The way Unique Visitor is identified usually is by the use of a anonymous cookie that is placed on a computer. This is a text file that usually does not contain any personal information.

In as much it is very difficult to tie things down to a person.

Some companies will capture and store PII (Personally Identifiable Information) in the cookies or url stems but this is a practice that is usually not looked upon approvingly (both by practitioners and customers).

At the moment capturing and showing demographic information is lots of guess work (there are third parties that can provide you this information). But I want to stress that purely knowing someone is Male or Female is usually of marginal value (in terms of your ability to then take that data and find insights and turn them around into action).

There is a lot more behavioral data you can, and do, capture in your web analytics tool that can be greatly actionable (and more than demographic). Additionally understanding micro-segments of your customers (campaigns, sources, organic / ppc, new vs returning, content consumed etc etc) are super actionable. I would recommend chasing those (and perhaps you are already on that path!).

Hope this helps.

-Avinash.

I am writing to get help from you, in the problem of how to calculate the unique visitor?

Just assume that we are in a retail web site,we may use email_id or something like that to identify the unique visitor.But if I want to analyze the correlation between age and product consume, and I think this method is going to break down. For example, I use this email_id to login while my father also uses this id to login to pursue different product. And we are in the same personal information while actually we are in different age; this definitely makes the result inaccurate.Any suggestion? Thanks.

Marc Andreessen posts “Coming Soon” titles on his blog. That’s really cool and something I’d love to do, too. Of course, I’d have to follow through on it. So why not borrow one of Marc’s instead?

One future title in particular, “Top 10 books for high-tech entrepreneurs,” intrigued me and got me thinking about the most valuable books I’ve read. So, in no particular order, the list below represents the twelve most influential and important books for marketers …

For anyone looking for a free way to show heatmaps to potential skeptics (they tend to like sexy visualizations) check out Crazy Egg. It’s a great place to start playing around with heatmapping and overlays. Their new ‘confetti’ option works pretty well too.

It’s free up to 5,000 visits so it’s a good place to get started and can provide enough visits for a decent conclusion.

More often, what I’ve found is that this deeper explanation — even when presented as cleanly and clearly as possible — winds up with eyes glazing over. Not entirely a bad thing, as these skeptics often have a valid takeaway: “This stuff is complicated, but that guy not only knows his tool inside and out, he knows more about what’s going on under the hood in *my* tool than I do. I think it’s best to stop beating him up and start recognizing him as a valuable resource for me.”

To be clear — the LAST thing you want as a *goal* for one of these “explanation” presentations is to simply show how smart you are and MAKE their eyes glaze over. That’s a good way to damage the relationship by coming off as a pompous ass. But, if you honestly make the effort to make the details comprehensible and have that as your singular goal, even if you don’t achieve THAT goal, you may still win a strong ally!

I have been using my Agency’s tool for my affiliate tracking, now I have a blueprint for how I can best work with my in house analytics team.

The only requirement being that the various channels be tagged with trackable parameters / cookie values. Do that and you are set.

Steve : Great sense of humor my friend! Thank you.

-Avinash.

For us one of the key education points for clients has been that, as you say, its okay to use (for instance) Google Adwords tracking to optimise the Google Adwords campaign, but to understand the overall cost of each channel in comparison, the central WA tool is everything. This has been especially true of affiliate marketing where we see the biggest gap between the affiliate measurement tool and the actual CPA values vs other channels (or is this just me?).

In addition i’ve always found people very open to the “double counting” argument, as you mentioned, the one where the sum of all the parts are greater than the part itself. This has always been the one that makes people completely understand the “difference” between the central tool and other ways of measurement.

-Mike

Another great post. Agree 100% with all your comments. Rolling your sleeves and making your hands dirty is key. Another element is to understand rules, filters and adjustments that are used in the implementation. Using an excel chart to “bridge the gap” is very powerful.

End of the day, this data does not go on the “books” and is in context. As long as it is in acceptable variance and trends correctly, some decisions can be made - This should not be an excuse to stop looking at data and avoid data driven decisions. Ofcourse, if your data is way off - it’s time to make your hands dirty.

-Rahul

For example, if Adwords has more conversions than I am recording on the analytics solutions - one of the reasons being the sessionisation you so clearly highlighted - the search/PPC team will not want to present the lower numbers to the client and it is quite tough to get them to understand the concept of sessionisation or other variables. Thus the web analyst role I feel has to become more of a machiavellian creature of politics, influence and buy-in to get the big picture across internally and to clients.

Thanks for a great post Avinash,

Web Analytics Princess http://www.marianina.com