I spoke with Eric Mattson of Marketing Monger on the topic of Web Decision Making. You can check out the resulting podcast on his blog.
Eric is on a path to conduct 1,000 podcasts of Marketers, Innovators and Entrepreneurs. If you are interested in those three categories I definitely recommend his blog, he has spoken to very interesting people in the web space.
You can also download the podcast here: MarketingMonger Podcast (5.12 mb, 22 mins).
In our conversation we covered many points in the web analytics and insights arena. The following questions we covered in some detail:
- What to look for when looking for great Web Analytics, and where?
- How do you begin to figure out what the most crucial metrics are?
- Where will web analytics be in three years?
- What will be our challenges?
One of my key take-aways from doing the podcast was that a connection from Sweden to the US from Skype to my land line phone can sound pretty decent. I wonder if the Vonage IPO should not have tanked. :~]
If you do take 22 mins to listen to the podcast I would love to get your feedback, please come back to leave a comment. Let me know how you would have answered the questions differently.
Via 
The podcast is very interesting, and I specially liked the "What to look for when looking for great Web Analytics, and where?"
I totally agree with you on the most important characteristics you describe, but I would change the phrase to: What to look for when looking for a wife, a web analyst, an employee, an employer, a cat, or a politician (those are really rare to find)?
And your bright answer: Intellectual curiosity and Attitude.
That's Avanish – just downloaded the podcast and will listen to it this week!
Marshall
Gosh, I'm following you around the podcast circuit
first Mindcomet and now marketing monger…
jko
This was a really useful podcast. I'm inspired to go out and hire a web analytics guru (or at least an intellectually curious person with the right attitude who can focus on web analytics). We have two very good data analysts on our marketing team – but they both primarily focus on specific users in the database – tied to campaign origins, purchase conversion rates, purchase add ons, renewals, etc. They also spend a lot of time optimizing banner and landing page conversion rates. As far as general web analytics go (click stream analysis) for optimizing overall website performance, we definitely have a lot of room for improvement. Can anyone suggest good tools for optimizing web site performance (that doesn't overwhelm you with a bunch of distracting data)?
Thanks,
Sean Ellis
VP Marketing
LogMeIn, Inc.
The podcast is very interesting.