"There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics" – Mark Twain
I have just noticed (rather belatedly, to say the least) that Laura Lee Dooley has posted a complete video of my encounter with Avinash Kaushik at the May E-metrics Summit in San Jose on Vimeo. The sound quality is a little poor, but you can more or less follow the thread of the conversation. I … Read more
Chatter is building on the interwebs about Omniture’s recent (and ongoing) latency woes. Looks like both SiteCatalyst and Discover are days behind in processing data (according to messages on Twitter, up to around 5 – 7 days in some cases). And it looks like the situation is still getting worse, rather than better. I have … Read more
After his breathless article last year, proclaiming Google Analytics to be something like a cross between the second coming and Barack Obama, Brandt Dainow seems to have soured on the big G, proclaiming this week that GA contains ‘disturbing inaccuracies’: Google Analytics is different from other products in that it has been intentionally designed by … Read more
Ok, it’s not quite Omniture acquiring TouchClarity, but I was delighted to read yesterday that my old pals at Foviance have secured the services of none other than Neil Mason through the acquisition of his company, Applied Insights. Neil (whose ClickZ column you should read) has been flying the flag for web analytics – especially … Read more
With another E-metrics Summit over (sans me, sadly), it’s clear that interest in web analytics and online measurement remains high, even (or especially) in these troubled times. But as the technology sets for online advertising and web analytics continue to merge and overlap, one urgent question remains unanswered: what are we going to do about … Read more
[Update 10/1/08: BT has announced that it will commence a new trial with Phorm to start September 30 in the UK. The trial, in accordance with the conditions below, is opt-in] Beleaguered behavioral targeting outfit Phorm appears finally to have caught a bit of a lucky break – the UK Government has (belatedly) responded … Read more
Yahoo is not letting the grass grow under its feet with its integration of IndexTools. Today IndexTools partners received an e-mail from Yahoo informing them of a change to the terms & conditions of the service, which need to be agreed to by October 15 in order to retain access to IndexTools. The e-mail calls … Read more
In a post yesterday on the company blog, Google has announced that it’s going to be introducing some DoubleClick-like features into the Google Content network (that is, the group of sites that use AdSense to serve contextual ads). The new functionality includes: Frequency capping and reporting Improved ad quality View-through conversions These new capabilities are … Read more
So far in my nascent Online Ad Business 101 series, I’ve covered the overall advertising value chain, and looked at a superficial level at how an ad ‘call’ is actually handled. This installment brings together themes from those two first posts, by taking a look at ad networks. As I have mentioned before, ad networks … Read more
There’s been a lot of chatter recently about the “dark side” of online advertising, in particular, the activities of companies like NebuAd and Phorm using somewhat shady techniques to gather behavioral data about users and using this data to target ads. I’ve even blogged about it myself. And click fraud remains a significant challenge to … Read more