not the Truste icon, it's not the pictures.

The problem I sometimes see is that site looks like the direct mail that comes to my house every day. Oh sure, it's beautifully designed, but I don't even have to open the envelopes to know which ones to pitch, and I'll bet you don't either. From the bulk rate permit number (instead of a real stamp) to the snipe that say, "Urgent! Time sensitive material!" it screams of a sales pitch. They aren't trying to help me and they don't let me go shopping -- they are just selling at me. I wonder if your site is like that. (I really wonder if my company's site is like that, and would love any criticism. It is ironic that the space we know the best, our own, is the place where we are able to judge the website so poorly -- we just know it too well.)

I'm sorry that I can't show you any examples of sites that look like junk mail, but I will just offend readers and friends (and I have already perfected the talent of offending my nearest and dearest, so don't need the practice.) Instead, I would suggest that you user test -- and you might even do it on your next business trip.

I came home from the WAA marketing meeting in Portland on Saturday, and all the way home, I did user testing. I tested with one guy in the Portland airport. I tested with two women on the plane. And I tested with one guy in Dulles International airport. I wasn't testing my site but I wish I had been. The anonymity of testing while traveling was really awesome. No one ever asked my name or for my card -- they were just looking at a couple of web pages and comparing them. I could have learned all the things that people I know don't say.

Robbin Steif
LunaMetrics

Increase the Value your Internet Consultant Delivers

2007-02-09T09:38:00.000-05:00

Those of you who have Internet consultants working for you - do you ever wonder if you are getting the most out of them?

Here are six ways you can get your Internet (or other) consultant to work harder for you:

1. Leave some money on the table

Yup, you read that right. It's hard to love clients who negotiate too hard. If you have negotiated to get less work for less money/time, that's pretty reasonable. It's when you've pushed really hard to get the same amount of work for less money that you've started a relationship where they love you less. (And on the supplier side: Never ask for a higher price with the assumption that "that'll give the client room to negotiate." The client will just feel like you were ripping them off to start with, and you've begun a relationship where everything is negotiable.)

2. Don't ask for five different rewrites of the proposal.

You aren't turning your consultant into your business partner by doing this -- you've made him do a lot of work for free, and it wasn't even work that you can use to improve your bottom line. If you have to ask for one rewrite, be sure that you are very specific in what you need (so that there won't be a third!) One might argue that if the proposal isn't meeting your needs, the consultant isn't asking the right questions -- what kills me is when I do multiple rewrites and they all say basically the same thing, and finally the client is happy with the adjectives or verbs in the nth rewrite.

3. Stay involved.

You may feel like you want a consultant so that you don't have to be involved. But the more involved you are, the better the quality of work will be. Any way you look at it, you know so much more about your business than your consultant ever will or can afford to learn. Furthermore, if you are involved, you create a stronger bond with the consultant - they know that you care. And let's face it, if you're involved, you see what they're doing. (If I only got to make one point, it would be this one. Clients who are involved get so much more value that the ones who are hands off.)

The best-loved are the clients who invite us to their marketing meetings (and pay for our time there.) They've signaled loud and clear, "You're a member of our marketing team."

4.Don't ask for free work.

Andy Beal wrote the most wonderful post on the power of saying no. Soon after I read it, a client wrote me and asked if I would take a two day trip to another state to attend her all-day meeting. She offered to pay for my flight and hotel. Empowered by Andy, I wrote her back and gave her a couple of different ways we could do this (in person, by phone) and I attached prices to each. She didn't answer that email but business went on as usual until she wrote again, asking for more free work. This one was an easier request (no travel required) but I didn't want to stick her with another price tag and I didn't want to do the work for free, so I just ignored it. The work was incredibly important and time-sensitive (I eventually learned), and if she hadn't started the pattern of asking for free work, I would have stepped up to the plate immediately with a reasonable price.

5. Think twice before you tell your consultant that she's wrong, and then think one more time.

Most of my company's clients hire us because we know a lot more about the Internet than they do or want to. So I'm often baffled when they turn around and tell me, or someone from my company, that they aren't going to do it our way. It sometimes makes sense (they don't have the resources, for example), but often, the answer is "I just don't like it." "It's not me." "I really don't care what the numbers say, this is what makes me feel comfortable." I walk away thinking, "But wasn't the idea to improve your website? -- what happened to that notion?"

6. Don't insult your consultant.

I was worked with a client who wanted me to consider his way of doing things. It was an interesting idea, he had. But still, I was absolutely shocked when one of his lieutenants sent me an email, musing that rational people don't like to be open minded. "Right," I thought cynically before deleting it without replying, "That's absolutely the way to get your consultant to work hard for you -- insult them."

Many thanks to the brilliant mind who suggested this topic.

Robbin Steif
LunaMetrics

My Interview with Eric Peterson

2007-02-04T22:26:00.000-05:00

When the AMA emailed me asking me to plug Eric Peterson's free Web Analytics 101 webinar on my blog, I just laughed. "We can get you an interview with Eric," their email boasted. I forwarded the email to Eric. "Gee, aren't I lucky?" I asked in my usual in-your-face fashion.

But eventually I realized that I had a responsibility to publicize Eric's free event, which will be on March 6 at 1 pm EST. Not only am I co-chair of the WAA's marketing committee, where one of my jobs is to market the case for web analytics, but I am always complaining about WA haves vs. have nots. On the "haves" side are the analysts who are at the point where they complain "I can't figure out how to integrate my MVT with my WA" or "I can't figure out how to know when visitors have downloaded a podcast completely." On the "have not" side are the webmasters who say, "I'm not sure that we have web analytics on our site. What are they?" (By the way, the WAA is not associated with the webinar. ) Since this webinar is perfectly positioned for the have-not crowd, or as Eric will point out below, anyone who is not executing all ten simple strategies, I wanted to publicize it.

So I did do an interview with Eric as prelude to telling everyone about his free webinar, and here it is.

Robbin: Let's talk about you for a minute. How did you go from being a Deadhead to being the Grandfather of Web Analytics, and why are you cutting off your grey ponytail?

Eric: First off, I am not the Grandfather of WA, I am not nearly old enough for such a moniker. Plus I would never take away that honor from my good friend Jim Sterne without his permission. How did I get from the Grateful Dead to where I am today? That's just what I did when I was young. Given a lack of direction when I was young, it was a good place. I studied mycology in college. Robbin: What is mycology? Eric: The study of mushrooms. I got into the Internet in 1994, started looking at web pages, stuff for the college. When I was done with my master’s degree, I had to decide on science vs the Internet and I chose the Internet. I have a lot of different interests – music, science, the Internet. When I got to WebTrends, the Internet was just going crazy ... In 2000, it was easy to say, "I want to be a part of that." I never once envisioned a time when I would have done so much with web analytics - author, founder, analyst, know-it-all :-)

Robbin: Your interests seem split. On the one hand, your blog and your work are really for the most sophisticated of web analysts. On the other hand, your trademark book, Web Analytics Demystified, is for the newbie, and this seminar is for the web analytics beginner. Where are you truly interested?

Eric: Do I have to choose one?

Robbin: That's a good answer right there.

Eric: I think it's limiting to say, "I'm only interested in entry level WA or I'm only interested in high end WA. I'm interested in companies making the best use of their investment in WA technology possible. If it's "I just got these web analytics," then my founding of the Yahoo group is where I’ve made that beginner contribution. Plus the books . "Hacks" kind of bridges the gap between entry level and high end. I get five emails a day from new peole who just got Web Analytics Demystified and write, "I got your book, I read it, and now I have a question."

Robbin: You recently wrote a column filled with advice for new web analysts, and I will reference it in the post. But do you have anything you would like to add to that?

Eric: It would be nice if I could say, "Take a course on WA at your local community college," but that's not there yet. I think the most important thing is to go to the Emetrics Summit. Anywhere in N. America or Europe, you have a great conference where you can go and learn. Book learning is good, really talking to people about the challenges you face is better. It's the hallway conversations, the dinner parties that specifically helps people who are new to this -- as long as they are willing to put themselves out there and say, "Hi, I’m [name] and am new to web analytics.

Robbin: What advice do you have for individuals looking to get a job in web analytics?

Eric: The most important thing is that there is organizational buy-in to be successful with web analytics. There are a ton of companies who have proved that they can create success by making data-driven business decisions. But for whatever crazy reason, people have a level of comfort with non-web data that they don't have yet with web data. If I were going to take a job as a web analyst, I would make sure that there is true organizational buy-in to use that data to make the organization more successful. And, if you’re an experienced web analytics professional and are looking at a job with a software or WA consulting company, the most important question to ask yourself is, do I like to travel?

Robbin:At the last Emetrics Summit, you talked about the importance of process. You remember, the infamous presentation where I only succeeded in making it to the Q&A. Sorry. But I did get out my Emetrics notes today and review your whole presentation. How does a small company -- someone with one person dedicated to the whole site, not just to the analytics -- create a web analytics business process? One of my customers really wanted me to ask you this question.

Eric: It's super duper easy when there is one person. Because the one person figures out where the WA inputs need to be, where the outputs are, and how to respond to those outputs. Typically, the problem is that they do this but don't document it, so when they take another job, not only does the expertise leave but so does the process. The strong need for business process is with larger companies.

Robbin: How do you feel about the piece that Justin Cutroni from Epikone wrote, in which he wrote that the process should be:

1. Collect lots of data
2. Analyze the data (look for problems)
3. Create a hypothesis as to why a problem is occurring
4. Test solutions for your hypothesis (what's the best way to fix the problem)
5. Implement change (the best solution discovered during testing)
6. Repeat
7. Make more money

Eric: It's right at a certain level. What Justin described was the architypical continual improvement process, and it's right but in my experience, when the mid-to-large size companied tries to implement that, something goes wrong. Because there is not enough detail. What Justin describes is a broad overarching framework. The problem is that the CEO just can't tell people, “Go hypothesize.” There has to be a better definition, Step 1, Step 2, Step 3.

Robbin: Doesn’t this speak to the question that Forrester analyst Megan Burns asked you that day, i.e. how do you keep your process from becoming shelfware? I was dying for you to answer, "Keep your process down to one page."

Eric: What I said to her as I remember was, if you are so good at this stuff and have done the diagrams, got the organizational buy-on, everyone knows it by heart, then it can sit on a shelf, that's fine. But largely, they haven't done this process. Eric: I interviewed her over the weekend on my blog, did you read it? Robbin: I will.

Robbin: What is the future of web analytics for the small company – the company that is never going to spend $10k/year (much less six digits) for a software package?

Eric: I’ve trained myself not to think about the cost of the WA, but about the value of the WA.But I hope that WA for the small business will come when someone can succinctly describe the value proposition of carefully monitor your AdWords spend, succinctly describe the value of good landing pages. Companies need to understand the value of WA, not the cost of WA.

Robbin: What are the questions that you wish I had asked you today?

Eric: Who is this webinar appropriate for? Anyone spending money on the Internet. Anyone spending money on website design, website analysis, anyone spending money on AdWords. My view is that WA is not something that only marketing does, but something that organizations do to drive success through the Internet channel.

What can attendees expect? Anybody attending the webinar should walk away with clear walking papers – a strong sense of what are the things they need to do with WA. There are ten points to my presentation. Any company on the call may be doing 3, 5 of the things that I suggest. The only people who should walk away saying, "I didn’t get much out of that" would be the company who is doing 10 out of 10 things.

Robbin: I need a great jpeg of you. Did you get your hair cut yet?
Eric: No, that's later this month. But I have a new photo, you can be the first to use it.
Robbin: A picture of your new haircut, that would be awesome link bait.

Eric: If I hate it, I am going to be walking around wearing a hat.

Here's the link to Eric's free webinar again, which will be on March 6 at 10 am PST, 1 pm EST.

Robbin Steif
LunaMetrics

Let's stop comparing websites to stores

2007-02-02T16:52:00.000-05:00

I read Bryan Eisenberg's article on "The Value of Online Traffic." He says he's tired of hearing marketers complain about the high cost of clicks. I, on the other hand, am tired of hearing marketers compare websites to stores.

Bryan writes things like, "The corner of 57th St. and Fifth Ave. in Manhattan is one of the highest trafficked intersections in the country. So it's no surprise that the cost of commercial real estate is priced accordingly. To establish and support a retail store there, you must take advantage of the traffic's high margins and volumes."

Well, that's fine if you are a bricks and mortar store. If you are at the corner of 57th and Fifth, you get to charge high prices. Shopping in downtown Manhattan is not just about acquiring goods - it's about having fun. When I buy shoes at Nordstroms in downtown Chicago or a scarf at Harrods in London, I expect to pay way, way more than I would on the Internet. E-tailing is about getting the goods. Shopping in the high rent district, however, is entertainment. Let's not get them confused.

And while I am ranting, let's stop comparing abandoned Internet shopping carts to abandoned carts in grocery stores (a sin which I have been guilty of in the past. The comparing part.) when we shop in a grocery store, we don't have to put it in the cart to figure out what it costs to get it home. More importantly, when we shop in a grocery store, abandoning a cart might be embarrassing. I never go grocery shopping but my spouse does it weekly and always comments on who he saw there. I guess if he wanted to abandon he could walk away, pretending to look for something else and then just never return, but he still might meet people in the parking lot who know him. ("Gee Paul, couldn't find any food today?") Online, no one knows when I leave (except for your super duper web analytics package.)

And speaking of leaving -- there aren't a lot of ways to leave a store. A big department store might have three levels but each one usually has one big entry/exit. A big grocery store might have only one main entrance and one main exit. Compare that to a website where you can exit (and usually enter) from any page at all. So let's make it easy to find things, because online, I don't expect to cross the entire website to move from the dairy to the produce.

And then there's the hassle factor. By the time you put on your coat, get your kids into the car, get to the mall, and spend an hour cruising around looking for the perfect black suit, you really, really want to find the suit. Because -- you have put way too much effort into the problem already to come home empty handed. On the other hand,shopping on line is so easy that I don't feel bad if I leave a site without whipping out my plastic. I can always go back tomorrow (or in five minutes, for that matter.)

Robbin Steif
LunaMetrics

Intro to GA Regular Expressions: Part XIV of XIV

2007-01-28T14:03:00.000-05:00

This is the last of fourteen posts I have done on Regular Expressions for Google Analytics. Now that I have learned them (and hopefully explained them), it's time to have that introductory post (I always do like to work backwards.)

Here's the reason. People skip the introductions to books, they don't read manuals, they just want to figure out how to make "it" work, whatever it is.

Only once it works are we ready to say, OK, so what? Why do I care, what's it good for, what's it bad for?

What are Regular Expressions (RegEx)? They use characters on your keyboard (like * and ^), enabling you to create an expression that may or may not match a target expression. They have a strict set of rules -- just like a programming language would -- and it's easy to make mistakes with them. (This is why I am a big user of this RegEx checking tool. ) So you will always have at least two expressions, the Regular Expression with the funny characters and the expression you are matching on your site, or in someone's address, or keyword. Here's a quick example of the Regular Expression vs. target expression issue: I can create a regular expression like this luna|robb?in and then match it against the keywords people used to come to my site to filter out all the times people used my company name or my own name, whether they spelled it right now not. In this example, the keywords were my target expressions. (Need to understand that pipe symbol in the RegEx? Need to understand the question mark in the RegEx?)

So why use them? The first reason that RegEx are worth caring about -- if you use Google Analytics -- is that Google cares. There are certain tasks Google just won't let you do correctly without using RegEx. Examples that come quickly to mind are: take yourself out of the data using an IP address, creating a custom filter, creating a filter that enables you to see both your subdomain and your domain in the same profile. (The latter is just an example of the second example, a custom filter, but I mention it because you can read about it in the GA help section.)

Other great examples of custom filters: Create a filter to learn what words people actually type in to Google before they click on your AdWord, instead of just learning which AdWord gets credit. (I use this one all the time. The only hack I like better is this one.) Force all your reports to give you pages by title instead of URL.

OK, so we understand that they are needed for filters. But how about goals? After all, you can do a head match or an exact match, why go to the trouble of using a RegEx match?

One reason would be if you have two pages that are essentially the same goal or the same place in the funnel. So, for example, let's say that when the visitor reaches either of these two pages, www.mysite.com/folder3/thanks.html and www.mysite.com/thanksalot.html, he has really achieved the same goal. By using RegEx, you can make your goal page in Google Analytics /thanks and whenever someone reaches either of those pages, the same goal (G1, or G2, or whichever one you choose) is incremented. Then if you happen to care about which page actually matters the most, you can easily go to the Content Optimization > Goals and Funnel Verification > Goal verification to see which page mattered the most.

Of course, if you have other pages on your site that match /thanks, you have to get more specific with your RegEx. However, I never forget the lesson that a friend taught me: keep your RegEx as simple as possible.

Another reason to use RegEx is when you are lazy. After all, just because there are a ton of variations, who wants to create a ton of iterations? The example above shows how to combine two into one, but what if you had 15 variations? Example: you have to be sure that your company is not in the analytics. Your company owns all the IP addresses from 72.77.12.26 through 72.77.12.40, inclusive. You sure don't want to create 15 filters. Instead, you can use a regular expression like this: ^72\.77\.12\.(2[6-9]|3[0-9]|40) -- it will capture all fifteen IP addresses. (The little carat ^ at the beginning says, don't match if there is something before the 72. The backslashes \ turn the special dots into plain dots. This 2[6-9] means, match 26, 27, 28 and 29. This 3[0-9] says, match 30, 31, etc through 39. 40 says, match 40. The pipes are OR signs. So at the end of the expression, you'll be matching to 26-29, OR 30-39 OR 40.)

Well, that's it on RegEx for now. Here are all the prior posts in the series:

Backslashes \
Dots .
Carats ^
Dollars signs $
Question marks ?
Parentheses ()
Pipes |
Square brackets []and dashes -
Plus signs +
Stars *
Regular Expressions for Google Analytics: Now let's Practice
Bad Greed
RegEx and Good Greed

Now that I am done with this series, I'll go back and make sure that all the posts links to all the other posts consistently. Done! Done! All done!

Robbin Steif
LunaMetrics

Conversion Analysis: VistaPrint

2007-01-22T15:58:00.000-05:00

It is always hard to know how many options to give a user. Too many and you lose the conversion; too few and they can't achieve their goal (and you lose the conversion.)

VistaPrint is a well-known Internet printing company, and is arguably best-known for their business cards. I clicked first on the product I wanted, "premium business cards" on the home page and landed here:

So this was the first moment of frustration. It didn't matter whether I scrolled up or down, I couldn't find any action buttons except the opportunity to upload my artwork or choose one of their templates. (And I really wanted them to tell me that they would walk me through a process.) But anyway, I uploaded my file (using the link that I have the red arrow pointing to) and was very frustrated to see that they had taken my vertical card, assumed that it was horizontal, and then yelled at me (electronically) because the aspect ratio of my image did not match the "chosen template."

Eventually I realized that I had landed on tab 3 of a four tab wizard, as you can see below:

Finally, by making them back up (i.e. choosing Tab Two), I got to tell them that I wanted a vertical, not horizontal card:

While writing this post, I noticed that there *is* a business card wizard, right at the top of the home page. (I never saw it and it is a great example of ad blindness.) Even if I had, it is a "free business card" wizard, whereby you choose one of their templates and get their advertising. There truly is a way to do this right, just not a very intuitive way...

Robbin Steif
LunaMetrics

Web Analytics for Beginners - MIA

2007-01-19T22:01:00.000-05:00

This week, Eric Peterson wrote a post about web analytics for beginners. As usual, he had lots of great advice, but I have to disagree with the "blog part" of his post. His advice was...

"Read some of the web analytics weblogs to keep up on current happenings. I personally like mine (go figure), but I also highly recommend Avinash Kaushik and Gary Angel."

Every thing else he wrote made sense. (Take the WAA's Web Analytics Course. Read the Web Analytics Forum. Buy and read Eric's book, Web Analytics DeMystified.) But if you are in marketing, are suddenly in charge of analytics (Eric's scenario) and are still working to understand the difference between visits and unique visitors, or log files vs. page tagging -- do you really want to read Eric's blog? On Eric's blog, you get to learn advanced web analytics, like creating a metric for visitor engagement. In the same vein, do you really want to read Gary Angel's blog? On Gary's blog, you get to learn advanced web analytics, like worst practices in Business Intelligence. (Gary, I am sure I mangled that completely. Sorry.) They are both excellent resources but they sure aren't the place you start when you need to know what a KPI is.

Avinash definitely has some great newbie stuff on his blog. Like his 10/90 rule post. Or his Tips for Small Business Web Analytics success. (And I really wanted to show one of his very first articles on visitor segmentation, but I can't find it.)

Does anyone else do newbie stuff? I went through my feed reader looking for who else I could recommend. If the beginner is beginning with Google Analytics, Justin Cutroni is an awesome place to start -- but not everyone uses GA. David Rhee, a web analyst at Gateway Computer, wrote a short piece for new analysts that really rocks (so get it on your list, but it's not a full tutorial.)

Wouldn't it be great if someone who loved analytics and understood them read all the blogs (there aren't really all that many) and then posted a link and a snippet to every beginner post?

One last thing. There is another important beginner resource, the Web Analytics Association Training Day. It is really designed with new analysts in mind. (I am pretty sure of that.) It will be May 6 in San Francisco, the day before the Emetrics Summit, and I see that you can already sign up for that event (by itself or in addition to the Summit) on the Emetrics summit registration page.

Robbin Steif
LunaMetrics

Welcome to the blogosphere: Ian Houston

2007-01-17T22:39:00.000-05:00

I first met web analyst Ian Houston at Emetrics in Santa Barbara 2006. He already knew who I was (and had already helped me in his quiet, incredibly technically capable way) online. When he told me that he owned his own company, Visioactive, and that he didn't have a website, I was surprised. "Yeah," he said, "I should just put a blog up there."

And he did, finally, today. So if you're interested in cutting edge web analytics, check out his blog. If you want to see a great "results not found: (for conversion geeks like me), type something into his internal search engine that you probably won't find.

Robbin Steif
LunaMetrics

Bob Chatham answers my Visual Sciences post

2007-01-16T21:44:00.000-05:00

After the Emetrics Summit in October, I wrote this post about Visual Sciences. Soon afterwards, Bob Chatham (who was then the CMO of VS and is now SVP - Education for purchaser Web Side Story) wrote replies to all of my comments. And there they sat for almost three months, in my inbox. (I have no excuses other than work and family -- but better late than never.) My comments from the original post are in italics and Bob's should be indented:

Yesterday at the eMetrics Summit, I saw a one-hour demo of Visual Sciences. The "demo-er" was Bob Chatham, their CMO. It is incredibly awesome.

[BC] Thank you, I have to agree – it's why I came to the company. It took me three or four demos just to believe that it's real

.
I walked into the presentation knowing that the product is black and probably visual. I walked out trying to figure out why, beyond budget, companies would choose a different solution if they could choose Visual Sciences. (I did come up with some, see the bottom of this post.)

[BC] Don't worry, there's a white-background version for "executives." We just picked black based on UI research that shows that it'w easier to stare at a black background for long periods.

Even budget shouldn't be an issue with a properly-sized system considered over a 3-year period. The TCO [total cost of ownership] usually works in our favor given the capabilities and expansion headroom. But you have to be willing to look beyond the short-term 1-year CPM rates that most ASPs charge.

I won't speak much to the implementation or technology. Among other reasons, you can't easily put them in a box. They aren't a client-side solution (you pretty much have to have software), but they sure aren't an old-fashioned logfile solution either. Instead, I want to speak just to the features/benefits.

[BC] Actually, we *are* a client-side solution...and a server-side one...and a hybrid of both, if you want. I'm assuming that you're talking about data collection methods here. We can use just JavaScript tags like any other ASP solution, or combine tags with logfiles or server-side collection based on Visual Sensor. If you're speaking about deployment/ownership models, there's a lot of latitude here as well. While the majority of our clients choose licensed software deployed behind their firewalls (about 2/3 of the customer base) the rest are either using our managed services (they own the software/hardware, we run/operate it on our premises or theirs), or an ASP-like setup where they effectively pay a CPM charge. There's no political statement here about one being better than the other, just an ability to accommodate a client's data collection and deployment requirements.

First, they have developed the capability (a "visual sensor") to capture data from all sorts of sources, not just the web. RFID, bar codes, text files, call center logs all qualify. So it is no longer just a web analytic package, it becomes a total analytic solution. I don't think they like the phrase 360 degree view, but if that isn't a 360, what is?

[BC] It’s really a combination of Visual Sensor (for real-time event collection at the source, e.g., a web server) and Visual Load (for importing log files, campaign codes/costs, lookup tables, etc.) that builds the 360-degree view. The customer has to supply the common key across the sources so that we can join them (we don't provide data scrubbing or matching services, but others, like Group One Software, Axciom, or Experian do).

They have a proprietary database -- and maybe that term is already too "boxy" -- maybe data storage or "place to keep their data" would be more accurate. This seems to be their primary secret sauce, and enables them to relate data in any way you want. (They call this n-dimensional.) They aren't working with a traditional relational database, so the number of fields aren't constrained and it is no longer incredibly expensive to have someone crawl into the database and expand the fields (in fact, there is no crawling in.) I kind of dismissed this as Bob spoke - it's an expensive solution so even if you pay for an extra 10 eVars from Omniture, you probably pay less money - but then, you might need that info now, not when the LiveSupport people get to it. In some ways, it is easier to compare it to Google Analytics, where you get one custom variable and no more, but the customer sets are so different that that becomes a senseless comparison (albeit easy to understand.)

[BC] I'm not sure I understand the Google Analytics comparison. With VS, you can have as many "custom variables" as you want (since the schema is completely open and tailorable, they're effectively all custom…). You get a standard "web analytics" schema for W3C logs out of the box for Visual Site. As for expensive...well, it'w probably more expensive not to be able to answer the questions that you need to answer…;-)

It is amazingly easy to create whatever report you want. We were five people watching them demo, and we couldn't come up with a single request for a report that Bob Chatham couldn't create from scratch within 5-10 seconds.

[BC] Hey…if you think 5-10 seconds is fast, you should see how fast web analytics guru Eric T. Peterson can do it. I'm just the marketing guy.

{note from Robbin - I deleted all the screen shot chatter that was in this spot because none of my screen shots were real jpegs and will be just awful in a post}

It's real time. Almost all the other page tagging solutions are real time, but unlike VS don't change while you watch unless you hit reload and wait 60 seconds.
So why doesn't everybody buy it? First, it is really expensive.

[BC] Let me know if you want to review a TCO [total cost of ownership] model for the product. We’re working on better comparisons to conventional solutions.

I don't know exactly how expensive but I have a pretty good idea. So it's not a solution you buy lightly, and you sure don't buy it without a full-time analyst or a team of analysts or you won't learn much. Plus, if you don't have time or resources to learn everything from your standard high-end solution (SC, HBX, WebTrends etc), then it's really not worth spending the money. And let's face it (this is my usual soapbox) - most people aren't getting as much as they should out of their free Google Analytics. In fact, most sites either don't have analytics, don't know that they have analytics, or don't care (but I digress...)

[BC] Agreed about the need for analysts with *any* high-end solution. As to why folks aren’t getting everything from their "standard" high-end solutions, maybe it's because they’re…standard. And then they give up in frustration

.
Second, I think that the company would be smart to sell the product on its merits and not sell it against the competition so much. Maybe that's just the IBMer in me (I was taught to NEVER mention the competition by name), but I think their product, in the right situation, solves so many problems that they don's need to have a negative campaign.

[BC] Aw, I'm just overly sensitive. We spent four years in stealth mode building the product, ignoring what other people thought. If we mention other vendors, it's really to facilitate comprehension based on what people are more familiar with. Any suggestions on how to make the product concepts more accessible/believable to reduce the time that it takes to get it?

Thanks Bob for all that wisdom. Apologies for waiting so long to post this (and if any little gibberish marks from the email crept in, double apologies!)

Robbin Steif
LunaMetrics

Regular Expressions Part XIII: Good Greed

2007-01-11T15:53:00.000-05:00

This is my next to last post in this Regular Expression (RegEx) series. I have been thinking about this post for a long time and yesterday someone asked me a question (which finally got me to write this). She wrote that she had two pages that she wanted to roll into one Google Analytics goal. She created the Regular Expression for it, ran it through Epikone's RegEx Coach, and it worked -- but it wasn't working in GA. (More on the Coach below.)

The two pages were:

subdomain.mysite.com/folder/subfolder/GoalThree.php
subdomain.mysite.com/folder/subfolder/GoalThreesome.php

She sent me a long, complicated expression which wasn't working for her and asked my opinion.

This is absolutely a case of putting Good Greed to work for you, we will see in a minute. As I wrote in my last post, Regular Expressions are very greedy and they match everything unless you tell them not to. This is a very hard concept to wrap your head around -- it means that, among other things, all the stuff before the expression and all the stuff after it gets matched to random things (unless you tell it not to. Or there is nothing to match to.)

Anyway, I wrote her back and said, why don't you just write an expression like this:

/folder/subfolder/GoalThree

This assumes that she doesn't have other GoalThreeVersions that will be incorrectly mixed in here. If, for example, she had another page, /folder/subfolder/GoalThreeCornered, that would qualify as a match too (because the RegEx matches everything it can, even if those characters aren't in the Regular Expression.) Moving back to how simple her RegEx might be, she might even have been able to get away with a goal like this, depending on her site:

/GoalThree

This matches every expression that includes /GoalThree

Finally a word about the Epikone RegEx coach. I haven't talked to Justin about this. But I am fairly sure that the coach is configured to check whether the phrase you type is a match to the RegEx you type, using the way GA interprets RegEx. That doesn't mean that you necessarily come up with a valid goal, or an IP address that will actually filter anything. For example, you might use it to see if colou?r is a valid RegEx for color and for colour (it should be), but that doesn't mean colou?r will necessarily work in your Google Analytics profile filters or goals. You really have to understand the context in which you are using the expression and what GA demands of you in addition to correctly configuring two expressions to match each other.

Backslashes \
Dots .
Carats ^
Dollars signs $
Question marks ?
Pipes |
Parentheses ()
Square brackets []and dashes -
Plus signs +
Stars *
Regular Expressions for Google Analytics: Now let's Practice
RegEx and Good Greed
Intro to RegEx"

Robbin Steif
LunaMetrics

Apologies

2007-01-10T07:13:00.000-05:00

Blogger did an update yesterday (scheduled for the same day as an update of Google Groups.) My feeds are not working now for new subscribers (at least on my computer - I would love if someone else would try it and send me email or just comment) and I can't even complain about it on the Blogger Google group... Another good reason to get off Blogger.

Sorry.

Robbin

Conversion analysis: directions

2007-01-08T15:36:00.000-05:00

I just couldn't resist showing this tiny piece of a non-profit website.

Wouldn't a check box next to "Please don't show my name in your printed thank you material?" do a better job? Now that I've looked at it 15 times, it makes perfect sense but when I first read it, I felt like I had to parse all the negatives.

Robbin Steif
LunaMetrics

Conversion analysis: why do websites make customers nervous?

2007-01-05T23:36:00.000-05:00

Three times in the past week, I have tried to make a purchase from a (big important secure) website, and every time, the site makes me feel like they couldn't understand my goals.

The first site was iTunes. I wanted to buy a gift certificate, and so went right into my own iTunes setup and choose Give an iTunes gift from the iTunes store. But in the shopping cart, they made me sign in. Hmm, I thought, do they think I am buying something for myself? Are they going to charge my personal credit card, when I need to use a different card? And shouldn't my grandmother be able to make this purchase without owning her own copy of iTunes? So I went to the Apple site and succeeded in purchasing a cerfticate there -- but all they needed to say was, please sign in and you will get a chance to choose a credit card.

The second site was NetFlix. I wanted to buy a gift certificate (again), but they took me all the way to the screen where I had to sign in (like iTunes) and even told me that when I hit enter, the sale was final. However, they still hadn't given me a chance to tell them where to mail the DVDs to, so obviously they were going to send them to me, right? I put this one off for two days and finally went back to it. Eventually I realized that the individual who gets the gift chooses when to redeem it and where to receive the DVDs, so I got back on my computer (as if I ever leave it) and finally made the purchase. (I also submitted the suggestion to them -- after all, they are offering $1M for a better algorithm, maybe they are paying conversion scientists??)

The third one was PR-Web. I used to do a lot of work with them and for whatever reason, haven't lately. Maybe their interface has changed and maybe I just don't remember it, but once again, they made me do things in the "wrong" order without giving me any reassurance. In this case, they insisted on taking all my credit card information without telling me that "On the the next screen, you will have a chance to upload your press release." I finally just did it in their backward manner because they do tell the customer that s/he can give them funds to sit there unused (like a no-interest checking account) -- I figured I'd have a way to use the money even if I didn't get a screen for the press release.

Just think - all I wanted was a little reassurance.

Robbin Steif
LunaMetrics

Negative Exact Match Part II

2007-01-04T22:50:00.000-05:00

Much to my chagrin, I didn't really discover Negative Exact Match. Example: -[keyword]

In fact, it is called embedded match. (From the Department of Non-Descriptive Names.) The example Google gives is in the entertainment industry -- you sell movie merchandise but you don't own a movie theater or sell DVDs, so you can't sell the actual movie experience. So you wouldn't want people to click through to your site (and spend your AdWords money) if they type in just the word Spiderman but you want all the variations, Spiderman tights and Spiderman costume etc.

Robbin Steif
LunaMetrics

It's 2007: Do you know what your copyright says?

2006-12-30T00:20:00.000-05:00

The newspapers are so good about reminding me when it's time to change my clocks; I thought it was only fair to return the favor and do a copyright head's up.

Unfortunately, I needed to write this article on my website so have to ask interested readers to click through. Enjoy this article about the conversion vs. legal issues of copyrights (and should it be copyright 2007 or copyright 2005-2007?)

My New Year's resolution is to get off of Blogger and move my whole blog to Wordpress on my website. What's yours?

Many thanks. And of course, Happy 2007.

Robbin Steif
LunaMetrics

Fourteen ways to evaluate your landing pages

2006-12-26T09:55:00.000-05:00

Are there any best practices in landing pages?

The only thing that ever matters is what the customer thinks. It is no coincidence that Matt Roche, the CEO of Offermatica, has the url www.landingpageoptimization.com for his blog.

Having said that, we don't always get the luxury of testing. Sometimes the page in question doesn't have enough traffic to run a significant test in a reasonable amount of time. The customer is unwilling to spend the money on alternate versions. Your boss doesn't believe in testing. Etc. And even if we test, we still need to know what to test.

So with that important caveat (i.e. in this arena, the customer is always right), here are a very few ideas.

1. Are the calls to action strong? "Strong" can mean "4 seats left at this price." But often it just means, is there a perceived value in (downloading the whitepaper|signing up for the email marketing|attending the webinar)? Does the button say "Submit" or does it say, "Get my free whitepaper now?" (When I went back to get the URL for that last link, I saw that the Matt had written in the comments, "I have a simple rule [about what a button might say.] The button should finish the sentence...")

2. If the page is longer than one screen: is the call to action at the bottom of the page as well as above the fold? Some people will want to see it at the top, but others will read the whole page. If the call to action isn't at the bottom, they may scroll up, but they may also wonder "Now what?" Speaking of above the fold - yesterday I looked at the new AVG anti-virus software that I have to buy and it comes with a free gift, I was told. But there was no way to click on the "Free Gift" to find out what it was. Very frustrating. Only after poking around to figure out the price did I find the gift, hidden below the fold (it was another kind of software that AVG sells.)

3. Do you bury your calls to action in a colored box? If it's a form (so there are boxes to fill in), that may not be a problem. But mere words may carry with them ad blindness.

4. Is it clear where the customer should click? I wish I had a nickel for every time someone told me, in person or over the phone, "You just have to roll your mouse over that one spot and it tells you what to do." Similarly, I did an analysis for an enterprise software company recently, and noticed that it was hard to find the one hyperlink among all the webinar information.

5. With an instant's glance, is the customer reassured that she has arrived at the right place? Even though I am in the camp that leans toward the "people don't really care about pictures," I do believe that pictures give a subliminal message.

6. Does the page represent someone who can solve the problem? For example, I worked indirectly with a fertility doctor, and the draft of a landing page had a picture of his clinic. It was a low building with palm trees in the yard. It looked like the kind of place where you get a face lift -- not the kind of place where you have a successful in vitro fertilization. (I hear that the converson rate of the final version is over 30%, but I only get a piece of the credit, since LunaMetrics just consulted on this one. And I don't mean to imply that this was the only change, but it is a good example.)

7. Does the page speak the language of the target customer? On the one hand, if your customer is buying tools for embedded linux, they may be disdainful and/or insulted if you take the time to explain how uClibc differs from glibC (or even, heaven forbid, write out what the acronym means.) On the other hand, the customer who is purchasing light fixtures may not have a technical vocabuly. Use words that meets his needs, and where you need to use more technical terms (e.g. xenon vs. halogen), define them.

8. Do you use company jargon that is meaningless to the customer? For example, I have friends in the design business who describe one of their services as "vision catching". Now that I understand, I realize that the company has done a fabulous job: they have put together words and made them their own. But before I understood, it was just jibberish to me. The landing page visitor may be seeing your site and your company for the first time; it's not the place to make him learn your terminology.

9. Are you using the appropriate amount of punctuation and capitalization? I have seen this problem a number of times -- if you have to yell at someone that this is THE DEAL OF YOUR LIFE!!!! WHAT ARE YOU WAITING FOR??? don't you think they will wonder just how spammy it is? On the other hand, there is clearly a target market for that kind of message (because most spammers really do test, and they have large "audiences". And they probably would have learned by now to delete all those exclamation points if that's what they learned.)

10. Do you really want navigation on the page? This brings up the question, what is a landing page anyway? Maybe it is a page that you design very specifically for a Google AdWord or a banner ad visitor to land on (in which case, you can decide if you want navigation.) But it's harder to choose what comes up the organic search, so you'll probably have a page from your real site, with your navigation. So now let's rephrase the issue: If you designed your landing page for a controlled situation like a PPC campaign, does the navigation on the page give the customer too many opportunities to leave the page without converting? This may well be the case if the ad was about signing up for a free whitepaper, and the job of the page was to get the information. On the other hand, does no navigation give the customer too few opportunities to find what he really wants, so is there an easy way to get to the rest of the site?

11. Does it work with Firefox?

12. Is the type large enough to read without using a magnifying glass? This one sometimes goes hand-in-hand with the Firefox issue -- the type size works nicely in IE but is much tinier in Firefox.

13. If you have a form on your landing page: do you really need all those fields? The more you ask for, the less likely the customer is to fill them out, even if only three are required. Check your web analytics overlay to see how this observation dovetails with your reality. Don't have an overlay? Go to Crazy Egg and install one for free.

14. Do you have web analytics on your landing page? Lots of times, landing pages are created without using the site template, and the analytics, which may be in the template, never get transferred to your landing page.

Robbin Steif
LunaMetrics

Double shopping carts for poorer conversion?

2006-12-19T22:11:00.000-05:00

I would give the world to see Rolling Stone's web analytics and to know for certain if they are converting as poorly as I think they must be.

A friend got on their website to buy a gift subscription and was completely unable to do so. Here is how the conversation went:

Robbin: I can't wait to look at their site to see what they are doing wrong.
Would-be purchaser: Maybe it has nothing to do with their site, maybe it is just that I'm unable to do it.
Robbin, somewhat incredulously: You mean, you had your credit card sitting next to your computer, you were unable to give them your money, and you think maybe it's your fault?

Well, I love a challenge, so I got on the site and saw the problem immediately. Here is what their home page looks like (and that is how I started, by typing their address right in and landing at Home):

"Subscribe to Magazine" is right up there on top and I chose it. (I marked it with a white arrowhead in the screenshot in case the screenshot came out too tiny.) But when I got to their very nice, compact form, it did not give me the opportunity to enter a giftee's address, or including a note to the recipient.

Hmm, there must be a way of doing this, I thought. So I poked around and further down the page found all the ways you can subscribe (blue highlighting added by me): I also found that they have not one, not two, but three different checkout carts: one for new subscriptions for yourself, one for renewing subscriptions, and one for gift subscriptions. Oh, I forgot to mention the one that you use to purchase back issues.

Maybe they've tested it and found that it converts better this way, but I'll bet that it's just easier for them to administer this way. And then you have to ask, is the goal of my site ease of administration (sometimes it is) or is it making money on my print publication when the whole world is moving to digital media?

Robbin Steif
LunaMetrics

I'm tired of the blog tag game -- Can we change it?

2006-12-18T21:25:00.000-05:00

For anyone in the blogosphere who has been living under a rock (that must be hard to do at the same time), there is a game of blog tag going on. The idea is, you tell five personal things about yourself and then tag five other bloggers to do the same. June Li tagged me but I am ready to turn the game upside down now. (No offense June, and your article on Mountain Dew not owning their own chatter was excellent.)

Let's face it, readers really don't care whether I hate my mother-in-law or that I got kicked out of the sixth grade for telling the teacher that she was wrong. On the other hand, I am dying to know who you all are. (Well, maybe not dying. But certainly, incredibly curious.)

Every once in a while, I find out who reads my blog. Thrice I've gotten emails about things that were broken on my blog. Sometimes I find out by seeing myself in another blog. Sometimes I find out through my role in the WAA (I'm co-chair of the marketing committee), and I'll be going about my WAA business, working with a volunteer who then volunteers, "Hey, I read your blog." On Friday, someone sent me a RegEx question.

So, in the same vein that Time Magazine voted you Person of the Year -- do tell about yourself in the comments. You don't have to say how you embarrassed yourself in junior high (so what else is new?) or that your boss doesn't approve of blog-reading time or anything else personal. Just... tell us who you are. But if you don't know what to say, or just don't want to say, maybe you will answer some of these questions:

What do you like about this blog and/or why do you read it?
What do you hate about this blog? (I'm a big girl, I can take it.)
Are you more interested in web analytics posts or conversion rate posts?
Do you have a Regular Expression that you are trying to figure out (and if so, what is it?)
If you are one of a handful of people who come to the blogsite all the time but never subscribe -- why not?

Well, that's five suggestions to my five readers, maybe I can feel like I still played the game.

Robbin Steif
LunaMetrics

Your web analytics, your duplicate content

2006-12-13T20:42:00.000-05:00

I managed to skip most of the analytic seminars at SES Chicago (after all, Brett Crosby and Matt Belkin didn't even show up as advertised to the analytics vendors seminar), and so didn't hear a lot about analytics (except here.) Every once in a while, someone would say, "Check your analytics before you decide."

The really interesting "Check your analytics" comment was with regard to duplicate content. Adam Lasnik from Google Webmaster Tools (formerly known as Google Sitemaps) insisted that Google doesn't punish site owners for duplicate content since most of it is innocently created. But I think he really meant, "We don't hand out a minus 30 penalty for duplicate pages." In fact, Google indirectly punishes you by putting duplicate pages in the supplemental results where my experience has always been, they rank poorly.

His comment about duplicate pages being created innocently is a good one. Just think, we have www.mysite.com and mysite.com. And then there are pages that are "print only" versions but are basically dupes of the real thing. We end up with secure and not secure pages for the same page by accident (I've seen that twice in the last week.) For most of these problems, the answer was, check your analytics, see which page is the most popular, and then be sure that the search engines don't try to index the less popular one (using either your robots.txt file or a noindex tag.)

Robbin Steif
LunaMetrics

My Negative Exact Match

2006-12-11T22:21:00.000-05:00

Just because this post is about something cool I figured out in Google AdWords doesn't mean that it's not about analytics and conversion. (Well, ok, it's not mostly about analytics and conversion....)

I'm probably not the first person to figure this out, but I definitely stumped "my" Google Ad rep. Here was the issue and the answer, and I will pretend that my company is the customer so that I can use examples.

Issue: If I use a big single head word like analytics and I let Google AdWords use a broad match configuration, the term pulls really well when the searcher uses at least one other word with it. So, for example, if the visitor types in web analytics or analytics consulting or Pittsburgh analytics, the click through and conversion is excellent. You might be thinking, what about when they type in stock analytics or financial analytics? Those don't matter because I already told Google never to match when the searcher uses stock or financial. You know, negative match.

The problem is, the term doesn't do very well when someone just types in analytics - it can mean too many things. I could try to find all the phrase matches possible, but I am too lazy for that.

Answer: "So," I said to the Google AdWords guy, "Can't I do negative exact match? Like this: -[analytics]. That way, analytics is still a broad match term, just not when it appears alone."

He looked at me, and he looked at my paper, and he looked at me again. "Well, I guess it should work, theoretically."

With that I thought, this is ridiculous, I am just going to try it. So I stood there while we talked and added it and AdWords took it. Later I went back and verified that it worked, and that the click throughs and conversions were increasing. I only have a couple days of data right now, but am at a click through rate of 6% for that campaign with no decrease in conversion rate. So I am getting ready to lower the bids.

I learned that I needed the exact negative match by implementing this Google Analytics hack from GA-Experts.

Robbin Steif
LunaMetrics

Matt Cutts and Web Analytics

2006-12-10T17:31:00.000-05:00

Today, Matt Cutts showed the browser technographics for the last month of his blog. He was surprised that his IE and Firefox users were split, given that techies are so inclined to use Firefox (I wasn't at PubCon but apparently they did a quick survey and found that it was two to one in favor of Firefox.)

He has a techie blog, right, a techie audience. So why is his audience not more highly skewed toward Firefox? My blog is just about the same as his, half and half, so I used my stats to evaluate the thoughts below. (Not a great idea, but better than no data.) These were the things that I considered:

Hypothesis: Firefox users "get it" faster than IE users so don't have to visit each post as often. After all, he was showing visits, not unique visitors. Hypothetical answer: Not only is this technological snobbery on my part, but it's just not true. I couldn't find any trend to prove that one.

Hypothesis: IE users are more likely to visit (e.g. to search and click through from the SERP) when the blog post is going to be less technical. Hypothetical answer: Possible. He did show how skewed his WA were when he did the post on hacking. However, to really feel good about this one, I would want more data.

Hypothesis: SEOs may like to use IE but don't want to admit it in a survey where everyone can see. Hypothetical answer: I like this one. I was very surprised at how many SEO presenters used IE while speaking at SES Chicago.

Hypothesis: Tech-heavy Cutts readers are feed subscribers and they don't need to visit his blog to read the post: it comes through in their feeds. Hypothetical results: This is my absolute favorite, especially because he showed how Firefox-heavy his analytics were when he did an extremely techie post. The post had over 100 comments (I think it was 132), and to comment, you have to actually visit the blogsite; a feed isn't good enough. When they visit, the WA finally sees them. Of course, there are probably people who subscribe and have to click through to actually read the post (like My Yahoo! subscribers), but many do not.

Robbin Steif
LunaMetrics

SES Chicago: Retailers who Dislike their Analytic Packages

2006-12-07T20:52:00.000-05:00

It was interesting to hear, this morning at one of the last SES Chicago 2006 panels, how some retailers are unhappy with all web analytic packages and are dying to design their own in-house packages. Some have already started.

This was a panel with five retailers (Pier One, Baby Age, SpinLife, Tool Barn and Vintage Tub & Bath.) One agency/consultant, Range, was on the panel. So, not very statistically significant but interesting nonetheless. The moderator asked all the vendors to address what they liked/didn't like about web analytics. Note: I didn't tape record this, and did the best I could to capture what people actually said, but as usual, the mistakes are mine, mine, all mine. All the comments in square brackets are mine (and aren't a list of regular expressions...)

Pier One. We use Webtrends 7. Our site generates multiple duplicate URLs, especially after someone uses our on-site search, and the analytics packages can't handle it. We are trying to create our own software. [I found that Pier One has GA runnning on their site, but obviously can't see what server side analytics they have.]

Baby Age: We have pretty much used every package out there except Coremetrics and have been pretty unhappy. For a while we were using Omniture and a couple of ROI trackers and they were off by 30 percent. We are using GA now and it seems to be the most accurate, but we are writing our own analytics now. We are working with local universities who have students getting masters degrees in mathematics and statistics and are getting histograms that we would never get from our analytics package. We are working with Penn State -- their professors are looking for projects like this. [Baby Age currently has both SC and GA installed on their site.]

SpinLife: Our experience was similar to Baby Age. We launched in 1999. We had our own analytics up front. We couldn't wait until we could afford a big package, and decided to go with CoreMetrics. We found that the large packages are skewed toward customers that sell simple SKUs. It was inconsistent with the kind of products that we sell. Coremetrics tried very hard and they could not make it work for us (lots of our transactions finish over the phone.) We went back to our home-grown package. We are moving toward a package called RedZone. We need something that handles phone orders well. [Sorry, I couldn't find the package she was referring to, any comments are welcome.]

Baby Age: Our biggest challenge was tracking deferred revenue.

Tool Barn: We use Index tools. We find that we don't have much time to read our reports [audience bursts out in laughter], and we like Index Tools because the info is force fed to us -- it is emailed to us. Index Tools also emails exception reporting, huge spikes etc.

Range: from the agency side, we have looked at just about everything and seen all these problems. The thing that drives us crazy is when people have four packages. None of those things are ever going to line up.

Tool Barn: Along those lines, we are participating in a case study with a dozen packages that will all be on our site. [I assume he means, the study that SEOmoz encouraged. ]

Vintage Tub & Bath: We use Omniture. You can have the best tool in the world but if you don’t have someone looking at it, who cares? [I swear that I heard him say this, but when I went to his website to get the url correct, I found that they only use Google Analytics. Perhaps I misheard.]

Audience question: How do you get buy-in from management to create your own tool? Answer: Buy gifts for the IT staff. [Laughter]
Pier One: I really mean this, in a way. IT loves to make things work correctly, and I watch them create stuff for me on their spare time in a few days that I expect would take months. [This reminds me a little of the guest post that Jodi McDermott wrote on IT vs Marketing.]

Robbin Steif
LunaMetrics

Web Analytics Gossip: SES Chicago 2006

2006-12-05T23:19:00.000-05:00

Although SES is not primarily a WA conference, there's still news and gossip.

Last night, before I went out drinking with my friends from FeedBurner, I got to meet Jeff Turner, formerly of Blogbeat.net, whose company was acquired by FB in July. I sat down with him (well, I stood) and reviewed all the ways that I love Blogbeat and why I have to turn to Google Analytics when I need hard blog data. However, I'm expecting great things of the new integrated FB and Blogbeat.

By now everyone probably knows that WebTrends purchased ClickShift and announced it yesterday. I met the ClickShift CEO, John Rodkin, at the WebTrends party tonight. However, he was wearing a WebTrends shirt, so I didn't really understand that he was "the man" until I started to wonder why he didn't know any of the other WA vendor names. "So," I asked him, "Did WebTrends buy Clickshift [which is a highly automatic, intelligent paid search tool] because WebTrends wants to get into search more?" I didn't have a tape recorder but I think John's answer was, "WebTrends wants to be the CMO's best friend." Then I talked to Jason Palmer, VP Marketing at WebTrends, who is incredibly impressed with John and his team - he thinks John is a genius.

Moving on, I was dismayed that Bill Bruno of Stratigent gave away all his passes to the free Google party and didn't leave one for me. Bill and the Stratigent CEO, Josh Manion and I all got to meet the analyst from Oregon who calls Josh and me all the time, Chad Bartley. (Parentheticaly, many thanks to all the analysts who signed up to talk to investment bankers.) Speaking of which, I got to meet Gary Angel of Semphonic who was exhibiting here too -- Gary signed up to talk to investment bankers after I posted on the Forum but wrote, "Robbin, your request was the strangest one I have ever seen on the Web Analytics Forum." On the trade show floor, while I was waiting to talk to Gary, one of his employees tried to give me a printed book of all his blog writings. "Do you work with any web analytics?" she asked me.

Chris Spiek of Awecomm (WAA Marketing lead for the WAA website) and Nancy Taffera-Santos (co-chair for WAA Events) crashed the Google party with me, after the WebTrends party, but no one noticed. The music was too loud and there was no food (I am not sure which is worse.) Jason, your party was much nicer, wish I had had the chocolate-covered strawberries.

I rode up in the elevator with John Marshall from ClickTracks, musing about writing this post. "Well," he said. "Everyone loves gossip."

Robbin Steif
LunaMetrics

post script: At 12:41 this morning, one of the many people I mentioned wrote me to tell me that my blog gets crawled fast. The post had already pinged the services, been crawled by Google, and he had received an alert that someone was writing about him. (Always a good idea. I use Google Alerts but am not too happy with them, anyone have an alert service that they love?) rfs

FeedBurner and IE7

2006-12-04T18:25:00.000-05:00

So here I am, actually writing my post in the FeedBurner office. I figured that while I was here, I would learn about IE7 and Feedburner.

But first, let's not forget what's really important: The FeedBurner offices. Every bit as cool as the company. All the walls are different colors, and the tables are set up like industrial picnic fences. You can feel the energy in the air.

Anyway, John Z, my always-responsive correspondent, explained the issues to me.

The new IE 7 has the ability to subscribe to feeds (just click on the feed button.) But since it's not a "standard FeedBurner thing," I couldn't understand why I was getting FeedBurner statistics showing me that I had IE7 subscribers.

The issue, John said, is about autodiscovery. Many blogs and podcasts have set feed preferences in their source code. That way, when someone goes to subscribe to a feed with IE7, if they have their autodiscovery set up as FeedBurner, they can track the subscription through FB. Blogger users like me are out of luck - Blogger doesn't support autodiscovery.

So why do I still see IE7 subscribers? When someone clicks on a generic feed link on my blogsite, and they are using IE7 as their browser, IE7 knows that I have a feed (and knows that I have FeedBurner, since that's the spot that the orange feed link usually goes to), formats it like a feed and serves up the opportunity to subscribe. Like this - see the Feedburner address in the address bar (with their flaming icon)?

Summary: If someone uses IE7 to subscribe to a feed with FeedBurner autodiscovery enabled, FeedBurner always measures it. If someone uses IE7 to subscribe to a feed like mine (no autodiscovery) they have to use the icons on my site, not merely the IE7 icons, for FeedBurner to notice it.

So for all you IE7 subscribers whom I don't know about: hello out there! (And it is oh! so cold in Chicago.)

Robbin Steif
LunaMetrics

ps John Z gets all the credit for this post. I am just the journalist here and get credit for all the mistakes.

Conversion Analysis: PCA

2006-12-03T17:31:00.000-05:00

I love to critique websites for conversion, but sometimes it feels like shooting fish in a barrel.

Tomorrow I am flying to SES Chicago, so I'm pulling together everything I need for my trip. This usually includes a coupon for my favorite parking lot, Parking Corporation of America. Today, I couldn't find a real coupon, so I got onto the Internet and typed in "coupon PCA." I was pleasantly surprised to see that their own site was #1 in Google.

Problem #1: Is it a link or not?

Despite the great Google SEO, I almost didn't get a coupon, because the site told me to click on my airport, but it appeared that only the airports at the bottom of the screen were live links:

The various ways of showing that a link was mousable threw me off -- it was clear that the underlined text was a link, but not so clear that the other text in a different color without underlining also denoted a link. I did figure out that Pittsburgh was a link, and did get my coupon, at which point, I started to see what other benefits the site offered.

Problem #2: Forms that don't work.

I park at PCA about once a month, for two or three days. It seems from their site that they have a frequent parking service -- once you've parked there for 31 days, you get a free 10-day stay. This would be valuable if they let you hold onto it until you actually stay at the airport that long, but I don't know the terms. Nevertheless, I filled out the form and hit "Submit Form.

Strangely enough, my email program came up instead of a "Thank you" page. So I went back to the Frequent Parking service page and ran my cursor over the "Submit Form" button. Sure enough, there was no URL assigned to that button but rather, a mailto address:

Problem #3: No trust.

Then I went back to the home page and looked at their GPS (Guaranteed Parking Service.) Like the free 10-day stay, I had my doubts about that one. I have never been unable to park in the Pittsburgh PCA - ever. That's not a service or benefit: it's like making a reservation at a restaurant that always has a couple of empty tables. (Maybe that matters for a weekend like Thanksgiving?) Then I scrolled down to the bottom of the page and saw that the copyright was 1998-2002 (I always wonder if sites with out-of-date copyrights are still in business.)

Still on the topic of no trust, I went to the Pittsburgh prepayment page, and saw that it had collapsed in on itself. Here's a sample:

As usual, this was a page that rendered beautifully in IE, not in Firefox. But would you want to be leaving 16% or more of your money on the table?

In Summary

It's true that I did convert - I did get my coupon. But I'm not a new or even semi-new customer; I've been there enough days to get lots of free stay cards. I would probably park there even without a coupon, using my AAA card for a smaller discount. Getting a frequent buyer card in the hands of someone like me should be PCA's prioirty.

And then there is the issue of trust. I know that they're a real company and that I can trust them because I have parked my car there so many times this past year alone. What if I were just checking them out for the first time?

Robbin Steif
LunaMetrics

Regular Expressons Part XII: Bad Greed

2006-12-02T17:00:00.000-05:00

Now that I have learned and explained the Regular Expressions that Google Analytics uses:

Backslashes \
Dots .
Carats ^
Dollars signs $
Question marks ?
Pipes |
Parentheses ()
Square brackets []and dashes -
Plus signs +
Stars *
Regular Expressions for Google Analytics: Now let's Practice
RegEx and Good Greed
Intro to RegEx"

I want to explore another area: Regular Expressions and the concept of greediness.

You might be tempted to write a Regular Expression like this:

/mypage/

expecting it to match the page on your site called /mypage/

And this Regular Expression really does match /mypage/. But it also matches /mypage/thirdpage-and-something-else . For that matter, it matches /secondpage/mypage.html and mypage.htm and mypage.asp.

Regular Expressions are greedy -- they match and match as much as they can. Greed can be good, but first I want to write about the obvious problem, i.e. the RegEx (Regular Expression) will match too many strings to be useful.

We can deal with this in various ways:

1) Tell the RegEx where to start. In the above example, if we wrote the RegEx like this

^/mypage/

it will only match when /mypage/ is at the beginning of the line, so it will never match /secondpage/mypage/ etc.

2) Tell the RegEx when to stop. We can do this in various ways, but need to know how the expression ends. For example, are we only looking for mypage.htm or are we also looking for all the pages that are in the /mypage/ folder -- /mypage/otherpages.htm? If only mypage.htm matters, then we can include that in the RegEx:

/mypage\.htm$

Notice that I used a backslash to make the dot into a real dot and not a special character, and a dollar sign to say, this only works at the end of the line. (That way, mypage.html won't match.)

We can combine that with #1 above and create this RegEx:

^/mypage\.htm$

and never get any unexpected characters before the slash or after the htm.

On the other hand, if all the pages in the /mypage/ folder that have .htm suffixes are of interest, we could do this differently:

^/mypage/.*\.htm$

I really hate when people throw this kind of gobbledygook at me so let me see if I can explain in pieces:

^/mypage/ = only consider the match if /mypage/ is at the start of a line...
.* = match everything that comes next until...
\.htm$ = you get to the last real period followed by htm and it's at the end of a line.

Clear as mud, eh?

Robbin Steif
LunaMetrics

Compelling and urgent: offers and subject lines

2006-11-29T23:08:00.000-05:00

I really notice lousy email subject lines and offers when I finally see good ones.

I opted in (by accident) to the email list of my favorite national clothing store. They have no e-commerce capabilities, so all email has the goal of driving the reader to the bricks and mortar location. They bore the reader with subject lines and no-offers like, "Shine this season at [our store]" and "Suede, Denim and more now at [our store]."

The company makes it worse by sending the whole ad in one picture. Many email programs, like Thunderbird or Outlook, may not open up the picture unless you click on the "show me the pictures" button (requiring yet another click. And clicks are precious.)

This week, though, their mail carried the subject line, "Hurry! Take an additional 20% off already reduced merchandise!" Not only did I open it, not only did I click to see the picture, but I printed it out and put it in my bag so that I could redeem the coupon.

You don't always have to do a sale to get noticed. I only got onto this mailing list by asking them to please tell me when their brushed cotton winter pants came into stock. So even a nice little personalized text message about product availability would have been more interesting to me than another email about what fabrics they had in stock. "Sale - New Reductions Just Taken" would have been so much more compelling if it had been written, "Limited Time Sale! 50% off selected merchandise." It really was a 50% sale, so the offer was compelling but the subject line fell flat.

Robbin Steif
LunaMetrics

Regular Expressions Part XII: Now Let's Practice

2006-11-27T17:17:00.000-05:00

Now that I have learned and then explained all the Regular Expressions for Google Analytics:

Backslashes \
Dots .
Carats ^
Dollars signs $
Question marks ?
Pipes |
Parentheses ()
Square brackets []and dashes -
Plus signs +
Stars *
Bad Greed
RegEx and Good Greed
Intro to RegEx"

let's can work backwards, i.e. look at some expressons and figure out what they mean and why.

I always hate when techies give a really simple explanation and then jump to the hardest example possible, so I will try not to do the same (which is easy for me, not being a techie and all.) Let's start with these warm-up examples from the Wikipedia entry on Regular Expressions.

".at" matches any three-character string like hat, cat or bat. Reason: Because a dot matches any character. So hat, cat and bat are all good matches, as would be any other one character match to the dot.

"[hc]at" matches hat and cat. Reason: Because square brackets create a list of items, and you can match to any one item in the list. So this expressions matches hat by pulling the "h" out of the square brackets, and it matches cat by pulling the "c" out of the square brackets, but unlike the former example, it doesn't match bat -- that's because there is no "b" in the square brackets.

"[^b]at" matches all the matched strings from the regex ".at" except bat. Reason: This is an alternative of the carat ^ -- when it is inside square brackets at the beginning, it means "not." Thus, the [^b] means, don't match a b.

"^[hc]at" matches hat and cat but only at the beginning of a line. Reason: This is a more standard use of the carat ^ -- it is not inside square brackets so it means, the RegEx will match your expression only if your expression starts at the beginning of the line.

"[hc]at$" matches hat and cat but only at the end of a line. Reason: This is identical to the second example in this list, except for the dollar sign at the end. The dollars sign ensures that the RegEx only matches your string if your string's characters come at the end of a line.

OK, here is a slightly harder one, also from Wikipedia:

((great )*grand)?((fa|mo)ther)

I will take this apart to make it easier to understand.

The parenthesis create groups, separated by a question mark. So we effectively have:

(expression in this set of parenthesis)?(another expression in this set of parenthesis)

Since a question mark usually means, include 0 or 1 of the former expression, we know that this RegEx is allowed to match just the stuff in the second set of parenthesis (right? That's what question marks do, they can match what comes right before them or not match what comes right before them. If they don't match the stuff before them, only the characters after them are left to match.) So, let's start by looking at the second half only, which we know should be able to stand by itself:

((fa|mo)ther)

The pipe symbol | means OR. So this resolves to (father) OR (mother). You might reasonably ask, why do we need all the parentheses? Technically, we don't need the outside set but they make the expression easier to read when it is all together like this: ((great )*grand)?((fa|mo)ther) It would be perfectly reasonable to write an expression like this: (fa|mo)ther. We do need the inside set because if we got rid of them, the expression would look like this: fa|mother , which means, either fa OR mother.

Now let's go back and look at the first half, the part that came before the question mark:

((great )*grand)

The star tells us to match zero, one or more than one instances of the expression before it. So it can match a string which doesn't include great, in which case we just have grand, and of course, we always have the end of the expression, which will either be mother or father. So we might match to grandmother or grandfather. It can match a string which includes great just once, in which case we have great grand mother OR great grandfather. And it can match a string which includes great more than once, so we might end up with great great great great grandmother OR great great grandfather.

So there you have it, all your ancestors with just one Regular Expression.

If you didn't understand any of that, please send me email, steif -at- lunametrics.com. (I am always disappointed that no one ever comments on RegEx posts.)

Robbin Steif
LunaMetrics

More on Website Goals

2006-11-26T15:18:00.000-05:00

I consistently am reminded that not all website owners -- even ecommerce website owners -- have purely financial goals.

Usually, I see non-monetary goals that are about ego or competitiveness. However, I got onto the B&H website yesterday - Saturday - (because they have great prices) and was surprised to see that the shopping cart was closed, but would open at 5:45 pm.

I whipped out my calendar and saw that in New York City, where they are based, nightfall was at 5:08 PM last night. Then I went to Shimon Sandler's site. He did a piece that I read a couple of weeks ago. At issue were Orthodox Jews who own e-commerce sites and wanted to turn off the sites on the Jewish Sabbath. (This time, I actually noticed that he linked to the B&H site as an example.)

B&H is not a small 10-page website. They have 424,000 pages according to Google. They sent me a 420 page catalog in the mail after I dropped $35 for a jumpdrive and a USB cable there. Online weekend shopping will continue to get stronger as just about everyone has broadband at home, and this is a big (private) company willing to forego plenty of Friday night and Saturday purchases in the name of their beliefs.

Read my other post on this topic: The Web, is it just about making money?

Robbin Steif
LunaMetrics

Update: auto-create Google Analytics Powerpoint and Excel presentations

2006-11-24T17:02:00.000-05:00

Just a note to tell everyone that if they want to auto-generate .ppt and .xls from Google Analytics, the software that Chris Harrington created (and I user tested and nagged about and then user tested again) is now updated. You can read the original post here. If this is something that interests you, please read the whole post because there are a number of "must have" issues.

Robbin Steif
LunaMetrics

Regular Expressions Part XI: Real Wildcards .*

2006-11-20T22:45:00.000-05:00

Now we are (I am) ready for a Google Analytics Regular Expression that is truly a wildcard .*

Months ago, I wrote a blog post about Regular Expressions Wildcards for Google Analytics. But when I went back to it, it was only semi-intelligible, so I deleted it and created all the Regular Expression building blocks first. If you like, you can read all ten of them: \ . ^ $ ? () []and - + *

Now that you (or perhaps more correctly, I) understand the building blocks, let's talk about how to create real wildcards.

Most of us are familiar with a star as a wildcard, outside of Regular Expressions. We can search for all our .jpg files on our computer with this: *.jpg, which to us means "get everything.jpg." However, with Regular Expressions, a star only means repeat the last character zero times or once or more than once. In order to make it mean "get everything," you have to pair it with a dot, like so: .*

Why? Because, a dot means get any character. A star means, repeat the last character zero times or once or more than once. So the combination means, repeat any characters as often as you like, i.e. get everything.

If we wanted to get every occurance of a jpg file, we would do it with a RegEx that looked like this:
.*\.jpg

For those of you who are scratching your head instead of nodding your heads, here is why: .* tells Google Analytics to match everything (as described above). The next part of the expression \. tells GA to then match a real dot. This is because dots are usually wildcards in their own right, but using a backslash turns them into ordinary dots. The last three characters, jpg, tells GA to match the letters jpg. So we get end up with "everything.jpg," which was just what we wanted.

Robbin Steif
LunaMetrics

Many thanks to Justin and his awesome RegEx Tool (which doesn't require a download.) Postscript: And of course, thanks to Steve, who taught me Regular Expressions from the beginning and found an error in this original post.

Measuring downloads and other onclick events

2006-11-18T16:17:00.000-05:00

"Honey, I finally coded my blog's onclick events," I told my spouse. He looked at me like I had lost my mind, but in fact, I had worked earlier in the week to code the download of a .pdf from his page at CMU. Onclick events are everywhere.

Before we get into the main topic, let's talk about events in general. Most web analytics, like most web analysts, are event driven. We want to know that someone signed up for our email marketing, we want to know that someone put something into the shopping cart, that someone downloaded a .pdf.

Lots of times, this is no trouble at all. When the page changes, that signals EVENT to the web analytics. There are at least three reasons why it is nice to have a new page show up when the user clicks on something:

1) It creates great feedback for the user (he's not mumbling, "Did anything happen there or do I need to click again?")
2) It gives a website the opportunity to talk to the user ("Thank you for your request for information, we'll be getting back to you within 24 hours," etc.)
3) It makes the measurement easy.

However, not all clicks can be measured with a page chage. Examples of events that we are probably desperate to measure and that may require special treatment are:

Clicks that send you to a different page. How many people clicked over to WebEx to sign up for that webinar, how many people clicked over to FeedBurner to subscribe to your feed? You can't know what they did once they got to the other site, but you can at least learn that they clicked.

Downloads - your .pdfs, your video files, your audio files. You won't know how many pages they looked at or how much they listened to, but you'll know that they clicked to download. (You really won't know if they finished the download either.)

Rich media events, like Flash

and more.

Most web analytics solutions still can measure these kinds of events, but require special code. Maybe it's a special variable, maybe it's a special on-click call. No matter how you look at it, it usually requires just that much more work on your part.

On the other hand, we need to use onclick events now more than ever. Flash and AJAX are pervasive and lead to many minutes (or hours) of work on pages that never change. I predict that coding onclick events will become much easier - as easy as coding a hyperlink is right now. A little window will come up, you'll be able to specify the kind of event and what you want to call it, and you'll be on your way. This is my same old story, though: web analytics will really make it when we really make it easy.

For the record, I went through all the Omniture videos in an effort to learn how SiteCatalyst 13 handles rich media events (part of the press release spoke to their new abilities in that realm) but I couldn't figure out what the new functionality is. Anyone is welcome to add that.

Robbin Steif
LunaMetrics

Two more thoughts on Blog Conversion

2006-11-16T15:31:00.000-05:00

Earlier this week, I wrote twelve tips on blog conversion. Here are two additional thoughts:

1) One commenter asked how I felt about including only a snippet of the post in the feed, so that all the people using feeds have to visit the blogsite to read the whole thing. Although I personally hate it, I would urge everyone to test it themselves. I was very influenced, a year ago, by this post that Xavier Casanova did on his analytics blog. When you read the comments, you really hear his audience telling him exactly what they want, and they really wanted to see the whole post in the feed. Thanks X, for finding that post for me.

2) I alluded to the importance of having on-site search. If you blog a lot and link among your posts, no one will use your on-site search box quite as much as you will, I promise you. You will want to link back to the post you did last year and won't be able to find it without a search box.

Robbin Steif
LunaMetrics

Regular Expressions Part X: Stars *

2006-11-15T16:06:00.000-05:00

This is Part X of the long long series I have been doing on Regular Expressions (RegEx) for Google Analytics. It is the last one I will do that explains what Google says vs. what they mean.

When it comes to stars (or call them asterisks if you like), Google Analytic says this:

* Match zero or more of the previous items

Perfectly reasonable, if you know how to create a list of previous items. If you already read Post IX, use of the plus sign in RegEx, this will be easy, and if not, I'll try to make it easy.

If the only special character you are using is the star *, then the previous item is defined as the previous character. For example, let's say that my company has five digit part numbers, and I want to know how many people are searching for part number 34. The problem I have are all those leading zeros - technically, the part number is PN00034. So I could use the little Google Analytics filter box in my search report with a RegEx like this: PN0*34. That will bring me back all the searches for PN034 and PN0034 and PN00034 and PN00000034 and for that matter, PN34, since using the star means that the previous item doesn't need to be in the search -- zero or more of the previous items, it says.

Alternatively, we could build a list of previous items using square brackets. Like in my post on plus signs, I had a hard time finding a reason someone would want to use this, but again, used the example that Steve gave me. His example was square brackets with a space. So, I could do a search for my company name in the same filter box on the keywords report, like so:
Luna[ ]*metrics. That will come back with LunaMetrics (no use of the space) or Luna Metrics, or Luna Metrics, etc.

For the sake of completeness, I should point out that you can put real characters in the square brackets like this:b[aeiou]*d, and it matches bad and bed and bid and bod and bud. But for that matter, it matches baaaad and boud and bd, so I don't think it is particularly useful. If I really just wanted to see those five examples (bad, bed, bid, bod and bud), I would be smarter to use the OR pipe | and do it like this: b(a|e|i|o|u)d.

Anyone who has a great example of using a star with square brackets is strongly encouraged to comment.

Backslashes \
Dots .
Carats ^
Dollars signs $
Question marks ?
Pipes |
Parentheses ()
Square brackets []and dashes -
Plus signs +
Regular Expressions for Google Analytics: Now let's Practice
Bad Greed
RegEx and Good Greed
Intro to RegEx"

Robbin Steif
LunaMetrics

Blog conversion: Twelve highly-detailed suggestions

2006-11-13T10:53:00.000-05:00

At least three of my friends have started blogs in the past two weeks. Every time I read one, I start to compose an email with suggestions and then I remember that not everyone likes unsolicted advice. So (for those three friends and everyone else who has a blog): here are my thoughts on how to increase your blog conversion (assuming you define conversion as getting your audience to be more involved with your blog.) It is not the Big Picture -- for that one, you have to go read Avinash's post on blogging. It is not about blog SEO -- for that one, you have to go read Rand's post on blogging. No, these are details that are way down in the weeds, but that's where the devil is, no?

1. Compose in an editor that won't insert strange characters into your feeds
It's easy to see who composes in MS Word -- those are the bloggers whose feeds look like this:

Iâ€™m researching options for being able to find zip codes within a specific distance from a location. Thus far Iâ€™ve found a couple of desktop applications, ZIP Code Downloadâ€™s Lookup GXE and Xioneticâ€™s ...

If the subscriber is reading with something like My Yahoo, he only sees the titles anyway and has to click through to the blogsite - so if you are checking this comment against a reader like My Yahoo, you won't see the mess that I see in my blog reading software. (I use Thunderbird, as do about 4% of my subscribers.)

I have experimented with this problem a lot and haven't found a way to save the Word document such that the strange characters don't come through. (The same is often true if you cut and paste an email into a post, which is actually what happened with the above post, the writer told me.) The best is to compose in Notepad, spellcheck a copy of it in Word and then manually fix your typos. This is an opportunity for everyone who uses a Mac to tell me how much better their technology is.

2. Link among your posts.
If I subscribe to your blog (so I can read your content without checking out your blogsite) and you don't link to your other posts, I am much less likely to check out other posts that you have written. This is also a problem for non-subscribers who land on a permalink with, say, a Google search (so they do visit your blogsite), but you don't link among your posts and they still don't see any more than the one page.

3. You have an internal search engine.
Even a crummy search engine, like the one that Technorati provides for free, is better than nothing. Don't you hate when you remember reading something great on someone's site, you get to the site, and you have no idea how to find it?

4. When you do a multi-part series, link both forwards and backwards.
I am currently writing a multi-part series on Regular Expressions for Google Analytics. I am up to Part Nine, and I promise you that linking both forward and backwards has been difficult and time consuming and sometimes I just don't get to it. Why not? Because when I put up Part X, I will have nine other older posts that need to have changes made to them. On the other hand, when I am done (it should only happen!!) I will completely index everything because it drives me a little crazy when other bloggers forget this nicety.

5. Set up your software so that your posts are signed in some way.
I see this problem a lot with new bloggers. They don't explore all the options that Blogger/Wordpress etc gives them -- and one of those options is the ability to electronically sign their posts. The WordPress default seems to be Administrator, so if you haven't set up a name for yourself, your post comes through to me like this:

Clear those Cookies - by Anonymous

This is especially important if you have a blog with multiple authors (as a reader, I want the ability to skip the author that I hate and go right to the author that I love.)

6. Have an "About Us" section
I really, really want to know who you are. Do you work for Microsoft? Are you a Google Analytics Certified Representative? This problem (no "about us" or "about me" section) is the worst when it is combined with #5, because then you have neither a name nor a description of yourself.

7. Use feed chicklets and the Universal feed icon.
Just because your blog is Atom or RSS enabled doesn't mean that people will subscribe. It's true that in Firefox you can see the Universal feed icon in the address bar, but if the reader just wants to click that Bloglines chicklet and be all set up, a little orange icon is just not going to do it for them. Spend a minute and subscribe to my favorite company, FeedBurner, and then use their Chicklet Chooser capabilities.

8. Don't blog so often that I can't keep up with you
This is very subjective. There are a lot of blogs, like TechCrunch, that do incredibly well with ten posts a day. I still subscribe to them, but now I only scan the titles (an argument for great titles), and maybe look at one item. In general, I find myself unsubscribing when I can't keep up. Since your mileage may vary, you should test test test.

9. There is no 9. (Really. I skipped it accidentally.)

10. Don't blog so rarely that I forget to take your seriously
Enough said

11. If you take a vacation, you may have a hundred posts when you get back, but save them to use over time.
One of my friends was unable to write for a few weeks and then published four incredible posts, all in one day. I wish he lived here in Pittsburgh so that I could take him out for a drink and chastise him. If the posts aren't time sensitive, write them up and just publish them, one each day.

12. Make it easy to scan your post.
Not every post is meant to be scanned. When you write a very technical, in depth post about how to create a certain kind of functionality, the reader need to read it. But a post like the one you are currently reading is perfect for scanning. You can read the boldfacing and then pause to read the test where you are truly interested.

Additions?

Robbin Steif
LunaMetrics

Regular Expressions Part IX: Plus signs +

2006-11-09T07:34:00.000-05:00

This is part nine of a multi-part series I am doing to make Regular Expressions ("RegEx") more understandable for users of Google Analytics. I am learning and teaching at the same time.

Today, I am writing about the plus sign, +. Here is how GA defines the plus sign:

+ Match one or more of the previous items

This probably seems perfectly reasonable to Google and other old hands at Regular Expressions, because they already know how to define "the Previous Items." But I didn't and had to figure it out.

The simplest meaning of "Previous Items" is "previous character." So, I could look for my name in my Google Analytics search terms by typing this into the "quick filter" box: Rob+in. That will return Robin or Robbin, and for that matter, Robbbbin. It's actually pretty useful, since I get a lot of searches like that, and often want to filter them out.

Alternatively, you can build a list of Previous Items by using square brackets. Like this: [abc]+ This will return a, ab, cab, c, b, bbbb and the like. This seems a little strange, but in fact, if you read the interpretation ("match one or more of the previous items"), you'll notice there isn't anything about the previous items being in a specific order.

However -- I couldn't think of any way to use square brackets with a plus sign that I couldn't achieve with other Regular Expressions. So I wrote my tutor in Australia, Steve. The best example he had was searching for a space. Thus: if I wanted to know how many people type in web site or web site or even web site, I could create web[ ]+site for my Regular Expression.

If you have any other great uses of square brackets and plus signs for Google Analytics, please share them.

Backslashes \
Dots .
Carats ^
Dollars signs $
Question marks ?
Pipes |
Parentheses ()
Square brackets []and dashes -
Stars *
Regular Expressions for Google Analytics: Now let's Practice
Bad Greed
RegEx and Good Greed
Intro to RegEx"

Robbin Steif
LunaMetrics

Blogging genes

2006-11-02T12:48:00.000-05:00

This just in: blogging is a genetic trait.

Well okay, the research report, done by podcaster Eric Mattson and professor Nora Ganim Barnes of the University of Massachusetts, didn't really go there, or at least not that far. They wrote,

An overwhelming majority of the [80] bloggers [in the survey] believe the attitude and behavior associated with having an effective blog can be taught. The challenge, they say is teaching a business to speak in an "authentic voice" regardless of what communications tools it chooses to employ. These bloggers believe that if businesses practice open and honest communications consistently in all their activities, they will be successful, regardless of whether they blog or not.

In the final analysis, blogging is more than posts, links, comments and feeds. Instead, it represents an attitude for interacting with employees, customers and communities. Perhaps it is not so much about having a blog as it is about thinking like a blogger...

It's true, they really don't go anyway near the nature argument. But whether it's nurture or nature, I think that the ability and inclination to write completely transparently and admit to being less than perfect doesn't come naturally to some people.

Well, don't take my word for it, check it out yourself. I was surprised to see that it is a $52 download, given that most academic papers are free. But then, I was also surprised to see that I was in the report. Now that I see my name there, I have this distant memory of answering a survey....

Robbin Steif
LunaMetrics

Firefox and Madame Tussauds Wax Museum and free user testing

2006-10-31T21:17:00.000-05:00

Earlier this week, I wrote that Madame Tussauds of London is the worst tourist website in England. But in fact, it is perfectly lovely and usable if you use IE.

You try it: open up a *Firefox* browser and type in the url: http://www.madame-tussauds.co.uk/, which I made into a link for the 52% of this blog's readers newsstand readers who use Firefox. See if you can figure out how to do anything besides visit other wax museums around the world.

I couldn't do anything with the site, because the my computer screen looked like this

There was no navigation and no mousable links except the "visit another wax museum" stuff on the right. I kept thinking, maybe they have only one page for each city, but if so, why would they write, Book Online Now, in the blue bar at the bottom of the screen shot? Eventually, I found their site map at the very bottom of the page and was amazed that an entire site was being hidden behind the home page.

But before I blogged, I opened it up in IE. Wow, I thought, I don't remember that navigation bar being right there where you would expect it, below the top banner:

In fact, it was just a case of the navigation getting compressed in Firefox. Most sites don't have the kind of Firefox usage that my blog does, but I hear surveys that put usage at 18% and even over 20% in Europe. (And hey, doesn't London count as Europe?)

History has taught me a few lessons about this problem. There is the obvious one: always check to see what your site looks like in other browsers. But this wasn't an error they would probably have caught - they would have seen the site render nicely, and would have kept on going and may never have noticed that that thin line of navigation somehow dropped off the page. So in fact, we need to get our customers and readers to use our sites in other browsers.

A second lesson I have learned is not to expect the Madame Tussaud's people to write me a thank you note. I always think that free user testing and lousy CGM is best handled with a comment, "Thank you so much for pointing out the Firefox problem we have. We'll get on it right away!" But I can just imagine their response, it would probably be "All our customers use IE." They may know that all their customers don't use IE, but they probably don't want to admit to it in print.

I, on the other hand, love when people write me and tell me about problems with my blog and my site. One man wrote once and told me that I had committed just the flip of the error above: my blog was messed up in IE. One lady in Massachusetts wrote me and told me that for months, My Yahoo was not picking up my feed correctly (I think FeedBurner waved a magic wand to fix that one.)

Wouldn't it be great if sites gave away awards or just honorable mentions to customrs who cared enough to tell them that their sites weren't working properly?

Robbin Steif
LunaMetrics

Jim MacIntyre of WSS and my blog

2006-10-30T22:52:00.000-05:00

"What do you think about Jim MacIntyre becoming CEO of WebSideStory?" the investment banker asked me this morning.

That was twelve hours ago and I had no data so could only speculate. But now I have real data:

My most popular post today was this one, Absolutely Blown Away by Visual Sciences. It had more than 65% as many views as all the views for that post combined for the last business week:

Furthermore, from Thursday October 19 through yesterday, only 7.3% of the people who read that post lived in Utah (or more correctly, had computers that live in Utah.) But today, 80% of computers looking at my Visual Science post live in Utah.

I am happy to do the reporting here, but I don't want to do the analysis. This is partially because I don't want to get involved in a competition that has nothing to do with me, and partially because I would need more data anyway. (I know, it is very unusual for me to mind my own business. But it happens sometimes.)

Instead, I will close with a comment about Google Analytics. GA - I see your geographic drilldowns all the time, I "demo'ed" them at the Summit -- but this was the first time that I have ever used them for something truly meaningful. Thanks for having them when I needed them.

Robbin Steif
LunaMetrics

The London Eye Shopping Cart

2006-10-30T07:51:00.000-05:00

I'm going to London on Thursday for five days with my teenaged daughter. We've been doing the research online in an effort to pick and choose among all the great things there are to do.

She insisted that we do the London Eye, so we bought tickets online. I am somewhat amazed that I succeeded in giving my money to them.

Despite the fact that they have a six page shopping cart, it wasn't that bad until I got to the credit card page. Here's a screen shot that shows all the things I did wrong:

After I hit "Confirm booking," I got an error message. The shopping cart was unhappy with the telephone number because I had included dashes. Well OK, I thought, they could have told me ahead of time or better yet, teach that field to ignore dashes, but I can handle this one, I deal with that one all the time.

So I fixed it and tried to Confirm Booking for the second time. This time the error was harder and probably cultural. Notice how the credit card number field is followed by two date fields - see the green highlighting. The first one is Start Date. The first time that I filled out the form, I just began to put my expiration date there. When the years options didn't go past 2006, I realized that something was wrong, and then saw that whatever Start Date meant, it wasn't mandatory. (If it isn't mandatory, and it doesn't cut across all cultures, and this is a really touristy thing to do, why do they include it?) Anyway, the error message yelled at me for including a month and not a year, so I dealt with the drop down box to get rid of the month. [I still have no idea what Start Date means.] I tried to Confirm Booking for the third time.

The finally one was ridiculous. It is in blue highlighting, where they ask for my name again. I gave them my name, Robbin F. Steif, and the error came back disallowing special characters. In other words, I wasn't allowed to put a period after my middle initial.

I confirmed my booking for the fourth time and finally, they took my money.

London Eye's site, however, doesn't win the award for the Worst London Tourist Attraction WebSite, just because they have such a crummy shopping cart. That "honor" is reserved for Madame Tussauds Wax Museum - London. More later.

Robbin Steif
LunaMetrics

Regular Expression posts made easier

2006-10-28T16:41:00.000-04:00

I've been writing about Regular Expressions for Google Analytics for some time now. The more I learned, the more I wanted to rewrite my very earliest posts, because In The Beginning, I took easy topics and made them hard. Or, I combined too many expressions together without just starting with basic ideas.

Anyway, I rewrote Part I, the backslash and I also rewrote Part II. Originally, Part II addressed multiple wildcards but I simplified it to be just the dot. I will deal with the plus sign + and the asterisk (which RegEx types like to call a star) in future posts.

Over time, I will get them all cross-indexed. (Done, done done!! at last. ) When I change the post title, I break the link, so I'll fix that too. (sorry!)

If you got lost learning about wildcards on Post II, this would be a good time, to the extent that you actually have time, to go back and just learn about dots.

Backslashes \
Dots .
Carats ^
Dollars signs $
Question marks ?
Pipes |
Parentheses ()
Square brackets []and dashes -
Plus signs +
Stars *
Regular Expressions for Google Analytics: Now let's Practice
Bad Greed
RegEx and Good Greed
Intro to RegEx"

Robbin Steif
LunaMetrics

Jodi McDermott writes about Marketing and IT

2006-10-24T10:00:00.000-04:00

After speaking about marketing and IT at the eMetrics Summit, I blogged about it here and commented that one woman in the audience had a great answer: make IT into your customer. I hit a streak of luck - Jodi McDermott, the woman I was referring to, read my blog and sent me email. (And of course, I hit her up for that guest blog post that I wanted from her, since she clearly has this so figured out, better than lots of other companies.) Here is her guest post - enjoy!

How do you get your IT department on board with web analytics - turn them into one of your customers!

I thoroughly enjoyed Robbin Steif's presentation at E-Metrics last week in which she spoke about the ongoing tension between Marketers and IT staff. In a quick show of hands around the room she asked everyone to express their opinions of the battles between the departments and how each person deals with it on a daily basis. Much to my surprise, I learned that my company is quite progressive in working through the trials of this relationship (and no, it has not always been this way). Instead of battling on the support needed to maintain a web analytics solution in-house, our team has turned IT into a customer by providing them with the same level of analytics as the Marketing team.

So how does one get the attention of the IT department? Get to the heart of the metrics and analyis that they desire, but can't obtain from their other monitoring tools. Segment, slice and dice based on the dimensions of data that they might care about – a healthy dialogue around HTTP status code and IP will get you much farther with them than discussing Campaign codes will.

Just last week I received an urgent set of emails from IT in which they were trying feverishly to determine why bandwidth had spiked on the site over the last 60 minutes. Through our web analytics tool (we use Visual Sciences) I was able to quickly segment the data to determine that the spike in traffic was coming from one of our new affiliate partners. They had dropped an email newsletter mid-day and the opens were driving so much traffic to the site that it triggered several alerts in IT. The question in their minds was - web site attack or valid customer traffic??? In minutes my team was able to verify that indeed it was valid customer traffic and what remained was a conversation with our affiliate partner to better coordinate their marketing activity with us.

Other examples of IT requests have included the analysis of filtered traffic versus unfiltered traffic. Our tool gives us the capability to quickly change the configuration and reprocess the dataset in order to determine the percentage of traffic from visitors who do not accept cookies and robots. We also recently participated in providing metrics for a portion of our traffic that we may send to a third-party caching network. Through the use of web analytics we were able to help our IT department forecast the volume of traffic that would be sent to the network and thereby negotiate the most cost effective contract for our company.

The IT department has to be prepared for both sides of the coin though. A few weeks ago we discovered that a page tag was missing from one of our important points in the order process flow. We were able to determine down to the hour as to when the tag disappeared. Based on their change control process they could tie the issue back to the team who had pushed out the new code (sans tag). Delivering the "gap analysis" back to IT needs to be done in a delicate manner. The granularity of the reporting that you can provide can both answer their questions and point out their weaknesses.

The relationship has not always been this smooth for our company, but showing value to the business through web analytics has put our team (and tool) at the top of the radar for our executives. This in turn is increasing the awareness of the IT staff as they learn what other nuggets of information can be gleaned from the data (and oh-how-quickly). If you can evangelize the value to the top levels of the organization – including the office of the CIO/CTO, the probability of having an amicable relationship with IT and gaining their support is most certainly an achievable goal.

Jodi McDermott
Director of Web Analytics
InPhonic
www.wirefly.com

Regular Expressions Part VIII: [Square Brackets] and Dashes -

2006-10-22T14:37:00.000-04:00

Come learn Regular Expressions for Google Analytics with me. I am learning Regular Expressions for Google Analytics and teaching with each lesson. This is why I roll them out slowly - each expression requires a lot of research. I have been awed at this process because the explanations are so opaque before I understand them, and once I learn them, they make perfect sense. Tonight, let's talk about square brackets, and I hope you'll see what I mean.

Google Analytics defines square brackets like this:

[] Match one item in this list

This is exactly what they mean, it just sounds hard because they don't tell you how to create the list and how to define an item. Simple explanation: When you use square brackets, each character within the bracket is an item. Look at this sample list with five items in it, each of which happens to be a vowel: [aeiou]. The hard part is undertanding that you don't need anything to separate the characters, and that each item in the list is only one character.

Here's how someone might use square brackets with Google Analytics. Let's say you were selling items with part numbers formatted like this: PART1, PART2, etc. You want to know how often someone lands on your site by typing the actual part number into a search engine, but you only care about PART3, PART5 and PART7. So, you could enter PART[357] into the fiter box on the top of your Overall Keyword Conversion report (for example). That will match each of those part numbers. (Technically, it matchest one of these three and more, but I will hold that problem/opportunity for a different post.)

It's helpful to understand dashes so that you can use square brackets easily. Google Analytics defines dashes like this:

- Create a range in a list

That means, instead of creating a list like this [abcdefghijkl], you can create it like this: [a-l], and it means the same thing -- only one letter out of the list gets matched. You can also combine the range method and the brute force, type-them-all-in method and create a list like this: [a-lqtz], which matches any one letter between a and l, or q, or t, or z.

Special case: Sometimes -- perhaps often -- we really want the dash to be one of the characters we are searching for. Maybe we want to see searches of luna-metrics and lunarmetrics and lunammetrics. In that case, we put the dash at the beginning or end of the list, like this [-rm]. That means that the full RegEx which would match the three lunametrics keywords above would be luna[-rm]metrics. This is because the phrase will start with luna, end with metrics, and in between will have a dash, an r, or an m. Those are the only choices in the little list I created, the one that looked like this: [-rm].

There are other interesting things that you can do with square brackets, but I am leaving them out for now, either because they don't all work with Google Analytics, or because I think this is enough for today. (Correct me if I'm wrong!)

Backslashes \
Dots .
Carats ^
Dollars signs $
Question marks ?
Pipes |
Parentheses ()
Plus signs +
Stars *
Regular Expressions for Google Analytics: Now let's Practice
Bad Greed
RegEx and Good Greed
Intro to RegEx"

Robbin Steif
LunaMetrics

The Web: Is it Really about Money?

2006-10-20T18:26:00.000-04:00

At the Summit, I heard Avinash Kaushik speak (or as Dylan says, How can you go to the Summit and not hear Eric Peterson and Avinash and Sam Decker?) And as usual, Avinash was wonderful, soon he will have groupies following him around. But I didn't agree with one thing he said. I wish he were right - making more money for the company and more money for your boss is the road to success. Unfortunately, I feel like all anyone cares about is ego. (To be fair, he did touch on this.)

Customers say, "I don't care what the right thing to do is, I want to do a better job of what my competitor is doing." Or they say, at my last company we did it this way [five years ago, a million years in Internet time.] Or they say, my wife|husband doesn't like it. It's true, as Avi says, that the person with the largest income gets to decide, but my real issue here is, not only do they get to decide, but they too often decide based on what makes them feel important, not on what makes them and the company more money.

As a consultant, this is a hard place to be. (It is probably even harder as an employee!) I always feel ethically obligated to point out once to the customer that if we do it our way, they will make more money. Then when they say, "I don't care," I can say, "OK, we will do it your way." But sometimes I wonder what they are paying for, doing it their way or achieving success.

I guess it is all in the definition of "success."

Robbin Steif
LunaMetrics

ps I promise that I will do Regular Expressions Part VIII soon.

Marketing vs IT: a Great Solution

2006-10-19T21:57:00.000-04:00

So how do you get the good folks in IT to help you when you're a web analyst who doesn't have the ability|clearance to make changes to the web site yourself?

That was a small part of the presentation that I did at the eMetrics Summit yesterday. There probably isn't any one answer, despite the fact that I sure did hear a lot of marketers with the identical problem: "IT doesn't have any incentive to help me (put up page tags, for example.) They think it will just slow down the site." However, one woman in the front had a stupendous answer. She consistently goes back to her IT department with a technographic analysis -- 404 errors, browser type, etc. The stuff that her IT department loves. So she has wittingly? unwittingly? made them into one of her customers, but can't keep it up unless they help her.

I wish I knew her name so that I could ask her to write a guest post.

Robbin Steif
LunaMetrics

Absolutely blown away by Visual Sciences

2006-10-18T20:26:00.000-04:00

Yesterday at the eMetrics Summit, I saw a one-hour demo of Visual Sciences. The "demo-er" was Bob Chatham, their CMO. It is incredibly awesome.

I walked into the presentation knowing that the product is black and probably visual. I walked out trying to figure out why, beyond budget, companies would choose a different solution if they could choose Visual Sciences. (I did come up with some, see the bottom of this post.)

I won't speak much to the implementation or technology. Among other reasons, you can't easily put them in a box. They aren't a client-side solution (you pretty much have to have software), but they sure aren't an old-fashioned logfile solution either. Instead, I want to speak just to the features/benefits.

First, they have developed the capability (a "visual sensor") to capture data from all sorts of sources, not just the web. RFID, bar codes, text files, call center logs all qualify. So it is no longer just a web analytic package, it becomes a total analytic solution. I don't think they like the phrase 360 degree view, but if that isn't a 360, what is?

They have a proprietary database -- and maybe that term is already too "boxy" -- maybe data storage or "place to keep their data" would be more accurate. This seems to be their primary secret sauce, and enables them to relate data in any way you want. (They call this n-dimensional.) They aren't working with a traditional relational database, so the number of fields aren't constrained and it is no longer incredibly expensive to have someone crawl into the database and expand the fields (in fact, there is no crawling in.) I kind of dismissed this as Bob spoke - it's an expensive solution so even if you pay for an extra 10 eVars from Omniture, you probably pay less money - but then,you might need that info now, not when the LiveSupport people get to it. In some ways, it is easier to compare it to Google Analytics, where you get one custom variable and no more, but the customer sets are so different that that becomes a senseless comparison (albeit easy to understand.)

It is amazingly easy to create whatever report you want. We were five people watching them demo, and we couldn't come up with a single request for a report that Bob Chatham couldn't create from scratch within 5-10 seconds.

Did I remember to say that the visualizations are to die for? Here is one from their website:

This screen shot shows paths through the site. The height of a bar is traffic to a page and the thickness of a connection from one page to another shows how much traffic flows from page to page (I wonder how you tell what direction the traffic is flowing?) I know that this screen shot doesn't do justice to the visualization but it was the best I could do - hope you can see the three-D connectors in "the air," I can barely see them in my preview of this post.

It's real time. Almost all the other page tagging solutions are real time, but unlike VS don't change while you watch unless you hit reload and wait 60 seconds.

So why doesn't everybody buy it? First, it is really expensive. I don't know exactly how expensive but I have a pretty good idea. So it's not a solution you buy lightly, and you sure don't buy it without a full-time analyst or a team of analysts or you won't learn much. Plus, if you don't have time or resources to learn everything from your standard high-end solution (SC, HBX, WebTrends etc), then it's really not worth spending the money. And let's face it (this is my usual soapbox) - most people aren't getting as much as they should out of their free Google Analtyics. In fact, most sites either don't have analytics, don't know that they have analytics, or don't care (but I digress...)

Second, I think that the company would be smart to sell the product on its merits and not sell it against the competition so much. Maybe that's just the IBMer in me (I was taught to NEVER mention the competition by name), but I think their product, in the right situation, solves so many problems that they don't need to have a negative campaign.

Robbin Steif
LunaMetrics

eMetrics Summit: Eric Peterson vs. Matt Belkin

2006-10-16T23:27:00.000-04:00

Here's what Omniture's Matt Belkin said about the presentation given today at the eMetrics Summit by Visual Science's Eric Peterson.

Eric's presentation, which I missed in large part but caught the end of and the Q&A, was centered on WA methodology. It was called, The Business Process in Web Analytics. Here, you can read much of the presentation yourself on Web Metrics Guru.

After the presentation, it was break time and I wandered into the vendor area. I started talking to Matt Belkin, VP of Omniture's Best Practices group. As part of our conversation, he showed me his computer, where he had typed, "Lack of methodology is responsible for the failure of web analytics."

"That's what Eric thinks," Matt said, referring to what he had typed on his computer. "Well, what do you think?" I asked. Matt started to speak, so I grabbed a piece of paper and scrawled down his answer while Bill Bruno from Stratigent stood and laughed at us (Bill was the source of a post I wrote at the Summit last April, so he knew exactly why I grabbed a notepad.)

Matt opined that for many companies, looking at web analytics is like drinking from a firehose - they are drowning in data and can't figure out what is actionable. He thought that analysts should find quick wins ("I saved us $30K on Google Adwords with the use of our web analytics last quarter,") and that with those quick wins, the rest of the organization would quickly get on board the web analytics train. He also pointed to the question that Megan Burns of Forrester Research had asked at Eric's presentation. Her question went something like this, "If organizations codify their web analytics process, won't it be a big book that no one looks at and quickly becomes shelfware?" Matt really agreed with that shelfware problem and told me I could quote him on this all. (I hope I have captured this well, despite my lack of a tape recorder.)

Since I hadn't attended Eric's entire seminar, I didn't think it would be fair to quote his words out of Matt Belkin's mouth. So I went back to Eric and read the sentence to him. Eric changed it to be, "Lack of methodology has contributed to the failure of web analytics." And he strongly disagreed with Matt's thesis. He pointed out that his seminar was in an enormous room and was filled - if "easy wins" were so easy, why was everyone in his eMetrics session instead of the other sessions? (It's true, the room he spoke in was enormous and full.) "Well," I countered, "You're a fabulous speaker. [He really is.] And you're Eric Peterson." Or as one of my friends pointed out a little later in the day, "How can you go to the eMetrics Summit and not listen to Eric speak?"

Late tonight at dinner, Jim Sterne listened to me point out the two sides. "They are both right for different companies at different times," he said. "There are huge quick wins to be had for instant ROI. But eventually they peter out, and then you need a good methodology so that you can maintain continuous improvement for your site."

Robbin Steif
LunaMetrics

Statistics for Analysts - the course you keep meaning to take

2006-10-13T10:27:00.000-04:00

For all you analysts: should you want to brush up on your knowledge of statistics (or even start from scratch), here is a link to the Statistics Open Learning Initiative at Carnegie-Mellon University. It is completely on-line, self-paced, and free. I road tested most of the course about a year ago and really loved it. The professor who wrote it does a wonderful job of using real world examples. For example, he teaches box plots and distributions using temperature -- he shows that the average high temperature here in Pittsburgh is the same as the average temperature in San Francisco, but oh! does the distribution vary.

I see now that you can do this course with either Excel or Minitab.

Robbin Steif
LunaMetrics

Regular Expressions Part VII: (Parenthesis)

2006-10-12T17:18:00.000-04:00

As promised, here is installment VII of my Regular Expressions (RegEx) tutorial - parenthesis. I am learning and sharing at the same time. I am only learning them to use for Google Analytics.

I wanted to get this one out soon after my last RegEx post, because the last one was on the use of pipes, which stand for OR in Regular Expressions. Pipes (OR symbols) and parenthesis often go together.

My tutor, Steve in Australia, does a really good job of explaining parenthesis. In the same way that this mathematical statement,

6*(2+3)

is equivalent to 6*2 plus 6*3, parenthesis in Regular Expressions make sure that the stuff outside of the parenthesis get applied to the stuff inside of the parenthesis equally.

For example -- and remembering that the pipe symbol | stands for OR -- we can have a regular expression like this:

grand(mother|father)

That will match either grandmother or grandfather.

Or, here is another, similar but not identical example:

Ste(ph|v)en

that will match either Stephen or Steven

What if the two terms are really different and there isn't much in the way of grouping to do? For example, what if we want to filter out Robbin or Luna (which I do all the time in my GA)? Then we can go back to the last lesson on OR and just use a simple pipe:

Robbin|Luna

(Often, even people who know me well misspell my name, so I could use what I learned in lesson V, question marks, to make the second "b" optional, like this: Robb?in|Luna)

In Google Analytics (I won't speak to other languages) we don't need to use any parenthesis if there isn't any grouping -- the pipe can stand on its own. Or as Justin always tells me, keep it simple.

[Incredibly techie addition: My last comment about never needing parenthesis when there is nothing outside the parenthesis is not always true. At the eMetrics Summit, Nick from Google and Justin from Epikone taught me a lot about creating custom filters and during that process, explained how parenthesis define a variable. I will revisit this topic later.]

Backslashes \
Dots .
Carats ^
Dollars signs $
Question marks ?
Pipes |
Square brackets []and dashes -
Plus signs +
Stars *
Regular Expressions for Google Analytics: Now let's Practice
Bad Greed
RegEx and Good Greed
Intro to RegEx"

Robbin Steif
LunaMetrics

My new FeedBurner t-shirt

2006-10-12T13:47:00.000-04:00

I really do love FeedBurner, and it's such an appropriate gift - I just found out that I am speaking about feeds and blogging in November.

Robbin Steif
LunaMetrics

ps I promise that I will write Part 7 of my RegEx series, maybe even today.

The (Very) Unofficial Crazy Egg FAQs

2006-10-09T22:09:00.000-04:00

I got tired of waiting for Crazy Egg to have FAQs so I just wrote them myself. I put them together based on the many questions Hiten Shah from Crazy Egg has tirelessly answered for me, as well as my own perceptions. No one from Crazy Egg has seen this or blessed this, and any mistakes are mine (mine, mine, all mine.)

Q: How is Crazy Egg different from other overlays?
A: Other overlays show you where people click on links. Crazy Egg shows you where people click, even if they are clicking on a picture that doesn't have a link associated with it. This is very helpful because it tells you where visitors expect to be able to click -- where you should have links . Also, some overlays give the same amount of "credit" to two links on a page that go to the same place, and Crazy Egg only counts a click where it happened. Finally, Crazy Egg has not one but three different kinds of overlay reports.

Q: What are the differences between the three reports that Crazy Egg provides?
A: The Overlay (#1) displays your test page with buttons next to the places where people click. When the buttons are close to dark blue, you have few clicks, and when they are at the other end of the rainbow -- the reddest -- you are getting the most clicks. You can click on any Crazy Egg Overlay button to see how many actual clicks came to that spot. Alternatively, you can use the Flower Marker (the tab next to Overlay) to show you all the results associated with all the buttons. The List (#2) is just that -- a list of the different kinds of clicks you get and how many of each there are. And the Heatmap (#3) shows you exactly where on a page people clicked (did they click in the middle of the picture? At the end of the link?) so you can see if links need to be longer or easier to reach.

Q: Can you describe the List better and explain what "Type" means?
A: Even though your most common type will probably be "A," you won't see B or C or D -- when you see A on the list, it stands for an "a tag" like a href. (A link.) Drop down boxes usually have type Select. Free form large boxes usually have type Text Area, and free form one-line text areas have type Input. IMG is an image.

Q: Why does my dashboard say, 1324 views, 649 clicks, 589 shown? Why can't Crazy Egg show all the clicks?
A: This means that there are clicks on the page that Crazy Egg is not identifying in the overlay. Many times it has to do with Flash elements, ads and even elements that are not on the page anymore. Javascript dropdown menus often have this problem.

Q: If someone clicks into a field and then enters a name with five characters and then hits the tab or enter button, how many clicks does Crazy Egg count -- one, five, six or seven?
A: It is supposed to count that as only one click.

Q: What does it mean when Crazy Egg says that they can archive up to a certain number of snapshots?
A: The snapshots are pictures of a test when the test is finished, since Crazy Egg archives the way the test looked right when it ends.

Q: I thought that I knew how long I needed to run my test, but there weren't enough visits so the data isn't interesting enough yet. Can I extend the length of my test without starting a completely new test?
A: No, you can't. Sorry. (Wouldn't it be great if everyone's FAQs were written this way, they actually answered a question like this without marketing doublespeak?)

Q: I can put the Crazy Egg code on four pages at no charge, right? And Crazy Egg will archive four tests at no charge, right? So does that mean that after I have ended one of my four free tests, I can start a fifth test, but I lose the archived snapshot of one of my first four tests? Or does that mean that my fifth test will not allow me to archive the final snapshot? Or does that mean that I am done with my free stuff and now I have to pay?
A: Wow, what a great question.

Q: I noticed that the code Crazy Egg gives me is always the same for my site, no matter which page it is on. Why can't I add the code to an include file and let it run on every page? I would be happy to pay.
A: True, true. Read the editorial part of this post.

Robbin Steif
LunaMetrics

p.s. If you haven't tried Crazy Egg, you are missing out on a great analytic tool.

More on Investment Banking and Web Analytics

2006-10-05T09:16:00.000-04:00

On Tuesday, I talked to yet another investment banker (Morgan Stanley, the company that took Omniture public.) I don't want to turn these guys away, because it's good for the WAA and the industry to have this kind of exposure, but damn! I wish they could link to my site. Can't you see it now, a link from Morgan Stanley's web analytics research to LunaMetrics? Well, I can dream, right?

We agreed that we would keep it to a half an hour. I don't remember all the questions (and should leave something for him to write himself), but as usual, he started with the assumption that web analytics "has made it," and I maintained that web analytics will not really make it until marketers can do most of the work in really easy-to-use interfaces and not have to wait for IT to code an onclick event or a custom eVar. At a certain point I said, "OK, this is your last question." So he asked his question and I answered and then he rolled right into another question. "Sorry," I said, "That last one was your last question." He was very nice and sent me the research on the pricing for the Omniture IPO as a thank you gift and then -- he asked his last question again, in email. It was an interesting one, though. He wanted to know when I thought that Google would release their upgraded, non-free version. (This was one of the topics that they raised in their research report, "Google also plans to sell a more comprehensive product offering shortly.") I considered telling him that Paul Muret writes me daily and tells me all the insider knowledge, but decided to stick with the truth: I really had no insight into that particular issue, and thought that Google would be smart to spend their time bullet-proofing the current free version.

Robbin Steif
LunaMetrics

Regular Expressions Part VI: OR

2006-10-04T15:16:00.000-04:00

This is the sixth installment of my Regular Expression lessons. I am actually learning more than teaching and just sharing as I go along. These are Regular Expressions for Regular People (c), so all the tech-talk is removed. My motivation for learning RegEx, as they are called, is Google Analytics.

OR gets symbolized by the pipe symbol |. The pipe symbol is on my US keyword just above the Enter Key but for some reason looks like two vertical dashes on the keyword itself. It's incredibly simple, and even Google Analytics does a fabulous job with its description:

This was a hard one to screw up, although they have done a good job of screwing up other easy Regular Expressions.

Here's an example. One of the sites that I work with is an engineering education site, and they teach both Statics and Finite Element Analysis (FEA). Some people also refer to the latter as FEM (Finite Element Method). If I were only interested in the statics keyword searches, I would probably want to get references to FEA and Finite Element Analysis and FEM out of the search reports. I could do that easily in GA by going to the little filter box that can be found on each report, making it into a red minus sign (so that I am filtering out) and typing in FEA|Finite|FEM . This has the effect of saying, "Get rid of references to anything that includes FEA OR Finite OR FEM."

Backslashes \
Dots .
Carats ^
Dollars signs $
Question marks ?
Parentheses ()
Square brackets []and dashes -
Plus signs +
Stars *
Regular Expressions for Google Analytics: Now let's Practice
Bad Greed
RegEx and Good Greed
Intro to RegEx"

Robbin Steif
LunaMetrics

My Bad Experience with Good Experience

2006-10-03T17:17:00.000-04:00

Good Experience must be the classic barefoot child of a cobbler, unable to do for themselves what they do for others.

The Good Experience website says that their mission is "is to encourage the creation of good, meaningful experiences in business and life." That says, "usability" to me, because that's the mental slot I have to put them in.

I met the Good Experience guys back in the winter at Shop.org in Atlanta. I gave them my card and vaguely remember telling them that they could put me on their mailing list. I was very surprised to get their first mailing because it was such a bad experience. It was all text (no html) with lots of naked links, lots of hyphens used to break the text up so that they could advertise job openings -- just unreadable. I wrote Mark Hurst, the CEO, after my first disappointing experience and he explained that text pulled better for them.

I never read a single issue of their newsletter, and this weekend, I finally unsubscribed. I immediately got a "personal" email from Mark. He called me by my last name and asked me if I could help explain why I was unsubscribing. (Note: I try very hard to never let someone subscribe to my email marketing with poor information. If they have signed up with their first name in all lower case, I go in and capitalize the first word so that my marketing does not come through as, "Hi jim." Since I know that the GE people had my business card, I was surprised, again, that they hadn't gotten this right. I don't remember the last time someone called me "Steif," when they weren't writing about me in an article.)

Anyway, I wrote back and explained that it was too hard to read the newsletter, as explained above. Mark replied that I could always go read it online and provided a helpful link. So I clicked on the link in Firefox and was confronted with the tiniest type that I have ever seen online. For completeness sake, I asked Taylor, our 22-year-old analyst, to look at it, and it was way too tiny for him to read, too. Of course, we could increase the type size, but is that a good experience? Eventually we figured out that if you open it in IE, it is not bad at all. So I guess Internet Explorer Users all get a good experience once they get past the email and Good Experience's "personal" email.

To be fair - Mark really did reply to me in person. And it really is hard to do for yourself what you do for others, often because great gets in the way of good and you end up doing ... nothing. Been there, done that.

Robbin Steif
LunaMetrics

My eMetrics Summit "pre-interview"

2006-10-02T09:23:00.000-04:00

Check out my interview with Marshall Sponder of WebMetricsGuru. My spouse looked at my picture, which Marshall included in the interview and said, "Can't you come up with something better than that?" I guess it is time for a new photo shoot... but as usual, I digress.

This is an interview in advance of the e-metrics Summit. (You're going right? I really just want to see all my friends....)

Robbin Steif
LunaMetrics

Mini-case study: Analytics, overlays and internal search.

2006-10-01T15:49:00.000-04:00

What do you get when you integrate --mentally -- your analytics overlay with your analytics numbers? A whole lot of insight into what your users are doing. In this case, my insight was all about internal search.

1. What does the overlay say?

We like to use Crazy Egg for Google Analytics sites because the GA overlay is so lousy. And while we still have to wait for two weeks of data to feel more conclusive, we are seeing that the search box is the most used link on the home page of one site. (Note: if the page under analysis -- in this case, the homepage -- has three separate ways to reach another page, like "About Us," the sum of those three sets of clicks may exceed the total clicks for a single link like "Search." This is in direct contrast to Google Analytics, where you always get the same information on links that go to the same page unless you add special code. But I digress.)

2. What do the analytics tell me when I drill down on the overlay issues?

The fact that Search is so popular rings all sorts of not-pleasant bells. It's true that some people like to use the search box, just like some people walk into a department store, ignore the signs around them and ask the first salesperson where they can find what they need. However, if internal search is too popular, it probably means that people aren't finding what they want at a glance - in your navigation and in the links from the home page.

Are they at least finding what they want when they search? I went to my Dynamic Content report and filtered by the word "search" to get the search page. Then, I exported it into Notepad because that gave me more control over how it would end up in Excel. I used Find and Replace to get rid of all the properties and other junk that comes with the search query data. And then I sat back and looked at it.

I was initially interested in sorting by search term, so that I could group identical or near-identical searches together. But as I was straightening up the data, I realized that very few searchers continued after the search - many if not most of the searches had a 100% exit rate. Very strange, right? So I started typing search terms into the company's search engine. And I was awed at how often the internal search engine came back with "Can't find it" -- even for the company's most popular products.

3. In summary...

... in summary, in about an hour, I learned that too many people use the search, probably because they can't find what they want from the navigation and other links on the home page. Furthermore, most of them leave because the internal search engine doesn't work very well.

What a great application of web analytics.

Robbin Steif
LunaMetrics

Increase your Conversion Rate for $1524.00

2006-09-28T14:05:00.000-04:00

How do you increase your conversion rate when your total budget is only $1500?

This is the question that I confronted recently when someone submitted a Contact Us form on our website. She made it very clear that she had very little budget to increase her conversion rate.

I thought about this for a while. Here are some of the things that owners of small businesses, who are not ready to spend much on outside conversion firms or consultants, might consider:

Do some cheap user testing.

Go find five to eight people who you know vaguely but who don't know much about what you do. (For example, the parents of some of your friends, if they live in the same city. If you can get people who mirror your target customer, so much the better, but as long as your product is not so technical that the individual won't understand the vocabulary, this is worth doing even with non-target users.) Sit down with them while they look at their computer and you are recording their thoughts (and tell them to talk out loud since you can't read their minds.) For 2-3, ask them to do whatever your site does (e.g. make a purchase. Request more information on your site.) For the balance, ask them what they think they could achieve on your website, and see if they can achieve it. Take great notes, keep your thoughts to yourself while they are working, and give them something for their time. If they are distant friends, they may be uncomfortable accepting your money but might love a $20 gift certificate to Starbucks.

Cost: about $200, depending on whether you need to compensate anyone with real money.

Install some free analytics and read them

Sign up for a copy of Google Analytics (they are now open to everyone.) Ask your web guy or gal to put the code that Google gives you on every page, or better yet, in a file that gets included in every page. Read the Google help section here, and when you get to a part that you don't understand, just skip it. (I'm serious. You'll learn it in time, but if you stop and say, "Don't understand it, can't figure it out, can't afford to hire someone," you'll lose all your momentum.) Every week, look at one new report so that you gradually learn what the analytics mean. Be sure to read all the little notes at the bottom of each report so that you really understand what the report means. Be sure that you create Google Analytic Goals -- maybe you will have to stay with your analytics for a couple of months before you know how to do that yourself. Subscribe to the Official Google Analytics blog if you are just learning analytics. If you know them, subscribe to This Just In and ROI Revolution's blog.

As you learn what your analytics mean, start to understand what changes they are suggesting. For example, where, in your most important (top) content is your bounce rate too high? People come to websites for lots of reasons - sometimes just to get a phone number - but a high bounce rate often signals a problem with that page.

Cost, $150 for your IT guy's time.

Learn as time permits, as cheaply as you can

Buy a copy of the Eisenberg's Call to Action and Persuasive Online CopyWriting and Steve Krug's usability-for-newbies book, Don't Make Me Think.

Cost, $74.54 if you buy them all new.

Subscribe to some blogs and email marketing. You already found this blog, so let me suggest The Site is Dead (that's Matt Roche's blog - he is the CEO of testing company Offermatica.) Other owners of blogs about conversion rate are welcome to get on and say, how about my blog? Blogs are wonderful for learning about a topic like this because you get a little bit of information at a time, not a book that you look at and keep meaning to read.

Cost: free

(Note: Steve Krug's book is designed to be short enough to read on a long airplane ride. Call to Action is laid out in very short, bite-sized chunks.)

Do some testing using Google AdWords

Now that you see where some of your problems are (user testing and web analytics) and have learned what some solutions are (learning as time permits), you can do some inexpensive landing page tests. Take one page that your users had a really hard time with, and create an alternative to it that your new education indicates might be a winner. Create a Google AdWord campaign with two ads (they let you create multiple ads which they show in rotation, as you probably know). Be sure that one ad lands on the current "bad" page and the other ad lands on the page you are testing. Let it run for a few months (because if you are a small business with a small budget, you probably don't have the kind of traffic to get statistical relevance in a week.) Measure which one "wins" -- you have to define "winning" yourself, but you can measure in three different ways:

Add the Google AdWords conversion code to your success page (often, a "Thank you very much" page)
Change the titles of the ads every so slightly so that you can see them differently in Google AdWords (and I really mean slightly. Example, add a colon after the headline of one)
Turn off autotagging in Google Analytics, create your own tags with a different utm_content tag, and measure in Google Analytics. Here is a link to doing that one.

No matter which way you go, be sure that you change your Google AdWords Campaigns so that it shows your ads evenly (i.e. do not let it "optimize" the one that gets the most clicks, since you care about conversion, not clicks, and you don't want to see your test get skewed by high click-through yet low conversion ads.)

Cost for this one depends on how many clicks you have to get in order to learn something from your tests. If one of your tests shows your conversion rate going from 1% to 2% for people who landed on that page, you can get away with only 1000 clicks for each test version. If you can find a keyword at $.30 a click, your cost will be $600. Plus you will spend $500 for the creation of a test page.

Total cost: $1524. Remember that the biggest variables are in the Google AdWords testing: can you get the keywords that cheap, and is the difference in your new conversion rate going to be high enough to let you pay for only 1000 clicks per test version?

Robbin Steif
LunaMetrics

ps I published this again in an effort to get the feeds to work correctly. Sorry. RFS

Regular Expressions Pt. V: Question Marks ?

2006-09-25T21:22:00.000-04:00

So I continue here with my Regular Expressions ("RegEx") lessons. I am learning RegEx only because so many customers use Google Analytics, which throws the code at the customer with very little explanation.

This next lesson is about the question mark. This time, Google does a pretty good job of meaning what they say:

? Match zero or one of the previous expression

When they say, "The previous expression," they mean, the character that comes right before the question mark. Since that is still pretty opaque, let me shine some light here.

Let's say that you have an economics website and you only want to look at the referrers that have the word "labor" in their title. But some of those referrers come from non-US countries where they spell it "labour." You could create a filter like this: labou?r

That way, it will match "labour" (which does have a "u," which is the previous expression) and labor (which has zero of the previous expression, i.e. no "u" is included.)

You cannot use it like this : labo?r, or at least, not for the same purpose. It's not a wildcard that you stick in between the o and the r to match any letter. The only matches would be to "labor" (zero of the previous expression) and "labr" (Thanks Serge for catching my error.)

Backslashes \
Dots .
Carats ^
Dollars signs $
Pipes |
Parentheses ()
Square brackets []and dashes -
Plus signs +
Stars *
Regular Expressions for Google Analytics: Now let's Practice
Bad Greed
RegEx and Good Greed
Intro to RegEx"

Robbin Steif
LunaMetrics

CrazyEgg for web analytics: my 5 cents

2006-09-24T18:23:00.000-04:00

I put CrazyEgg up on my site for a short period of time, mostly so that I could try it out before recommending it to a customer. And I loved it. First the explanation and then the editorial.

CrazyEgg is a website overlay on steroids, although they may be devastated to read that description (more below). Not only does it give you the standard overlay information that you can get from Clickmaps (or whatever overlay you have), but it also shows wherever people are clicking, even if that is not a link. For example, I saw this in my short test:

Notice how the words, "So now you have a website," which are just a .gif, are more popular than the real links are.You can tell that at a glance because the overlay button is light blue, not dark blue -- it is closer to red, and the redder the button, the more popular.

CrazyEgg makes this even more clear with the use of their heatmap. Notice how my "about us" link is my most popular one:

I always knew that About Us was my second most important page, but I never really "got it" quite as well as I did when I saw this heatmap. Pictures are worth thousands of words even for analysts, it appears.

Now that you see how cool it is, let me explain the issues.

The FAQs and other on-site Help on the CrazyEgg site don't just suck - they are non-existent. Want to change the time period of your test? No idea how. Want to know what the classifications to all those clicks are? If you work with web stuff all the time, you'll get it, otherwise you are lost. Want to know why they only show about 90% of the clicks that they report you have? No answers. Want to know what it means to archive four snapshots? Nope, no answers there either.

Furthermore, there is no way to add the code to an include so that you can just use it all the time, like you would an overlay. It would be the perfect solution for all those lost souls who are finally realizing that as great as GA is, the overlay is lousy, so they might as well pay $20/month for a great overlay.

I wrote CrazyEgg and asked why you have to tell them the name of every page you are adding your code to (and then still get the same code for each page). Hiten Shah (who was incredibly good about answering questions) wrote back very promptly three times and explained that they don't want to be lumped in with all the WA and overlay providers. They are a testing solution, not a WA solution, he wrote. I think that's just ridiculous (Sorry, Hiten). Scandanavian Airlines positions itself as a business airline, but they don't make it hard for tourists to travel on them. CrazyEgg could easily position itself for testing and still allow people to use their services for day-in, day-out web analytic overlay work without compromising their marketing strategy.

Hiten tells me that he is a reader, so let's see if he comments (and what he says.)

Robbin Steif
LunaMetrics

Regular Expressions Part IV: The ending Anchor $

2006-09-14T16:37:00.000-04:00

As regular readers know, I am learning about and sharing my lessons on Regular Expressions. In my last post on this topic, Part III, I wrote about the opening anchor, aka the carat symbol. It's used at the beginning of some regular expressions. Today I am writing about its sister, this anchor $, which is sometimes used at the end of Regular Expressions (RegExen. I wish I had one of those "cool" smileys to easily insert here.)

In the Google Analytics very unhelpful Help section on Regular Expressions, it says this about the dollar sign:

$: match to the end of the field

What they really mean is, don't match if the string from my website has any characters beyond where I have placed the dollar sign in my Regular Expression. The dollar sign signals all the characters that I want to match to. (This is the hard part about the explanation, it's always hard to explain what the target is and what the RegEx is.)

So let's say that you have some pages that end in htm and others in html. You want to write a Google Analytics Step 1 (part of a goal) for your email sign-up form, but you only want the new .htm version. Your RegEx might look like this:

/email-form\.htm$

The dollar sign tells the Google Analytics, if the page on your site has anything after the final "m" in "htm," it doesn't count as a match to this expression. Notice that I also used a backslash before the dot so that Google Analytics interprets it just as a dot, not as anything special.

I understood what it does pretty quickly, but I had to put this post off for at least a week in an effort to understand why anyone would ever use a dollar sign. Here's the problem: if you have any campaign code whatsoever that gets attached to this string when someone lands on your site, there is no match. For example, let's say someone lands on your site and when he looks up at the address bar, it says this:

/email-form.htm?cid=123

As soon as there is campaign code, the dollar sign anchor will tell GA that there is no match. And it can be hard to remember everywhere that you would have campaign code and everywhere that you wouldn't.

So forget the fanciful examples - why would anyone ever use it?

Once place you might use it would be with an IP address (for a filter, someone that you are trying to filter in or filter out.) You might have an IP addresss like this that you are screening out: 12\.34\.56\.78, which matches 12.34.56.78, but you want to be sure that it doesn't match 12.34.56.789 -- so you set up your expression to be 12\.34\.56\.78$ . And if you want to be sure that it doesn't match 512.34.56.78 as well, you should use the beginning anchor ^ (how's that for a reminder and a link back to the last part of this series), ^12\.34\.56\.78$

You should also be able to use it, Justin says, with the "on the fly" filter that you can do with every report (the little box near the top of every screen.) For example, if I wanted to know how many different variations of search terms end with my company's name, I should be able to type in LunaMetrics$ in that little box on one of the search term reports (like Marketing Optimization > Search Engine Marketing > Overall Keyword conversion, and only see search terms like LunaMetrics or Call LunaMetrics or who the heck is LunaMetrics). I have never gotten that one to work. I do see potential there, though, because I can use a carat^ at the beginning of an in-report filter, like this: ^LunaMetrics, and I see all the search terms that start only with my company name.

And you can use it in the profile filters.

Am hoping one of the GA gurus will get on to say why the $ anchor doesn't work in the in-report filters. After all, I am only taking lessons here, and sharing them with the world.

Backslashes \
Dots .
Carats ^
Question marks ?
Pipes |
Parentheses ()
Square brackets []and dashes -
Plus signs +
Stars *
Regular Expressions for Google Analytics: Now let's Practice
Bad Greed
RegEx and Good Greed
Intro to RegEx"

Robbin Steif
LunaMetrics

So you're going to the Summit, right?

2006-09-12T21:54:00.000-04:00

I have an incredibly selfish reason for wanting everyone to go to the eMetrics Summit, Oct. 16-18 in DC. It's not money (I don't work for Jim Sterne); it's not personal aggrandizement (by the time I speak at the end of Day Three, everyone will be gone but me); it's not even business development. No -- I just want to see all my friends.

I was thinking about this while finally reading The Long Tail. Our web analytics community is a perfect example of a tail market that wouldn't exist without the Internet, for more than one reason. But it does exist and that's how I get to share interests with people all over the world. Internet or not, though -- sometimes I just want to have a drink with my friends.

Hey, I'm realistic - I really don't expect Lars to come over from Sweden or Steve to come over from Australia or Mike to come from S. Africa. At least not to this Washington DC conference. On the other hand, I'm so looking forward to talking to Ian Houston and Tim Seward and Justin Cutroni and June Li and Joseph Carrabis and Avinash. And Matt Roche, what will I blog about if you don't make it to DC?

So Dylan -- are you coming to the Summit? (I'll buy the first round...)

Robbin Steif
LunaMetrics

Regular Expressions Part III: Anchors ^

2006-09-10T20:37:00.000-04:00

This is the third in a series of lessons I am taking (and sharing) on Regular Expressions. You can also read this lesson on my tutor's blog if you are a techie. This one is on the use of the anchor, symbolized by a carat, like this: ^. My tutor, Steve, writes about the dollar sign as well; I will handle that in a future post.

(Useful factoid: the people who work with Regular Expressions all the time call them RegEx. I have no idea how they make that plural.)

Here is what Google Analytics' incredibly opaque Help says about the carat anchor:

^ -- Match to the beginning of the field

I really understood every individual word in that sentence, I just couldn't understand what they mean all strung together. (So I have a personal tutor.)

Here is what it means:

^ -- If anything comes before this character, the string is not a match to this Regular Expression

For example, let's say that I have two pages on my website, http://www.mysite.com/secondpage/contact/, and http://www.mysite.com/contact/.

Usually, Google Analytics, which is where I use RegEx (RegExes? REs?), perceives those two pages to be called /secondpage/contact/ and /contact/. That's because GA already knows about the domain, www.mysite.com, and usually only cares about it if I have a subdomain (and have added the code, a technicality we won't deal with.)

If I want to find all the strings that start with /contact/ (the second option) but just put in that same line, /contact/ for my Regular Expression, I will get everything that can possibly match the string, which will include the one I don't want, /secondpage/contact/. This is something that has taken me a while to understand with Regular Expressions -- they match everything that they possibly can, so you have to use the special characters to keep them from getting out of control.

If I only want to match http://www.mysite.com/contact/, I can use Regular Expressions like this:

^/contact/

That's it. That's how you use the anchor. And now, you are done. Everything after this is a clarification of one big nagging question that I had: Why would anybody use an anchor carat anywhere except here:
^http://www.mysite.com/etcetera/andso-on.php

Answers:
1) GA already thinks in terms of relative urls. It assumes the http://www.mysite.com, so when you ask for ^/contact/, it will come back and correctly show you strings that say /contact/, and you are usually saying to your boss, "They mean www.mysite.com/contact/."

2) Anchor carats are useful in other places besides just urls. Let's say you want to create a filter for the entire range of IP addresses in your company. However, your IP addresses all start with a two digit number, like 64.xx.xx.xxx, so you wouldn't want to filter out something that looked like this: 164.xx.xx.xx. To solve that problem, you can use a carat: ^64 etc

Not sure if your regular expression will match the string you need it to? Use this handy tool from Epikone. You put in the string you want to match to and then the regular expression your wrote, hit enter and see how well you did. Many thanks to Justin (from Epikone) for help with this post. And of course, be sure to read Steve's post about this topic.

Backslashes \
Dots .
Dollars signs $
Question marks ?
Pipes |
Parentheses ()
Square brackets []and dashes -
Plus signs +
Stars *
Regular Expressions for Google Analytics: Now let's Practice
Bad Greed
RegEx and Good Greed
Intro to RegEx"
Robbin Steif
LunaMetrics

What do web analysts do all day long?

2006-09-07T23:43:00.000-04:00

I hear this question a lot. What do we web analysts do with our time? To make this tractable, I am going to focus just on web analytics - no split path testing, no data mining, no user testing, no... no.. just what one considers to be "traditional" web analytics. (Maybe an oxymoron?)

I think web analysis has four goals:

1. We use web analytics to troubleshoot the site and the business

Is a conversion rate down significantly, are page views/visitor way off? Is some other performance metric not performing? If so, where is the problem coming from -- from a certain section of the site, from a certain product? Is that page or piece of the site broken in some way - code missing, a link not working? If the site is not broken, is the problem coming from traffic sources - an AdWords campaign that is landing in the wrong place, a referrer that no longer refers, an affiliate you forgot to pay and so conveniently forgets to send you traffic? Notice how I went from the most general information, such as conversion rate or page views, down to specific information, such as whether an affiliate is angry at us.

And if nothing is broken -- how can we account for the problem? Is the metric down across all sources and all products? Is it down vs. last year (or are we just seeing seasonality?) Is there new competition, or better competition (and with that, I have to leave off, since I promised to limit this to web analytics.)

Don't be fooled into thinking that there is no ROI here. When you find a problem and fix it quickly, you avoid days worth of opportunity loss -- revenue that might have been left on the table or leads that registered with a competitor, were it not for you, the analyst.

2. We use web analytics to figure out how to make the site better.

This one is an all-nighter topic, and it is midnight already. So here are some easy examples. We might compare the conversion funnel from Lead Form 1 and see it converting from the form itself to the Thank You (success) page at 25%, yet the conversion funnel from Lead Form 2 converts at only 12.5% -- so what are the differences in design? We might just look at bounce rates (single entry rates) and compare similar pages that bounce at very different rates. We look at our successful keywords in our Finding Methods report to figure out how to optimize our site for those, since those are clearly some of the ways that customers are using to search for our site. We look at conversion rate by source to decide which paid campaigns to pour more money into and which to cut. We segment our customers all the way down until we figure out what the most profitable customer looks like and where she comes from, and then we pour more resources into finding more customers just like her.

This is the area that gets the most attention from top management (unless the site is broken, in which case, they are furious.)

3. We spend time making our web analytics perform better.

Software isn't perfect, but if we are going to invest in it (and even if it's free, our time is an investement), then let's get the most out of it. To use the form example from the point above - if our software supports it, we can track each spot in the form and see where potential leads bail. Better analytics can help us do a better job of spotting online opportunities. We also fix our web analytics when they break -- because, why would you invest in a $50K/year package (not to mention the analyst you have to pay), to have broken analytics and learn nothing? Technically, this third goal is just a way to achieve #1 and #2, but we (I?) spend enough time at it that it was hard not to call this one out.

4. We present the information to management in a format that makes them care about the information and take action.

This is perhaps our hardest job. We get down so deep in the data that it is hard to remember the needs of management (or customers.) They have other things to do so if the analysis doesn't come to them in a meaningful and easy format, they stop caring. I should also point out how important consistency is. Once your CEO or customer understands the metrics, you can improve upon them gradually, but don't change the format (or heaven forbid, the metrics) arbitrarily.

I will be using some of this at the Summit, so please comment and criticize!

Robbin Steif
LunaMetrics

Why no one comments on Danny Sullivan's new blog

2006-09-02T14:36:00.000-04:00

Since the whole SEO industry is still dealing with the departure of Danny Sullivan from SES etc, I won't go there and will just complain about conversion on his new blog/podcast (well, commenting. Maybe he doesn't define comments as a form of conversion.)

I checked out his new site today, and I was pretty surprised when I got on the site and saw post after post, with no comments. Hmm, I thought, maybe that's because loyal Searchcast listeners are just that, listeners. And you get the subscription so you don't need to go to the site... still and all, a little weird. And then I tried to comment (and all I want to tell the guy is, could you please read my post about 10 mistakes that podcasters make and recognize that mistakes 3-6 were inspired by you?) But I was unable to comment, and here is why.

First, I had to create a TypeKey membership. Already a stumbling block (like asking your buyers to sign in before making a purchase). Then I went back to the site and tried to comment but I wasn't signed in. OK, I can do this, I though. So I clicked to sign in (with my shiny new sign up) and got this:

It didn't matter which choice I made, either way, I got the same error message:

An error occurred: This weblog requires commenters to pass an email address. If you'd like to do so you may log in again, and give the authentication service permission to pass your email address.

Eventually, in the course of writing this post, I went back to my profile, changed it to pass my email address, and now I get the error message automatically. I don't even have to make a choice.

When the data look strange (like your 3% conversion rate just dropped to .002% or you are one of the most popular podcasters around but no one sends you comments), it's a red flag. Maybe something really is wrong.

Robbin Steif
LunaMetrics

Signing in to a website

2006-09-01T17:45:00.000-04:00

Don't you just hate when you forget your password? Or worse yet, you forget both your password and your user id.

If you are desperate enough, you'll be able to retrieve them. Plenty of sites make it easy to get them again (I lost my Offermatica password twice today and both times, got a new one within minutes. But that's because they made it easy.)

The real problem for websites is when the user really does need to sign in (think online banking or looking at frequent flyer points online, for example) and can't, because she forgot her information. So instead, she gets her customer service the old fashioned way, which is exactly what these companies are trying to get away from.

I'm not arguing for no passwords or everyone having "weak" passwords. But why can't sites that require a password signin remind you of their format? If the user id is an email address, always, why don't they tell you that? There is no security issue -- anyone who wants can proceed to the signup screen to learn the format. If the password must be longer than 8 characters and include at least two non-alpha characters, why don't they tell you that after your password fails, instead of just failing? We all have a "pool" of favorite passwords so that we don't have to remember every word in the alphabet - if you tell me what the format is, I can probably narrow it down to three passwords and possibly succeed before I have tried too many times.

Robbin Steif
LunaMetrics

Analytics and ... investment banking?

2006-08-31T17:34:00.000-04:00

For the second time in a month, an investment banker called me to talk about web analytics. What with mergers, acquisitions and IPOs (and of course, the development of the industry), it's on their radar now.

His questions were so interesting, I wish I had been taking notes like I was when the big WA firms spoke at the Summit in Santa Barbara. In any case, here is what I can remember.

Investment Banker starts with an easy question: Who is the best customer for packages like CoreMetrics and WebSideStory and Omniture?
Robbin: E-commerce. Companies who sell on line can prove the ROI of the package quickly, although they have plenty of issues with multi-channel purchasing - the customer sees it on the web and buys it in the store. Companies who are doing lead generation have a harder time proving the ROI (Robbin neglects to say, especially when the company has to touch the lead many times before the sale is closed.) Companies who are doing on-line content, like CNN and the NYTimes.com, should be able to prove the same kind of ROI as an e-commerce company because they are selling online, it's just that they are selling advertising.

Investment Banker: What will it take for WA to become more pervasive?
Robbin: People really won't buy *and use* their web analytics until it is in their financial interest. So if you're a content site, and a big advertiser comes to you wanting a deeper understanding of your reader behavior before signing a new contract, suddenly, it's in your interest to have better analytics.

Investment Banker: Research firms are predicting that the WA space will grow to about $1B in five years in marketing capitalization. Do you think that's enough marketing cap to support the number of current WA firms or will we see lots of consolidation?
Robbin: After business school, I went into direct marketing, not investment banking. You can run the numbers as well as I can or better.(Why do investment bankers waste time asking questions that they are in a better position to answer?) From where I sit, I just know that I would *love* to see consolidation in the industry so that we can do a better job with standards and so that my company doesn't have to keep learning new software packages. Probably not the answer he wanted to hear.

Investment Banker: Which of the big firms have done a really good job investing in cutting edge technology, enabling themselves to leapfrog the competition?
Robbin: Well, WSS has made some interesting purchases with Atomz and Visual Sciences. But let me tell you what I really think, and I sincerely doubt you will hear this answer from other people because the individuals who are successfully implementing big packages have IT staffs that can customize them. So here's what I think: I don't think that cooler technology is going to rule here. The real problem is that you currently can't get your money's worth out of big packages without creating those custom evars and s.props and VISTA rules. Currently, buying a big package and then not having an IT staff that can and will customize it, and of course, an analyst, is like buying a Porche and driving it in first. (I get to use this analogy over and over again. Many thanks to the individual who gave it to me.) I think that those companies will have a hard time expanding really far until they can create the ability to customize without the analyst needing to be a javascript expert.

Investment Banker: Will BI firms get into the WA game?
Robbin. Sure. But the really important thing that will happen is, data will be more seamless, so that it can flow between your BI and WA and CRM. Easily, not with a 4 month integration project.

It's probably just as well that I can't remember everything we talked about. Leave the guy something to write about in his research report, now that my four readers have all learned what I said.

Robbin Steif
LunaMetrics

Analytic troubleshooting: narrow the data scope

2006-08-29T00:05:00.000-04:00

Twice in the last 24 hours, I had trouble with analytics -- once with Omniture's SiteCatalyst and once with Google Analytics. Both times, I "solved" the problem (more accurately, finally understood it) by making my time period shorter and shorter. But I'll only show the Omniture example.

The Omniture/SiteCatalyst problem was that the customer was seeing more orders than items put into the shopping cart. So even if everyone only bought one item (somewhat unlikely), and everyone checked out (incredibly unlikely), there still weren't enough items to justify all those purchases. We had already verified that the purchase numbers were pretty good, and it wasn't that hard to see that items put into the checking cart, as a percent of visits, was incredibly low compared to recent history.

"So when did this start?" asked Omniture LiveSupport (a question I should have asked myself.)

I pulled a report for the last 60 days and found this:

You can see the crash on August 1, and when I "zoomed in" on August 1 and did a report by hour, I was able to find exactly when it happened. IT tied it to the change that they made. (By the way, the report is Commerce > Shopping Cart > Cart Additions.)

Now, this seems very straightforward. I had a similar program with Google Analytics (and that one is actually being reported as a change request, or a bug), but only by narrowing and narrowing my parameters was I able to delete enough variables to understand that the problem was truly a GA bug.

Time isn't the only parameter to use when troubleshooting but it sure is a great place to start.

Robbin Steif
LunaMetrics

Analytics: Getting a second opinion

2006-08-24T18:01:00.000-04:00

Web analytics can be a lonely field. It's awesome to go to the eMetrics summit or other conferences and meet the people you correspond with all the time, but that only happens a couple of times a year. And how often do you get to sit down with another analyst and say, "Look at my stuff. What mistakes am I making?"

That was one of the reasons that I took ROI's webinar - it includes a free GA audit. (The other reason was that I wanted to learn advanced GA, now that I have so many customers using them.) Today I had my audit with Michael Harrison, and it was so wonderful to actually go through the goals and filters and get advice. Once he even said, "It looks great. You've got it all set up right."

The best part was when we talked about my regular expressions, which look like this:

/secondpage/register/

He asked, "You realize that this includes everything before the first slash and everything after the last slash?" I only answered, "Yes," because his wife has been in labor for days now, and he was doing me a favor and calling me from his home. If he had had more time, I would have told him how I learned this from my Regular Expressions Tutorial.

Robbin Steif
LunaMetrics

Regular Expresions Part II: Dots

2006-08-23T23:12:00.000-04:00

This is part II of my journey into Regular Expressions for Google Analytics, whereby I am learning them (they are abbreviated as RegEx, or maybe in the plural, RegExen) and teaching them at the same time. I have rewritten this old post to include only the dot, like the one at the end of this sentence. This is to make the post easier and create building blocks for future posts.

Google Analytics says this about dots:

. matches any one character

This is exactly what they mean, but it is so out of context, I couldn't wrap my head around it. (Match any one character that comes from where? I asked myself...)

They mean that you can create a RegEx like this

.ate

and it will match hate, fate, sate, or any four character expression. For that matter, it will match 8ate (there were no rules saying that the character has to be a letter.) It won't match just ate, because it wants one character to substitute for the dot.

This is why we don't (usually) ask Google Analtyics to match a regular expression that looks like this:

homepage.com

because the dot is a wildcard that stands for any one character (right?), so this will also match homepagescom and homepage4com and homepagedcom. Instead, we need to use a backslash to turn the Regular Expression dot into a Plain Old dot. (This is a good time to read Regular Expressions Part I, backslashes, if you haven't already.) Anyway, we would express it like this: homepage\.com.

And that's why you see backslashes and dots together so often.
Backslashes \
Carats ^
Dollars signs $
Question marks ?
Pipes |
Parentheses ()
Square brackets []and dashes -
Plus signs +
Stars *
Regular Expressions for Google Analytics: Now let's Practice
Bad Greed
RegEx and Good Greed
Intro to RegEx"

Robbin Steif
LunaMetrics

Conversion: Great Thank You pages, Part II

2006-08-23T00:08:00.000-04:00

You can read Part I of this topic here.

Soon after writing about great thank you pages, I had a chance to look at one. We signed another new customer and I started poking around their site to learn more. I filled out a "contact us" form and was awed at the incredible reply. "Thank you for your request for information," it read. "Your form is being routed to the person who can help you, which will be Jane Smith. She will get back to you in about 24 hours, but if you want to call her yourself, she is at 800-123-4567." Then they included an opportunity to opt into their email newsletter (so that I would have a second chance to convert that day.) And finally, Jane Smith got back to me by email within an hour or so.

So they gave me a name, a timeline, a phone number and a chance to convert again, all in a sentence or two. And they lived up to their promise.

Robbin Steif
LunaMetrics

Analytics: How I cheated on Google AdWords

2006-08-19T22:25:00.000-04:00

It's true. I cheated on Google AdWords so that I could measure A/B Google tests in my Google Analytics.

First, the background. Lots of small websites and advertisers aren't ready to take the multivariate testing plunge, so start by using Google AdWords to A/B test. This is pretty tried and true: You create two ads for the same AdGroup which are absolutely identical, down to the URL that shows on the Google page (SERP). However, when the customer clicks, each ad has a different landing page. Then the advertiser compares conversion rate (or revenue, or average order size) for all the customers who start with Ad1 vs Ad2.

Admittedly, it has its limitations. Search engines are demographically skewed, and just because it works for Google customers doesn't mean that it will work on Yahoo. But it's way better than saying, "I know what will work. I just know."

Google has recently made measuring different ad versions easier in the AdWords interface, but with Google Analytics, you still have to know how pull down the right menus and segment to see what you need. And even then, if the ads have the same name, you can't tell them apart.

Step 1: Pulling down the right menus. (I can't remember whether I learned how to do this from Justin's GA blog or from ROI's GA blog, and I can't find the reference.)

Choose Marketing Optimization > Marketing Campaign Results > Campaign Conversion. Left click on the Analysis Options next to one of your Google AdWord campaigns (which you get with the little red circle to the left of the campaigns - follow the top red arrow in my picture); choose Cross Segment performance (that's the middle red arrow I've drawn); finally, choose Content. When you choose Content, you'll get a list of the different ads that are running for that campaign, by goal.

Step 2: This is where you cheat: Retitle your ads, ever so slightly. When you are using your Google AdWords to do A/B testing, as described above, the ads are identically worded. Google Analytics lists them out by title, which means, it can't tell you that Ad1, titled, "Increase your Conversion Rate," and which lands on www.lunametrics.com , is doing terribly, and that Ad2, titled, "Increase your Conversion Rate," which lands on www.lunamerics.com/conversionrate, is doing great. It only sees one ad, called "Increase your Conversion Rate." You can cheat on Google AdWords by changing the titles very very slightly. In this case, I would change one of the ads to have a capital Y in Your, so that it reads, "Increase Your Conversion Rate." The difference is slight enough that it shouldn't matter, and will enable you to read the results in GA.

Robbin Steif
LunaMetrics