One thing that I never want to be.

We all have a tendency to learn up to a point, we get comfortable and keep chugging along rarely investing in our ongoing education.

I call it the slow but sure path to irrelevancy.

Let me share my prescription for avoiding irrelevancy: Try new things.

Simple right?

At any given time I have six or seven interesting tools running on this website. That's not including others I actively seek out around the web. Most of them are not even related to my current job or problems I know of. And that's on purpose.

I want to constantly be in the know of new and more clever ways of working with data, tools that are often solutions to problems we don't know we have yet or tools that are sometimes seeking problems to solve!!

Irrelevancy is not fun. Stale people are not appealing (just like, as your mom taught you, a week old bread). If there is one thing you take away from it post I hope it is the importance in investing in yourself / your education / your ongoing awesomeness.

In this blog post I want to share four analytics tools that I have been playing with for a while… tools that solve an interesting problem… tools that point to what might be in terms of our near term analytical future… and in almost all cases they don't even know!

I love doing this, I hope you'll have as much fun as I do.

First Some Context.

Remember I am the creator of the 10/90 rule of investment in web analytics.

I had created the rule many years ago, early into my job at Intuit, and quite simply it states:

When I had created the rule Google Analytics did not even exist!

The rule was borne out from my own experience having inherited a world class tool we were paying $250k a year for and produced crap. Well not crap… lots of data that no one cared about or actioned. I threw out the world class tool, purchased ClickTracks for a fraction of the cost and put money into Analysts and boom!

Ok not boom overnight… but over the course of a few months the org started to be more data driven, because analysts we hired produced analysis. That fed a virtuous cycle. More analysts. More insights. More desire to be data driven.

So as you look at the tools below remember the 10/90 rule.

In the end it does not matter who has the coolest or the biggest tool. Or for that matter how many tools.

People matter.

You matter.

Remember that, at least for the rest of this post. Ok?

Let's go look at some tools…

Measuring "Invisible Virality": Tynt.

Tynt's promise is simple. Add a piece of javascript to your web page (do a View Source on this page to see it), and it will tell you how often your content is being copied.

Copied! Say it ain't so! :)

[Please click on the above image for a higher resolution version, including all the other metrics.]

In the last month data was copied off one of my posts 5,616 times, with most of it being content and some of it images.

But that's not all.

If you look at the higher resolution version (click above) you'll see it also reports other data like Visits Generated etc.

The way it works is that when someone copies a piece of content Tynt adds a little bit of additional text and a trackable code with a hash (#) at the end of the url from where content was copied.

Like so… the text that was copied from my blog is the first two lines… the Read More and link was added automatically by Tynt…

When people click on that link Tynt can report visits generated, page views, where the links were posted (in case there is a referrer) etc.

There is additional data like how many of your copies created links that were posted and then clicked on…

Gold are places were the copied text was pasted with the additional "Read more: http://…" text+link were also posted AND someone clicked on it.

You'll note that Tynt's selling point is connected to SEO. The idea that your copied text creates links back to you which in turn creates visits back to you, and per Tynt, better SEO goodness. You know links and page rank and what not!

I *personally* do not see much value in all that data. Two reasons:

So I am less enamored by Tynt data that focuses on all that.

I love the data you saw in the very first screenshot, and I absolutely love this…

[Please click on the above image for a higher resolution version, including all the other metrics.]

The first screenshot shows how often content is being copied and the above indicates the blog post / web page where the content is being copied from.

Why is this cool?

If you are a regular reader you'll notice that at the end of every blog post (before the start of the comments section) is a Topsy widget.

It measures how often a blog post is tweeted/retweeted. Goes viral. Higher the number the better, makes sense?

I also measure the # of Comments Per Post as a measure of how "engaging" / "valuable" people found the content to be. Looking at how often it was tweeted/retweeted is one more layer of information in understanding what subject / ideas in a post / things I write are well received by people and which are not.

But.

Both the above attempts measure two minorities.

The cool thing about Tynt is that it allows me to get some sense of "engagement" / "perceived value" / "Like" with the v a s t majority of people who will neither submit a comment nor write a tweet.

People who still use email. People who like something I wrote so much (or hate it so much) that they copy the text and paste it and forward it to others. Or copy the text and post it on their blogs (without attribution of course :)).

I like that a lot.

This entire interaction that was completely invisible to me is now a bit more visible. I can measure the "invisible virality" / "spread" by this big huge non-commenting, non-tweeting audience.

In the time period above I had written 4 posts (5,616 times copies). Check this out… It turns out the post with the fewest comments, just 25, and the fewest tweets, just 100…

…was copied an astonishing 506 times, when all other posts were copied in small double digits.

See what I mean… something I would have perhaps considered to be only a small success turns out was a huge hit with the blog's audience. I just would not have known that so far.

Here's another interesting application. . . Lots of people are measuring "influence" of a blogger (/ piece of content) using data from the "minority activity" (comments, retweets etc) and selling it as the complete truth. But how can you do that without some insight from the majority?

Tynt shares one very interesting piece to the puzzle that perhaps in the future fit some place where we can use it with all other context we have.

Invisible Virality. Cool right?

Applying Smarter Ideas to Measuring "Sentiment": Analyze Words.

Raise you hand if you are in the "If I am any more excited about doing sentiment analysis then I'll pee in my pants".

So many raised hands!

Here's the problem: Most solutions stink. Not just stink… dinosaur's breath after a meal stink.

We are algorithmically trying something that as yet does not lend itself to algorithmic measurement… "emotion". It is darn near impossible to cleanly buckets feelings and nuance into clean Positive, Negative, Neutral buckets.

We, computer programs, are simply not there yet. [Though I am absolutely confident that we will get there at some point.]

For now you are most likely wasting time (and money). Sorry.

Here's the other problem…

Even if it works… I don't think it works. [What!]

Let's say you have a 100% perfect human read and 100% human categorized analysis on hundreds of thousands of rows of text. Clean into the three desired categories. Like in the image above.

Now pause for a second and think… what could you do with this?

You have aggregated data into three pieces and we all know aggregated data stinks at delivering insights!

That does not mean wanting to identify insights from lots and lots of text is not prudent. It is.

I like a much more nuanced approach.

Analyze Words applies one such nuanced approach to text analysis.

It uses the well established and long use LIWC (Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count) methodology to categorize all your delightful text (in this case your tweets).

Why the LIWC? Here's the idea behind the LIWC:

Cool right?

You go to Analyze Words and you punch in your twitter id and bam (!) your "psychological" profile, or in this case mine…

Nice eh?

No simplified over promise under deliver aggregates!

The three categories and 11 sub categories provide much much much more nuanced understanding of what your text is saying, in this case for your twitter profile.

Why is this cool?

In this case measuring "Personable": Engaged in other people's well-being and at peace with expressing your own uncertainty about the world. High Scores in personable use positive emotion words, ask questions, express their own ambivalence and reference others frequently.

Better than positive, negative, neutral right?

Or "Analytic": "If law school exams were a persona, they would rank real high in this category. Ample large words and phrases that include complex thinking styles (e.g. "if – but not …")."

Love it!

Two magnificent things about this approach (remember it's not the tool, its what you do with it :))…

Of course you can do even more.

You know how you are doing… now compare it to your "competition" and find their strengths and weaknesses…

When you do competitive analysis, like above, find contrasts with your own profile, what your brand stands for in the world and their brand stands for.

Highlight differences where you brand strength is strong. Hopefully they'll discover where they stink and for the sake of humanity fix that.

Nice eh?

Analyze Words provides a glimpse of an approach that I hope others follow.

Rather than trying to find short cuts, where none exist, and provide aggregate data, where it just gets crapified, follow a well established methodology while leveraging segmentation and nuance.

We've applied it just for Twitter in the above case but you can easily see how you could apply it to call center data, tech support websites, forums, online survey open text voc answers and so much more.

Applying Simpler Ideas to Measuring "Sentiment": StatsIt.

StatsIt started off as a differentiated web analytics tool, but has morphed into a delightful social media monitoring tool.

It's approach is to index blogs and tweets and delicious and twitter and youtube and on and on and analyze that data to find yummy actionable insights about your social media presence / activity.

Like all tools it gives you pretty charts…

Sweet, now you know how much "activity" is happening. Give it to your boss, she'll be impressed. You on the other hand realize "activity" rarely has insights.

I want to focus on just one part of StatsIt that I adore because of how simple it is in its brilliance when it comes to finding insights from lots of text.

StatsIt has indexed a ton of content from all the social web activity. When you tell it your brand terms (or just your brand name, in my case "avinash kaushik") and it churns through that social web data to provide you with something awesome…. a tag cloud!

[Click on the image for a higher resolution version, along with a peek at other metrics.]

Why is this cool?

Mikko and his team have taken 1,000 words from the English language that are connected to emotion. Good emotion, bad emotion, ugly emotion.

They look at their social web data and in that they look at the words around your brand mention and finally identify the emotional words people are using in context of… you!

The tag cloud above shows the emotional words use around mentions of me for a month's worth of time.

Without having to read all the text I can at a glance now get a really good understanding of the tone and texture of activity around my presence. More importantly it does not take all that long to figure out what emotions should be there but aren't.

A very simple, effective and elegant solution to a complicated problem.

Oh and guess that happens when you click on one of the words in the tag cloud?

You are right… it takes you directly to the text from all the data that StatsIt has collected!

By clicking on the words you are essentially segmenting your data and drilling down to the text (tweets, blog posts) where you can learn more about what the person was saying when they express, say, "great" as an emotion. :)

Effective "sentiment analysis" baby!

Why can't we be this simple in other places?

We are always seeking complexity. Here are two ideas that popped into my head from the StatsIt's approach that might apply in other places.

We collect lots of open text from our online surveys right?

Rather than finding the perfect answer to what's expressed in the text, and of course getting it wrong, why don't the vendors show us a emotional tag cloud?

Can there be a better / easier / faster way to allow us to make sense of all that text, leverage as a segmentation tool and find insights every day?

Vendors! Come on!!

Another idea.

Reviews are important. Most ecommerce sites have them.

But why is it that we only see "quantitative" analysis of the reviews? 5 stars. 3.2 moons. 61% rotten tomatoes. Etc etc.

The richness of the review is only partly in the quantitative analysis of the rating. The real sweet nectar is in the words people write in reviews.

I recently gave a talk at eBay. So let's use that as an example.

You get quick quant rating on eBay that you typically use. But perhaps the real gold is here….

This seller, me, is 100% positively rated.

Now let's say that you want to buy a Sony digital camera that is listed by both me and Emer. We both have 100% positive ratings for our 60 or so prior eBay auctions.

How can you best decide if you should buy from me or Emer? You can't possibly read 120 reviews, or even scan them quickly.

Now would your life be much much easier if eBay choose to provide an "emotional tag cloud" for both Emer and Avinash?

Very quickly you could see that while we both have same quant ratings it turns out that my emotional cloud shows a neutral to positive feelings expressed while Emer's is outrageously positive.

Now is it easier to decide who to buy from?

As our dear friend Sarah Palin would say: You betcha!

So why does eBay not provide this simple emotional tag cloud?

Or for that matter Trip Advisor or Amazon or any site that hosts reviews and ratings?

Simplicity rocks. Especially when it's actionable.

Quick, Efficient, Effective Mobile Analytics: Percent Mobile.

It is always a really good idea in web analytics to understand how data is captured (case in point the delightful blog post on Competitive Intelligence data capture).

No where is this more true than when it comes to mobile analytics.

There are many methods of collecting data depending on the platform you are on, and if Steve Jobs gets upset he can totally shut you down with a mere update of his TOS! :)

I am not going to cover all that here today. For those of you who already have my second book Web Analytics 2.0 please jump to Page 250 to learn all about data collection options, platform limitations, challenges with campaign analysis and finally reports and KPI's you should measure for mobile.

In this blog post I want to share a lightweight wonderful mobile analytics platform called Percent Mobile.

Now most web analytics tools, like Google Analytics and WebTrends and others, will capture and report data for javascript enabled smart phones (like the iPhone, Android and some Nokia phones). Honestly that is all the traffic that is of commercial value, so even if you miss the rest it is not the hugest of deals.

But all these "big boys" have simply "added on" mobile analytics to their tools. The result is that they suffer from both a lack of imagination and, this is important, truly great databases when it comes to devices and carriers and other unique mobile information.

Not Percent Mobile.

They have two incredible benefits:

Here is what the resulting data looks like…

[Please click on the above image for a higher resolution version.]

No hunting and pecking to find the data, like you would in Google Analytics or Site Catalyst or CoreMetrics. A quick at a glance view of how much traffic is mobile, key stats about the devices, the devices themselves (go iPad!!), vendors and operating systems.

If you compare this to your web analytics tool you'll notice almost immediately how much better this data is compared to what the "big boys" are reporting.

Click on the image above and you'll see a bit more clearly other really sweet metrics. % of mobile devices accessing your site via WiFi. Phones with touch screens and full keyboards etc.

[Can you imagine how cool it would be to segment your mobile traffic for full keyboard phone vs none and see which convert better. Or does access via WiFi mean more content consumption than via 3G? Etc. So cool.]

That is not all… if you scroll a bit more you can get a country map view, the networks used to access your site (AT&T still #1 for me!) and countries etc.

Of course it would be hard for me to like any tool that does not allow segmentation. :) You simply drag and drop on to the box on top..

And what would an analytics tool be without the normal search, referrer and all that data we have so come to love (and hate!).

I particularly like the "Activity Types" box at the bottom left, I don't know why web analytics tools don't categorize referrers by default.

I am also surprised at the long tail of referrers. Yes Google is big but there are 91 other referrers for this segment. More mobile SEO!

Why is this cool?

It might seem odd that I would like a tool that would give me similar data that I can get out of WebTrends or Omniture or Xiti or whatever.

The first reason is that, as mentioned above, the data is actually much better because of the databases that power Percent Mobile.

The other thing is that getting this data causes less pain than pulling my two front teeth.

Finally I so do like supporting pretty tools, especially if they have good data!

The one thing Percent Mobile lacks is some way of measuring any outcomes. I can certainly dig to my "conversion pages" but it would be great if they just let me just input them into the tool and then they could measure outcomes for me (even if it is like the Goals process in GA).

But if you want a light weight easy to use free mobile analytics tool just throw Percent Mobile on your site and have fun. Go to www.percentmobile.com , click Sign Up (top right) and use the Invitation Code "Avinash" (no quotes).

Mobile rocks no?

Summary Of Our Lovely "Let's Keep Learning" Cruise.

It is important to point out that I am not affiliated in any way with any of these tools / companies. I am also not recommending overtly or covertly that you buy / use them. That is totally your call.

Of course I would not personally use them or write about them if I did not thing they had value. :)

My sincere hope is that you'll internalize:

I hope you got that, more than names of interesting tools.

I cannot tell you how much fun it is to step outside the world of Omniture and Google Analytics and other traditional web analytics tools. It stretches your mind and sometimes you look at these new techniques and data and you notice you are smiling and feel so happy.

Try it, and have fun.

[In case you were curious at the moment I am playing with these incredibly cool tools: PostRank, Next Stage Sentiment Analysis, SEO Effect, and Colligent. Each in its own way does something magical and quite unlike anyone else.]

Ok your turn now.

What do you think of the work that Tynt, Analyze Words, StatsIt & Percent Mobile do? Have you tried any of 'em? What obvious flaws did I overlook? Are there other tools you are using in the Viral, Social, Sentiment, Mobile space that you really love? If so would you please post them in comments?

Please share your feedback / critique / ideas.

Thanks.

PS:
Couple other related posts you might find interesting:

• Multiplicity: Succeed Awesomely At Web Analytics 2.0!
• Actively Avoid Insights: 4 Useful KPI Measurement Techniques
• Web Analytics Tool Selection: Three Questions to ask Yourself
• Kill Useless Web Metrics: Apply The "Three Layers Of So What" Test
• Web Analytics Career Advice: Play In The Real World!

Viral, Social, Sentiment, Mobile: 4 Delightful Web Analytics Solutions is a post from: Occam's Razor by Avinash Kaushik

Even with a broken right hand I can't help but write this post!

The waterfall of positive feeling stems from the fact that this book was very hard to write.

I only had one job, at Intuit, when I wrote my first web analytics book. I now have several full time jobs, plus this blog, plus speaking around the world, plus a family, plus… so much more.

It took weekends of writing and nights of editing and days of research combined with practicing the preaching by doing oodles of analysis and, more importantly, the support of the most understanding wife in the world.

At the end of it all it is rather gratifying to see one's book at a bookstore, helps grasp the magnitude of the process. And there's absolutely nothing quite like hearing your five year old yell in a busy Borders bookstore: "I FOUND DADDY'S BOOK!"

This blog post is in three parts: The pitch. Request for help. A lovely contest [Contest closed now, thanks for the entries!].

You don't have to read the whole thing & skip ahead, but that would hurt my feelings. :)

Here we go. . .

The Pitch:

I invite you to consider buying my second web analytics book. It is not only the most current book on everything important and bleeding edge in Web Analytics, it is a labor of love that will help you transform your personal thinking and assist in revolutionizing your organization (big or small).

It is not a technical book, though it will make you technically dangerous. It is not just a business book, though every dna strand in this book is more about online marketing than online analytics. It is not a hard book to read, though it is brain food.

Here's why I think you'll love it:

Chapter 1 The Bold New World of Web Analytics 2.0

No dragging of the feet, the book starts with a bang by laying out the framework that will be the center of every company that will leverage data (qualitative, quantitative, competitive) on the web. It ends with a challenge to embrace Multiplicity – without this it's goodbye greatness.

Chapter 2 The Optimal Strategy for Choosing Your Web Analytics Soul Mate

It will be hard for you to find a more compelling four step process to choose the right web analytics tool for your company. Soul searching, questions to torture vendors with, comparing vendors, running a pilot and negotiating a contract, it's all in there. You be off to the races right.

Chapter 3 The Awesome World of Clickstream Analysis: Metrics

The thing I enjoyed about this chapter (I know I wrote it, but still. . .) was that the first half works really hard to evolve your critical thinking skills. I love that because we take too much for granted, now you'll be skeptical. A good thing. The second half shows exactly how to pick the best metrics for your org and, my absolute favorite (Page 64), how to diagnose the root cause of a metrics performance.

Chapter 4 The Awesome World of Clickstream Analysis: Practical Solutions

When people think of web analytics everything they think about is chapter 4, and yet you'll find so many yummy treats here. The best WA report, segmentation, site search, SEO & PPC analysis, email, rich media, cookies, data sampling. . . . I am out of breath!

Chapter 5 The Key to Glory: Measuring Success

If I have one jihad it is to massively convert every person who touches the web to focus on measuring Outcomes! It is the one reason we can't achieve the greatness we so richly deserve. No more! Glory will be yours!! B2B. B2C. Small Biz. Large Biz. Non-Ecommerce. We make love to 'em all! One thing you'll read here that you'll read no where else? Computing Economic Value, a concept that will liberate you.

Chapter 6 Solving the “Why” Puzzle: Leveraging Qualitative Data

Oh, oh, oh qualitative analysis!! I am a Mechanical Engineer with a MBA, a late covert to the power of understanding the super sexy "why" by leveraging lab usability studies, surveys, card sorts, online remote testing and more. You get a jump start. The thing you'll adore: Pages 190 – 192.

Chapter 7 Failing Faster: Unleashing the Power of Testing and Experimentation

Sure you've heard of A/B and multivariate testing. But do you know how to truly win the game? There is no technical mumbo-jumbo here, just the real deal and how to get testing right. The thing you might not know / realize the power of: Controlled Experiments. I am convinced this is God's gift to online humanity, you'll agree with me by the time you reach Page 208.

Chapter 8 Competitive Intelligence Analysis

The most magnificent advantage the web possesses: everyone's data is available for everyone else to use. If Hilton Hotels has the data for Choice Hotels why not use it to "crush" them (sorry Sarah!). This chapter shows you how. I think the thing you'll be surprised by is at the start of the chapter (Data Sources, Types and Secrets).

Chapter 9 Emerging Analytics: Social, Mobile, and Video

The chapter I had the second most fun writing. Mobile, twitter, blogs, videos etc are just so darned hard to measure and so much changes every few hours that I had to really really work hard to find the essence of each and then make specific practical measurement recommendations that will stand the test of time. It was hard.

Chapter 10 Optimal Solutions for Hidden Web Analytics Traps

This is a collection of major reasons I think people fail at web analytics, and of course I boldly try to share how to avoid that fate. Behavior targeting, dashboards, accuracy, data mining, predictive analytics, and, the thing you'll appreciate the most IMHO, five steps for intelligent analytics evolution!

Chapter 11 Guiding Principles for Becoming an Analysis Ninja

All my life learnings laid bare. . . this is where you, yes you, start to evolve from a Reporting Squirrel to an Analysis Ninja! No metrics, data pukes, guidance on creating every more reports. No, none of that. Rather… analytical techniques, tips and tricks to apply to your job, how to evolve your thinking to a higher level.

Chapter 12 Advanced Principles for Becoming an Analysis Ninja

The chapter I had most fun writing (and rewrote the most number of times). It deals with two of the hardest practical challenges we face in the field of measurement: multi-touch campaign attribution analysis and multi channel analytics. Both are very hard to get right, both have a ton of fud out there, it was fun to share my recommendations.

Chapter 13 The Web Analytics Career

The chapter I should have had in the first book. How to plan a career in web analytics (paths, salary, longevity), and how to then cultivate the right set of skills. If you are a leader then how to spot great talent, how to interview them and make the right choice.

Chapter 14 HiPPOs, Ninjas, and the Masses: Creating a Data-Driven Culture

Some might argue, rightly so, that the most elusive thing to accomplish is to truly bring data democracy to your organization. This chapter bravely hopes to help you do exactly that: excite people about data, remove organizational barriers, use data to change behavior, dealing with data quality, and creating data driven HiPPO's.

Convinced?

Nothing, absolutely nothing, in life is easy. But if you have the will and access to knowledge then that just might help you choose an optimal path, a path where your hard work will yield above normal results. That's my hope, and promise, with Web Analytics 2.0.

Jennie and I have decided to donate 100% of our proceeds from this book, just like for the first one, to two charities. This book benefits The Smile Train and Ekal Vidyalaya. We are very excited about that.

Request For Help:

As you all know my philosophy for this blog is eat like a bird, poop like an elephant. But if you are up for it I would love to ask you for a bit of help.

Recommend the book.
If you know someone who needs to turbocharge their online existence, please recommend Web Analytics 2.0 to them. Even in our hyper connected world, nothing works like a personal recommendation.

If you use a link please consider using: http://bit.ly/akwa20 That link has an affiliate code, all proceeds of which go to the above mentioned charities.

Review the book.
If you have a blog, website, twitter account, any kind of platform, it would be great if you could write a review of the book and help spread the word.

If you purchased the book online then please, pretty please, review the book on the store's website. Amazon. Borders. Target. Powells. Whatever you used.

Connect me.
I am very very bad at pimping. So if you know someone who is someone (or knows someone who knows someone) then please consider connecting us. Especially people outside our analytics / search circle. Authors. CEO's. Journalists. Influencers. TV anchors (or weather man/woman). Oprah (I can dream, can't I?).

Our world is separated by six degrees of separation, I am sure you know someone who just might consider helping me with my cause.

Share a picture.
I love getting to know my audience, and while your emails and tweets are pretty fun there is nothing like a picture.

I had a "Web Analytics: An Hour A Day Fan Mail" flickr group that has some incredible pictures from around the world, bringing my audience closer to me.

I would love to do the same again for my "Web Analytics 2.0: Fan Mail". Be as creative as you want to be. Babies. Cats. Posters. Cars. Places. Or the best, you. All would be welcome.

I will only post the pictures with your permission. Please send them to blog at kaushik dot net. Thanks!

A Lovely Contest:

[The contest is closed now. Winning entry details.]

Steve Cunningham invited me to be a part of a little "contest" he is running. The prize is a delight, you get to win a pack of seven books on online marketing & social media: Six Pixels of Separation, The New Community Rules, The Whuffie Factor, Trust Agents, Crush It!, Duct Tape Marketing, and Web Analytics 2.0.

How to win you ask? Two ways.

1. Answer this question in comments below: If you were to measure the success of a company's social media efforts how would you do it?

Pick any social media channel, or all. Only a short answer is required. The most innovative / interesting answer wins. No answer is too small or too simple.

[If you have my book already then my answers in the book to this question will win you major brownie points, but perhaps not the contest! :)]

2. You can get four more chances to win, if you want. Simply visit these blogs and answer a different question on each: Steve Cunningham, Beth Kanter, Tara Hunt, and John Jantsch.

Good luck!

A Word of Thanks:

This is from my book's acknowledgment page…

I would like to express my deep appreciation to the readers of my blog, Occam’s Razor. In approximately three and a half years I have written 411,725 words in my 204 blog posts, and the readers of my blog have written 615,192 words in comments! Their engagement means the world to me and motivates me to make each blog post better than the last. It is impossible to thank each person, so on their behalf let me thank three: Ned Kumar, Rick Curtis, and Joe Teixeira.

A very solid case can be made for the fact that neither one of my books would exist without you and your engagement and encouragement.

Gracias. Arigato. Ngiyabonga. Xie xie. Obrigado. Shukriya.

Web Analytics 2.0 Book: In Stores Now!! is a post from: Occam's Razor by Avinash Kaushik

It is with immense excitement that I am sharing the news that I have just finished writing my second book!

Web Analytics 2.0:
The Art of Online Accountability & The Science of Customer Centricity

It is a long title ain't it? The good news is we are going to refer to it simply as Web Analytics 2.0.

In this post I wanted to share thoughts about the book, the process of writing it (and doing three rounds of edits!) and outcomes.

The Background

Since mid-2008 Willem Knibbe, my wonderful Acquisition Editor at Wiley, was very kindly encouraging me to update my (best selling!) first book, Web Analytics: An Hour a Day.

The "problem" was the book continued to sell at a nice rate and I was not sure what to update because 90% of the content was still current and relevant.

Still there was a lot of new stuff I had written, new models I had developed, new and more advanced techniques, new problems we were dealing with in the world and so on and so forth.

That lead to my proposal to Willem to write a new book that would use Web Analytics: An Hour a Day as a starting point. The second book would be an advanced book that would allow the first book's readers to truly become Super Analysis Ninjas, and for those that had not read the first book to have the finest possible immersion in web analytics.

And that's just what Web Analytics 2.0 is.

The 2.0 Book

The book's core philosophy is based on the framework you have seen me talk about on this blog. . . the quest to answer four key questions: the What, How Much, Why, and What Else. . .

The awesome thing about writing a advanced book is that I can start with a bang! No history and what not. It starts with: Here is how your world should look like and this is why its important, now let's get down to business.

That's by page 9. : )

And then it just keeps kicking it up a notch. Bam! Bam! Bam!

Like the first book this is not a book about Omniture or Xiti or Google Analytics. It is not a "press this button in the tool and then press that one" book.

It hopes to be brain food.

Here is how you should think. Here are the traps to avoid when picking key performance indicators. Here are the core analytical techniques you should apply. Here are a bunch of reality checks. Here is how to embrace outcomes, regardless of the size of business you have. Here is how to achieve higher highs with testing and by listening to customers (literally). Here is how you leverage your competitor's data. Here is how you becoming a true Analysis Ninja (step, by step, by step).

And none of that is even close to the coolest part of the book (see why I am so darn excited?).

There are so many topics I deal with each day that I have not had time to write about on the blog, all the things I practice all day long in the five jobs I hold.

The book gave me the impetus to write all that down.

So there are complete sections in the book that teach:

Why tracking the social web is such a massive problem.

How to measure success of blogs.

Meaningful non-crappy twitter analytics.

Mobile analytics! This was so much fun to write about.

Measuring rich applications whose primary usage happens with no internet connection.

And more such things.

But you might end up buying the book simply for Chapter 12, it covers two things that I think will rock your world:

1. Multi-touch campaign attribution analysis (dissected and presented in a way like you have not seen it any where, I think)

2. Multi-channel non-line analytics (practical tips, best practices, unique stories to inspire you)

Even after all that I was not completely satisfied. : ) There are two more new things to end the book. A complete chapter on how to start, nurture and advance a career in web analytics. The last chapter of the book is on how to overcome the hardest challenge of it all: creating a data driven organization!

The Writing Experience

This was a very hard book to write, in many ways harder than Web Analytics: An Hour a Day.

That's partly because this time around I had my full time job, my work with my start-up Market Motive, my advisory roles in three companies, my world travel to support my professional speaking career, my blogging (the only thing that suffered), and of course my family.

It is difficult to find time and energy to write a book with all that (and impossible without a magnificent wife who takes on three times a normal human's load to support you!). Especially to pull the writing and three rounds of edits in four months!

It was also hard because this is a much more advanced book with so many topics on the bleeding edge. It is hard to make sense of it all and understand it enough to apply a reality filter and then write something that people can apply today, and use for a very long time.

And yet it was a lot of fun to write this book.

I think that's primarily because with the first book I had no real sense for what the book would become, who it would impact, how far it would go.

This time around I have a much better sense for all that.

So many of you have written to me about all the ways the book has touched your lives. As I wrote this book that was constantly at the back of my mind. It pushed me to work harder and do better because I realized all the places it would go, all the people who will crack it open, all the expectations it had to meet.

I had this visual of all the people who might buy this book and how in some way something I wrote could have an impact on them. That was pressure, but it was also fun.

The Second Little Book That Could

Some of you know that my wife Jennie and I had decided that we would donate all the proceeds from the first book to charity. We had chosen The Smile Train and Doctor's Without Borders and split 50% of the proceeds between each.

My hope was that Web Analytics: An Hour a Day would sell enough for us to donate the $10,000 advanced we had received.

We have thus far received, and donated, 18 months worth of royalties from the book, approximately $70,000 (!!).

Not in my wildest dreams had I imagined that! And there is no way that we could have afforded to donate that much money.

In a very small way this blog and the book have helped other people in our lovely world. It has been an extremely gratifying experience for us.

With Web Analytics 2.0 we have decided to do the same again.

100% of my author proceeds from the book (and all the amazon affiliate sales) will be donated to The Smile Train and Ekal Vidyalaya.

Ekal Vidyalaya runs schools in remote locations that reach the poorest of the poor children in India. Without Ekal these children would have a very limited set of opportunities in life, if any.

When the going got really tough with this book the thing that kept me going was to produce a book that would have a big impact on people who buy it and a small impact on the charities Jennie and I choose.

The 411

The book can be pre ordered on amazon now, if you are so inclined.

It will be released mid-October 2009.

Wish me luck.

Web Analytics Books! is a post from: Occam's Razor by Avinash Kaushik

I am quite fond of saying that in the context of using methodologies like Surveys and Experimentation and Testing in service of improving web experiences.

Today I used that idea in a different context, ask you what was top of your mind so I could try and answer some of them. My question was very open ended.

Here's my simple tweet :

I got a boat load of questions on my twitter and facebook accounts. Some were a delight, others were like "what?" :), and there were some that made me pull my hair out. [Is that social media in a nutshell? :)]

In this post I'll cover all the questions I got on Twitter. I'll answer the ones from Facebook in the next post (this one got too long!).

But before I go on one important point of emphasis.

It's all about Outcomes baby!

A lot of questions fell into this bucket "what should I do" / "where should I start" / "how can I convince xyz of something". I am going to answer all those questions with this: Focus on what the Outcomes are that you / your company is driving towards.

I know it is the lamest thing someone could say, it even sounds like a cop out. It is not. This game is all about Outcomes!

Let me go out on a limb and say there are only three types of Outcomes any website delivers (except of corner cases – all you anal retentive folks take two steps back!):

1. Increase Revenue
2. Reduce Cost
3. Improve Customer Loyalty / Satisfaction

That's it.

When in doubt ask your self if what you are doing falls into one of those three buckets. If it does, keep going. If not then I suggest you revisit what you are doing.

I know there might be others Outcomes, but for most "business" sites it will be about those three and their derivatives. [Business sites could be for-profits or non-profits, ecommerce or non-ecommerce, blogs or tech support etc.]

Let's get this puppy on the road.

A selection of your questions on Twitter and my answers. . . .

@JudithLewis : How do you convince people to look beyond page impressions for usable measurable metrics?

I am not trying to be glib here, but you have to show them how pathetic those kinds of metrics are. If your HiPPO's quite large then replace pathetic with primitive. : )

Recently I have started saying that the only metrics that truly help find actionable insights are those that measure / reflect customer behavior.

Page impressions is a "aggregate metric" (like Visits or Unique Visitors or Page Views). They are all great to know the What. But they are not truly reflective of customer behavior.

Examples of customer behavior metrics are Visitor Loyalty, Visitor Recency or Distributions of Depth and Length of Visits etc. All things Visitors actually do on your site.

So the first time give them Impressions.

The next time be an Analysis Ninja and give them a little extra analysis focused on something related to outcomes ("we had these many page impressions but Visitors that came from source x had more impressions" or "I dug a bit deeper and found at the first page impression was key in getting people not to bounce and see more impressions" etc etc etc).

Change the world, one small step at a time.

@mthinker : How do we account for the one viewer who has more than one machine? for the user who is selectively blocking scripts?

Short answer: You can't.

Long answer: You can't. But….

If you have a non login, non spyware site like say this blog then "people" are transparent to you/me. I use cookies (see my privacy policy) and as you switch computers (or browsers on the same computers) you are a different Unique Visitor to me.

If you have a login site, like say www.turbotax.com (buy tax software from them!), where people are not logged in by default, then it is a bit difficult for you to "stitch" their behavior into one piece. But if you extract data our of your analytics tool or switch your unique tracking to something like the login id (that you have stored in a cookie or pass to your analytics tool in some other way) then for those that do log in you can "stitch behavior".

If you have a login site, like say www.amazon.com, where anyone who has shopped there is logged in my default then that makes it easier to "stitch behavior".

To the last part of your question, if they are blocking scripts then you are out of luck with your javascript tag based solutions (Google Analytics, Omniture, IndexTools, WebTrends etc). But if you use log based solutions (Urchin, WebTrends etc) then you can still track these folks. Expect a minor nightmare trying to "merge" the two sources together.

Important. Do ask yourself this question: What is the ROI for perfection? or Do I really need 100% "accuracy" to do my job and create a great site?

There is more data on the web than on any other channel (TV, Radio, Magazines etc). It is a lot more and with a lot more confidence (just dig one inch below the surface of how TV is measured). Even with no cookies, even with cookie deletion, even with people switching computers you can make decisions and improve your site and add to your bottomline.

Don't get conned into chasing your tail (and let me stress I am not saying that you in particular are!). Leave that to Consultants, Gurus, Bloggers (me!).

Bonus reading: Perfection Is Dead, Long Live Perfection

@seanpower : How do you define and measure ROI in social media? SM is great, but when is active participation enough or overkill?

Outcomes baby! : )

I have to admit that I think that any company should participate in Social Media simply because it is important to be where your customers are, it is important to be a genuine part of the conversation.

It does not cost much (just buy Red Bull for the knowledgeable 23 yr old in your company). It can yield long term ROI.

With that in mind the most important measure of ROI is to know that you are actually participating in the conversation and (more importantly) creating conversation.

So for blogs it is measuring RSS Subscribers (people want to pull your messages, yea!), Ripple Index (using technorati "authority" until something better comes along, no not Google Blog Search!) and Conversation Rate.

More here: Blog Metrics: Six Recommendations For Measuring Your Success

For Twitter there are such measures as well. To me twitter is a great channel to magnify your message (if it is of value). So I use retweetrank.

So is IntelSoftware doing better than avinashkaushik? No. How about TXInstruments? Yes!

It's a simple example of Outcomes (magnify the message), but should give you a feel for how to move forward.

@mlvalentine : Most of my WA challenges are w/ explaining how it works and why it won't add up like a balance sheet to non-WAs.

I wish I had a good answer, I don't. It is pretty hard.

What is worse is that we live in a world where most Sr. Management / Decision Makers (and many Web Analysts!) have grown up in a world where two plus two equals four. Not three point five or four point seven.

It is really hard to change their minds, or get them to believe that anything that does not add up is still worth a lot.

In my career I have always tried to show that the data collection is as rigorous as possible (clean tags, first party cookies etc) and then switch to showing value from what is available.

For example even with 90% confidence it is hard to argue with actionability of most web analytics data. Or even with 70% confidence. We just have so dammed much and there is so much in there of value.

There is a list of why data won't be clean in this post: Data Quality Sucks, Let’s Just Get Over It

It also contains a six step plan that you can execute to win your lovely HiPPO's over.

@nectarios : How do you convince c-level execs of the power of web analytics and more importantly to invest in the human power necessary?

You are in luck. I have a specific post that covers just this:

Lack Management Support or Buy-in? Embarrass Them!

Here are the five specific recommendations:

# 1: Implement a Experimentation & Testing Program.

# 2: Capture Voice of Customer. Surveys, Remote Usability, Whatever.

# 3: Deploy the Benchmarks I Say, Deploy ‘em Now!

# 4: Competitive Intelligence is Your New Best Friend.

# 5: Hijack a Friendly Website (/ Earn Your Right to be Heard).

Check out the details in the post.

@midlakewinter : For a blog & corporate site on same domain. Measure together or as separate entities?

To a great extent it depends on your company, the types of customers you are targeting and their technical sophistication. So do please consider that.

But.

Based on my experience in analyzing a bunch of these cases I have come to realize that it is often optimal to measure them as separate entities because they tend to solve two different problems.

A good example is Bonobos. The site is at http://www.bonobos.com/ and the blog is at http://www.bonobos.com/blog/

I had analyzed their site last year for Inc Magazine and one of the things the data showed was that the audience that came to the blog would buy some pants from time to time but mostly they were there for the community and learning what the company was up to etc. So high bounces (which is ok in this case) etc.

On the other hand the "corp" site was there as the main store front, to attract and covert new visitors, to sell etc. While some of them would read the blog and perhaps be convinced to buy the pants, that was a small number.

The content consumption pattern (and Primary Purpose!) of each audience was different so it would have been optimal to measure and report separately.

Just as a small example high bounce rate in one case would be ok, but not in the other. So you could understand data better.

I have seen this frequently. Hope this helps you with a framework of how to think of deciding in your case.

[Full disclosure: I did not get a pair of pants for doing the bonobos analysis. Though it would not have hurt my feelings if I had gotten one! :)]

@brandingme : Can i pass a techie question by you?!?!?! see explanation here: http://bit.ly/h70XO

I'll summarize Adrian's issue.

He was using this to track a link to a flash app:

http://www.example.com/#/register?utm_source=source&utm_medium=medium&utm_campaign=campaign

The # does not work optimally.

So he moved to this:

http://www.example.com/?utm_source=source&utm_medium=medium&utm_campaign=campaign/#/register

The problem is that it works. Ok that is not his problem. :) His problem is that he does not like the url stem to stay, its "ugly". [Did I get that right Adrian?]

Here is what can be done in this case.

You can still use the first url stem /#/register? but you'll use a special Google Analytics function called setAllowAnchor.

Here's more information on exactly how to use setAllowAnchor.

Then birds will sing, the sun will shine and life will be a bed of roses. :)

[I want to thank my buddy Nick for helping me with this answer.]

@Omni_man : I'd be interested in best practices of connecting online browsing to offline success when there is little to connect the two.

Adam is absolutely right, with the missing Primary Key to tie the two data sets it is really hard to connect online (anonymous) visitors to, say, store visits.

If people say they can do "holistic view analysis" or "multichannel magnificence" easily then view them with suspicion. Please. Especially if they are selling you a tool. Pretty please.

There are some cases where the Primary Key exists and this is possible. Two good examples are www.walmart.com and www.safeway.com where online Visitors and, surely, online Purchasers are encouraged to use their Store Card (safeway) or pick up in a store (walmart). Both of those things with some difficulty allow you to merge the data and get a offline to online view.

Remember it would still happen outside your web analtyics tool, usually in a corporate data warehouse.

So what about the rest of us?

You can follow seven different strategies to measure Multi Channel impact. Each will give you a better idea of a website's incremental offline impact (even if not as direct as we discussed above).

Here's the post: Tracking Offline Conversions: Hope, Seven Best Practices, Bonus Tips

[Dear Readers: If you use Omniture I highly recommend Adam's blog, it is very good.]

@jarmes : I want analytics data justifying the removal of main navigation :-)

I commend you on your bravery. :)

You have only one option: Test!

More here:

Experimentation and Testing: A Primer and

Experiment or Die. Five Reasons And Awesome Testing Ideas.

Let me know how it turns out.

@ncabane : My juicest. mundane daily challenge is to attract people to my blog and to the company i work for, using analytics.

Use tools like Insights for Search to identify related keywords and optimize your paid search and organic efforts to attract a wider repertoire of searchers.

Absolutely positively have a search long tail strategy, that's were the "impression virgins" are.

Use tools like www.compete.com to do a diff between your referrers and your competitors referrers. Then steal them!

Its the Referral Analytics report, looks like this (comparing www.intel.com and www.amd.com):

Seriously though far too often we focus on our own web analytics data, Google Analtyics and Omniture and WebTrends and what not. What you want is to look outside, that's were joy exists.

@Edw3rd : A hard question is determining salability (predictability) of a particular approach or campaign…success is historical

This is the problem with twitter, 140 characters are simply not enough.

So Edward I don't really understand your question. But let me try. . .

With regards to campaigns it is important to realize there are three problems that stymie your ability to replicate success or, importantly, scale it.

1) Diminishing Margins of Return. You will surely hit this, all the time. So just because this campaign worked so well from 100 to 10,000 users, you can bet every use after that will be really hard.

2) Inventory. Most of us don't realize there is a finite inventory out there. For people who search for something. For people who want to buy something from you. For your raw ability to keep succeeding. These are usually hard to predict.

3) You got lucky. There is no other channel quite as complex as the web, in terms of the number of variables. It is also friction less. So your past success for a campaign, or a series of campaigns could be 100% luck. It could be because of things your competitor did. Or that it was your lucky day and you got on the front page of www.digg.com . Or….

Keep those three things in mind. The only way out? You try, you live, you learn. Remember the greatest gift the web gives you is the ability to fail faster (cheaply).

Hope I am a bit close to what you wanted to know.

Bonus Read: Data Mining And Predictive Analytics On Web Data Works?

@tonysingh : What are the key measurements for media sites?

I am sure you know all the ones related to ad sales etc etc.

Let me recommend two more: Visitor Loyalty and Visitor Recency .

I fundamentally believe that many media sites focus first on making money and secondarily on creating loyal customers. It should be reverse.

If you want my humble prescription for media sites (publishers) then here it is:

Rethinking Decision-Making in a 2.0 World.

@airsibel : Missing or inaccurate data that does not align with database figures. Perfect data in web analytics, is it an Utopia?

Sadly it is difficult to achieve, its just the nature of the beast. For now.

Things will change.

But this does not mean you can't take action. The first post has a six step action plan you can follow, the second shares my view of the value of perfection:

Data Quality Sucks, Let’s Just Get Over It

Perfection Is Dead, Long Live Perfection

@itwop : What insight/action does my competitor get out of his analytics that I'm overlooking/ignoring?

The only way to find out is call her! :)

@abba_dad : What did my customers do before/after/between visits to my website?

For before you'll get some clues in your referrers, keywords, etc data.

For after use the Destinations report in Referral Analytics in Compete.

For between visits, call them (your customers)!

@pere_rovira : What reports should i look at today and why?

The best person to answer that question is you.

If I had to recommend one simply based on what is in that tweet, I would say focus on reports that measure one or all three of the Outcomes mentioned at the start of this post.

Because that will ensure you'll show value of your job / consulting contract.

@wuterence : Where Does the Everyday Marketing Manager Start????

I have the most perfect blog post for you:

A primer on Web Analytics: Five Steps to Success.

Hurray, all done!

I hope you had fun and found the answers to be relevant and meaningful to you in some small way, even if you did not ask the question.

Ok now your turn.

Would you have answered these questions as I did? What would you have done differently? Please add your own thoughts.

Thanks.

Dear Avinash: Top Web Analytics Questions, Twitter Edition is a post from: Occam's Razor by Avinash Kaushik

1) Quick reflection on a birthday.

2) My perspective on the benefits from blogging.

Hopefully you'll have as much fun reading this as I did writing the post.

Act 1.

Occam's Razor (the web analytics blog, not the principle!) is exactly two years old today. First post: Traditional Web Analytics is Dead.

I can't believe it has been two years, at the same time I am absolutely ecstatic about the journey so far. It seems like I have lived three different lives during that time. Crazy. Cool.

At the end of the first few weeks my wonderful wife was worried that I would run out of content, and wisely counseled me to slow down my posting (twice a week). I was worried too. Now looking back I can't believe it has been two years! [161 Posts, 283,496 Words in posts, approximately 900 images!]

Perhaps the biggest thrill is your participation, your engagement, your support and all you encouragement. This is no way that I would put in almost 24 hours a week into this were it not for that gift of your time. [3,306 Comments by you (plus 359 comments by me), 232,057 Words in comments (plus 79,657 by me), 20 Comments on avg per post!!] Thank you. I am deeply appreciative.

This being a web analytics blog what would a anniversary post be without a KPI. There are many ways to measure success of a blog , Visitors and Comments and Technorati and ROI and so much more.

If I had to pick one metric (Critical Few!) this would be it:

The reason I like Feed Subscribers is because it is "permission marketing" at its best. This is a social medium and it is a extra (perhaps slightly painful) step to sign up. By signing up you also give me permit the blog to be pushed to you, in the world of "marketing 2.0" I can't think of a better asset to have.

I have to admit that I am tickled pink that the blog has just under 10,000 subscribers. When I started writing my expectation that the upper limit was 500, after all how many people in this world could possibly care about something as esoteric as web analytics.

Every week the Subs go up and I look at with a child like bewilderment, I thank you for that.

[Let me hasten to add that like everything in web analytics the absolute number matters less, its the trend over time that is important.]

Act 2.

I had no idea about what benefits I would get from blogging.

It all started for me at a conference in Phoenix Andy Beal strongly suggested I start a blog, and he also provided all the initial guidance. But even after I started the blog I had no expectations of any "return on investment". I just wanted to share my lessons and perspectives, just give something back.

Reflecting back now I have am impressed in small and big ways in which the blog has benefited me in the last two years.

Here are some ways in which your blog might benefit you (in no apparent order). . . .

Let's dive in and look at them in a bit more detail, and have some fun.

You might end up writing a book.

Ok I admit that this might happen less than always, but I know of six other books in the last few months that were all sourced from blogs. One on cartoons, one on presentations, one about reputation and more. So while it might seem to be a stretch, I think it is not. Atleast not as much as you might imagine.

I never set out to be an author. The call from Wiley surprised me. It took a couple months before we agreed. It was painful to have a full time job and all the other stuff and write a book. But the result is fantastic.

I am very proud of Web Analytics: An Hour A Day, it has sold beyond my wildest dreams (and is still on the top 1,000 books sold on Amazon almost every day, 11 months later!).

One of our earliest decisions, even before we signed a contract, was to donate all our proceeds to charity. Jennie and I wrote a chq for each our two charities for $9,000 each after four months of sale. I can't wait for our next chq (at the end of May '08).

So you should blog because you might become an Author plus you could end up helping so many other people (from your knowledge, and perhaps financially). And that's a good thing.

You'll have friends / "groupies" around the world!

Last month there were a little over 40,000 unique visitors to this blog. Way more friends that I could ever have imagined. Ok, not all of them are friends! I kid, I kid.

People walk up to me all the time now and just start talking. They are always sweet, they say nice things about the blog and its value to them. They almost always say: "Oh I feel like I have known you for years!". They refer to specific posts or emails I might have replied. It is amazing and it is nice to have this network develop.

You'll also end up making some pen-pals, and some of them will spread your message. You'll have your own small troop of evangelists!

And you can't forget the connections you'll end up making through this most social of environments. I know so many more people know, big and small and giant. People I would otherwise have never known, the six degrees of separation truly become six pixels of separation on the blog world.

With 50% non-US traffic from this blog I have friends now pretty much in all corners of the world. People who engage in a conversation, one to one or one to many, each week. And that's a good thing (and quite surprising for a introvert!).

You'll never need a resume again.

I hated updating my resume. It is such a brilliantly inefficient medium to communicate your value proposition.

[Sidebar: Oh and it would take me hours and hours to tell you horror stories about people how looked like God's gift to humanity (ok, our company) from their resume and who were absolute dud's five seconds after they opened their mouths in interviews.]

Now when situations of resumes arise, I send the url for the blog. The longer it exists the more valuable it becomes as a alternative resume.

On blogs you can't fake it (atleast not for a very long time) and it so perfectly reflects your intelligence, your character, your values, your smarts (or lack there of) and so on and so forth. You can "fake" the piece of paper, you can't fake a blog.

Of course the flip side is also true. If you have a great blog you might not have to go look for a job. They'll come find you. I am sure all the bloggers in our space get atleast two job offers a week. :)

And here is perhaps the nicest benefit of having your own blog (and making sure your potential new employer has it and has sent it to the interview committee): They won't ask you silly questions.

They have a good idea of who you actually are and smart interviewers just get to the point. And that is a good thing.

You can establish your personal brand (/microbrand).

When I started writing the blog I had bunch things I was not going to do. No self promotion. No simply responding to other blogs. No being mean. Nothing that distracts from the focus areas I had chosen. No non value added stuff. And so on and so forth.

In hindsight it ended up creating a unique "brand", and now the blog in many ways reflects brand "Avinash". A set of values, something different from others, something me. The brand has its own set of attributes, expectations and promises.

That in of itself is would have been impressive. What was a wonderful surprise was how much that brand can stand on its own. I am still a small blogger. But through the "power" of this blog I have a brand that can stand apart and on its own, even after it was associated with something as astonishingly huge as Google.

Here is the last brand value argument: I control it.

Through my posts, the images, the ideas presented, my comments and emails and everything else I get to set what brand "Avinash" represents. So people can still try to take a weed whacker to it, but through your platform you maintain the brand.

Having that platform is the biggest gift you'll get from your blog. And that is a good thing.

[Bonus Link: The Brand Called You - by Tom Peters. I read this 1997 article a long time ago and it has shaped a lot of my thinking about "brand you", I highly recommend it.]

You could become an "influencer".

A email Stephane wrote to me made me realize how fantastic blogs are at creating "influencers". He described how at the eMetrics Insights Day he was invited to present industry insights on a panel along with Jupiter and Nielsen.

Pause and think about it for a second.

Two big established companies with budgets of millions and years in the "business". And one, like me, "small" blogger. And he has the power and the authority as a result of his blog (and WASP ).

Now to be honest Stephane is brilliant and get's invited to do this all the time. But even someone like me gets invited all the time to "analyst briefings" (sadly I decline most of them) and meeting with CEO's and yes even gets sent nice gifts. :) Trimmings that in the past were reserved for the elite few.

For the longest time the loud voices belonged to the "experts" and "analysts". Forrester and Jupiter and Gartner and others had a hold on the "influencing" market. They continue to have a voice, but it is no longer the voice.

Through your blog you have the power to be a "influence powerhouse", provide an authentic voice of someone who actually knows, and provide a valuable service to the world.

The ability to influence others is now a lot more democratic. Next up on stage, Stephane, Nielsen, Forrester and You!

And that is a good thing.

You could end up creating a business.

Many people start a blog for this reason, to create a presence for their company or themselves. Perhaps sell some things or just flog their brilliance or get leads / clients. All perfectly legitimate and it could work for you as well.

I think the only condition is that you give something remarkable and of value to your readers.

If your blog meets those two conditions then I think you are kosher and the blog can be a great asset for your business.

For me personally the blog has not been a business. In total I have received two speaking engagements in two years sourced directly to the blog, and zero consulting engagements etc.

But that is not a surprise because I have deliberately not advertised my services, asked people to hire me and only once asked people to buy my book.

Part an attribute of what I want the blog to stand for, part the "Avinash brand" and part karma.

This is something I love doing and I am thrilled that I don't have to do things to monetize the blog. But of course each blogger is in a different position and I know many bloggers who make a nice living off their blog. And that's a good thing.

You can tell your spouse: "Honey, I am kind of a big deal!"

Like all couples we'll sometimes end up having a mild tiff about something. Jennie normally wins these, mostly because she is usually right (and I like thinking that I am not wrong, just less right :)).

Sometimes when I have exhausted all my other arguments / points I'll pause and tell her my latest feed subscriber (or UV number) and say: I have ten thousand feed subscribers. You know, I am kind of a big deal!

Yes grasping at straws, but it does feel good to put that on the table. And as you can imagine, it rarely works!

It does result in her pausing for a few seconds. Helps me think of something else to bolster my weak case. Getting that time to think as a result of your blog, its a good thing!

[The image above is dedicated to my dear friends in the C&A team, especially CHild!]

Bonus: You'll have a "legacy".

I am a sap. I think of stuff like this.

I write because I love writing but a nice side effect is that I have this body of work that some day my kids will read and perhaps get to know a different side of their dad. I wish it were something a lot more exciting and interesting, but nonetheless it is something I am very proud of and maybe they will be too some day.

We don't leave anything except the impacts of our actions behind. For me these words are another way of leaving a trail. I cherish that tremendously.

Convinced about the value of having a blog (personal or business)? Ready to start and build something wonderful of your own? It takes hard work but, as you can see above, it is well worth it.

Ok now its your turn.

How long have you been reading Occam's Razor? How did you find it? What is the one thing of value that you get from it? Do you have a particularly favorite post? Or perhaps a favorite Occam's Razor story? If you blog, what benefit do you get from your blog?

I would love to get your stories and feedback, what better way to celebrate two years! Thanks.

PS:
Couple other related posts you might find interesting:

• Ten More Blogging Tips From A Novice Blogger
• Blogging: How-to’s, Technical Tips and Best WordPress Plugins
• Blog Metrics: Six Recommendations For Measuring Your Success
• Nine Rules To Work / Live By

Benefits Of Blogging – A Practitioner's Perspective is a post from: Occam's Razor by Avinash Kaushik

Then a picture arrives in the mail. Solves the problem.

Why the dilemma?

Because it has been the a year of change and transformation: eight months of being an independent consultant, six months of being a published author, five months of being MarketMotive's co-founder, and along the way being a Speaker and Online Marketing consultant and general running around the US and Canada.

The picture though brought all that into perspective and crystallized the wonderful theme of the year: meeting all of you. It is the last picture on this page, and you'll what I mean – a perfectly beautiful picture for this time of the year, and there's the book! :)

Through the book, the blog and through all my speaking engagements . Lots of chances and opportunities to meet the people of web analytics .

Many of you, on my request, have shared your wonderful and creative pictures with my book Web Analytics: An Hour A Day . It is a kind gesture from all of you and I have a lot of fun seeing where the book has traveled and hearing your stories.

This post showcases some of your pictures (and please send me your picture, I love 'em!) because more than anything this has been a year of the blog empowering me to launch the book which has been successful beyond my wildest expectations.

The book has 43 reviews on Amazon, my goal was 75 (if you have read the book please consider writing a review for it on amazon.com). We are well on my way to meeting the goal! Thanks to all of you!!

The other goal was a donation goal. 100% of my proceeds from the book (author proceeds as well as amazon affiliate sales) are donated to charity. The book was launched in June and my goal was to donate $10,000 by the end of 2007 (six months of sales).

Two weeks ago I wrote a chq for $18,000 from my first payment from Wiley (covering a period of June – Oct). The Smile Train and Doctors Without Borders each got $9,000. All that from a little first time effort in a niche area of web analytics.

I am both proud and humbled.

Proud to help the to charities in a tiny way. Humbled at what you all have helped me achieve, your support means so much. Thank you.

Now here are the pictures of the people of web analytics with Web Analytics: An Hour A Day…..

David Hughes in Gwynedd, Wales, and yes that is a RAF Hawk in the background. This wonderful picture was taken by David's son Ben at Tal Y Llyn, very impressive!! David is actually in Web Analytics: An Hour A Day. I quote his wonderful idea of Non-Line Marketing.
 

In between breaks at Omniture University our good friend Simon Chen catches up on Web Analytics: An Hour A Day!!
 

Beth's not quite at University level yet, but is still getting a head start in Web Analytics! A bright future awaits no doubt. :)
 

Another tough day of working at home in Seattle ends with a gorgeous sunset. Time to close the book and the laptop and get on with other more important matters.
 

While for David from Holland the journey on EuroRail means work time. He kindly includes his notes in the picture, I am very impressed. Did you notice the Trinity? :)
 

Stephane and Maia help the Wicker Emporium in Canada thrive, the book does its tiny small part. Notice the nice Jaguar in the reflection?
 

Alexander (second from the left) wrote very kind words about the stress on Qualitative analysis and sent this nice picture with rest of his crew at myfamily.com. That's Shane, Alexander, Rick (book on head), Jim and Chris, thanks guys!
 

Fernando and Beatriz strike a pose in Spain. You saw Fernando's website fotonatura.org showcased in my last post: Web Analytics Demystified. If you have noticed my own humble attempts at macro photography you'll know why I am a huge fan of Fotonatura.
 

Shirley owns and runs American Bridal, she posed for this picture are SES SJC at the MarketMotive booth. The thing that impressed me the most was all the post-its that were stuck to various pages of the book, it is true delight for a author to know his work is more than a paper weight! Thanks Shirley!!
 

All work and no play makes Ben a…. very smart guy! In fact smart enough to be a Conversion Rate Expert!! Ben's enjoying the book in jolly old England.
 

Finally the picture that inspired this post! "On Christmas morning in the year 2007 I got started on my life journey in the hottest career on the planet: Web Analytics!!" I hope there were other presents under the tree as well!!!

I hope you have enjoyed the pictures.

If you want to see some older pictures you'll find them in these two posts:

July – The People Of Web Analytics: An Hour A Day and
Aug – Five Thousand Times Two Translates Into Goodness

Thanks to everyone who made the effort to share the pictures, I really appreciate that very much. It is never too late to send me your picture! I would love to have it.

Here's to a great 2008 for us all. Happy Analytics.

PS: Hello from lovely and historical Macau.

Web Analytics Blog: Reflections is a post from: Occam's Razor by Avinash Kaushik