I recently had this conversation with a friend who doesn’t do the Internet for a living — reminding me that I have to do a post on jargon (and need your help — read on):

Robbin: You know that whole series of posts I wrote on Regular Expressions and Google Analytics?
Friend: Right, I remember you telling me about it.
Robbin: I just got the nicest email, telling me how helpful the posts were to learn about RegEx.
Friend: What’s RegEx?

So, I am going to create a lexicon of web analytic words. Not real words, like “conversion” and “page views” and “hits.” No, you can get all that in Web Analytics Demystified. Instead, I’d like to put together the phrases you hear all the time and just don’t understand. They should make sense, they just don’t… (For example, one person sent me “WOW” and told me that it meant “Week over week.” Someone else sent me “clickstream analysis” vs. “pathing analysis.” That kind of stuff.)

So please send me any gobbledygook (sp?) that you hear. I’m especially interested in slang, or two ways of saying something that sometimes seem the same and sometimes seem different. Acronyms. You don’t have to show off what you don’t know in public; you can just send email to my last name at lunametrics.com or to info.

Robbin Steif
LunaMetrics

Even web analytics have “their moments.”

When I got to work today, I turned on my laptop and started reading my email. The subject line was very tame, “Status: miniFEA users.” (FEA stands for Finite Element Analysis.) But this is how the email message went:

Dear Sexy Web Analyst,

I will be submitting a report to the National Science Foundation. If I could include a sentence or two on the use (and growth of use) of the miniFEA program that would be great.

Can we look at it briefly tonight?

I am sure that appropriate compensation can be found.

Your appreciative client.

Professor Paul S. Steif

I spent quite a few minutes trying to come up with a response that was equal to his email message. Finally I wrote, “Yes, we can do both of those things tonight.”

However, the analytics took longer than I thought. As soon as I got into them, I saw that the page I had designated as a goal page looked like this over time:

Clearly a broken tag — it broke on August 8, six months ago. I had to do all sorts of Excel exporting and graphing of less important pages to get a proxy for the traffic.

From this we learn, look at your web analytics fairly often (so that you can catch stuff like this.) Lecture your web developer that you will one day care about your WA, so please don’t break tags, and be especially careful (dear web developer) with sites and pages that don’t allow you to just throw the analytics into an include file. And finally, don’t send email like this to your wife if she is a blogger.

Here was the final comment of the evening:

My spouse: I can’t believe you are going to publish that. I am supposed to be a serious academic. My cover will be blown. That wasn’t even what I was shooting for.

Gotta go –

Robbin Steif
LunaMetrics

I was finally inspired by Alan, who reads this blog using his Blackberry on the Paris Metro. (Truly a world wide web.) Also inspiring were the comments of an anonymous poster, who wrote that all the Regular Expressions (RegEx) posts were incredibly helpful, but couldn’t I please make them easier to access? So I did it, they are all beautifully threaded now. I even fixed awful typos in the Summary/Intro post and the ^ post (and you know, typos are the worst when you are a newbie learning a technical topic, you can spend hours trying to understand a topic, only to finally learn that the author was just lazy.)

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
Intro to RegEx
{Braces}
Minimal Matching
Lookahead

Robbin

I wrote an article for the Pittsburgh Technology Council on WA for Beginners — it was just published. Even though I wrote it, I think they own the copyright, so I will just start it here and let you click through if you are interested:

Use those Boring Web Analytics to Improve your ROI

Web analytics are the statistical packages that measure your Web site traffic. You may think of them as boring or useless. However, data-smart companies are using their analytics to increase their Internet traffic and to turn more browsers into buyers (or into leads).

Where do I get Web analytics from? Chances are, you already have them…. {Read the rest of the article on their site.}

Robbin Steif

I could have spent the whole day writing about why one should go to the Emetrics Summit in San Francisco, May 7-10. But life calls, and so I have limited myself to the first eleven that came to mind.

1. Lifetime Supply of Altoids. I was never an Altoids fan before I started to go to the Summit, but they give them out at least twice, and now I have them on all my desks and in my car.

2.To quote Eric Peterson, “I think the most important thing [for a new web analyst to do] is to go to the Emetrics Summit. Anywhere in N. America or Europe, you have a great conference where you can go and learn. Book learning is good, really talking to people about the challenges you face is better. It’s the hallway conversations, the dinner parties that specifically helps people who are new to this — as long as they are willing to put themselves out there and say, ‘Hi, I’m [name] and am new to web analytics.’” Most people actually think the Summit is for advanced analysts, which is a sure sign that it is for all analysts…

3) Those free Omniture flashlights. They cast a curiously strong beam.

4) You get to meet Chris Gemignani from Juice Analytics. (If you aren’t reading Juice’s blog, you should be.) I personally plan on cornering Chris at lunch
one day, where I will force him to give me advice on the visualization of free body diagrams for the mechanical engineering textbook that my spouse is writing. (How was that for one long run-on sentence?) And for those of you who don’t live with a professor, go hear Chris speak so that you can present the data to your boss in a boss-friendly way.

5) You might get a free Visual Sciences thumb drive. I used to have two, one from each Summit, but my daughter (she of the Smashing Pumpkins poster) stole one.

6) To quote Dave Rhee off the Web Analytics Forum, “I tell others that eMetrics is the one conference they *must* attend, even if they have to take vacation days and pay for the travel and conference costs out of their own pockets.”

7) You’ll learn more about customer profiling from Microsoft. They are a great company to be doing this seminar, since they have created so many wonderful free profiling tools.

You get to hear both Ian Houston from Visioactive and Judah Phillips from Reed Business Interactive. In the same session. It will be like Web Analytics for geeks the most technical and sophisticated minds around. But don’t worry if you aren’t super advanced; during the same time slot, you can come hear yours truly talk about WA for beginners. (You know me, I hate using those polysyllabic words and the concepts that go with them.)

9) Web analysts are friendlier than SEOs. I have been thinking about this line for a long time, ever since a friend came back from PubCon and told me that it was like high school. BTW, I don’t think this is true of all SEOs — when I was at SES Chicago, I sure did get some great help from them, especially Rand Fishkin. But web analysts don’t call themselves rock stars, and I think we work really hard to be inclusive. A couple of months ago, someone from the Emetrics summit called me to brainstorm about ways that new attendees can meet more established analysts. I don’t know what they decided on, but if you are new, please come up to me and introduce yourself. Here, I’ll include my picture. I love to connect people and will do my best to connect you, too.

10) You’ll learn how eBay optimized their customer acquisition strategy and if you are smart, put some of those ideas to work for yourself.

11) The food is awesome.

12) You sit and talk to web analysts all day long, and then you have a group of friends that you can write for help. (Trust me, I do it all the time.)

Bonus: You’ll come home with many more tools in your kit and the ability to do a better job of increasing your company’s sales and the effectiveness of your organization’s website.

But, don’t register here yet — first, go to the WAA membership page and become a WAA member. That way, you save 10% off the early bird price of $1990, and the $190 you save pays for the $129 in membership fees. Maybe your boss will let you pocket the extra $61 that your company saved altogether? Nah, didn’t think so.

Robbin Steif
LunaMetrics

To my true love, Blogbeat:

I have always been in love with you. From the moment I set eyes on you, I knew that you were the one for me. I suppose it is poetically ironic that you should choose to leave me the week of Valentine’s Day.

I’ve seen this coming for a long, long time. Ever since that day last July when Tracy Hailpern from Feedburner called me to be part of the press release, the one where Feedburner announced that it was buying you and your love — I knew this day would come.

Oh sure, “We’ll still be friends,” you say. That’s what all my other lovers have said, and where did that get me? Do you think they call me and talk to me, or measure my blog?

What am I supposed to do tomorrow morning when I wake up and you aren’t there to tell me who visited my blog using the term “Price of Sitecatalyst” from King of Prussia, searching on Google even though this is his third visit? (I always thought King of Prussia was a shopping mall. You’d be awed at how many “price of SC” searches I get.) Do you expect me to use MeasureMap? No, I know that you expect that we really will be friends and that we’ll be a threesome with Feedburner. But you know, I have my own special relationship with Feedburner and you don’t really measure up, no pun intended. The one thing you did so well, matching up the geo-location with the browser string identifier with the referrer and the search term and permalinks visited — that’s gone. You were a real man with me, Blogbeat. Now that you’ve married Feedburner, I need a calculator to figure out how old those visits from 23,532 seconds ago really were. And just to make this hurt even more, you aren’t offering cookies to exclude myself from the data.

Yes, I know, I could use Google Analytics. I’ve been readying myself for this breakup for a while; I installed GA on my blog last summer; I even coded onclick events for my feeds so that I could tell which buttons people preferred. (I found out that they like the big orange feed button the best.) Looking at aggregated analytics is wonderful for my customers who have large sites, but Blogbeat, you just don’t understand. I only have about 235 subscribers and 100 visitors to the blogsite itself each day. I love to scroll through and look at who came and where they landed in an effort to figure out, did the reader find what s/he was looking for? Now that you’ve disaggregated the searches from the landing pages, those data are gone.

When you asked me to be part of your beta test, I knew this was the beginning of the end. I hung on to every word you said, ever chance I had to be with you. But did you care about me? Did you incorporate any of my suggestions into the gamma product (whatever comes after beta)? In addition to being your lover, I am a web analyst, but you never cared.

In fact, the only person I can say anything nice about here is Zach at Juice Analytics, who finally showed me how to express my misery. Of course, it’s always easier when you are doing the breaking up, like Zach is.

Maybe I’ll be better off without you. I won’t check my analytics all the time. Sure, they’ll be interesting, but they won’t be fun anymore. Not without you.

Love Forever - I’ll never forget you

xoxo

Robbin

My daughter complains that I never blog about her. Well, here goes:

I watched her try to buy a Smashing Pumpkins poster. Actually, I wasn’t really watching, I was just doing my work, all snowed in here in Pittsburgh, and listening to her yell at her computer.

First, she tried on Amazon (or more accurately, was led to Amazon at every turn.) “What happened?” she asked. “I just clicked on the button to go to my shopping cart and it says that I bought it, I don’t even know what I paid.” So I went over to her computer, only to see that she had accidentally used Amazon’s 1-click. This would not have been a problem until I pointed out that she had paid as much in freight as she paid for the product. She started to scream (my kids get big allowances every month but have to buy all their own stuff - clothes, gifts, entertainment, so they really care what happens to every dollar.) We went to the FAQs and I showed her how to cancel her order.

“I don’t want to buy it on eBay,” she claimed, “I don’t have money in my PayPal account.” Well, I explained, PayPal no longer requires that you wait 4 days to transfer money in. So she started down the eBay road.

First, she had to register for eBay. Then she clicked through to PayPal, but PayPal insisted that she sign up for their credit card (you have to have really good eyes or use it a lot to notice the “continue without getting a PayPal card” link. Then she couldn’t remember her PayPal password, so they emailed it to her. At that point, she either had no way to get back to her transaction or couldn’t find her transaction. But it didn’t really matter, she was so angry that she was ready to break the computer screen.

So what could everyone have done differently? Well, Amazon’s famous one click may work well for them, I wonder how many customers they alienate. (You can turn it off but you have to know to do so.)

eBay definitely needs to find a way to keep your transaction “live” or in a separate window while you process all their stuff. And PayPal had better be doing one heck of a job signing up credit cards that people are actually using, or they should just get rid of that screen and improve their user experience.

Anyone have a new Smashing Pumpkins poster they want to sell?

Robbin Steif

When I used the phrase blog whore the other day, Taylor, our search analyst, and I both turned so red that I said, “Just go home so I don’t have to be any more embarrassed than I already am.” (And ironically, LunaMetrics has been getting ready to work with Prolasta, so we have no end of opportunities to be embarrassed.)

So the blog whore problem is about people who write and say, “Please feature my product in your blog.” “Please mention my survey in your blog.” Please, please, please. On the one hand, I’m flattered, on the other, I feel like … well, you get it by now. (And I don’t even get to make money at it…)

Now, whomever you are, reading this, don’t think I am talking about you. I know you take it personally, but I get email a couple times a week asking me to write about something. Don’t you want to rate my product? Don’t you want to publish my new study? (At least all those investment bankers who call to talk about web analytics don’t ask me to blog about them.)

Let me point to Eric Mattson as a shining example of how to market to bloggers. When he wanted me (and everyone else who participated in his first research study on Thinking Like a Blogger) to blog about it, he didn’t write me and say, “Here’s the study you participated in, please write about it.” Instead, he made me feel really special. I can’t find his original email, but it said something like, “I’ve just finished this study in conjunction with the University of MA, and normally the download costs money, but since you participated, here is a complimentary copy.” And I thought, wow, this would be cool to blog about. He might have had that in mind all along, but he didn’t make me feel … well you get it.

So if you want someone to blog about your report/survey/article/whatever, woo them. Take the indirect route, which always works well in matters of the heart. Make that blogger feel special and loved, like s/he’s getting a scoop.

Happy Valentine’s Day.

Robbin Steif

So your website isn’t converting enough visitors and you really aren’t sure why. Is it the form? Is it the color of the buttons?

I think everyone should take a very big step backwards and say, “If I didn’t know this business, would I buy from this website?” Like the movie Groundhog Day, I feel like I keep having the same experience: people who show me sites that don’t convert well, but not for all these technical reasons. It’s not the buttons, it’s not the forms, it’s not the Truste icon, it’s not the pictures.

The problem I sometimes see is that site looks like the direct mail that comes to my house every day. Oh sure, it’s beautifully designed, but I don’t even have to open the envelopes to know which ones to pitch, and I’ll bet you don’t either. From the bulk rate permit number (instead of a real stamp) to the snipe that say, “Urgent! Time sensitive material!” it screams of a sales pitch. They aren’t trying to help me and they don’t let me go shopping — they are just selling at me. I wonder if your site is like that. (I really wonder if my company’s site is like that, and would love any criticism. It is ironic that the space we know the best, our own, is the place where we are able to judge the website so poorly — we just know it too well.)

I’m sorry that I can’t show you any examples of sites that look like junk mail, but I will just offend readers and friends (and I have already perfected the talent of offending my nearest and dearest, so don’t need the practice.) Instead, I would suggest that you user test — and you might even do it on your next business trip.

I came home from the WAA marketing meeting in Portland on Saturday, and all the way home, I did user testing. I tested with one guy in the Portland airport. I tested with two women on the plane. And I tested with one guy in Dulles International airport. I wasn’t testing my site but I wish I had been. The anonymity of testing while traveling was really awesome. No one ever asked my name or for my card — they were just looking at a couple of web pages and comparing them. I could have learned all the things that people I know don’t say.

Robbin Steif

Those of you who have Internet consultants working for you - do you ever wonder if you are getting the most out of them?

Here are six ways you can get your Internet (or other) consultant to work harder for you:

1. Leave some money on the table

Yup, you read that right. It’s hard to love clients who negotiate too hard. If you have negotiated to get less work for less money/time, that’s pretty reasonable. It’s when you’ve pushed really hard to get the same amount of work for less money that you’ve started a relationship where they love you less. (And on the supplier side: Never ask for a higher price with the assumption that “that’ll give the client room to negotiate.” The client will just feel like you were ripping them off to start with, and you’ve begun a relationship where everything is negotiable.)

2. Don’t ask for five different rewrites of the proposal.

You aren’t turning your consultant into your business partner by doing this — you’ve made him do a lot of work for free, and it wasn’t even work that you can use to improve your bottom line. If you have to ask for one rewrite, be sure that you are very specific in what you need (so that there won’t be a third!) One might argue that if the proposal isn’t meeting your needs, the consultant isn’t asking the right questions — what kills me is when I do multiple rewrites and they all say basically the same thing, and finally the client is happy with the adjectives or verbs in the nth rewrite.

3. Stay involved.

You may feel like you want a consultant so that you don’t have to be involved. But the more involved you are, the better the quality of work will be. Any way you look at it, you know so much more about your business than your consultant ever will or can afford to learn. Furthermore, if you are involved, you create a stronger bond with the consultant - they know that you care. And let’s face it, if you’re involved, you see what they’re doing. (If I only got to make one point, it would be this one. Clients who are involved get so much more value that the ones who are hands off.)

The best-loved are the clients who invite us to their marketing meetings (and pay for our time there.) They’ve signaled loud and clear, “You’re a member of our marketing team.”

4.Don’t ask for free work.

Andy Beal wrote the most wonderful post on the power of saying no. Soon after I read it, a client wrote me and asked if I would take a two day trip to another state to attend her all-day meeting. She offered to pay for my flight and hotel. Empowered by Andy, I wrote her back and gave her a couple of different ways we could do this (in person, by phone) and I attached prices to each. She didn’t answer that email but business went on as usual until she wrote again, asking for more free work. This one was an easier request (no travel required) but I didn’t want to stick her with another price tag and I didn’t want to do the work for free, so I just ignored it. The work was incredibly important and time-sensitive (I eventually learned), and if she hadn’t started the pattern of asking for free work, I would have stepped up to the plate immediately with a reasonable price.

5. Think twice before you tell your consultant that she’s wrong, and then think one more time.

Most of my company’s clients hire us because we know a lot more about the Internet than they do or want to. So I’m often baffled when they turn around and tell me, or someone from my company, that they aren’t going to do it our way. It sometimes makes sense (they don’t have the resources, for example), but often, the answer is “I just don’t like it.” “It’s not me.” “I really don’t care what the numbers say, this is what makes me feel comfortable.” I walk away thinking, “But wasn’t the idea to improve your website? — what happened to that notion?”

6. Don’t insult your consultant.

I was worked with a client who wanted me to consider his way of doing things. It was an interesting idea, he had. But still, I was absolutely shocked when one of his lieutenants sent me an email, musing that rational people don’t like to be open minded. “Right,” I thought cynically before deleting it without replying, “That’s absolutely the way to get your consultant to work hard for you — insult them.”

Many thanks to the brilliant mind who suggested this topic.

Robbin Steif
LunaMetrics