It’s a contest! With real prizes and great judges.

Background: Just about everyone knows that I am always complaining about how bad the GA documentation is. (No secrets there.) When I talked to Amy in GA Engineering at the Emetrics Summit, she said, “Make me a list.”

And, just about everyone knows that many minds work better than one. Hence the contest. So here are the categories, the judges, the prizes and the very minimal rules.

Category #1: Mistakes. We (the contest — I should make it clear that Google isn’t sponsoring this) are looking for things in the documentation, Conversion University, or the Google Blog that are just plain old wrong. For example, the URL Builder does not specify utm_campaign as required, even though it is required.

Category #2: Omissions. We are looking for important facts that are just plain old missing from the documentation (only. Conversion University and the blog are not meant to be as comprehensive.) For example, GA uses Perl Compatible Regular Expressions, which is an incredibly helpful fact if you are designing fancy expressions, but nowhere (that I’ve seen) is that included in the documentation.

Category #3. Opacity. (Opaqueness?) We are looking for important concepts that are really poorly defined in the documentation only. Example: have you ever tried to write a filter and used this as your only guide? Wouldn’t it be awesome if Google told you the kinds of values these filters usually take, so that you knew how to design your Regular Expression?

The Judges. In addition to yours truly, the judges will be Justin Cutroni, Director of Web Analytics at Google Analytics Authorized Consultant Epikone, and Avinash Kaushik, who is technically an outside consultant, but works as the Analytics Evangelist for Google. All decisions will be very subjective (but final.)

The Prizes! We have four prizes, donated by two of LunaMetrics’ customers and one of the judges. Databazaar agreed to donate a $50 gift certificate for printer supplies (ink, toner, whatever you need). Voip.com agreed to donate a month of free Make a Call (”click to call”) and six months free of a second line on your cell phone. Since I only have myself to blame for the fact that the good second line voip pages are not up, I had better explain: when you have a second line for your cell phone, you can give out one number to potential boyfriends and not worry that they will drive you crazy, even after you figure out what creeps they are. Or, you can call about a potential new job on your employer-owned cell phone, and your current employer never sees the charges because of the cool technology.

The fourth prize is a signed copy of Avinash Kaushik’s book, Web Analytics: An Hour a Day. (It went on sale on Friday.)

Rules: All entries must be posted here as a comment (so that everyone can see them. Including Google. That means, they’ll get your thoughts, whether you win or not.) Everyone is eligible except myself and the judges. (That means, all the GAACs are eligible, and I hope some of you submit some ideas.) No idea is too stupid (because if you don’t understand it, there are probably close to two million other users who don’t either.) You can submit in as many categories as you like, and you can submit up to three ideas in each category. This is only for Google Analytics and not Website Optimizer. Please don’t submit product enhancements or bugs here, this is about documentation only. All entries are due by June 26, 2007.

Whew. I think that’s it for now. Late Addition: Here is a post with the winning entries.

Robbin

Since it’s the weekend, I thought I could rant a little about Greg Niland’s recent podcast on testing your website. But first, a few nice things about Greg:

• He has the world’s most adorable laugh. And it is even more fun to hear it over the phone after you have heard him do it on fifty podcasts
• Unlike his SEO peers, he does a podcast for newbies. Most advanced web marketing professionals, be they in SEO or web analytics, want to show off their advanced techniques.
• He devotes a lot of his time to charitable causes.

But on to the main attraction. I only this week had a chance to hear his podcast with Shimon Sandler. The exact topic was “Making money the Unfun way.” Hmm, I thought as I started to listen. What will be so unfun here? Rewriting URIs? Playing with your robots file? Canonical issues?

Oh, I was wrong. The major unfun issue they wanted to talk about was testing.

Testing? Unfun? Well, I guess what is fun to one person might be boring to another.

But then guest Shimon Sandler, who is an SEO, put testing into two categories, A/B and Mutivariate, “also known as Taguchi.” Really? Greg asked, I’ve never heard of multivariate testing called Taguchi. Maybe multivariate testing was designed by someone named Taguchi, Shimon answered.

(For the record, very simplified: the Taguchi method is one way of decreasing the number of page views and conversions your test needs, as opposed to a full-factorial analysis, which uses every variation. Offermatica uses Taguchi; Google Website Optimizer uses a full-factorial analysis. The Taguchi Method was designed by someone named Taguchi, but as a way of applying statistics to manufacturing.)

Sandler rattled off a few names in the MVT field, but forgot (or didn’t know) most of the important ones. He knew Offermatica, Vertster and at least one other, but missed Optimost, Sitespect and Website Optimizer. And then, the two of them talked about what you could test. But being SEOs instead of conversion “scientists” or MVT jocks, they could only come up with SEO-type things to test. Your PPC ads. Your urls.

Well, everyone who works in testing knows that to make a difference, you should start by testing BIG things. Your headlines. Your buttons. Your shopping cart. Your call to action.

But what was I expecting? Greg needed to have someone from the testing world on that show. How about Sean Purtell from ROI Revolution? How about Ophir Prusack? How about Bryan Eisenberg?

Well, in closing my rant, I do want to give credit to Shimon Sandler for addressing the web analytics issue. When I called Greg and pitched him on doing a show on web analytics (back when our company wasn’t a Google Analytics Authorized Consultant, life was sane and I didn’t spend every weekend working), he told me that his listeners “just aren’t interested in logfiles.” (I tried to explain that not all WA is server side, but I don’t think he cared.)

Robbin