Web Analytics Management

The Early Bird Catches Semphonic ThinkTank in DC

We started the Think Tank training series at last year's X Change, primarily in response to what we heard from clients and peers, web analysts, online marketing executives and web managers:

There's not enough solid, "hands on", in depth training around the "doing" of web analytics. Yes, there are plenty of courses that deal in concepts and theories, and there are vendor courses, that while providing basic instruction,often have a subtext of wanting you to purchase more product. There's a gap in vendor neutral web analytics education.

The Think Tank introduction was met with great success. Folks told us that they learned more in the one day then they had in the previous year. So, I'm particularly excited about bringing Think Tank to DC on May 12-13. Gary Angel and Paul Legutko are going to be teaching classes on Omniture (Excel Client, Report Builder, DataWarehouse, Discover), and integrating web analytics data with Voice of Customer and offline data.

You can get all of the details at: http://www.semphonic.com/TT/TTMainPage.aspx

If you'd like to sign up for DC, this is the time to make your plans. Early bird pricing ends this Friday.

The first day of classes will be great if you work with Omniture.

The second day classes will be helpful if you're:

• Planning on integrating data from tools like Foresee, QuestionPro, or OpinionLab into your web analytics solution...whether it be Omniture, Google Analytics, Webtrends, etc.
• Figuring out how to successfully plan an integration of web analytics data into your corporate data warehouse in order to combine it with rich customer data, as well as how to develop segmentation models to extract meaningful insights.

If you have any questions, please send me an email. We hope to see you in DC on May 12-13.

Getting a Grip on Digital Analytics

One of the themes we talked about at the 2010 Vision webinar was how a strategy around analytics is going to move from being a "nice to have" to "need to have" component to online marketing strategies.

With the proliferation of new digital channels such as social media, video and mobile, the management of data and then enabling analysis and action from that data is going to become a much bigger challenge.In a few years, we'll look back on this period as the end of the slow days of online...when all you needed to do is concentrate on building your web site and bring people to the site to conduct business.

We're now entering the age of The Data Tsunami. If managing the Tsunami is something that you grapple with day to day, and/or think about late at night, you might like to take a look at the white paper I just published:

Getting a Grip on Digital Analytics
A Plan for Driving Online, Social Media, Mobile and Video Strategy

I'd like to hear what you think of the centralized and cooperative plan I've laid out, especially the need to appoint  an "analytics czar" to bring governance and vision to the management of digital analytics.

 

The idea of creating a centralized office or C-level person for analytics may sound somewhat "pie in the sky" especially if your organization still has a silo style method of dealing with web analytics, or user experience testing, for example. Or, your organization may consider that mass distribution of Google Analytics is in of itself a strategy.

The availability of free Web analytics tools has not necessarily led to an increased use of analytics data to make business decisions. Even though Web analytics is available for free, the mistake that many make is that they believe that having the software is enough to provide answers. It’s checking the box off: Yes, we have Web analytics; now let’s move on.

As we move forward in 2010,I think it's clear that organizations that have not grasped the concept of analytics centralization and governance will be at a significant competitive disadvantage due to their inability to move digital data out of silos and into the hands of senior business executives, as well as managers who run the day to day marketing, commerce and content operations.

I hope the whitepaper will give you something to think about and hopefully help you plan for managing the Data Tsunami. Let me know what you think.

By the way...we'd love to see you at the Semphonic Think Tank in Wash DC on May 12-13. Featuring in depth Omniture training, Voice of Customer and analytics integration, and lots more.