Analytics, click fraud and working the booth...
Allan Dick’s party last night at
Hakone Gardens left most of us a little hazy this morning, so how better to clear away the cobwebs but with a 90 minute session on web analytics?!...
Actually it was pretty good, especially Matt Bailey from Site logic Marketing, whose presentation managed to shoehorn a Star Trek analogy and a picture of a rats arse (!?) into a compelling argument for us all to track and analyse our website’s traffic.
The premise was around defining your goals before you start measuring, set bench marks and don’t just report for reporting’s sake. Make sure you act on the data and use it to hit your success metrics.
“With SEO (Search Engine Optimization), if people can’t find you - then you don’t exist.
With usability, if they can’t find it - then it’s not there.
With analytics, it tells you what just happened so you can do something about it.”
Interesting that a straw poll of the 500-odd delegates showed about two thirds were using analytics, but a miserly fifth had no idea what to do with the data. A report called Web Analytics Demystified in June 2007 stated 82% of those surveyed poorly understood analytics and 56% found the whole process far too difficult and confusing to carry out.
Another great tip was to use analytics to understand the context of how people are talking about your company, product or service on blogs and social networks – track back and see whether you’re being set up well for a sale – it’s all about reputation management.
The click fraud session turned into a bit of a heated argument over third party’s reporting versus what Google reports as being the percentage of clicks it does not charge for and hands back to advertisers. Google said it was in a range of less than 10% and the 3rd party company (didn’t catch the name) was saying it was higher. It got a bit messy when it was insinuated that the 3rd party was making waves for its own benefit...............and so it rumbles on..........I’ll keep DigiTales updated with any new developments on the subject.
Kudos to the click fraud moderator, Jeffery K Rohrs, for being the only host so far that hasn’t introduced the speakers “without further ado!” – What does that mean????
The rest of the day was spent on our booth talking to customers and signing people up to our adExcellence accreditation program. The expo hall is huge, the biggest I’ve ever see at an SES conference.
Being Microsoft we get a lot of questions and sometimes even pitches at the booth – today I was approached by some guys wanting to sell us a new browser they’ve built.......mmmmm......think we might already have one of those...
