Yesterday, on the Web Analytics Forum, a visitor asked, “How do I choose a web analytics vendor?” JonB from England (who appropriately goes by the username of Mr_Awesome) answered with an excellent non-technical response. He skipped the usual issues of “Do you want server side or client side analytics?” or “Now what is it you want to measure?” and addressed evaluation of the company itself. In the email where he gave me permission to pick up his words wholesale, he added, “I learned all those lessons the hard way, of course.” Here is Jon’s list:

1. Look at their customer list. Are the businesses they serve in a similar market/vertical with a similar business model to you? If so that’s a good sign.

2. Ask to speak to their support/account management staff directly. Ignore the fancy sales guys as once you sign the contract, you won’t ever deal with the sales guy again (until it’s renewal time - at which time they will suddenly be your best friend again).

3. Never sign anything more than an initial 12 month contract.

4. Most importantly of all - check no less than 3 references that you choose from the vendor’s reference list. (Don’t let the vendor give you references… that’s just a pointless idea.) Better still, go out and find someone not listed on their ‘clients’ page and track down the person responsible for their Web analytics programme internally. Buy them lunch/coffee/chocolates and probe them on their opinions of the vendor.

5. Document your expectations from the tool and give this to them in writing before you sign.

My additions (outside of the techie stuff and the “what do you want to measure?” stuff) are:

A. What do you want to spend? I find that analytics pretty much fall into three categories:

• Free/Almost free
• Mid-range ($1000+)
• Astoundingly expensive ($15-25K/year.)

Once you establish a price range for yourself, you’ll find that there are just a handful of reasonable choices.

B. Make sure that you are comfortable with the company’s commitment to their software — you don’t want to work with a new company who has few customers and who may easily go under in a year, or even a large company where the analytics area is not a strategic focus.

C. Narrow down your list and ask for a trial, free period with your top choice. You could even have a trial period with your two top choices and compare them.

Robbin Steif
LunaMetrics

Last night, I got an email from a new blog service that is going to create an aggregation of Pittsburgh-based blogs. It looked very fishy (and phishy) to me. It was from PittsburghNews@gmail.com and the subject line was “permission to aggregate your blog’s feed. - lunametrics.blogspot.com.” Here are some highlights of the email:

We would like to ask permission to aggregate your blog’s feed. All
you need to do is reply to this email and tell us if it’s okay to use
your feed in our site. To see the initial version of the site go to
PittsburghsNews.

http://pittsburghsnews.com .
(Creative huh?)…

… We only promote aggregated content that we like and we actually have
pretty high standards. Our taste and judgment might be impaired but we
like your blog’s feed items and believe this can only help you get
more readers…

There was no name or phone number attached to the email.

On the one hand, I went on high alert. This was clearly a phishing scheme. On the other hand, I am very interested in blog marketing for myself and my customers, and there were little touches in the writing (like their “Creative, huh?” and “our taste and judgment might be impaired..”) that made me wonder if this might actually be real. So I typed in the URL (no clicking!) and it was for real.

So, why was this legitimate email different from all other legitimate emails?

1) They asked me for something that I thought they didn’t need my permission to do. (In all fairness, I am not a lawyer. So, I forwarded the question this morning to Mike Madison, who pretends to be a professor of law, specializing in intellectual property at the University of Pittsburgh, but who is really a blogger. Read Mike’s legal response.)

2) They told me I had won the lottery without applying. Sort of like all those spam emails (and even snail mail) “You’ve won a million dollars, all you have to do is sign here.”

3) They told me that they loved my blog but didn’t indicate why. I was particularly suspicious because it’s a Pittsburgh blog rollup, and I never write about Pittsburgh except to tell local analysts when the Pittsburgh Web Analytics Wednesday is (May 10, 6-8 pm, Panera’s on the Blvd. in Oakland.)

4) It came from a nameless address, the equivalent of noname@gmail.com

5) It wasn’t signed by a real person’s name

6) There wasn’t a phone number in the email

In order to get me to convert, all I had to do was write back and say “Sure.” Ultimately, I did so, but not before spending a long time thinking about how to write email that people trust and will act upon.

Robbin Steif
LunaMetrics

Well, this has been an interesting 36 hours in the life of a blogger! I wrote my last post, the one where I talked about how the Internet is a banquet but most people are still starving, out of frustration, but the Web Analytics Forum picked it up. My blogalytics recording this blog’s biggest day ever from their link.

My blog is not meant to be an opinion forum, but rather, an educational forum, but I do want to finish up on this topic, because one individual commented on the Forum that simple questions do not deserved to be answered!

This reminds me a little bit of a comment I recently saw on TechCrunch. The blog editor, Michael Arrington, introduced a new, easier to use product, and one of the commenters wrote, “Why doesn”t everyone just learn how to write code?”

Since this opinion set is at the fringes, let’s look at the comment left on yesterday’s post by one commenter, Jacques Warren. It was a very reasonable, moderate comment:

I think the new forum members should assume that all the others have done some readings, such as Sterne, Peterson, Eisenberg, and Inan. With these few books, they would grasp way more from the discussions. [I think Jacques was saying, "and new forum members should read those books too."]

I can’t disagree with Jacques. But having said that - and having read the books - I still have Web Analytics 101 questions to ask (and no vendor to ask them of. Or vendors with “Live” support who take so long to answer that I have to find friends within their company to get anything done.)

Increasing the number of people with an analytics skill set only helps build the industry. And let me not forget the software vendors, who desperately need more people who can use their product so that they can sell more, stay in business, and continue to offer new upgraded features. It’s a win-win-win situation.

Let’s keep answering those Web Analytics 101 questions. And I promise I won’t write an analytics editorial tomorrow.

Robbin Steif
LunaMetrics

“The Internet is a banquet and some poor suckers are starving,” wrote local blogger Mark Stroup after Pittsburgh’s recent Web Analytics Wednesday. I laughed when I first read the comment but haven’t been laughing this weekend when I saw, on the Web Analytics Forum, how lavish the banquet is and realized how few are eating.

I read the forum very regularly so that I can learn, ask questions, answer questions and just satisfy my generally nosy personality. It is a wonderful resource, particularly because the people who write go out of their way to make everyone feel welcome. Sometimes people get on and ask really esoteric questions, but that’s usually because they are working with a very sophisticated company and need to know. However, I was very frustrated this weekend to read as analyst after analyst weighed in on the topic of non-linear conversion metrics, fancy statistical measurements, neural networks and self organizing maps, and every other form of “let me show you how much I know.”

I don’t want to write, “as if anyone cared.” Well, okay, I do want to write that, but I won’t — there truly are companies that are at the head of the Internet banquet table. But I feel like web analysts are already a privileged sort, when it comes to the Internet, because knowledge is power, and analysts have so much knowledge. Other questions, like the one I asked about Mint, and the questions a new CoreMetrics user asked about how his product worked, got lost completely. (I’m not an administrator of the Forum and I still find myself sending private email to posters, asking if their question ever got answered, particularly if I’m interested in the answer as well.)

It’s not that I’m crying so much about the analysts whose unanswered boring questions (like mine) don’t get answered in the rush to evaluate the next cool thing. No, they can ask them again, the way that I do if no one answers. I keep thinking about who has a seat at the Internet table. Some people do web analysis with non-linear equations while most owners of businesses with websites (and isn’t that every business now?), even owners of e-commerce sites, are still saying, “What are web analytics and why do I need them?” When I see this tiny group of privileged people working to conquer a very esoteric question, while the vast majority of businesses don’t even understand what web analytics do, I finally understand Mark’s point about the Internet feast vs. the Internet Famine.

I wrote a follow-on post to this one, where I focused less on “wherefore web analytics” and more on the topic of new web analysts and their questions.

Robbin
LunaMetrics

ps Many thanks to Pat McCarthy at Conversion Rater for encouraging me to write about the difference between the Internet “haves” and “have nots.”

This post has a dual purpose: to show how http://co.mments.com made it easier for visitors to take action, and to introduce co.mments to this blog.

Recently, I noted that commenters to my blog don’t often reply, and I wanted to create a way for them to keep track of the conversation (Blogger doesn’t have comment trackback. ) So I was delighted to find co.mments, a service that allows individuals who comment on blogs and other sites to keep track of conversations in once place.

Not quite sure what co.mments is yet? Here is the write-up from TechCrunch:

…Co.mments reminds me of the most of a sort of highly specialized blog bookmarking tool, focused on keeping all of the posts that you want to track (including comment discussions) in one place. You do not need to leave a comment on the post to track it with co.mment.

And the best part is that you can use it without creating an account - it will track things and keep them organized based solely on a cookie. However, if you want to create an account to use it on different computers or browsers, you can.

I started using co.mments myself to track conversations on other blogs, but the more important conversion event, for them (I would think) would be to get bloggers like myself to include it on their blogs so that readers would start to use it. In order to do so, though, I had to load yet more code onto my template, something I just was putting off — too much effort.

But when I went to co.mments to check out the code, I noticed that they had created a FeedFlare. This meant that instead of messing with my template, I could just ask FeedBurner to do all the heavy lifting. It also meant that this cool co.mmenting ability would be available not just for visitors to this blogsite but also to feed suscribers.

So on the bottom of every post, you should now see a co.mments link, which will enable you to track that conversation or post just by clicking on it. I enabled this ability because their compay made this as easy as falling off a wet rock.

Robbin Steif
LunaMetrics

As everyone who reads blogs knows, the NYTimes just redesigned. They now include a cloud visualization on their searches:

Many thanks to Dave Radin of Megabyte Minute who showed me that I was ignoring how the Times was embracing the Web 2.0 look.

Robbin Steif
LunaMetrics

Creativity is great - but please don’t use it when you ask your customers to fill out forms.

For example, I read an article in September about Avis — they had decided to put the asterisk (*) by the optional fields in their form, and have no asterisk by the mandatory fields — the reverse of what people expect. What a way to shoot yourself in the foot.

In a similar vein, I tried to pay my phone bill online last night and went slightly crazy trying to figure out how to fill out their form. Here’s what it looked like:

I looked at those three “Bill Date” fields for about 10 minutes. Maybe they were giving me the option to pay two bills at once, which would require three dates — the beginning date of the first invoice, the closing date of that invoice, and the closing date of the third invoice?

Finally, I entered the month into the first field, but I couldn’t get the day or year to go in, despite the fact that the month took up only about 10% of that long field. That was when the light went on — they wanted the month in the first field, the day in the second field, and the year in the third field. I would say, how stupid, but what do I expect? They are a phone company.

Robbin Steif
LunaMetrics

How can you make visitors take action? Here are twenty five ways in seven categories.

Scent
1) Make sure your site says hello nicely. If the job of the home page is to convince visitors to move deeper into the site, the home page has to look just like the kind of business you are. The casual visitor only takes five seconds to scan your site and decide if you’re the place for him.

2) Like a bloodhound following a scent, we humans follow the information we are looking for until we can’t smell it any more. Find different ways to say the same thing so that you are using the different target words that individuals are looking for.

3) Long pages are nice, because they have more opportunities to use the words people are looking for. However, don’t create scroll stoppers - I did a whole post about this one recently.

4) Create long links that tell people exactly where they are going. Remember - clicks are precious, and visitors are annoyed when they waste them.

5) Instead of web buttons that say “Submit”, how about “Click here for your Free White paper?” Use buttons that tell the customer what will happen when they click (after all, clicks are precious.)

Navigation
6) Open up your navigation so that the visitor can see subcategories and link deeper into the site. This will also help him find where he is going more quickly.

7) If you can, slice your categories in multiple ways — such as women’s clothing by season (spring, summer, in between) as opposed to just women’s clothing by type of clothes (sweaters, pants, etc)

Do a little user testing on your navigation - ask your friends what they think the navigation options mean. You know that solutions means “what we do” but the visitor doesn’t always.

Copywriting
9) Use words that the customer uses, not words that your company uses. It will help you in the search engines, too.

10) Stop talking about yourself (”Our company this, our company that”) and start talking about the customer (”Have you ever…?” “Do you need to….?”)

11) Write to the customer as if you were having a one-to-one conversation instead of a one-to-many lecture. Here’s an awful example of “writing at” the customer (it’s from a spoof site called HuhCorp.com): “Welcome to the world’s most dynamic e-business marketing, design and consulting agency. We provide distinct clients with groundbreaking business strategies and cutting-edge designs to aggressively and creatively compete in a changing economy.”

12) Sell benefits instead of features. In place of telling the customer that you stock 25,000 kinds of mattresses, you might say, “With 25,000 different mattresses in stock, we’re sure to have the one that meets your back’s needs so that you can sleep through the night.”

Trust
13) Give just the right assurance at just the right time. For example, when you ask for someone’s email address, include a link to your privacy policy right next to the email field. Here’s another example: tell them about your encryption when you ask for their credit card.

14) Keep your site up to date. As soon as an event is over, remove it from your site (think about how foolish billboards look when they have a time sensitive ad up after the event has past.) Update your copyright every year so that people believe you are still in business.

15) Check your site weekly for broken links and fix them when you find them. You wouldn’t hand out a torn brochure, would you?

Respect your visitors
16) Treat email questions as if they were a customer on hold. Tell the individual when you are going to get back to them.

17) Create error messages that you would feel comfortable saying in person, and work hard not to make the customer feel like it’s his fault that he couldn’t find the page.

18) Don’t ask for the same information more than once (don’t you hate when you call the phone company, the automated voice attendant asks for your phone number, you key it in, wait for a live person, and the first question is, “What is your phone number?”)

Different options for different people
19) Some people love to use the search box - they are like the individual who walks into the store and finds the nearest salesperson and ignores all the signs. Create excellent search — the kind that can handle typos, that comes back with a manageable number of options, that always suggests something. The larger your site, the more important this becomes.

20) Some people don’t want to contact you online. Get your telephone number on every page if that’s one of the ways you expect to convert visitors into customers.

21) Some people don’t want to pick up the phone. Create online assistance - if not chat, then an IM address. If not an IM address, then a Contact Us box.

22) Give visitors multiple ways to say, “I’m interested,” such as joining your email list, downloading a white paper, downloding a demo, signing up for a webinar, etc.

Distractions
23) Get rid of your Flash intro (if you haven’t already.) Not all Flash intros are bad, just 99% of them. When my customers hear that forcing their Flash intro onto all visitors is like forcing everyone to watch a 20 second movie at the supermarket, they always say, “But they can click to skip the intro.” True, but clicks are precious.

24) Get rid of little bits of Flash or other rich media that slowly drive the viewer crazy.

25) When the customer is trying to give you his/her money, take it. Don’t ask him to create a user id and password. Time kills all deals - you can ask for the new registration after the purchase.

Bonus Set your analytics up (you knew this was coming, right?) so that you can look at them daily - get them emailed to you, if possible. Then make decisions based on them.

Robbin
LunaMetrics

Many thanks to Dave Morgan of SiteSpect, who swallowed my April Fool’s Day post hook, line and sinker. The first paragraph - where a couple of other blogs commented on this blog - was all true, creating just the verisimilitude I needed to pull it off. My family couldn’t understand why I was laughing so hard as I wrote it Saturday morning, so it was great to see that someone saw how ridiculous the concept of punishing non-converting visitors was.

Let me finish up on invasive analytics, for now. Instant Cognition, which uses many of the same analytics that this blog does, sent me a question. “What do you think of the feature in BlogBeat that lets you tag visitors?” he asked, wondering if that wasn’t invasive. He pointed out that he knows that I live in Pittsburgh and that I use fiber optic, so now he could tag me. BlogBeat actually has a very cool ability that I hadn’t explored until I read the question, i.e. once you recognize the IP address with browser, city, etc, you can attach a person’s name to it.

I played with it, and truly I don’t think it’s any more invasive than creating an Excel spreadsheet with the IP string information in one column and the person’s name in another — it’s just more convenient. Sort of like the Google Maps Satellite View — the satellite view was never confidential, just harder to get before Google put it on all our desktops. And then as soon as the individual changes computers or a dynamic IP address reinitializes, they visit and you don’t know it.

Having said that — it is very cool.

Robbin
LunaMetrics

After I wrote that post about Revealsite being Big Brother or maybe just being great software), Conversion Rater did a piece on it (thanks Pat), and then it was picked up by a blog in the Netherlands. My Dutch is a little rusty –shall I say nonexistant? — so I ran it through a translator and it said, or meant to say, I think, “Revealsite is not the only software that can do this.” So I started to look for another intrusive software package besides VisitorVille, which both blogs mentioned - and succeeded. However, you shouldn’t compare either VisitorVille or RevealSite to this newly discovered package - it’s on a whole different plane.

Today. April 1, I talked with Ariela Bertnsen from Denmark about her company, IntheClickOfTime and its intrusive softare. They are just in alpha and have a website holding page. IntheClickOfTime resolves all your IP User Strings into email addresses (so I can’t make fun of the investigative team on CSI Miami doing that anymore) and then automatically emails visitors as soon as they leave the site, asking them why they didn’t make a purchase or otherwise convert. The sample letter she showed me told visitors that they would only be allowed to visit the site one more time without converting, at which point their address would be “blacklisted” from the site. I asked Berntsen why they wrote that letter and created that capability. “Don’t come to my site if you aren’t going to spend your money,” she snapped. “Sites are not there for education or for price shopping - conversion is the name of the game.”

Robbin
LunaMetrics