"There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics" – Mark Twain
A colleague brought to my attention the dubious practices of LogStats.de, a German provider of free web analytics. LogStats is a typical teeny-tiny provider of free web stats, using a JavaScript-based tag for data collection. Free web stats is a pretty thin business to be in these days, what with behemoths like Google and us … Read more
You might imagine that after seven years in the web analytics industry I would have worked out what a third-party cookie was. But it turns out that my thinking on this is fuzzy (like so much in my life), or at least incomplete. Let me explain. When asked what a third-party cookie is, most people … Read more
I’m always amazed by the economic niches that grow up around the periphery of big companies and industries. It’s a great demonstration of the Darwinian roots of capitalism. So I was delighted to discover (in a purely academic sense, of course) via GoogleWatch that a little industry has grown up around the business of managing … Read more
Via an article on TechCrunch, I learn that a new search engine front-end for Wikipedia, WikiSeek, has just launched. Major features are: Nice, Google/Live-style results page (rather than the crappy results page that the Wikipedia search produces) Results from Wikipedia itself and referenced Wikipedia sources only A tag cloud of results (though am I alone … Read more
There’s an interesting article in Advertising Age about a new system that Starcom are deploying to build a complete picture of marketing effectiveness, including combining the effect of multiple exposures to marketing over time. The project sounds similar to one I undertook in my WebAbacus days with Eric Picard (then with Bluestreak) and Carat Interactive … Read more
I learn via my friends at E-consultancy that ABC Electronic in the UK – who provide traffic auditing services for online publishers – has just ratified a change in its policy on the mandatory measures that must be included in an ABCE audit return. Starting Jan 2007, it will no longer be mandatory to report … Read more
A couple of days late on this one, but today’s (well, Monday’s, technically) market consolidation news is that Webtrends has acquired Clickshift, purveyor of paid search bid management software (as a service, natch). This acquisition nicely fleshes out Webtrends’ solution set, allowing them to compete across the board with Omniture and WebSideStory who both have … Read more
There’s an amusing graphic on Steve Rubel’s Micro Persuasion blog lamenting the demise of the page view (1994 – 2010, says Steve). Steve highlights the fact that, as web applications move beyond the traditional ‘page by page’ model, utilizing technology like Ajax and Flash, the page view – which, together with the click, is the cornerstone of … Read more
Yesterday at the E-metrics Summit in Washington DC, Google launched a new service under their Adwords brand, called Google Website Optimizer. It’s an automated A/B testing/optimization tool for Adwords advertisers to enable them to maximize the conversion rates they get from the keyword campaigns. In essence, the system allows you to test the effect of … Read more
Via a post on Stowe Boyd’s blog, Genius.com‘s SalesGenius is brought to my attention. At first glance, I thought this was just another bulk e-mail marketing tool with post-click web analytics built in, but they’re doing something slightly more interesting here, by tracking the clicks from e-mails sent by company sales reps and then presenting … Read more