Thanks for your comments.

-Avinash.

Rgds,

jaisri

I am particularly interested in understanding the intergration of adserver, other induvidial reports (through APIs) and webanalytics in one single window, to enable us to understand the marketing activity in a single window and a deeper insight in the consumer behaviour.

This is not as hard as you think it is, in fact many tools already make this possible. For example the tool we use, ClickTracks, can directly download the data from google adwords or overture and show integrated reporting, as you put it, in one window. The cooler part is that then if I want I can go segment behaviour by that integrated data and understand customer behaviour much better.

The same thing applies for adserver as well. I saw a really nice implementation in Omniture (specially with doubleclick) where data came in and integrated into reports very well.

At the end of the day any anlaytics tool will do what you want. Some better, others will need more work. The most important part is this really simple part: Think about tracking before you implement these campaigns and then ensure your marketing efforts are passing identifiers (url parameters, cookie values etc) specific to efforts to your website (and thus in turn to your analytics tool). Then you are only limited by the ability of your tool to slice and dice, and most do a decent job.

The point of failure usually is that we don’t think ahead of time and we don’t make our agencies / people working on our efforts make that extra trivial effort to pass us identifiers.

Hope this helps.

I am a online advertising professional, who has caught the web analytics bug recently and I follow your blog and find it extremely useful. Since I am from the lead generation and hence optimisation background, I would like to see your view on the convergence of online marketing efforts, like banner advertising, SEM, whitepaper marketing, etc.. being analysed through web data and unification of different reporting and hence understanding of customer and their behaviour on the website.

I am particularly interested in understanding the intergration of adserver, other induvidial reports (through APIs) and webanalytics in one single window, to enable us to understand the marketing activity in a single window and a deeper insight in the consumer behaviour.

In fact let me paraphrase it, and then request you do a blog on each section.

1.Business objectives - money making plans
2.Great customer understanding (Web analytics?)
3.Qualitative data (Define? What works best?)
4.Web insight - the hard core clickstream analysis
5. Action agenda - doing stuff that will make more money.

So how about a blog on each point? Now there is a challenge you surely cannot refuse!
Thanks
Matthew

But is web insight not a stepping stone to proper integrated customer insight that includes online behaviour?

Oh absolutely positively online behaviour is a critical component. In my mind it is not where I would start. The ordering is Business Strategy -> Fantastic understanding of your customers -> Qualitative data -> Hard core clickstream analysis -> Money, Money Money!!! :)

At the moment we often, all of us, miss the first few steps and move to “hard core clickstream” and sure enough money does not follow.

I think you are right, but you are an advanced user! You will just have to trust me on this - in my role I get to meet about 25-30 of the top companies every year, and having seen what you do I can confirm you are in the advanced cataegory!!

But is web insight not a stepping stone to proper integrated customer insight that includes online behaviour? I know you bring together much more than pure web behavioural data to give yourself a sandbox to play in. Much of what you talk about above is still based upon anonymous user session, where as customer analytics (predictive analytics according to others) deals with individuals.

THanks for the post… gets the brain going!
Talk soon
Matthew

I hope you will take those KIAs you suggested and write a post about each one. How to calculate, what it means, why it’s important. I think that this is what we miss the most in WA, that level of nitty gritty “how to” knowledge. And the reason (I suspect) is that once one knows how to do something, it’s so easy, one must think, Ah, the whole world knew how to do this except me, that’s not blogworthy. Avinash, always remember that you are at the cutting edge and any “how to do this” information from you is valuable.

Robbin

but I don’t think traditional web analytics are anywhere close to dead. For you, yes. You are really advanced. But most of the world now has a website with crummy analytics that they still don’t even know how to look at. And that includes e-commerce customers (just not all of them.)

I think you overestimate how “advanced” I am, that’s not true. :)

You do have a great point that most of us are still trying to figure how out to make sense of what Omniture / Coremetrics / WebTrends / Your Favourite Tool is “spewing out”. That is the exact reason that we need to abandon looking at “traditional KPI’s” (think Visitors, Page Views, Exits, Time on Site, Conversion). We can jump into the world of KIA’s (Key Insights Analysis) and rather then think just KPI keep a perspective on our business goals and then try to find nuggets of insights.

Here is a really simple one, rather than measure Average Page Views Per Visitor how about Page Views by Referring URL’s or Conversion by xxx and yyy and zzz. Not really smart stuff but not really just the KPI world.

-Avinash.
PS: Non-linear Conversion Funnels are really cheap, just nine hundred bucks, or a free trial, with ClickTracks.

These (web analytics are dead) are great thoughts but I don’t think traditional web analytics are anywhere close to dead. For you, yes. You are really advanced. But most of the world now has a website with crummy analytics that they still don’t even know how to look at. And that includes e-commerce customers (just not all of them.)

This reminds me of Shane Atchinson’s comment in ClickZ (which I am too lazy to go and find) about non-linear conversion funnels. Yes, conversion is not always linear and it is a cool idea. But how about all those people who still don’t understand what a funnel is?

Of course, when I wrote about this one my blog, it caused a real uproar…

Robbin