Occam’s Razor by Avinash Kaushik

I recently had the opportunity to record a couple of podcasts with Wendi Malley of the Web Analytics Association’s Research Committee. The topic of the podcasts was Measuring Rich Media. A heavy and ambiguous topic if there ever was one. Wendi was kind enough to point me to the Wikipedia definition of Rich Media:

Rich media is the term used to describe a broad range of interactive digital media that exhibit dynamic motion, taking advantage of enhanced sensory features such as video, audio and animation. The term is used to describe widely varying technologies and implementations and an exact definition is elusive.

Like everyone else I have used lots of websites that create rich internet experiences. I have also had the delight of having to measure some rich experiences that use Ajax or Flash or RSS or blogs (are they really rich experiences or really social and web 2.0 experiences?).

[My peer blogger Clint Ivy deserves the credit for first posting links to the podcasts, thanks so much Clint.]

In our first podcast we discussed measuring Ajax, Flash and Flex based rich experiences (including RIA’s – Rich Internet Applications).

WAA webpage with podcast and conversation transcript : Click Here.

Listen to the Podcast : (39:22 mins)
       

Download the podcast : Click Here (4.6 mb)

Quick Essence: How to do you measure experiences where the page paradigm is dead and there is a lack of any standardization in the current page centric web analytics tools? Especially since every single day the technology and what we do with it evolves. The podcast discusses shifting out thinking from “page views” in a session to identifying “business events” using available technologies (javascript or, for example, ATG event logging) to capture key outcomes and context. More than ever in the RIA world it is important not just to measure outcome but also experience and customer satisfaction with that experience while integrating the rich experience data with rest of the site data for segmentation purposes. For more about the limitations, pros and cons, best practices and examples please listen to the podcast.

In the second one we focussed on measuring RSS (Really Simple Syndication) and Blogs.

WAA webpage with podcast and conversation transcript : Click Here.

Listen to the Podcast : (33:43 mins)
       

Download the podcast : Click Here (3.9 mb)

Quick Essence: RSS and Blogs are very young and there is a distinct lack of analytics tools created to measure them (except for MeasureMap which I can’t wait to try, sadly sign up has been closed for a while). But there are some interesting things we can do right now. For RSS there is lots you can track with free services like FeedBurner (number of daily subscribers, clicks on feeds – content consumption, geo location and types of readers, and even live data).  Measure success of a blog is even more fun. I cover the thoughts in my Measuring Blog Success post. In addition to that we discuss what rich media / experiences have been used on this blog (Ajax live search, zoom clouds etc) and what was learned from these experiments and how you can use them.

One Overall Core Thought:

Measuring success of rich experiences (ajax or flash or flex or others) requires a fundamental mindset shift away from how web analytics is thought of and done today. It is hard but necessary. Period.

Three Important Things to Consider:

1. Pre planning: Unlike other things for this area you need to do a lot of pre-planning and make sure your code is included in the rich experience before you get started. On web pages we can recover and tag later etc. In this area it is very hard to do so set a lot of time for planning.
2. Integration of data, hyper important because A) you can’t measure in a silo (so you need to know what the differences are in outcomes based on where different segments of people come from or based on offers or what they might have seen before or after the experience) B) you want to know what people “think”, so in our case it is important to integrate into mechanisms such as website surveys.
3. Testing, testing, testing, testing. You are ready for rich experiences, but are your customers ready? I have a great example of this in the podcast above. Failing faster is a awesome recipe for long term success. 

I want to thank Jim Humphrys and Wendi Malley for the opportunity to do the podcasts, and I highly recommend Wendi for the job of professional podcast recorder! : )

Please share your feedback on the podcasts and your perspective on how to measure rich experiences. Also please considering joining the wonderful Web Analytics Association (click here), it comes with tons of benefits.

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PS: I am very happy that today Occam’s Razor has achieved two small milestones.

With this post we have crossed 100,000 words written in 61 blog posts (and you have contributed and additional 82,000 in comments).

Today, after a little over six months of existence, we also crossed 500 unique blog links in Technorati (Nov 29: Rank 4,803 and 1,241 links from 504 blogs).

It is truly kindness from strangers that makes this small milestone possible since I know less than 1% of the blog authors who have linked to this blog. I thank you all very much, you have made my day (it has been a very very tough couple weeks so this is appreciated even more, Gracias).

[The ranking will go down because technorati only considers a rolling six months window, and I can’t possibly get lots more new links! : ) ]

The 2006 e-consultancy Online Marketing Masterclass event in London was a jam packed day of fantastic speakers, a wonderfully intelligent audience and great conversations. The RIBA is a great location as well, Ashley and the nice e-consultancy team deserve a big round of applause.

As at all such events there was so much to learn from attending and speaking and from the audience questions. All nine presentations were great but here are two that had I think had particularly relevant insights for readers of Occam’s Razor. I have excerpted the relevant slides, which are followed by a brief commentary that provides my interpretation (a format similar to the emetrics DC summit reflections).

I want to thank the authors for permission to share their work, it is very nice of them to share the wealth.

# 1

Who? Andy Harding, Carphone Warehouse Plc
What? Customer Acquisition in a Multi-Channel Environment ( )
Where? Slides 5 & 6, Customer personas and value of each target. Slide 15, You capability and customer expectations.

Why? I wanted to pick just one thing from each presenter, to keep this blog post short, but there were two absolutely brilliant concepts in Andy’s presentation. Like many of us in the web world The Carphone Warehouse has invested in understanding the personas of their customers:

Personas can be used to create optimal customer experiences or to create the right type of marketing programs or targeted acquisitions strategies or other such activities that can be performed when you know your customer so well. But Andy’s team has gone one step further and compute the Size and Value of each persona, here’s the graph plotted with Age on the x-axis….

This graph is very powerful because while we all create personas only a select few will take one step further to quantify the value and volume of each of those personas. A graph such as the one above can help provide decision makers with a very powerful mechanism to do simple things like focus on where to invest resources or what the bottom-line impact will be from solving for each persona or, if trended over time, how to improve the value of each of the large bubble and watch it move higher on the y-axis.

I am not sure how Value is computed but you can use Profitability or Customer Loyalty or Net Promoter or Least Likely to Switch (in case of phone company) or Most Amount Spent on Add-on Services or other such metrics. Pick the one that makes most sense for your company.

We are all becoming increasingly familiar that the web is a living breathing mechanism that is constantly changing. For the longest time companies (website owners) were in control of creating the customer experience but increasingly customers are creating their own experiences (think all the web 2.0 stuff and mash-up’s etc).

In the above slide Andy provides a great framework to diagnose where we, as website owner’s are, and what the expectations of our customers might be. The red and yellow lines show how capabilities and expectations trend over time.

Early in your existence (or when the Internet started) the red line was lower, websites had very robust / delightful capabilities that were way ahead of customer expectations (maybe they were not quite as savvy or they did not care). But as the web has evolved and our customers have become increasingly sophisticated the slope of the yellow line (customer expectations) has a much steeper gradient.

Look at your company’s website, the features and tools it provides, how much it can scale, is it static or dynamic and ask more such questions. This will help you plot the red line, include what capabilities you are looking to build in the future. Now go back to your customers (personas above) and ask them what they expect from a website experience. Plot the yellow line.

Now comes the hard part. Where is your company at the current time? Point A (in which case you are fine) or at point B (in which case you are in trouble).

My belief is that this simple graph can be hugely actionable because it will provide powerful insights about what you need to get done to deliver against the expectations that your customers have (or maybe even question if you want to do that). I suspect that most of us will find that we all think that we are at point A and what we will find is that we are really at point B and woefully unprepared to move from point A to B (it can be hugely painful in terms of resources, skills, processes, infrastructure and mindsets).

# 2

Who? David Hughes, Non-Line Marketing
What? Retain and Grow: Getting Close and Staying Close ( )
Where? Slides 37, It’s “Non-line Marketing”.

Why? David’s delightfully entertaining talk (I highly recommend seeing David present in person!) focussed on how to retain and grow our existing, and valuable, customers. One can use all the wonderful options available to us to execute our own retention strategies: superior customer services, loyalty programs, personalization, community, providing incremental choice and convenience etc. Slide 5 has this wonderful quote: “Your diamonds are not in far-away mountains or in distant seas; they are in your own back yard if you will but dig for them. – Russell Conwell 1862”. In the presentation there are wonderful examples of how to execute your own strategy.

One of the most interesting concepts David presented was that of Non-Line Marketing.

In our minds, and execution strategies, we typically live in the silos of On-line Marketing and Off-line Marketing. Sure we try to think, a little bit, of off-line when we do on-line and vice a versa. But in reality we live in a world where customers behave in a very weird way. Rather then choosing one channel over the other or starting at one and ending up at the other (as the linearity above might imply at first glance) our customers are going back and forth between the two channels depending on what stage they are in, what they are buying and what their comfort level is.

[I have taken the “artistic liberty” of illustrating three customer experiences on his slide, purely for communication purposes.]

We execute marketing programs and measure effectiveness as if the process is linear. But in reality as the red, green and purple lines indicate customer behavior is very different and we are not very well set-up to measure effectiveness. If you come to the website (the red line above), read reviews, go to the store, look and touch the products, talk to the sales person who totally wow’s you and you go and buy the product (all in one day). Who gets the credit? Your Google PPC program? What if your path was the one shown by the green arrows? Off-line then online then offline then online?

If the world truly is made up of non-line customer behavior should effectiveness of all our marketing programs be a “faith based initiative” (trust me my marketing is working, I just can’t prove it)? How can we measure success in a non-line customer experience world? Tough questions with evolving answers.

We are very much at the first baby steps of executing “nonline” marketing campaigns and measuring effectiveness of such campaigns. What is clear is that our customers already live in that world, we have to catchup. This is all the more reason that your core web success measurement strategy can’t rest on the bedrock of clickstream data, if it was not already limiting before it is very much so now. Taking steps to incorporate other measurement sources such as surveys or remote usability or market research or collecting information via registration etc are going to be critical. And who knows that else is around the corner. [Qualitative data. Survey Best Practices.]

I want to thank Andy and David again for their wonderful presentations and also for sharing them with us.

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It has been six months of blogging as of Nov 16th. A delightful experience full of surprises and lessons and amazing conversations and new friends and hard work and lots more. Having taken very apprehensive steps into the world of blogging now I would not replace it for anything, and I highly recommend it to one and all.

Along those lines I wanted to share some “technical” / “backend” tips, lessons and recommendations from my brief experience. I had covered “frontend” blogging tips in a earlier post (what to write, how to make your blog popular, time commitments etc). In this post I wanted to cover some technical tips on how I blog and how to optimize your blog etc.

Quick Summary:

#1: “Try before you buy” [Experiment before you jump in.]

#2: Your Own Domain?

#3: Blogger Websites or Your Own ISP?

#4: What Blog Software to Use?

#5: Best way to Write and Edit Your Blog Posts?

#6: Best WordPress Plugins [if you have a wordpress blog this will save you hours of searching and help give your blog a power boost quickly]

#7: The story of six months in numbers [What can you do in six months of blogging?]

Detailed recommendations……

Recommendation #1: “Try before you buy”

Blogging is a toughie, make no mistake. It will take a lot more time and be a lot harder and more addictive then you anticipate. So the very first recommendation is to create a “play blog”. For me it was www.kaushik.net/blogtest (I also have a blogspot test blog). It was the best way to:

• Try to learn technically what it takes to create a blog (software, hosted, domains etc)
• Try out different options and themes before I got the perfect look and feel
• Try to blog and try various formatting and commenting and editing options in a test environment (where Jennie and a couple friends helped stress test things)
• Figure out if you like this blogging thing

When you are ready for prime time, you’ll be ready for prime time. Besides the “play blog” is a great place to try new plugins or search engines etc that you want to implement on your main blog, things that could potentially make your main blog unstable.

Recommendation #2: Your Own Domain?

You have surely noticed that there are many .blogspot or .wordpress or .typepad etc domains on blogs. These are free or paid service providers that allow you to get going really quickly. But the choice you have to make is where you want the long term equity of your blog.

From a branding perspective, from a SEO perspective, from a long term perspective I choose to host my blog on my own domain name. One of the nicest benefit of going with your own domain is that you have the ability to change your platform or service providers or move things then atleast you can keep the equity that you have earned over time with you (let’s say readers and bookmarks and Page Rank etc).

Get your own domain name, something relevant or cute or whatever you are comfortable with (there are many websites that will sell you domains for five to ten dollars per year).

Recommendation #3: Blogger Websites or Your Own ISP?

It is extremely easy to get started on blogger or wordpress or an equivalent blogging website. And is free. You can also get fairly inexpensive services such as Typepad (just $49 per year). They also come all tricked out and with base systems (comments, spam filtering etc) working right out of the box.

In reading blogs, before I started out, I found a lot of feedback around benefits of such services but also the limitations that these services placed in how much you could extend out platforms or concerns around how much flexibility there was to do Search Engine Optimization or help / support that you could get if things were not working well (though this might not happen a lot).

My decision was to go with my own ISP, www.lunarpages.com, who had tremendous support and one heck of a good deal on hosting services ($7 per month plus free website domain for life, plus three gigs of storage and eight hundred gigs of transfer – I will never get that important!). They provide phone support, rare for ISP. This gives me extra peace of mind (have never had to call them yet) and it was quite inexpensive.

Get your own ISP services, again for some of the reasons above related to the control you can have, the support and portability (if you want to move / change etc).

Recommendation #4: What Blog Software to Use?

If you follow recommendation #3 and host your own blog with a ISP then you have the flexibility to meet the blog platform that best meets your need. My ISP, lunarpages, actually allows free one click install for three blog software. pMachine, Nucleus and WordPress. I tried all three of these software before I ended up choosing WordPress. The key reason WordPress won was:

1) People seem to love wordpress (just do a technorati search)
2) Massive number of wonderful themes freely available (or here)
3) Existence of hundreds of plugins that will you to extend your blog in amazing ways (here or here).

I have now used WordPress for six months I am deeply impressed with how solid the platform is, how many people are out there creating wonderful plugins and themes and how easy it is to use. I love and avidly recommend WordPress to you (also see the list of fantastic plugins below).

Recommendation #5: How to Write and Edit Your Blog Posts?

I admit that I am bit of a perfectionist (I know it does not look like it!).  I really disliked the rich html editor that came natively with the blog software (any in #4 above). I would want the perfect page breaks and paragraphs and spacings yet it would never come out just right.

Since I am comfortable with basic HTML I switched off the rich html editor and did my own raw html. This was good, output was nice but it took longer. That got me on the hunt for dedicated software that I could use to compose or edit my posts.

I tried Qumana, Performancing, RocketPost and BlogJet to see which one would work best. By a long shot BlogJet was the winner. It does not have the most comprehensive features (for example it cannot make your coffee in the morning) but what it does it does really really well.

I like the three tabs on the bottom so that I can switch between the rich editor and writing my own html. It is completely integrated with most blog software (including my own WordPress) hence it is easy to compose posts or edit live posts etc. It has many intuitive features such as adding images or videos to your posts or integrating with flikr etc.

A side benefit is that I save all the posts on my hard disk so I have backups of all the posts (small benefit but a good one). Finally I do like not being at the vagaries of a internet connection or web browser to save posts (or lose them), my desktop is more stable. : )

I compose my posts in BlogJet. Post them as draft on the Blog. Then do one final review and set of edits on the blog itself.

Get BlogJet, it is well worth $40 that it costs. (Get a Trial version.)

Recommendation #6: Best WordPress Plugins.

Another admission, I love little utilities (for my desktop) and plugins (for firefox). Tiny little programs that do one thing and do them well and make a huge difference in the user experience. So it should not be surprising that I have taken to WordPress plugins like a duck to water. I have tried many, here are my favorites that are currently live on this blog:

Akismet: You can’t have a blog without this plugin (this blog has received 13,057 pieces of spam in six months!!!). Akismet stops all the spam on your blog dead in its tracks. It is multiple times easier to use than SpamKarma 2, much easier to install and configure (press one button), and has a very low false positive rate (less than 1% in my case).

CRCRLF: This plugin corrects a wordpress email formatting problem specifically for Outlook where wordpress incorrectly passes through carriage return characters before line feed characters on Unix systems. This one is not absolutely necessary but I want email subscribers to get the best possible formatted emails! : )

Dashboard Options: The native wordpress dashboard has few options in terms of the customizations you can do to the look and feel (and remove the stuff you don’t like). This is a wonderful plugin that allows me to custom configure exactly what I want to see on the dashboard (after I log into wordpress, which I do 25 times a day) and add customer RSS feeds to the dashboard. Very handy.

Feedburner Feed Replacement: This plugin helps me get accurate stats about my feed subscribers by forwarding all the feeds from my blog to FeedBurner by creating a randomized feed for FeedBurner to pull from. Your blog will natively provide a rss 1.0 and rss 2.0 and atom feed, plus you will add FeedBurner. This makes it harder to get really good numbers, but this plugin fixes that problem.

GeneralStats: The analyst in me adores this plugin. At any given moment it gives me a count of Categories, Posts, Comments, Pages and words in posts, comment and pages. While this plugin is to allow you to display these stats on your blog pages, post activation I simply go into the admin page and review the metrics [as of 16th Nov: 57 Posts (94,096 words), 681 Comments (78,629 words), 8 Pages (5,622 words)]. If you are a data geek you need this.

Get Recent Comments: I have tried atleast ten different Recent Comments plugins, ones that would allow me to list the most recent comments on the right navigation. This one was simply the best because of how much control it provides on the output. You can set options for how many comments, the length of the comments, what should happen when one click’s on the comment, options for trackbacks and more. There is even a preview function in the admin console. Brilliant.

Google Sitemaps: The second SEO plugin. Every time I publish a post this plugin will generate a new sitemap automatically for this blog and, how great is this, it will send a ping to Google to come and index the new content on the blog (!).  I have a Google Sitemaps account and typically I can see the bot visited this blog just a few minutes after the ping. The plugin also has many options you can set to optimize the sitemap.

Log 404: This plugin helps keep a record of all the 404’s that are being generated on your blog. What better way to find errors?

No Ping Wait: My list of Services to automatically ping is rather long (don’t want to miss out on any pings!) hence sometimes it would take forever for the post to be, well, posted. This plugin greatly speeds up that process by “moving generic pings to execute-pings.php”.

Optimal Title: One of my SEO plugins. It moves the title of the post to be before the blog title. So rather than “Occam’s Razor by Avinash Kaushik >> Excellent Analytics Tip #8: Measure the Real Conversion Rate & Opportunity Pie““it becomes “Excellent Analytics Tip #8: Measure the Real Conversion Rate & Opportunity Pie” >> Occam’s Razor by Avinash Kaushik“. Search engines give a great amount of emphasis to Page Titles so this is great. Additionally if your blog post shows up in search engine results this will ensure the blog post title will show up in the search excerpt and not just the blog title (and increase the chance people will click on your link).

Search Meter: My own personal internal search engine usage report. It takes one click to install this plugin and it adds a report that shows me the key phrases that visitors are typing into the search engine on this blog (look on left navigation on the home page) and reports on the recency (time) and frequency (how often). Great way to know what people are looking for.

Sociable: See the line of icons at the bottom of this post, I have the Sociable plugin to thank for that. It can add links / icons to your post for most Social Bookmarking websites which makes it a bit easier for your visitors to save, catalog and share your posts. The plugin has many customizable options that you’ll be quite thrilled with.

Search Excerpt: The default search results page that was with my blog theme was really terrible and would bring back complete posts that contained any key word that was searched. Kind of blew. This wonderful plugin fixed that problem, now when you search you get a excerpt of the text that contains that key phrase you searched for. [I had to hack the search results php page for my theme and being a novice I could not really make it work until Steven helped, thanks so much buddy!]

Search Reloaded: This plugin optimizes the default search algorithm that comes bundled in with WordPress. Makes it easier for blog visitors to find relevant content quickly.

Tags in the Head: Third SEO plugin, it simply helps generate tags in the <head>. It used to be critically important to have Meta Keywords and Meta Description in your html page, it is not as important now (from what I have read about search engine indexing). Still this plugin makes it really easy to add keywords (you can add your own in the admin pages or it can take your technorati tags etc) and a description that is automatically inserted into each post of your blog. (Do a View Source to see it in action.)

Tiger Style Administration: The default WordPress administration area is ok but this plugin improves it roughly fifty times. After you install Tiger Style you will be surprised how much closer your menus are and how pretty the whole thing becomes. It is a amazing improvement over what you get with WordPress.

Ultimate Tag Warrior: Blogosphere is littered with praise for this plugin, you have to immediately download and install it if you don’t already have it. It provides multiple ways for you to add the all important tags to your blog / posts. It also incorporates one click access for you to use the Yahoo Key Word Generator to suggest tags  that you can add to your post to make it more visible in normal search engines or technorati.

WordPress Reports: Third data geek plugin, it creates a one page report for your most key metrics from Google Analytics and FeedBurner. I don’t have to go to two different places to get my data, it is hosted on a nice easy to read report on my blog itself. How very convenient!

WordPress Database Backup: Your native WordPress install probably came with this absolutely necessary plugin. Allows you to, in one click, backup your entire WordPress blog contents. You have the option to save the file on your desktop or have it be ftp’ed some place. You should have this one even if you have no other plugin. I backup right after I am done posting a new post.

WP-Print: While WordPress will natively create optimal text pages for printing this plugin actually creates a really pretty print page. It keeps some formatting in place and very thoughtfully it also spells out all the URL’s for the links you might have in your post. At the end of this post try the Printer Friendly Version link to see it in action.

I hope you will find these plugins to be helpful. If you have others that have worked for you then please share via comments.

Six Months in Numbers:

Six months of blogging translates into 58 Posts (94,289 words), 689 Comments (79,058 words), 8 Pages (5,622 words). Here is the story in traditional numbers……

Did you notice the digg effect in Month 2? : )

Overall I am still surprised that this many people read the posts or that yesterday there were 632 subscribers for the blog feeds.

Thanks for all your support and encouragement.

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