Justin Cutroni › Comments

"Dave: Google Analytics as a silly habit of showing not set in any custom report even if you had drilled down by keywords. By drilling down by keywords you are not “filtering” by keywords, you are looking at all rows of data and not set typically be the highest value. You will also notice this in other reports (especially if you do custom reports which I am quite prone to), such as campaign reports etc. Of course it is easy to go to the extra trouble and nest step to filter our not set or apply a segmentation filter. Ideally the team at Google will one day fix this legacy issue. Avinash." - Justin Cutroni

"Bibi: You are right that for strong brands the tag cloud would be “concentrated”. My humble perspective is that in our wonderful world of fragmented audiences where we can reach deep, that it should not be. Segmenting with paid and organic would be of value. My experience is that the organic one will look much more diversified and the ppc one will look a lot more focused. But either way the analysis would certainly be of value. Thank you! Avinash." - Justin Cutroni

"Djemmers: The tag cloud is distinct from visits generated by individual search queries (the things you see in your GA, Omniture, WebTrends search report). It is looking for existence of words in search qieries. In as much Wordle is not taking into account how many times a word is in search queries. Only how many times a word exists in the data (without making any judgment on the value of it as in Visits or Conversions). As in my example (the first tag cloud in the post) it is simply telling me how diversified the words are, if the words I want show up often enough, how many times the word kaushik appears. It just validates my SEO strategy. Then I go to step 2, trying to figure out where I am making money. :) There are tag clouds that will use Visits to do the size (as in the case of the Juice keyword trees) and even use the color of the word to show bounce rates or conversions. But sadly Wordle does not do that. I hope this helps. Avinash." - Justin Cutroni

"Fred: You can use the &limit=xxxxx parameter in the url to get as much data as you want. More details here: Back to Basics: Tip for exporting rows Of course you can also of course use the GA API to pull out every single row of your data from Google. Joe: Nothing to be ashamed of!! Column sorting can be very useful. :) Zyxo: I am slightly confused about the question. Is your concern about the search queries people wrongly type into Google/Bing/Yahoo? In that case I think the search engines are getting really really smart about suggesting correct spelling as you type or after you see the search results. Or is the concern that people type the wrong thing into the search engine, then come to your site and now you want to teach the right spelling? If you could please share some context I’ll be happy to see if I can answer. Dave: I completely understand your concern. The gatorade tag cloud is just one part of a more exhaustive analysis I had done, sadly I can’t share all that context. But..." - Justin Cutroni

"Katie: The most elusive person in all of Web Analytics land, the proverbial purple cow, is….. a business person in WA who has medium to strong technical skills. They are sooooo rare. So if you are willing to be exposed to the business side of things, hijack a site (no matter how small) and market the heck out of it, perhaps consider taking a couple business classes, becoming a student of Seth Godin, getting advice on how hard life is from your parents :),…. of any such thing then you just might become a purple cow. At the end of the day data is in service of the business. Most people think the business is in service of data. Be in the first category and you’ll thrive. Good luck!! Avinash." - Justin Cutroni

"Javaun: Wonderful comment, thank you so much for sharing your personal experience. I agree with you on the other two points as well. Web Analytics practitioners must take the blame for both our obsession with data quality: Data Quality Sucks, Let’s Just Get Over It and for being too enamored with our ability to report data. The latter means we report the Insignificant Many rather than analyzing the Critical Few. Almost always it stymies our progress. But awareness is the first step towards improvement. Thank you so much again, Avinash." - Justin Cutroni

"Matt: It is a current limitation due to the balancing act to get the feature out in beta faster. It would be reasonable to expect that more metrics, and dimensions, will be available over time to create custom alerts. I am a huge fan of Outcomes so I assure you that having access to all Goals is very very high on my personal wish list. :) Avinash." - Justin Cutroni

"Eric: I agree with the sentiment that many have a stake in it, but when it comes to leadership I don’t think many have a stake at claiming leadership. There are one or two departments in the company that will optimally lead data driven decision making. The UX team is not one of them. The UX team is good at a lot of things but it is unusual to find a UX with the optimal mental model required. Remember the post is not about participation, which will involve many teams, the post is about optimal leadership. Thanks so much for adding to our lively conversation. Avinash." - Justin Cutroni

"Michael: You are one of the enlightened folks in IT, and your mix of business and technically makes you a odd duck. :) Hence I am sure you can accomplish a lot no matter where you are. But for the organization to truly blossom, for the data democracy prosper, you’ll have to fight the good fight for clear and distinct business leadership by someone who has the power to change customer web experience based on your data insights. You of course, as is clear on your blog, doing that. Please know that we are all rooting for you! Sandy: I appreciate you sharing the feedback from your own IT experience. In my time working in IT, 3 yrs, I realized we are good at building things and keeping things going and doing cool implementations (/hacks). But that is where the road ended. It is better for someone else to take it from there. Avinash." - Justin Cutroni

"Damian: It really is sad how often the web analytics work gets completely ignored by the senior decision makers. But we, WA, people have to take responsibility for that and do all we can to truly create data driven bosses! Thanks for the comment! Avinash." - Justin Cutroni

"Naveen: The book is being translated into Spanish, Polish and Chinese but at the moment there are no plans to publish it in India. If that changes I will let folks know. Thanks so much for your interest. Avinash." - Justin Cutroni

"It is always nice to read a post about non-successes, especially when it is so unsexy to talk about it. Thanks for sharing your story. I am convinced that the difference between winners and non-winners will be that winners will learn how to try and fail, fast, and try again. Here’s to failing faster! Avinash." - Justin Cutroni

"@Christoper: Not everything is about SEO!! : ) I like making things visual, when I was writing of "lovely beast" Hello Kittly just came to mind. It was a innocent reference. @Paul: Excellent suggestion, I'll keep it in mind. Though in the book there is a whole chapter, 13 I think, dedicated to creating data driven organizations. A how to guide how to destroy entrenched mindsets! @Flamex: There is a lot out there but I strongly strongly encourage people to focus, start small. The ideal option is that you know what you are hoping to accomplish online and use those goals as a way of prioriting what data you will look at, where you will start, what are all the things you will ignore. If that is not possible then I always sart my analysis, focus, by looking at where we are spending money and I start there. For example if it turns out we are doing a lot of Email Marketing and SEO, then I'll start measuring impact of that. If you only want one single report to start with... then here is my..." - Justin Cutroni

"@Christoper: Not everything is about SEO!! : ) I like making things visual, when I was writing of "lovely beast" Hello Kittly just came to mind. It was a innocent reference. @Paul: Excellent suggestion, I'll keep it in mind. Though in the book there is a whole chapter, 13 I think, dedicated to creating data driven organizations. A how to guide how to destroy entrenched mindsets!... more... - Justin Cutroni

"I am profoundly disappointed by the non-existence of the “kaushik shrine” in your backyard. Truly a bummer! Just kidding. I welcome your critique Garry. All three are great points, and excellent food for thought for me. I hope to continue to use the blog as a complement to the book (like last week with Twitter Analytics) to keep my lovely readers on the bleeding edge in area that evolve waaay too much for a book. Thanks again! Avinash." - Justin Cutroni

"I am profoundly disappointed by the non-existence of the “kaushik shrine” in your backyard. Truly a bummer! Just kidding. I welcome your critique Garry. All three are great points, and excellent food for thought for me. I hope to continue to use the blog as a complement to the book (like last week with Twitter Analytics) to keep my lovely readers on the bleeding edge in area that evolve waaay too much for a book. Thanks again! Avinash." - Justin Cutroni

"Aerin: The whuffie bank is a very interesting idea, not the least because of their noble non-profit motivations. From a measurement perspective it is simply yet another Compound Metric like “clout” or “influence” or …. Whuffies. There are five different things that go into computing the metrics: http://www.thewhuffiebank.org/static... (Click on How is Whuffie Calculated) But I am unsure of the comfort levels with some of their assumptions (I do not believe having a hashtag in a tweet makes it any more valuable or simply the presence of a link in a tweet means your tweet is of high quality!). Other assumptions are good and now universally accepted (ex: retweets are good). In the end I think about how to use the information provided to be better (for a personal gig or my business) and in that sense it is very hard, very very hard, to know from compound metrics what to do. My whuffie balance is 4,027. What do I do? There is a trend included but I am not sure how to parse out how to get..." - Justin Cutroni

"Congratulations Time!!! The winner of our contest is…. Claire Murray! I humbly believe Claire had the best on point answer and she also added more detail when I asked her to comment on how she would measure twtter, as an example. Here’s Claire’s additional thoughts: For your Twitter account, I’d want to look at: · Number of your tweets that get retweeted and by how much · Number of followers (one time and repeat) · Content of retweets (any that get commented on, etc. seem to have some value to others more than just retweeting?). · I’ve seen some stats on tweets that indicate the major percentage of them come from a small minority of tweeters; and that study also examined and categorized the content. I’d want to look at it from something like that level of detail so get an idea of who, how, when, how often, etc. This is a bit subjective, and I’m sure I’d learn more from some of the books in the library! It was very hard to pick just one winner since there were so many good entries. For..." - Justin Cutroni

"Liz: Nice find! Analyze Words seems to use one of the two algorithms that Tweet Psych is using, LIWC, but the output is differently organized. I am not happy that is says my “Arrogant/Distant” is High! But “Spacy/Valley Girl” is Low. :) Mahendra: Lists are too new to be incorporated into computations of various twitter tools, but I am starting to see it being mentioned. I did not include it because I am not sure there is a good use of it yet. That said my working hypothesis is that Lists are a great “vote of confidence” by the community and in as much it would not be unusual if being on a high number of lists correlates with higher “influence”. Christine: I am actually surprised that sentiment analysis, or simply clustering the data, has not made a lot more progress.. For example there is a keyword tree for one word referring traffic to my blog: http://kaushik.net/avinash... I has uploaded about 10k words and even this simple tree for one of those keywords,..." - Justin Cutroni

"The winner of our little contest is E. Mills! His/Her answer was very close to my own thought: I don’t like those metrics is that they are aggregated metrics that simply report on “activity” (and they don’t even do that in context) and don’t report either on customer behavior or outcomes. The latter two are the most important to any business (and hence to me). Overall atleast if they had some context perhaps it might add some marginal value (like increase in # of followers per day, rather than total). E. Mills gets a copy of my new book, Web Analytics 2.0. I would be remiss if I did not mention the contest entries from Romy, Alli and Tony. All three of them were close and were it not for the time stamp of their comments any of them might have won. Thanks so much for playing along guys! Avinash." - Justin Cutroni

"Matt: Vast generalization but pretty much every web analytics tool, testing tool, survey tool, ad serving tool etc etc now use javascript to collect data. Javascript as in page tagging. Log files are of value in some cases, as outlined in this post, and a few tools still support log file parsing. Avinash." - Justin Cutroni

"David: That is the basic purpose of any analytics tool, including GA. Just go to Content, Content by Title, find your page, click on it, and do a little dance for in front of you is the data you want. :) Avinash." - Justin Cutroni

"Nicky: You can do a/b testing with the optimizer, it is much easier than doing multivariate testing. Here is the four step process you would follow: Advanced A/B Testing If you don’t want to measure a conversion page (say lead submission or donation etc) then you can also test which version of your page, A or B or C, did better on other metrics. You will simply integrated Google Website Optimizer with Google Analytics and use GA to measure any metric’s performance you want. Here’s a helpful link for integrating the two tools: GWO / Google Analytics Integration Good luck! Avinash." - Justin Cutroni

"Everyone: Thanks a million for the kind words of support for the book, and for your lovely entries. I am struck by how well thought out your contest entries are and how much creativity is out there to solve this complex issues. The contest winners will be announced on Friday, until then please keep your ideas coming! Thanks again, Avinash." - Justin Cutroni

"Kount: As you mention Crazy Egg does archive snapshots but other tools don’t. I would push back and ask you why would you need site overlay for every hour? Would you have a capacity to take all that data and make intelligent decisions? It is quite likely that the only data you might find valuable will be for persistent things (like top nav or some persistent promotional spots), for which any tool’s site overlay will work. For the fast changing links and content there are other navigational analysis reports that will work just fine. I realize this it not the answer you were looking for, but hopefully it is food for thought. Avinash." - Justin Cutroni

"Marlyn: In the drop down you’ll see “Matches regular expression”, use that rather than Contains. For example I am using Value: facebook|twitter|flickr|linkedin|.com to create a quick social media segment, but in the Condition I am using Matches regular expression. When in doubt you can of course always do this: http://www.flickr.com/photos... :) Avinash." - Justin Cutroni

"Sri: I am not sure what you mean by “this functionality”? None of the analysis in this post used Unique Visitors as a function, which means you can track it all without using cookies. But to answer your question about Urchin, yes you can track all of the things in the post, and more, with Urchin and host it in-house inside your systems and firewalls. There are also log file parsers, some free, that will also get you some wonderful data without having to use cookies (they’ll use available info in your logs like ip and user agent strings etc). I do want to stress, perhaps again, that there is a lot of analysis you can do without using cookies. The metrics you can’t are unique visitors and, say, new vs returning visitors. Rest of your data is still fine, campaigns, keywords, leads, page views, etc etc. I wish you the best. Avinash." - Justin Cutroni

"Tal: Have you used this: SES Theme Split Test http://wordpress.org/extend... It is a theme split tester for A/B testing WordPress themes. It uses Google Analytics to do the reporting. Details here: http://www.leewillis.co.uk/how-to-... I’ll of course also suggest this to the GWO team, perhaps they can create something as well. Avinash." - Justin Cutroni

"Angie: First the most important thing: Your goal history is not lost! ‘) Moving goals is a helpful feature in the new version of Google Analytics, you can see the view you want. Unfortunately, and I am sorry about this, the messaging in the system is not clear on the impact of you moving the goal from, say, set 1 to set 2 (or whatever). Each goal has its “position” in the system. When you move the goal it inactivates the old position and recreates it in the new position. Fresh start in life. :) But when you look back you don’t see any history (obviously). This is something the team at Google should make a lot more clear and think about. If you want to “recover” the “lost” history for a goal you had moved then follow these steps: 1. Say you had moved goal “Leads Captured” from Set 1, Goal 1 to Set 2, Goal 2. 2. Go back to the Profile Settings page. Create a goal into Set 1 Goal 1 (the original position before you moved it). 3. Call this goal “Historical Data for Leads Captured”. 4. In..." - Justin Cutroni

"Drew: Revenue of course is “god” for ecommerce sites. But just looking at it poses an issue: it might not be insightful enough. Take this example. You made $1 mil in Oct. You made $1.2 mil in Nov. Magnificent growth. But in Oct you got 1,000 Visitors and in Nov you got 1,000,000 visitors. Ouch! Both Conversion Rate and Average Order Size try to get you to understand if you are being “efficient”, something just looking at the aggregate revenue number might not reveal instantly. Avinash." - Justin Cutroni

"Congratulations on the new gig Jim!It is always hard to leave a long time job, but I think you are going to have a lot of fun at Capstrat.Congrats on the second baby (now I can get a picture of your 2.0 with my 2.0 book! :)).Avinash." - Justin Cutroni

"Congratulations Alec! That is some delightful journey. To one of your latter points, even if your current customers might not come read your posts I think others will find the unique work you are doing to be of value. Keep it up! Avinash." - Justin Cutroni