If we had a contest, I might win with that photo of Ian and Dylan in the 3D glasses. Steve gets all the credit for that Photoshopped piecture of Avinash and Judah. Shareen, here at LunaMetrics, gets all the credit for bringing order to my PhotoChaos. Anway, click to enjoy - Robbin

This is a two-topic post.

First, Batman rules. When I originally post this link to LunaMetrician Taylor Pratt’s article about Web Analytics and SEO, he got 30 unique views (that’s how they judge this contest, by unique views.) But over 500 people read this blog, and while 30/500= a 6% conversion rate, still, I just need a little bit more help. If you already went to his story, you don’t need to go again (unless you are on a different computer — how is that for gaming the system?) But if not, please check it out, even if only for a moment or two.

Also, I got into SF way too late last night, and refused to go out with everyone for sushi (because they felt like it was 9 m and I felt like it was midnight.) I did manage to capture a few pics with my new digital camera. I haven’t figured out all the flash settings yet.

So here is Eric, with his new haircut. I offered to give him $15 and take him to Supercuts to get a really awesome cut, and he was offended, he said all the other women love his cut.

(To be fair, this is a really lousy shot. Like I said, I am still learning how to use this little camera.)

I have a great shot of Rene that I can’t get up here, for some reason, and I lost my picture of Scott Baldwin.

Finally, here is June. It’s a nice picture of her, but by this time, I had figured some stuff out on my camera, plus, I wasn’t sitting in the dark outside with 50 other people, balancing luggage at the same time.

When I am not desperately trying to get down to the workout room, I will get Rene’s picture back. And another picture of Scott.

And here’s that link again to Taylor’s article.

If you’re going to the Summit, please don’t forget the offer I made in February - come up to me if you don’t know anyone, and let me introduce you. Web analysts are the nicest people around. Plus I love being a connector; let me connect you. So here’s my picture and you’ll know which one I am.

(Notice how I still haven’t written about custom advanced filters. But Oh! am I using them.)

Robbin

Some quick notes: if you are going to be at the Emetrics Summit, we are having a table for WA bloggers on Monday. Any WA bloggers are invited, although we might need more than one table…

IE6 can be pretty bad for blogs with lines that go over the margins, I learned. Many thanks to Chris at Moody’s Economy.com and Joe at More Visibility for pointing out the problem to me. I was just kind of lazy when Chris wrote me (because I go home every night and work on rethreading almost 300 posts on Wordpress, it is hard to worry about this blog too.) So Joe, you were just the fire I needed to fix the blog.

Coming soon, the next part of the multi-part series on GA filters. If you are having trouble with a filter, send it to me, I am doing so many tests that I might as well include yours too.

Robbin

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

Although SES is not primarily a WA conference, there’s still news and gossip.

Last night, before I went out drinking with my friends from FeedBurner, I got to meet Jeff Turner, formerly of Blogbeat.net, whose company was acquired by FB in July. I sat down with him (well, I stood) and reviewed all the ways that I love Blogbeat and why I have to turn to Google Analytics when I need hard blog data. However, I’m expecting great things of the new integrated FB and Blogbeat.

By now everyone probably knows that WebTrends purchased ClickShift and announced it yesterday. I met the ClickShift CEO, John Rodkin, at the WebTrends party tonight. However, he was wearing a WebTrends shirt, so I didn’t really understand that he was “the man” until I started to wonder why he didn’t know any of the other WA vendor names. “So,” I asked him, “Did WebTrends buy Clickshift [which is a highly automatic, intelligent paid search tool] because WebTrends wants to get into search more?” I didn’t have a tape recorder but I think John’s answer was, “WebTrends wants to be the CMO’s best friend.” Then I talked to Jason Palmer, VP Marketing at WebTrends, who is incredibly impressed with John and his team - he thinks John is a genius.

Moving on, I was dismayed that Bill Bruno of Stratigent gave away all his passes to the free Google party and didn’t leave one for me. Bill and the Stratigent CEO, Josh Manion and I all got to meet the analyst from Oregon who calls Josh and me all the time, Chad Bartley. (Parentheticaly, many thanks to all the analysts who signed up to talk to investment bankers.) Speaking of which, I got to meet Gary Angel of Semphonic who was exhibiting here too — Gary signed up to talk to investment bankers after I posted on the Forum but wrote, “Robbin, your request was the strangest one I have ever seen on the Web Analytics Forum.” On the trade show floor, while I was waiting to talk to Gary, one of his employees tried to give me a printed book of all his blog writings. “Do you work with any web analytics?” she asked me.

Chris Spiek of Awecomm (WAA Marketing lead for the WAA website) and Nancy Taffera-Santos (co-chair for WAA Events) crashed the Google party with me, after the WebTrends party, but no one noticed. The music was too loud and there was no food (I am not sure which is worse.) Jason, your party was much nicer, wish I had had the chocolate-covered strawberries.

I rode up in the elevator with John Marshall from ClickTracks, musing about writing this post. “Well,” he said. “Everyone loves gossip.”

Robbin Steif
LunaMetrics

post script: At 12:41 this morning, one of the many people I mentioned wrote me to tell me that my blog gets crawled fast. The post had already pinged the services, been crawled by Google, and he had received an alert that someone was writing about him. (Always a good idea. I use Google Alerts but am not too happy with them, anyone have an alert service that they love?) rfs

I have an incredibly selfish reason for wanting everyone to go to the eMetrics Summit, Oct. 16-18 in DC. It’s not money (I don’t work for Jim Sterne); it’s not personal aggrandizement (by the time I speak at the end of Day Three, everyone will be gone but me); it’s not even business development. No — I just want to see all my friends.

I was thinking about this while finally reading The Long Tail. Our web analytics community is a perfect example of a tail market that wouldn’t exist without the Internet, for more than one reason. But it does exist and that’s how I get to share interests with people all over the world. Internet or not, though — sometimes I just want to have a drink with my friends.

Hey, I’m realistic - I really don’t expect Lars to come over from Sweden or Steve to come over from Australia or Mike to come from S. Africa. At least not to this Washington DC conference. On the other hand, I’m so looking forward to talking to Ian Houston and Tim Seward and Justin Cutroni and June Li and Joseph Carrabis and Avinash. And Matt Roche, what will I blog about if you don’t make it to DC?

So Dylan — are you coming to the Summit? (I’ll buy the first round…)

Robbin Steif
LunaMetrics

Well, the e-Metrics summit is coming and I have two interests:

1) When I saw that Tim Seward from ROI Revolution posted about attending the Summit, I thought, “Gosh, I wish he or Justin would do a session on GA.” The speakers are all chosen but if a few people are interested, I think we can pull together a table at lunch one day where Tim (and Justin? Justin is on vacation so I don’t know what he’s up to) will speak. I’d like to learn more about Regular Expressions but maybe I’m in the minority. Send me email and tell me if you are interested and what topic you’d like to hear about. Steif at LunaMetrics or just comment on this post if you are interested, and I’ll write them both.

2) Speaking of speaking, I am speaking on Marketing for IT types. To me, marketing is trivial and IT is hard. So if you’re a techie, you must know everything, right? But no one knows everything and so I am dying to find out what kinds of things that techies would like to learn about web analytics marketing. It can be technique or it can be Organizational Behavior (like, “Why are marketers so stupid? Why do people in Marketing think they are so great?”) Please send email. Any ideas, no matter how dumb they might sound to you, would be incredibly welcome. My email address is still the same as it was in the paragraph above, steif at LunaMetrics.

Robbin Steif
LunaMetrics

Feedburner announced their acquisition of Blogbeat, my favorite blog measurement service.

I have been wanting to review Blogbeat for some time now, but instead, I have been sending email to Jeff Turner, formerly their CEO and now lead engineer at FeedBurner. My first email subject line, last April, included a laundry list of things I wanted him to fix or improve. “Soon I will be reviewing you in my web analytics blog,” I wrote, “but I would like you to fix all sorts of problems first…” He got right back to me with a note of appreciation, and I wrote,

You are so great to work with. I work with [fill in a big analytics company name here] where the software costs $50,000, they take a week to answer my questions, and they don’t answer in full.

So that’s one of the reasons that I love Blogbeat. The other reason is, it provides just the level of functionality I need for my niche blog.

I do run MeasureMap and GA on my blog, but I almost never look at them. MeasureMap doesn’t let me drill down to the user level. As user-friendly as Google is, it’s just too big for a small blog where the questions are primarily:

• How did people come to me: referral, search, direct? (This info comproses the Blogbeat overview)
• What were the referrals, what were the searches?
• Who came to me and what did they look at? What did they want to know? Did they look at more than one post?
• Did they subscribe?

In other words, I want to know, what kind of buzz is my blog generating and what do my readers care about? I also want to know if they converted.

I would never work at this level for a lead generation website. That’s because I want to know things like how much revenue was generated by marketing source (so, “people who clicked on a specific banner ad converted into a lead x% of the time, the cost per lead is $85, and a lead is only worth $45, let’s fix this.”) But most blogs - especially small blogs - are different. Conversion may be, how many pages did they look at? Conversion may be, did they click through to the rest of my site, or did they subscribe to the feed, or did they click on the AdSense? Blogbeat addresses all those onclick events in their Links section.

Certainly you can argue, it would be nice to be able to tie together more of the data in Blogbeat. So if Blogbeat already knows which IP address came in via which method and what they searched for and which pages they looked at, can’t they tie that to onclick events so we can see what causes a conversion? That’s one of the things I am looking to Feedburner to do.

Although the Blogbeat city cloud feature is lovely, I primarily look at the detail by visitor. It enables me to look at an IP address and see this (although I have deleted the actual IP):

Notice that I get all sorts of information here. I see that this is someone who lives in Coldwater, Michigan, they found my blog by searching for “causation vs. correlation” on Google, they landed on a post that I know will do a good job of answering their question, this is their first visit and they only looked at one page. (And if I cared, I would notice their technographics, IE6 and Windows XP.) If they had looked at more than one page I would have clicked on the “more…” to see all the pages they viewed.

Since my audience is not as big as John Battelle’s is, I have the luxury of scrolling through those visitor pages every day. Reports that show averages and medians are great, but this is the online equivalent of getting out and meeting the people.

So once again: Congratulations, Feedburner. You made a great choice. However, I’ll be sending you my punch list of improvements just as soon as the noise dies down.

Robbin Steif
LunaMetrics

ps Need more information on the acquisition and what it means to subscribers?

I was so surprised to get on my FeedBurner stats this morning and see a new tab, Live Hits.

Here’s what FeedBurner wrote about it, by way of explanation:

Why does it matter?

Hits don’t always correspond to subscribers, but they’re still important. Especially when they come from a web browser.

Potential subscribers are likely to “hit” your feed in their web browser when they click a “subscribe” link on your web site or discover your feed in a search engine. While these people are not counted as Subscribers (but will be the moment they get hooked on your content and start viewing it with a feed reader), they have nonetheless seen your feed, and we count these exposures as Hits

To really understand what this was, of course, I had to write John Zeratsky at FeedBurner (John, I hope your boss reads this so she knows how incredibly responsive you are…) John explained that anytime anything (a person or a bot) hits your feed, it shows up in a rolling, live fashion (they only show the last 25.) You can use it to be sure your feed is working. You can guess that someone is probably considering subscribing to your feed if the user agent is
Internet Explorer or Firefox Live Bookmarks (or other browsers. Those are the two that I have and could try.) John pointed out that it’s fun, too — you can click on your blog to start the subscription, refresh your other window (the one with your FeedBurner live stats) and see your own hit.

Robbin Steif
LunaMetrics