Occam’s Razor by Avinash Kaushik

Reality: A small fraction of people who can benefit from data actually use it.

This is especially true for the world of web analytics.

I realize as we swim around our fish bowl this seems hard to believe. :)

But it is very true.

Sure one problem is that many Fortune xxx companies don’t even have a web analytics solution or, worse, are paying z millions for it and using it to report page views.

Either little or quite sub optimal use. And that’s a shame because you can get a lot lot lot more from the web analytics tool.

So why are we in this sad state?

In talking to many Marketers and Sales folks and Website Owners and “Management” it becomes clear that much of the hype about web analytics being like climbing to Mount Everest or being useless or messy or full of “dirty data” has sunk in quite deep. [Tears rolling here.]

Or “web analytics” auto translates into people’s minds as “counting hits”. [Uncontrollable sobbing by me at this point!]

People would rather pull off a finger nail than learn how to leverage their website data. [Large clumps of hair pulled out, to clean the aforementioned tears!!]

This is all soo sad because the reality is that. . . .

Web Analytics is like Angelina Jolie: It’s sexy, it kicks butt, and is a goodwill ambassador!!

Right?

We believe it, but how do we get to a point where others in the organization do as well?

Step One for each and everyone of us (and you are unique and abnormal in that you read a web analytics blog!) is to accept and recognize the fact that Web Analytics might be having a lot less impact than it should. Once you accept then you can move on and do something about it.

Step Two is to realize it is a challenge to win a Olympic medal in swimming, but that should not scare you from trying to learn to swim and get pretty good at it. There is a shallow end of the pool where it is easy to get started and get better over time. Nothing wrong with wanting to compete at the Beijing Olympics of course, just make sure upfront that that is what you are shooting for with your effort: one massive payoff after a lifetime of investing.

Step Three is to try and get everyone in your organization just a bit more excited about using data, make it more appealing than pulling off finger nails. Maybe even attempt to convert them into Raving Data Lunatics (people who will do anything to get their hands on data before making their next decision!).

A reader’s email started this whole train of thought:

I’m going to try to convince decision makers within my company that they should start incorporating web analytics in their everyday work. However, these people have more than enough on their table and adding another task on their todo list is easier said than done, to say the least.

My question is: Have you run in to this before and do you have any good tips on how to approach these people in order to make them all fired up for the task and adding it to their todo list without hesitation?

See yourself reflected in this reader’s email? I am sure we all find ourselves in that situation from time to time.

Go do Step One and Step Two first, then here’s how to do Step Three. . . .

# 1: Do Something Surprising: Don’t Puke Data Out.

You are undeniably smart. When we get a new job or interact with a new team or get our first web analytics tool installed our first tendency is to impress the Marketers and Decision Makers with the quantity of data we have.

We proceed to puke data out.

Reports go out. The adventurous amongst you might even export into excel and proceed to send 16 tab spreadsheets with every conceivable number anyone could want, along with the directions to heaven.

Try to resist.

That is what they expect, by now, and they are wary of data pukes.

Surprise them.

Give them a gift, a gift of an answer.

Go have a conversation with someone who wants to talk to you and listen. Ask these questions:

“Please tell me a little bit about your job?“
“What aspects of your life / job touch our website?“
“What’s one question you wish you could get answered about our website, or what’s one thing you could learn from our website Visitors?“

Now go back and answer that one solitary question. Don’t send a report back. Call them and tell them the answer. They’ll be hooked after you do this once or twice.

Now teach them to fish (metaphorically of course).

Remember you can’t convince people by puking data out, you can’t expect that “they’ll figure it out“, and repeating things sixteen times or moping about how “they don’t get it ” does not work.

Smile, go have a conversation and go back with a answer. How is it possible that that won’t work? You are so pretty!

# 2: Start With Outcomes / Measuring Impact, Not Visits.

Just open any web analytics tool and you’ll notice that Visits and Visitors and Time on Site and Repeat Visits and Pages and other such stuff stares at you.

Go ahead try it, I’ll wait here. Check out any one you like: Google Analytics or Omniture or WebTrends or CoreMetrics or the one your brother-in-law just invented (the one that proactively sends a small electric shock to Visitors who abandon shopping carts on your website).

And like duty bound people that we are we rush that out of the door. We try to explain cookies and time on site and exits to our Decision Makers.

You might as well be taking Japanese (unless you in Japan, in that case you might as well be talking Hindi).

When you start make sure you start by showing how wonderful Web Analytics is at measuring Outcomes, the reason for your website’s existence.

Show them how much money your website is making. Show them how many leads you got. Show them Macro and Micro Conversions. Show them how the site is solving for driving traffic to your retail stores, or movie theaters.

All those things they get! And they’ll be hooked.

Then they’ll ask:

Angie, where do these people come from?
Jennifer, how come that is only $14 million, what about all the great persuasive content we have?
Maya, is this right, only 15 people out of 20 million checked out our store locator, why do you think it is (because the link is invisible!)?
Michelle, so you are telling me our pathetic website is generating more leads than all our sales people combined?

See what I am saying?

They will ask you for “traditional web analytics ” data, but if you start there they will have very little appreciation for why it is important to listen to you. What’s your hook? Not the purple shirt and pretty jeans you are wearing today. Its Outcomes and Impact.

Go back to wearing kakhi’s, and give them the addictive stuff.

Or to put it in Bill Clinton’s famous phrase: It’s the outcomes stupid .

# 3: Create Heros & Role Models (and no, not yourself, put your red cape back).

It is really hard to convert the entire organization, and it does not matter if you have 50 people or 20,000. And here is the other troubling factor: why should they all, at the same time, listen to you? And do you even think you can excite everyone all at the same time with something generic? And. . . . I can go on about the reasons.

Find someone receptive to your advances (and I don’t mean in that way). Find a willing partner, find someone with low hanging fruit or with a willingness to listen to you or someone who will atleast let you tag the site right or someone who is spending a lot of money or someone with a small site or. . . . you catch my drift.

Now put your heart and soul and all your skills as a Analysis Ninja in finding them actionable insights. Live and breath their business (ps: this is always a good idea). Make the Decision Maker a absolute hero from data driven decision making.

Here is the amazing piece of human psychology: Heros rarely want to stay in their cubicle farm / corner office and be happy. They want to fly around (in your red cape no less!) and talk about their heroism. They want to share (/brag).

Let them tell your data story. Let them excite their peers. Let them show how they did it.

And here is the amazing thing: You still come out on top.

The other Decision Makers / Marketers will, again human psychology, get jealous and will want to themselves become heros (or get a higher bonus as well). They will ask the original hero how she/he got so smart. Guess where all the roads will point: You my dear.

Go ahead sit down on your gray chair and smile a evil smile, and don’t forget to stroke that white cat as you smile! :)

Ok so that is me just teasing you a bit, but you can never go wrong by creating evangelists for the impact data can have on a business. Create those evangelists, make them heros, let them sell.

You just go find a gray chair and look for a white cat! Ok ok I’ll stop now!!

# 4: Web Analytics 2.0 Baby! Use Your Customers & Competitors.

HiPPO’s might not listen to you. Marketers will be full of themselves. Even your boss won’t really pay attention to you.

Here is the dirty little secret: You have two powerful weapons - your Customers & Competitors!

I have consistently found that few HiPPO’s or Marketers or Decision Makers will argue with your Customers, and hence customer insights. You can tell them all you want that dancing monkeys on the home page don’t work. But give them that same feedback from 4Q (a free survey - checkout the improved invitation ) and bam the dancing monkeys are gone!

So use this power.

Figure out what your best customer listening channels might be (oh and clickstream is not a direct customer listening channel, I call it Behavior analysis, here I am recommending Experience analysis - more: Trinity Strategy ).

The other great strategy is to build excitement by using competitor metrics (say using something like compete.com or hitwise.com or other sources - say customer satisfaction survey indices).

No one wants to look bad in comparison to their competitors and everyone wants to beat them with ever more consistency! Leverage this!

Present analysis about share of search or media mix modeling or upstream and downstream traffic or task completion or other such things.

Don’t you think Marketers at DHL will be so much more happier with the above graph (”oh what are we doing so well!”) and ones at FedEx and UPS will want to know how to get better.

Problem of excitement solved!

# 5: If You Want Excitement, Make It Fun!

Ok ok so perhaps not everyone thinks Analytics is Angelina Jolie. (Boy that was hard to say!) But have you tried to make it Sexy and Fun?

(Oh I totally forgot to ask you: Have you drunk the Kool-Aid? Forget almost all of the above if you are not convinced that Analytics is Angelina Jolie. Nothing harder than trying to convince people of something you don’t believe in.)

There are so many small and big things you can do to make Web Analytics fun.

Do #2 on this list first, it is always extremely sexy and in fashion to make money / improve conversions / measure multichannel impact. But try some of these other things as well. . . .

Hold contests.

The first time we ran a multivariate test we wanted everyone excited (and learn some statistics) and so I had a contest. $1 to get in and the challenge was to guess by how much conversion rate would improve from that first test.

Oh boy everyone wanted a piece of it. We had 25 dollars I think before the test started. Guesses were all over the place, 5% and 20% and 9% and …. As soon as the test was live they were all checking the Offermatica results (and I had explain statistical significance!) and asking why B was not winning or D or whatever they were rooting for.

It was a hoot. And they learned about testing and a very valuable lesson: That to have huge impact on conversions you need to create versions that are very different. You see the conversion in that test only went up by 0.75%.

The winner had guessed .65% (and was laughed at before the test started because it was such a low number). I was the winner. And I put the $25 to buy cookies for the office. :)

Do such stuff. Have a quarterly contest to the person who figures out the most useless metric on your “golden blessed dashboard”. Or the Marketer that figures out the most creative use of VOC. Or the department that logs the most actions taken. Or . . . . you are more creative than I’ll ever be.

People love to play, and they love to win. Tap into that.

Hold Internal “Conferences”.

Why is it that you need to go out to learn and share? Why not hold a half day “conference” in your own company every quarter where Marketers come and show off their key learnings to everyone else?

Find the biggest conference room you can find (or book a conference room at a nearby hotel), mike them up, have them do presentations, let them teach.

People will learn from each other, but it is also exciting (and a honor) to stand up and present and teach. Oh don’t forget to invite their bosses.

If you want to go all out, print shirts (you can get them for as little as 15 bucks!) or, this works really well, hand out a plaque to the presenters (something they can proudly display on their desk, trust them they will - right Jeff? :).

Notice you also just made someone a hero.

Hold Office Hours.

We often live in our caves (with our Angelina Jolie posters!). All requests have to come in via the ticketing system, it will be “prioritized”, Excel goes out.

Sad.

Each week set aside half a day where anyone can come and ask you (/your team) any question they want. About a existing report or for some ad hoc analysis or for how to access / interpret report. This is not so much fun as much as you’ll become more accessible and people will know that when they want to learn you are there.

Or have a scheduled hour where you invite Marketers / Decision Makers and have them shout out questions and you show them live with ClickTracks or IndexTools or AdCenter Analytics how you can answers their questions on the spot!

Fun is your friend.

End of the story. . . .

Web Analytics is exciting. It can be a amazing high when you figure out a new way to analyze the data, or answer a real business problem. Sometimes you answer a particularly tough Marketing problem and then Web Analytics can even be a orgasmic experience.

But you need to think different.

Try the above tips, and I wish you all the very best in exciting your organization (big or small).

Ok now your turn. Would you care to share some of your insights? Big or small? What has worked for you? Please share your own strategies and success stories. Thank you.

PS:
Couple other related posts you might find interesting:

• Six Rules For Creating A Data Driven Boss!
• Seven Steps to Creating a Data Driven Decision Making Culture
• Convert Data Skeptics: Document, Educate & Pick Your Poison
• Competitive Intelligence Analysis: Metrics, Tips & Best Practices
• Five Free “Advanced” Web Analytics Examples: Look Outside, Think Different
• Multiplicity: Succeed Awesomely At Web Analytics 2.0!

We love our conversion rates. :) Really really.

Part of me is glad because my book and the Trinity strategy and the Web Analytics 2.0 mindset all stress the importance of measuring Outcomes.

No Outcomes = No Happiness.

But I have come to realize that we are not being the best we can be by focusing on just the overall website conversion rate. We are leaving money on the table. We are not getting enough credit. We are not getting a good understanding of the complete picture. We are being short sighted.

Regardless of why your website exists it is quite likely that there is a rich diversity in reasons why people come to your website (hence the core pitch to understanding Primary Purpose using 4Q: The Best Free Online Survey For A Website). Conversion being just one of them (“please please let me in, I want to be converted!!”).

What about those who refuse to be converted online?

You worked hard (hopefully!) to get them to the site, if they did not convert did you accomplish nothing?

Hence my recommendation:

Let me explain.

This “picture” represents a typical website and measurement of it’s success, what’s the word I am looking for. . . . oh conversions. . . . : )

You have your two percent conversion rate (though just to be generous I am probably showing a number much higher than that above). You should be happy, atleast you are up to some benchmarks in that space.

But what do you do in terms of measuring complete success of your website? All that white “space” (Unique Visitors) wasted for nothing?

No. Well maybe some.

But people don’t just come to your site to Buy. They are there to Research products and services (and buy offline). They are looking to get Support. They are there for looking for Jobs. They might be there to look at your latest Blog Post, etc.

Make each one of those your Micro Conversions. Identify what they should be using 4Q and then using your Web Analytics tools to measure success.

Here’s your new, and I might add complete, measurement of success. . . .

Nothing wasted, every activity on the site measured for success in some small or big way.

Here’s a view that might apply for your ecommerce website. . . .

For the macro conversion you measure Outcomes (say orders, see this post for definitions: Conversion Rate Basics & Best Practices). For micro conversions you could measure page views and job applications submitted and number of times the Print This Page was clicked (the hypothesis being you’ll buy in a store or something like that) or Task Completion Rates by Primary Purpose for Support, Research & Careers from your website onexit survey.

Either way you have just provided your management team with a complete picture of your website’s success. And you have shown that you are brilliant because you are measuring success of all visitors on your website. Priceless.

Have you clearly identified what the micro conversions are on your website?

Benefits of measuring micro-conversions:

1. You’ll focus on more can just the main reason the site was created.

2. You’ll measure multi-channel impact, well beyond your website. Most people don’t get budgets for web analytics because all they are focused on is measuring what happens during a small % of visits. Expand and conquer.

3. It will force you to understand the multiple persona’s on your website, trust me that in of itself is worth a million bucks. It will encourage you to segment (my favorite activity) visitors and visits and behavior and outcomes. Success will be yours.

4. You’ll realize the limits of a pure clickstream strategy and you’ll be forced to expand beyond just Google Analytics or Omniture or CoreMetrics etc and execute a true Multiplicity strategy, that is good for your company and it is good for your career.

5. You’ll be happy. Most people who do web analytics are sad and/or frustrated. One of reasons for it is because they are hyper focused on a small part with way more data than they can ever churn through.

   
   By expanding your measurement horizon and seeking insights from a broader area means you’ll know what to do with all this data. Which means you’ll smile a lot more, because you’ll feel a sense of accomplishment from your job. Happiness is good.

Convinced?

Ready to execute?

Let me share some stories to spark ideas in your mind about how to identify your own complete conversion rate picture.

Photo publishing and sharing website:

When www.fotonatura.org, an awesome Spanish photo sharing website (check out: Calopteryx splendens!) wants to track success they measure Conversion Rate. . . .

They are doing very well. Fernando is quite happy with how is project is performing. But he is also very smart and he is measuring micro conversions, things that his site is trying to do that mean success for him. . . .

His micro conversions. . .

1. Registrations on the site.

2. People / Members publishing photos (core for growth).

3. (I think, my Spanish is bad!) People who sign up for premium content.

4. (I think) People who sign up for newsletters / announcements (good for future customers).

A complete picture measuring all types of behavior and all elements of success. The 1.72% conversion won’t go up waaay high, but the site’s success is bigger than just that one number. Above picture is how you measure that.

Makes sense right?

A quick note: Your micro conversions don’t have to lead up to the macro conversion (though in this case they kind of do). In our very first example of ecommerce website notice that the micro conversions are very different from the macro, they are just subservient, a little bit, to the macro.

Tech Support Website:

(These ideas are from one of my posts: Measuring Success for a Support Website.)

Macro Conversion:

Task Completion Rate (measured by surveys, true customer centricity baby!).

Micro Conversions:

1. “Call Avoidance”: Number of Visitors who see the Phone Number page (hypothesis: all other things being equal if the site is good this number goes down over time).

2. Content Consumption: Visits over time to each technical support core area (maybe different products or types of problems etc).

3. Tickets Opened: # of technical supports tickets opened on the website (and over time compared to those opened over the phone).

4. Sales: Revenue from referrals from the tech support site to the ecommerce site (sometimes the best solution to fix a problem is to buy the latest version of the product, or a upgrade!).

5. Net Promoters (”Likelihood to Recommend”): The % of people (or a indexed representation) who will recommend the company products after a experience on the tech support site.

Again the stress is on understanding the overall purpose, get people answers to their questions hyper fast, and also the other smaller things that the site might be impacting.

Who knew this thing was so much fun? :)

Another Ecommerce Website:

We have already covered ecommerce in the very first example but I wanted to share this one as well because it was so nicely created for this concept. . . .

Very self explanatory, covers all the reason the site exists beyond simple taking orders / transactions.

Social Media Metrics / Blog Success:

Social media sites are tricky because many traditional analytics tools and mindset fail at identify first what to measure and then at data capture. At the moment there are not set tools and perfect answers. For blogs I have made an attempt at creating metrics to measure holistic success.

The “macro-conversion” I use, and recommend, is RSS Subscribers, or more specifically growth of RSS Subscribers. The hardest thing to do in an attention economy is to get permission to push content, RSS represents that permission to me.

I track RSS using FeedBurner:

Of course it would be silly to get hung up on a point in time and obsess about daily up and down, so I actually track growth in Feed Subscribers over time (month to month):

Macro Conversion: Net Subscribers Added.

When it comes to micro conversions things get a bit more delightful. . . .

Clicks on the book’s link to Amazon:

Ok so I have to put that into excel and actually compute the % between the red and the green, but you get my point. It is a “conversion” if people click on link and perhaps go buy a book (it is especially nice because 100% of my proceeds from the book are donated to charity!).

Since the link as a affiliate code in the link I can track conversions at Amazon’s website using their affiliate reports.

Conversation Rate:

The number of user comments per post, trended over time. It represents the success at engaging visitors with your unique content and getting them to contribute their thoughts, i.e. in the most social of social environments your ability to create meaningful conversation.

For the last 30 days this number stands at approximately 30, a bit higher than my goal.

(Thanks to my good friend Joost for the Blog Metrics plugin!)

Ripple Index:

The number of unique blogs that link to your blog (with links expiring in in six months to ensure you keep creating content that causes a “ripple”). I use Technorati to measure this.

In the above image that number is 1,163. Your, or my, ability to influence others and create conversation in the ecosystem.

There is another interesting thing the above example of blog illustrates, something you can apply to your own success measurement of any type of site: Sometimes you have to go beyond just the tools you have, and other times you have to create new metrics to measure micro conversions. That’s ok.

Macro + Micro = Complete Picture.

I hope the above examples help you paint your very own unique picture. Good luck!

Was that helpful? What do you measure when it comes time to identify success of your website? Any unique micro or macro conversions you would care to share? There are so many different types of websites out there, care to share conversion metrics for your site?

Please add to the conversation using the comments form below.

PS:
Couple other related posts you might find interesting:

• Stop Obsessing About Conversion Rate
• Excellent Analytics Tip #8: Measure the Real Conversion Rate & “Opportunity Pie”
• Is Conversion Rate Enough? It’s A Good Start, Now Do More!
• Excellent Analytics Tip#4: Make Your Analysis/Reports “Connectable”
• Excellent Analytics Tip#2: Segment Absolutely Everything
• Blog Metrics: Six Recommendations For Measuring Your Success

It gives me a great deal of delight to introduce 4Q:

A true permission based on-exit survey that provides an easy to deploy, easy to use and easier still to analyze framework to answer 4 questions that no website owner can live without.

It is the antidote for the most pressing of web analytics challenges: the yearning and struggle to understanding the “Why”.

And its free!

And you can have it today!!

No strings attached!!!

Have web analytics data? Made good progress already? Want to light a rocket fuel powered ability to take analytics to the next level?

4Q is for you. Check out the rad video below!

Ready to sign up? Check out: http://4q.iperceptions.com

For the rest of us, let’s take a step back.

If you have read my book or my blog you are quite aware of the What and the Why issue. All the quantitative data you and I have from our web analytics tools is really good at helping us understanding the What happened.

Visits and Visitors, pages viewed, referrers, keywords, bounces, paths (!), campaigns, and so on and so forth. All critical data that helps you step up your game - improve your campaigns, fix pages, fire someone.

It cannot, no matter how much you torture the data, tell you Why something happened.

Why do these visitors see sixteen pages on our site? Is it because they are “engaged”? Or is it because we have the worst navigation in the universe on our site? Why is it that we only have one percent conversion rate? Why does only 20% of the site traffic looking at our product pages? Why this and why that and why if and why no and why why . . . .

Typically the response is: “I think this is happening…” or “When I was the ruler of the world this is why people did this. . . . ” or “Snort, snort, snort, snorty, snort (that’s the HiPPO speaking!! :)”.

We overlay our own opinions and experiences and preferences.

Unfortunately we are not our customers. In fact being as close to our companies as we are, it is quite likely that we are the worst possible people to empathize with our customers.

So why not ask them? You know, the customers? Sounds radical. But the web can help.

One of the more scalable methods of listening is surveys, and the greatest survey in the world only has three questions!

1. What is the purpose of your visit to our website today?
2. Were you able to complete your task today?
3. If you were not able to complete your task today, why not?

Primary Purpose. Task Completion Rate. Segments of Discontent .

The wonderful people at iPerceptions have created 4Q as a free service to allow you and I and everyone else to be able to have the perfect survey in the world on our site.

They have kindly added one more question to the mix that will help measure customer satisfaction!

4Q.

It is such a thrill for me to be able to be on their Board of Advisers and help them with this excellent effort. I am so proud of Akop and his team for the nights and nights of work that they have put in. Jon and Jerry were sweet for buying into my faith based initiative!

No launch would be complete without a YouTube video. :) I have created one for 4Q. But the YouTube dumbs down the resolution, which upsets me a great deal.

So I re-recorded the entire thing for all of you! And since I was redoing it any way I added more context, a few more slides and try to explain things more clearly. So below is a better version of my YouTube 4Q video , hope you’ll find value in it.

[Oh and I do apologize at the start for my extra sexy deep close to Barry White romantic voice. I have had a terrible cold for a couple weeks - I am missing approximately 40 hours of sleep. These days I am juiced up on Red Bull, Zone bars and, yes, passion!!]

Here’s why you need a simple survey, how you can sign up, implement it and analyze the data to find key insights. . . .

Here’s some eye candy. . . .

The survey invitation: Remember 4Q is a true permission based onexit survey, visitors to your website are not going to be interrupted in the middle of the shopping cart or in the decision making process.

Customer satisfaction report: You can have this aggregated or segmented by months or weeks.

Task completion rate: My all time favorite #1 Web Analytics Metric (booo conversion rate!).

 

Customer satisfaction segmented by primary purpose: A segmentation junkie like me would never let any opportunity go by without providing a segmented report!

Open text VOC: Sources of visitor discontent can be identified by clicking on the links for each segment you are interested in below.

Awesome ain’t it?

It is a lot of fun too!! You are going to love hearing from your customers (even if they yell at you - remember they are trying to help and that is just how they show their love!).

4Q is available to you without any strings.

• The survey is 100% free, regardless of how big you are or how small you are or how round you are.

• You have the control of when to turn it on, when to turn it off etc.

• You have control over the rate at which the survey is shown, it is easy for you to adjust it in the tool. Your choice.

• Your data is yours, there is a very strict privacy policy that governs the storage and access of the data collected. Please check out the policy.

• We are not going to bug you. Period.

Here’s the url again: http://4q.iperceptions.com

Surveys are a lot more powerful and can yield much deeper insights about the customer experiences on your website. Deployed right they can be a critical source of learning for your decision makers.

4Q will not make your breakfast in the morning, but my hope is that it takes cost off the table when it comes to trying surveys and provides you with answers to the foundational questions. So no breakfast in the morning, just a kiss on the cheek when you wake up to get you going for what you need to get done. :)

I very much welcome your feedback and concerns, about anything and everything.

[UPDATE: The user forum for 4Q is at: http://iperceptions4q.com/forum/. It is the most optimal way for you to get support, ask other questions, make suggestions and generally have a ball with the community. Please check it out.]

Closing (Unrelated) Thought:

In almost 12 months of being an independent consultant I have done a lot of things that have been new experiences for me and a ton of fun. But without a shred of doubt the biggest thrill for me has been helping launch new stuff.

Tools and features that, I humbly, believe further the cause of measurement and understanding of data. In their small tiny tiny way they solve important problems and ease a little bit of the burden out there.

Be it all the work with Analytics focusing on core website measurement. Or Joost de Valk’s small but significant effort in creating the excellent Blog Metrics wordpress plugin to bring new success metrics to measure social media. And now this humble effort creating 4Q, our attempt to mainstream qualitative measurement.

I cannot believe how incredibly lucky I am to get the chance to have a small hand in these three great web tools, being able to be in there, get dirty and help. So much more fun than sitting on the sidelines and pontificating. Let me take this chance to thank my brilliant partners for their kindness to me (and because I am hopped up on pills: hugs for all you gals and guys when I see you next!).

PS:
Couple other related posts:

• Overview & Importance of Qualitative Metrics
• The Three Greatest Survey Questions Ever
• Got Surveys? Recommendations from the Trenches
• Eight Tips For Choosing An Online Survey Provider
• Lab Usability Testing: What, Why, How Much