"There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics" – Mark Twain
One of the topics that we didn’t get quite enough time to cover in detail in my face-off with Avinash Kaushik at last week’s eMetrics Summit (of which more in another post) was the thorny issue of conversion attribution. When I asked Avinash about it, he made the sensible point that trying to correctly “attribute” … Read more
The gloves will be tied tight. Brightly colored silk dressing gowns will be shrugged to the floor; gum-shields inserted. In the blue corner: yours truly. In the red (and blue, yellow and green) corner, web analytics heavyweight, Avinash Kaushik. As the crowd bays for blood, battle will be joined. The Garden never saw anything like … Read more
An interesting post on the official Google Analytics blog from Brett Crosby appeared last week, in which he announced that Google is to start introducing a new URL format in its referring click-through URLs for organic (i.e. non-paid) results. From Brett’s post: Starting this week, you may start seeing a new referring URL format for … Read more
Curmudgeonly hermit that I am, I don’t often leave my Pacific Northwest aerie and venture out into the wider world (unless you count the Eastside as the wider world, which I don’t). But next Monday, March 30, New York City will be blessed by my mysterious presence, as I participate in a panel at the … Read more
If you’re an adCenter Analytics (ACA) beta customer, or you’ve read my colleague Mel’s posting over on the adCenter Community site, you’ll know that we’ve decided to close the ACA beta program at the end of the year. In some senses, this is a sad day for me, since ACA (then known as Gatineau) was … Read more
My new job is going splendidly so far, thanks for asking – and I’m already busy enough to have to be making excuses about a lack of posts. But how could I hope to succeed without the excellent advice of some of the finest minds in technology and business? First, xkcd offers a helpful primer … Read more
I have exciting (for me) news to share with you today – I have a new job, with the somewhat tongue-twisting title of Director of Yield Business Intelligence Product Management. I know, cool, huh? In case you’re left a little non-plussed by precisely what Yield Business Intelligence is, let me enlighten you: I’m in charge … Read more
This, as it turns out: Ah, Mrs Thomas, you know me too well. The only problem with it is that it’s just too perfect to actually eat. As you’ll have no doubt already worked out just by looking at it, it’s made of 70% milk, 20% dark and 10% white chocolate. From the wonderful … Read more
The excellent Tom Slee (aka. Whimsley) has been on my blogroll for some time. Tom writes longish posts about a range of interesting topics – at the moment he’s in the middle of a dissertation about whether Amazon’s recommendation service really does help unknown authors to find an audience and side-step the ‘evil’ publishing business … Read more
Now if that headline doesn’t get me some search ranking juice, nothing will – though my contextual ads (left) are likely to be less impressed. I was going to post this earlier in the week, but Eric Peterson’s swashbuckling defense of cookies (and my hand-wringing response) intervened. As it turns out, though, that debate is … Read more