A good friend of mine runs a company called Health Formula.  They sell health and wellness supplements.  I visited him today to compare notes and ended up gathering some great ideas.  Here are some of them:

1. Start tracking your payment errors.  Whenever someone hits the submit button at a Health Formula site, all the messages back and forth from the payment gateway are recorded and logged.  Normally, you’d expect to get a successful transaction.  However, a certain percentage result in errors.  Health Formula analyzes all the errors to try and correct them.  They’ve discovered some gateway problems and other situations where they were able to intervene and fix.  If you have control over your shopping cart, I’d recommend this approach.
2. Use Test Director to QC your website.  This is especially important if you control your own shopping cart and make changes.  This neat tool, recently purchased by HP, lets you run hundreds of orders through your system automatically.  You can test for as many scenarios that you can think of.  It’s a very cool tool.
3. Use Subversion to track your version changes.  Subversion is an awesome open source program that runs on a server and provides version control.  It integrates easily into both Windows and Linux environments and I think there is even a plug in for Macro Media.

I love talking to other professionals in our industry.  You never know what you’ll learn.

A friend of mine is starting a business where he’ll be displaying his products at trade shows.  I’ve often attended and displayed at trade shows and have wondered how to capture the metrics I need to determine if the show or our approach was a success.

You hear the neighbors complain about traffic and what a bad show it is - but is it really?  How do you compare a good show to a bad show?  Obviously, if you had a lot of sales or good leads, it’s a good show.  But could you have done better?

In the online world, we are blessed with reams of data.  We know how many folks are visiting our site, when are our busy times, how many are engaged with the site and how many convert.  However, in the physical world, we don’t have these luxuries.  This makes it hard to compare different shows and different booth workers.

What if we had a way to simply gather traffic and engagement at a trade show?  I think I have a way to do it, but I can’t figure out how to implement my idea.  Here’s what I propose; I would like to have a cell phone sniffer that counts the number of unique cell phones walking by my booth and also the length of time each phone spends at my booth.  I realize that not everyone carries a phone (similar to how not everyone has JavaScript or cookies enabled) and not all cell phones use the same carrier (similar to the different browsers we see) but at least, we could use the numbers for trends.

Could you imagine how useful this would be?  Then you could measure your conversion rate and compare different shows and periods of time.  Anyone know where I could find this system?

Mature Process Reporting Should Become Seedbed for Discoveries, Patents, and Broad Practice Foundations

With constant data streams passing over the minds of analysts everyday, it seems higher than likely that, over time, the team which deals with this data should start to construct ideas and applications built on consistent experiences. The amount of information which is aggregated about visitor and customer information over time gives a specific picture about who needs what with regard to navigation, structure, and assistance within the website. That information, paired with analysis, should produce a list of items for IT and stakeholders to brainstorm on solutions and short-cuts to help users achieve navigational nirvana.

The idea of the web analytics process is the continued production, analysis, and decision support for the business in which it has been installed; as well as the obligatory feedback from the action which takes root within the agency. Therefore the establishment of process is, at least in my eyes, a goal for online businesses with more recent adoption. In the case of mature and refined analytics process practitioners, this should be a means to success of a single entity, and feed into the larger sphere of markets, industries, and eventually, universally adapted technologies which could feed macro-improvement of the user experience globally.

Look Past Process: Visitors Deserve Your Attention and Devotion

We are all users who are visitors. As a collective group, we can attest to the number of half-baked ideas which are thrown on the net for one reason or another. Many of us who matured working with computers have a few we hide away from the world. Hell, I have ten of my own. We all find sites which we thought were going to meet our expectations and fail miserably. Our arrival on pages often misses the original intent of the search or slightly misdirects the concept. We blame the search results, but, broadly, this is the output from lousy understanding of SEO taxonomy (i.e. Silos) and/or usability issues.

With usability testing, search marketing and SEO information as widely available as they are, the only explanations for a lack of progress in these subjects are:

1. Finances: Marketing budgets fail to consider the possible positive primary outcomes of efforts to improve these aspects of a site, much less the periphery value of the research contributions and application value abroad
2. Hesitation: Generally, businesses in practice tend to be ‘bearish’ when it comes to expenditure on technology which discusses returns. Intent might be pure, but the risk clearly does not merit the restraint.
3. Ego: In contrast to the previous item, trendy businesses based on whimsy and willingness to engage in risk view using data as somehow ‘cheating’ on creativity or lacking in true inspiration. Therefore, they overlook or suppress buy-in through a flurry of logical fallacies.
4. Perceived Complexity: To some, creating an in-house usability program, building a lab, standardizing reporting and inciting discussions on stats and quantified experience data is an ENORMOUS undertaking. It becomes a sociological hurdle for the company and eventually, with enough steam, a self-fulfilling prophecy.

With little or no participation in gathering an understanding of how YOUR site visitors respond to content, you, in essence, neglect their voice. By neglecting them, you inhibit your growth and deprive a community of people dedicated to evolving our world wide web experience of data which can contribute to greater understanding. Gaining this perspective is the key to unlocking the true potential of a process-driven analytics practice and a wildly valuable means to building the new architecture of the world wide web.

A Lofty Prediction with Exponential Considerations

If I had to place a bet on the future of web analytics, it would be on services and solutions. Commercial vendors like Omniture and Coremetrics (and Google Analytics when/if that time comes) will provide a series of broad tools, which, at least Omniture, has started doing. As the analysis and application of insight suggested actions cascades down from those platforms, industries, and markets will eventually respond with vertical groups and practices zones. Some will split specifically into advertising, others into expertise on eCommerce, still others into Social Media or Branding or what have you.

Over time, probably a couple years before enough talented analysts can blossom and contribute, markets and geographies will develop their own identities where conversations and comparing notes will likely drive highly-predictive analytics and scaled systems for buy-in by the most frugal small/medium business ventures. Shared resources will again be the natural progression (outsourcing is a natural evolution of industry). Small but incredibly effective micro-solutions based on research compiled by ambitious teams driven by numbers will dominate each niche feeding more information back into the collective process.

Commonly, in human communication theory, people of a like group develop what is referred to as a closed language or closed dialect. This is as true of a generic dating couple, transcending nation, culture, or race, as it is of entire socially isolated tribes in say…, Papua New Guinea. We use words within the context of our group which represent the understanding upheld by those within the borders defined by that mass. For example, I can get away with telling my good friends to “Go to Hell”…and they’ll get the implied meaning of the phrase without becoming anxious or guarded. Not that my imposing 5′9 frame should present such threat, but, you get the idea. This is very much part of the same idea that a company which has become ‘Process-Aware’ would begin to use certain specific dialect or language as an internal sign that practice is maturing.

If you have made the decision to include ‘Process’, as defined by Eric, as a means to get the most from your web analytics investment, then you probably have an idea about the steps. The blueprint is simple but the work is hard, and knowing how to see where you’ve brought your practice to may require metrics of its own. The purpose of this post is to help illustrate a behavior which people exhibit in their communication which may help to define the progress of your adaptation by simple observations.

In eCommerce; the marketing department, business intelligence department, or an entire small business usually has a group of people who share similar goals. As a retailer, the primary goal is to sell a product above its costs to the extent that when all considerations are made, a portion of money remains to sustain the livelihood and lifestyle of the investors, shareholders, and resource contributors. With these shared goals come discussions about goals and how success is measured. With discussions come descriptive, business and operations specific language which affirms goal alignment and participates in something called “uncertainty reduction“. By reducing risk and uncertainty, communication becomes more clear and ideas flow freely without the risk of tangles in semantics or other noise. Language, essentially closes within the group.

Simply stated, this is the cycle in an interpersonal relationship when two persons are getting to know each other. When this is applied to a group, it is referred to as ‘Organizational Learning’. This is defined as an organization which..”actively creates, captures, transfers, and mobilizes knowledge to enable it to adapt to a changing environment.”(2) This, itself is a process.

As a web analyst, the idea of instituting process to gather, organize, and disseminate information for its use for valuable improvement is both cyclical and self-seeding. Our reports are built on information which we have ensured for accuracy, structured and analyzed for purpose. Our scheduled delivery becomes essential and regular for the fulfillment of the practice expectations from our group of readers. It meets with its audience on a level with which they can both comprehend, and inspires action for the best outcome of the group. (This is John Stuart Mill’s principle of Utilitarianism) The result is, that, with consistent value being wielded for the improvement of their own success and the success of the organization (’Game Theory’), that its content becomes useful and relative. As these messages are reinforced, the behavior of the social structure continues to align. With the alignment of goals and the advent of group communication, feedback begins to trickle in to the analyst. The feedback ought to reflect a dialect which was initially sown. (NOTE: Any feedback is a sign of adoption, but valuable feedback is a sign of adoption & success.)