With the ever-growing smorgasboard of online marketing options, if you’re a marketer, you know it’s critical now more than ever to measure what you’re getting from your marketing spend. But looking backwards is not enough. You must also segment and uncover insights about your most valuable customers that will help you strengthen your competitive point of difference.
To effectively measure and analyze online initiatives, you need a variety of measurement and analytics tools and processes, i.e. customer surveys, usability studies, sales data, offline data mining and online traffic measurement. Applied to the Web, all of these fall under the umbrella of “Web analytics”. So where can you find out more about how to “do Web Analytics”? Here’s a start:
* Seminar*: “Boost Your Web Site’s Impact, Effectiveness and ROI with Web Analytics”:http://www.boostwebsiteimpact.com/, November 14-15, 2006, Holiday Inn on King, Toronto.
* Event*: “Web Analytics: Make the connection between your marketing spend and the bottom line”:http://www.aimscanada.com/Default.aspx?pageId=322&eventId=413&mode=2, AIMS breakfast event, November 30, 2006.
* Course*: “Web Analytics Program (series of 4 online courses)”:http://www.tech.ubc.ca/webanalytics/index.html from the University of British Columbia, and visit this “Squidoo Lens on Web Analytics Courses”:http://www.squidoo.com/webanalyticscourses/.
* Association*: “Web Analytics Association (WAA)”:http://www.webanalyticsassociation.org/ has open access articles. More info available for members (plus many discounts)
* Forum: “Web Analytics Forum”:http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/webanalytics/. Join and ask anything about Web analytics. Post a job opportunity. Many other vendor specific forums exist. However, many require that you are a client, except for “Google Analytics”:http://groups.google.com/group/analytics-help. You may also want to check out the “LinkedIn”:http://www.linkedin.com/ group associated with the Web Analytics Forum.
* Blogs: Too many to count! Start with these …
** “Occam’s Razor”:http://www.kaushik.net/avinash/ (Avinash Kaushik)
** “Lunametrics”:http://lunametrics.blogspot.com/ (Robbin Steif)
** “Braden’s Web Analytics, Usability and Online Marketing Blog”:http://www.bradenh.ca/wordpress/index.php (Braden Hoeppner)
** “WebMetricsGuru”:http://www.webmetricsguru.com/ (Marshall Spooner)
** “Share the Genie’s Power”:http://clickinsight.blogspot.com/ (me*)
** Andrew Goodman also blogs about analytics relevant to search marketing on “Traffick.com”:http://www.traffick.com/.
In the Web Analytics arena, conferences are not dead. The Emetrics Summit held in Washington D.C last week was attended by over 450 people. The next North American Summit will be in San Francisco in May 2007. And the thirst for learning about Web Analytics is high. The warm-up Web Analytics Training Day, held on the Sunday before the conference, was attended by over 80 people and was sold out in advance.
_* discloses my direct involvement or support._
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May I humbly suggest my blog at http://shamel.blogspot.com as a valuable resource and point of contact for Canadian and Quebec practitioners in the web analytics field.
As a member of the Web Analytics Association and involved in the Event Committee, I also manage the Web Analytics Wednesday event in Montreal. The event could be described as an happy gathering of web analytics enthusiasm, held every month in a conveniently located restaurant. The next one is coming up November 8th, in Montreal. Check http://shamel.blogspot.com/2006/10/web-analytics-wednesday-montreal-qc.html for details.
S.Hamel
http://shamel.blogspot.com
http://linkedin.com/in/shamel
Hi June:
While not directly related to web analytics, Aquent and the American Marketing Association recently presented a free webinar with Prof. Tom Davenport of Boston’s Babson College.
Davenport is a high profile researcher and author of the popular Harvard Business Review article, “Competing on Analytics”. The webinar’s research calls out a new breed of companies who are using analytic savvy for competitive advantage.
The archived webinar can be viewed, for free, here:
http://www.aquent.com/webinar
Best,
James Gardner
Aquent (www.aquent.com)
Aquent is the world’s largest marketing staffing firm. For twenty years we’ve been the leader in helping marketing organizations find the people they need, on a freelance and direct hire basis, and in helping marketing professionals find the rewarding assignments they want.