Message from the Chairman

As an independent, non-profit organization, the WAA is sometimes asked for its position on relevant topics in the web analytics industry. Privacy is important to all of us as a misunderstanding of our tracking technologies can lead to distrust. Therefore, I wanted to share a recent question about page tagging and web beacons being mistaken for spyware as well as the WAA's official response.

Haiku Wordle Twemes and Twitter Tweets

Saying this sentence:
"I wordeled emetrics tweets"
Sounds like Dr. Seuss

I Love Charts

Just came across a masterpiece on children education for Web Analytics :-) This short video is great: you can learn the song by heart and sing it in work meetings in order to convince them about the importance of graphs! Let me know how it goes...

New Standards Definition Doc

Over the last year, the Standards Committee have been hard at work. We took the definitions document from last year, and have totally revamped the definitions based on your feedback. We've added a few new definitions, but one of the things we're most excited about is our new "Ask Your Vendor" questions, where we've highlighted places where different vendors do calculations in different ways.

Results of Q1 2008 Web Analytics Communication Survey

Back in February, I launched a brief survey too see how web analytics practitioners are communicating our data within our organizations. A mere three months later (sorry! I've been busy!), I'm happy to report back the results. The four questions in the survey as follows:

Don't Lose Sight of the Big Picture

I recently completed an enormous effort in analytics. We launched a series of tests some weeks earlier and it was time to make an account for it all. One of the happy agonies of using a robust analytics tool is that you can look at the data from hundreds of different angles, each shedding a slightly different light on the subject. Anyway--I just wanted to make a case for stepping back and overlaying the tests on the big picture, rather than focusing purely in the world of each individual test.

Real-time Information

As part of this ongoing series of posts on communicating analytics data, I launched a survey back in February to see how web analytics professionals are communicating with their executive teams. I'm going to step through the entire survey results in my session at eMetrics Marketing Optimization Summit in Toronto, Canada before unveiling on this blog, but it turns out that most of the respondents communicate site visitor analytics on a weekly or monthly basis. This seems like an entirely reasonable span of time, but does it work for all KPIs? What about your most important metrics? How many times have your executives come to you out of cycle for a daily update — even when they'll be getting an update at the end of the week?

Video Metrics are a Focus for Measuring User Generated Content

I have come across a couple of discussions about measuring User Generated Video Content recently, and thought I would share them with members. 

Towards a Taxonomy for User Generated Content

I recently posted an article on my blog about definining and designing Key Performance Indicators for measuring User Generated Content, based on key objectives. You can read a response here on the WAA site from Daniel Waisberg. Thanks for the feedback Daniel.

To me, the next important piece of the puzzle in developing an approach to measuring User Generated Content is to define basic, universal categories of measurement. A taxonomy. One that defines the principal characteristics of UGC that affect an audience´s level of engagement with the content.

Measuring User Generated Content

I read a post by Luisa Woods at Marketing Metrics a few days ago that called my attention; she has a very interesting point of view on why should we measure UGC. Since I worked for one year at  esnips, a 100% UGC website, the question was not whether UGC could/should be measured or not, the exclamation was: measure it or we will fire you! :-)

So I ended up with a very practical model, which I presented at emetrics washington and will present again at emetrics Canada. Here is the description: