At the “Emetrics Summit”:http://www.emetrics.org/ in Washington DC last Wednesday, Brett Crosby of Google announced the launch of “Google Website Optimizer”:http://services.google.com/websiteoptimizer/, beta. A multivariate testing platform free to those with a “Google Adwords”:https://adwords.google.com/select/Login account, Optimizer allows you to test landing pages or conversion events for not only search engine marketing, but also email, ads or an offline drive-to-web campaign. Sure, this will help Google increase Adwords revenue but it’s a definite win-win for Adwords customers as well. Way to go Google!
I had been in Washington for the Summit since the Saturday before, and after 4 days of very long days and jam-packed sessions, some of our heads were filled to brim. However, we were awake enough to suspect something was up when Brett walked to the podium wearing a suit with his presentation on a flash drive and not preloaded.
Use of the Optimizer is by invitation only. Google will be screening sites before they allow access to the Optimizer. Brett said that they definitely have criteria for admission and I hope that this includes a screening of the readiness of the applicant to do a robust test. There’s nothing more dangerous than an invalid test. Because people tend to have more confidence in test results, they tend to risk more. Taking action on invalid test results can be deadly.
Category: June Li
The “Hudson’s Bay Company”:http://www.hbc.com/ (HBC) is in the process of deploying a common business intelligence (BI) sales reporting system across its major retail The Bay department stores, “Zellers”:http://www.zellers.com/ discount stores and “Home Outfitters”:http://www.homeoutfitters.com/. In this article on ITbusiness.ca, they openly share their implementation difficulties for this large integrated project, which involves over 5,500 end-users.
Kudos to HBC for sharing. I suggest you “read the full article”:http://www.itbusiness.ca/it/client/en/home/News.asp?id=40609, but here are my three major takeaways.
The first takeaway is that the days of defining functional requirements and handing these over the wall to the Information Technology (IT) department are gone. For complex, integrated projects, business people need to bring IT into the loop early in discussion so that the tradeoffs between business and IT requirements are worked together, not as salvos fired back and forth about what business can and can’t have. A major cultural change on both parts, this is easier said than done.
For many people, the term “Web Analytics” is meaningless or confusing. Not surprising since Web Analytics has been used to describe:
# The software and tools used to report about data
# The process of analyzing data
# The results and insights of the process
What’s the right answer?
All of the above!
It’s a means to an end. Think of Web Analytics as a combination of tools and analytical processes you can use to measure the results of your marketing efforts. Analysis uncovers new insights (aha’s!) into what you can do to kick your marketing performance up, one notch at a time.
How exactly is Web Analytics a means to an end? The end is a marketing goal. Dramatically higher campaign response perhaps? Web Analytics helps you analyze people’s behaviour and answer meaningful questions that move you forward to your goal, one step at a time.
Sometimes these steps are small, sometimes large. The more questions you ask and get answers to, the faster you’ll improve. Small changes, made frequently, lead to big gains.