Earlier this week, I wrote that Madame Tussauds of London is the worst tourist website in England. But in fact, it is perfectly lovely and usable if you use IE.

You try it: open up a *Firefox* browser and type in the url: http://www.madame-tussauds.co.uk/, which I made into a link for the 52% of this blog’s readers newsstand readers who use Firefox. See if you can figure out how to do anything besides visit other wax museums around the world.

I couldn’t do anything with the site, because the my computer screen looked like this

There was no navigation and no mousable links except the “visit another wax museum” stuff on the right. I kept thinking, maybe they have only one page for each city, but if so, why would they write, Book Online Now, in the blue bar at the bottom of the screen shot? Eventually, I found their site map at the very bottom of the page and was amazed that an entire site was being hidden behind the home page.

But before I blogged, I opened it up in IE. Wow, I thought, I don’t remember that navigation bar being right there where you would expect it, below the top banner:

In fact, it was just a case of the navigation getting compressed in Firefox. Most sites don’t have the kind of Firefox usage that my blog does, but I hear surveys that put usage at 18% and even over 20% in Europe. (And hey, doesn’t London count as Europe?)

History has taught me a few lessons about this problem. There is the obvious one: always check to see what your site looks like in other browsers. But this wasn’t an error they would probably have caught - they would have seen the site render nicely, and would have kept on going and may never have noticed that that thin line of navigation somehow dropped off the page. So in fact, we need to get our customers and readers to use our sites in other browsers.

A second lesson I have learned is not to expect the Madame Tussaud’s people to write me a thank you note. I always think that free user testing and lousy CGM is best handled with a comment, “Thank you so much for pointing out the Firefox problem we have. We’ll get on it right away!” But I can just imagine their response, it would probably be “All our customers use IE.” They may know that all their customers don’t use IE, but they probably don’t want to admit to it in print.

I, on the other hand, love when people write me and tell me about problems with my blog and my site. One man wrote once and told me that I had committed just the flip of the error above: my blog was messed up in IE. One lady in Massachusetts wrote me and told me that for months, My Yahoo was not picking up my feed correctly (I think FeedBurner waved a magic wand to fix that one.)

Wouldn’t it be great if sites gave away awards or just honorable mentions to customrs who cared enough to tell them that their sites weren’t working properly?

Robbin Steif
LunaMetrics

“What do you think about Jim MacIntyre becoming CEO of WebSideStory?” the investment banker asked me this morning.

That was twelve hours ago and I had no data so could only speculate. But now I have real data:

My most popular post today was this one, Absolutely Blown Away by Visual Sciences. It had more than 65% as many views as all the views for that post combined for the last business week:

Furthermore, from Thursday October 19 through yesterday, only 7.3% of the people who read that post lived in Utah (or more correctly, had computers that live in Utah.) But today, 80% of computers looking at my Visual Science post live in Utah.

I am happy to do the reporting here, but I don’t want to do the analysis. This is partially because I don’t want to get involved in a competition that has nothing to do with me, and partially because I would need more data anyway. (I know, it is very unusual for me to mind my own business. But it happens sometimes.)

Instead, I will close with a comment about Google Analytics. GA - I see your geographic drilldowns all the time, I “demo’ed” them at the Summit — but this was the first time that I have ever used them for something truly meaningful. Thanks for having them when I needed them.

Robbin Steif
LunaMetrics

I’m going to London on Thursday for five days with my teenaged daughter. We’ve been doing the research online in an effort to pick and choose among all the great things there are to do.

She insisted that we do the London Eye, so we bought tickets online. I am somewhat amazed that I succeeded in giving my money to them.

Despite the fact that they have a six page shopping cart, it wasn’t that bad until I got to the credit card page. Here’s a screen shot that shows all the things I did wrong:

After I hit “Confirm booking,” I got an error message. The shopping cart was unhappy with the telephone number because I had included dashes. Well OK, I thought, they could have told me ahead of time or better yet, teach that field to ignore dashes, but I can handle this one, I deal with that one all the time.

So I fixed it and tried to Confirm Booking for the second time. This time the error was harder and probably cultural. Notice how the credit card number field is followed by two date fields - see the green highlighting. The first one is Start Date. The first time that I filled out the form, I just began to put my expiration date there. When the years options didn’t go past 2006, I realized that something was wrong, and then saw that whatever Start Date meant, it wasn’t mandatory. (If it isn’t mandatory, and it doesn’t cut across all cultures, and this is a really touristy thing to do, why do they include it?) Anyway, the error message yelled at me for including a month and not a year, so I dealt with the drop down box to get rid of the month. [I still have no idea what Start Date means.] I tried to Confirm Booking for the third time.

The finally one was ridiculous. It is in blue highlighting, where they ask for my name again. I gave them my name, Robbin F. Steif, and the error came back disallowing special characters. In other words, I wasn’t allowed to put a period after my middle initial.

I confirmed my booking for the fourth time and finally, they took my money.

London Eye’s site, however, doesn’t win the award for the Worst London Tourist Attraction WebSite, just because they have such a crummy shopping cart. That “honor” is reserved for Madame Tussauds Wax Museum - London. More later.

Robbin Steif
LunaMetrics

I’ve been writing about Regular Expressions for Google Analytics for some time now. The more I learned, the more I wanted to rewrite my very earliest posts, because In The Beginning, I took easy topics and made them hard. Or, I combined too many expressions together without just starting with basic ideas.

Anyway, I rewrote Part I, the backslash and I also rewrote Part II. Originally, Part II addressed multiple wildcards but I simplified it to be just the dot. I will deal with the plus sign + and the asterisk (which RegEx types like to call a star) in future posts.

Over time, I will get them all cross-indexed. (Done, done done!! at last. ) When I change the post title, I break the link, so I’ll fix that too. (sorry!)

If you got lost learning about wildcards on Post II, this would be a good time, to the extent that you actually have time, to go back and just learn about dots.

Backslashes \
Dots .
Carats ^
Dollars signs $
Question marks ?
Pipes |
Parentheses ()
Square brackets []and dashes -
Plus signs +
Stars *
Regular Expressions for Google Analytics: Now let’s Practice
Bad Greed
RegEx and Good Greed
{Braces}
Minimal Matching
Lookahead

Robbin
LunaMetrics

After speaking about marketing and IT at the eMetrics Summit, I blogged about it here and commented that one woman in the audience had a great answer: make IT into your customer. I hit a streak of luck - Jodi McDermott, the woman I was referring to, read my blog and sent me email. (And of course, I hit her up for that guest blog post that I wanted from her, since she clearly has this so figured out, better than lots of other companies.) Here is her guest post - enjoy!

How do you get your IT department on board with web analytics - turn them into one of your customers!

I thoroughly enjoyed Robbin Steif’s presentation at E-Metrics last week in which she spoke about the ongoing tension between Marketers and IT staff. In a quick show of hands around the room she asked everyone to express their opinions of the battles between the departments and how each person deals with it on a daily basis. Much to my surprise, I learned that my company is quite progressive in working through the trials of this relationship (and no, it has not always been this way). Instead of battling on the support needed to maintain a web analytics solution in-house, our team has turned IT into a customer by providing them with the same level of analytics as the Marketing team.

So how does one get the attention of the IT department? Get to the heart of the metrics and analyis that they desire, but can’t obtain from their other monitoring tools. Segment, slice and dice based on the dimensions of data that they might care about – a healthy dialogue around HTTP status code and IP will get you much farther with them than discussing Campaign codes will.

Just last week I received an urgent set of emails from IT in which they were trying feverishly to determine why bandwidth had spiked on the site over the last 60 minutes. Through our web analytics tool (we use Visual Sciences) I was able to quickly segment the data to determine that the spike in traffic was coming from one of our new affiliate partners. They had dropped an email newsletter mid-day and the opens were driving so much traffic to the site that it triggered several alerts in IT. The question in their minds was - web site attack or valid customer traffic??? In minutes my team was able to verify that indeed it was valid customer traffic and what remained was a conversation with our affiliate partner to better coordinate their marketing activity with us.

Other examples of IT requests have included the analysis of filtered traffic versus unfiltered traffic. Our tool gives us the capability to quickly change the configuration and reprocess the dataset in order to determine the percentage of traffic from visitors who do not accept cookies and robots. We also recently participated in providing metrics for a portion of our traffic that we may send to a third-party caching network. Through the use of web analytics we were able to help our IT department forecast the volume of traffic that would be sent to the network and thereby negotiate the most cost effective contract for our company.

The IT department has to be prepared for both sides of the coin though. A few weeks ago we discovered that a page tag was missing from one of our important points in the order process flow. We were able to determine down to the hour as to when the tag disappeared. Based on their change control process they could tie the issue back to the team who had pushed out the new code (sans tag). Delivering the “gap analysis” back to IT needs to be done in a delicate manner. The granularity of the reporting that you can provide can both answer their questions and point out their weaknesses.

The relationship has not always been this smooth for our company, but showing value to the business through web analytics has put our team (and tool) at the top of the radar for our executives. This in turn is increasing the awareness of the IT staff as they learn what other nuggets of information can be gleaned from the data (and oh-how-quickly). If you can evangelize the value to the top levels of the organization – including the office of the CIO/CTO, the probability of having an amicable relationship with IT and gaining their support is most certainly an achievable goal.

Jodi McDermott
Director of Web Analytics
InPhonic
www.wirefly.com

Come learn Regular Expressions for Google Analytics with me. I am learning Regular Expressions for Google Analytics and teaching with each lesson. This is why I roll them out slowly - each expression requires a lot of research. I have been awed at this process because the explanations are so opaque before I understand them, and once I learn them, they make perfect sense. Tonight, let’s talk about square brackets, and I hope you’ll see what I mean.

Google Analytics defines square brackets like this:

[] Match one item in this list

This is exactly what they mean, it just sounds hard because they don’t tell you how to create the list and how to define an item. Simple explanation: When you use square brackets, each character within the bracket is an item. Look at this sample list with five items in it, each of which happens to be a vowel: [aeiou]. The hard part is undertanding that you don’t need anything to separate the characters, and that each item in the list is only one character.

Here’s how someone might use square brackets with Google Analytics. Let’s say you were selling items with part numbers formatted like this: PART1, PART2, etc. You want to know how often someone lands on your site by typing the actual part number into a search engine, but you only care about PART3, PART5 and PART7. So, you could enter PART[357] into the fiter box on the top of your Overall Keyword Conversion report (for example). That will match each of those part numbers. (Technically, it matchest one of these three and more, but I will hold that problem/opportunity for a different post.)

It’s helpful to understand dashes so that you can use square brackets easily. Google Analytics defines dashes like this:

- Create a range in a list

That means, instead of creating a list like this [abcdefghijkl], you can create it like this: [a-l], and it means the same thing — only one letter out of the list gets matched. You can also combine the range method and the brute force, type-them-all-in method and create a list like this: [a-lqtz], which matches any one letter between a and l, or q, or t, or z.

Special case: Sometimes — perhaps often — we really want the dash to be one of the characters we are searching for. Maybe we want to see searches of luna-metrics and lunarmetrics and lunammetrics. In that case, we put the dash at the beginning or end of the list, like this [-rm]. That means that the full RegEx which would match the three lunametrics keywords above would be luna[-rm]metrics. This is because the phrase will start with luna, end with metrics, and in between will have a dash, an r, or an m. Those are the only choices in the little list I created, the one that looked like this: [-rm].

There are other interesting things that you can do with square brackets, but I am leaving them out for now, either because they don’t all work with Google Analytics, or because I think this is enough for today. (Correct me if I’m wrong!)

Backslashes \
Dots .
Carats ^
Dollars signs $
Question marks ?
Pipes |
Parentheses ()
Square brackets []and dashes -
Plus signs +
Stars *
Regular Expressions for Google Analytics: Now let’s Practice
Bad Greed
RegEx and Good Greed
{Braces}
Minimal Matching
Lookahead

Robbin
LunaMetrics

At the Summit, I heard Avinash Kaushik speak (or as Dylan says, How can you go to the Summit and not hear Eric Peterson and Avinash and Sam Decker?) And as usual, Avinash was wonderful, soon he will have groupies following him around. But I didn’t agree with one thing he said. I wish he were right - making more money for the company and more money for your boss is the road to success. Unfortunately, I feel like all anyone cares about is ego. (To be fair, he did touch on this.)

Customers say, “I don’t care what the right thing to do is, I want to do a better job of what my competitor is doing.” Or they say, at my last company we did it this way [five years ago, a million years in Internet time.] Or they say, my wife|husband doesn’t like it. It’s true, as Avi says, that the person with the largest income gets to decide, but my real issue here is, not only do they get to decide, but they too often decide based on what makes them feel important, not on what makes them and the company more money.

As a consultant, this is a hard place to be. (It is probably even harder as an employee!) I always feel ethically obligated to point out once to the customer that if we do it our way, they will make more money. Then when they say, “I don’t care,” I can say, “OK, we will do it your way.” But sometimes I wonder what they are paying for, doing it their way or achieving success.

I guess it is all in the definition of “success.”

Robbin Steif
LunaMetrics

ps I promise that I will do Regular Expressions Part VIII soon.

So how do you get the good folks in IT to help you when you’re a web analyst who doesn’t have the ability|clearance to make changes to the web site yourself?

That was a small part of the presentation that I did at the eMetrics Summit yesterday. There probably isn’t any one answer, despite the fact that I sure did hear a lot of marketers with the identical problem: “IT doesn’t have any incentive to help me (put up page tags, for example.) They think it will just slow down the site.” However, one woman in the front had a stupendous answer. She consistently goes back to her IT department with a technographic analysis — 404 errors, browser type, etc. The stuff that her IT department loves. So she has wittingly? unwittingly? made them into one of her customers, but can’t keep it up unless they help her.

I wish I knew her name so that I could ask her to write a guest post.

Robbin Steif
LunaMetrics

Yesterday at the eMetrics Summit, I saw a one-hour demo of Visual Sciences. The “demo-er” was Bob Chatham, their CMO. It is incredibly awesome.

I walked into the presentation knowing that the product is black and probably visual. I walked out trying to figure out why, beyond budget, companies would choose a different solution if they could choose Visual Sciences. (I did come up with some, see the bottom of this post.)

I won’t speak much to the implementation or technology. Among other reasons, you can’t easily put them in a box. They aren’t a client-side solution (you pretty much have to have software), but they sure aren’t an old-fashioned logfile solution either. Instead, I want to speak just to the features/benefits.

First, they have developed the capability (a “visual sensor”) to capture data from all sorts of sources, not just the web. RFID, bar codes, text files, call center logs all qualify. So it is no longer just a web analytic package, it becomes a total analytic solution. I don’t think they like the phrase 360 degree view, but if that isn’t a 360, what is?

They have a proprietary database — and maybe that term is already too “boxy” — maybe data storage or “place to keep their data” would be more accurate. This seems to be their primary secret sauce, and enables them to relate data in any way you want. (They call this n-dimensional.) They aren’t working with a traditional relational database, so the number of fields aren’t constrained and it is no longer incredibly expensive to have someone crawl into the database and expand the fields (in fact, there is no crawling in.) I kind of dismissed this as Bob spoke - it’s an expensive solution so even if you pay for an extra 10 eVars from Omniture, you probably pay less money - but then,you might need that info now, not when the LiveSupport people get to it. In some ways, it is easier to compare it to Google Analytics, where you get one custom variable and no more, but the customer sets are so different that that becomes a senseless comparison (albeit easy to understand.)

It is amazingly easy to create whatever report you want. We were five people watching them demo, and we couldn’t come up with a single request for a report that Bob Chatham couldn’t create from scratch within 5-10 seconds.

Did I remember to say that the visualizations are to die for? Here is one from their website:

This screen shot shows paths through the site. The height of a bar is traffic to a page and the thickness of a connection from one page to another shows how much traffic flows from page to page (I wonder how you tell what direction the traffic is flowing?) I know that this screen shot doesn’t do justice to the visualization but it was the best I could do - hope you can see the three-D connectors in “the air,” I can barely see them in my preview of this post.

It’s real time. Almost all the other page tagging solutions are real time, but unlike VS don’t change while you watch unless you hit reload and wait 60 seconds.

So why doesn’t everybody buy it? First, it is really expensive. I don’t know exactly how expensive but I have a pretty good idea. So it’s not a solution you buy lightly, and you sure don’t buy it without a full-time analyst or a team of analysts or you won’t learn much. Plus, if you don’t have time or resources to learn everything from your standard high-end solution (SC, HBX, WebTrends etc), then it’s really not worth spending the money. And let’s face it (this is my usual soapbox) - most people aren’t getting as much as they should out of their free Google Analtyics. In fact, most sites either don’t have analytics, don’t know that they have analytics, or don’t care (but I digress…)

Second, I think that the company would be smart to sell the product on its merits and not sell it against the competition so much. Maybe that’s just the IBMer in me (I was taught to NEVER mention the competition by name), but I think their product, in the right situation, solves so many problems that they don’t need to have a negative campaign.

Robbin Steif
LunaMetrics

Here’s what Omniture’s Matt Belkin said about the presentation given today at the eMetrics Summit by Visual Science’s Eric Peterson.

Eric’s presentation, which I missed in large part but caught the end of and the Q&A, was centered on WA methodology. It was called, The Business Process in Web Analytics. Here, you can read much of the presentation yourself on Web Metrics Guru.

After the presentation, it was break time and I wandered into the vendor area. I started talking to Matt Belkin, VP of Omniture’s Best Practices group. As part of our conversation, he showed me his computer, where he had typed, “Lack of methodology is responsible for the failure of web analytics.”

“That’s what Eric thinks,” Matt said, referring to what he had typed on his computer. “Well, what do you think?” I asked. Matt started to speak, so I grabbed a piece of paper and scrawled down his answer while Bill Bruno from Stratigent stood and laughed at us (Bill was the source of a post I wrote at the Summit last April, so he knew exactly why I grabbed a notepad.)

Matt opined that for many companies, looking at web analytics is like drinking from a firehose - they are drowning in data and can’t figure out what is actionable. He thought that analysts should find quick wins (”I saved us $30K on Google Adwords with the use of our web analytics last quarter,”) and that with those quick wins, the rest of the organization would quickly get on board the web analytics train. He also pointed to the question that Megan Burns of Forrester Research had asked at Eric’s presentation. Her question went something like this, “If organizations codify their web analytics process, won’t it be a big book that no one looks at and quickly becomes shelfware?” Matt really agreed with that shelfware problem and told me I could quote him on this all. (I hope I have captured this well, despite my lack of a tape recorder.)

Since I hadn’t attended Eric’s entire seminar, I didn’t think it would be fair to quote his words out of Matt Belkin’s mouth. So I went back to Eric and read the sentence to him. Eric changed it to be, “Lack of methodology has contributed to the failure of web analytics.” And he strongly disagreed with Matt’s thesis. He pointed out that his seminar was in an enormous room and was filled - if “easy wins” were so easy, why was everyone in his eMetrics session instead of the other sessions? (It’s true, the room he spoke in was enormous and full.) “Well,” I countered, “You’re a fabulous speaker. [He really is.] And you’re Eric Peterson.” Or as one of my friends pointed out a little later in the day, “How can you go to the eMetrics Summit and not listen to Eric speak?”

Late tonight at dinner, Jim Sterne listened to me point out the two sides. “They are both right for different companies at different times,” he said. “There are huge quick wins to be had for instant ROI. But eventually they peter out, and then you need a good methodology so that you can maintain continuous improvement for your site.”

Robbin Steif
LunaMetrics