As an authorized Google Analytics Consultant (GAAC) we were invited at the GooglePlex in Mountain View (CA) to preview the brand new features, but we had to keep our lips sealed under NDA.

By all means it was worth it and today Avinash Kaushik presented them at eMetrics Washington DC. Below are some of my favorite features:

Analytics Intelligence and  Custom Alerts

The most exciting of these new features is a set of reports called “Analytics Intelligence”.

The “intelligence” provides automatic alerts of significant changes in the data patterns of your site metrics and dimensions over daily, weekly and monthly periods. Resulting in less time spend monitoring manually and more time to do things useful things.

However, don’t expect the tool to do your analysis! The tool doesn’t know your business as you, or your consultants, do. There is still much need for ‘human’ intelligence and analytical skilss.

Expanded Mobile Reporting

You can now track mobile websites and mobile apps to better measure your mobile marketing efforts. If you’re optimizing content for mobile users and have created a mobile website, Google Analytics can track traffic to your mobile website from all web-enabled devices, whether or not the device runs JavaScript.

And coming soon, you’ll be able to see breakout data on mobile devices and carriers in the new Mobile reports in the Visitors section!

Expanded Goals & Site Engagement Goals

Google Analytics offers two new goal types – time on site and pages per visit – to enhance functionality.  Additionally, you can now have up to 20 goals in each profile. Yes!

BUT! The danger here is that you will lose your focus, and start defining goals for ‘less useful’ events. We always advice our clients to focus on 3 KPIs, and optimize and analyze the conversion paths (on site and other channels) based on these figures. Trust us, you need to focus! 

Multiple Custom Variables

You can now segment different variables at the page, session, and visitor-level. Previously, you were limited to one custom variable/segment.  With this feature, users can classify any number of interactions on the site into  trackable segments. For example you can now define and track visitors according to visitor attributes (e.g. member vs. non-member), session attributes (e.g. logged-in or not), and by page-level attributes (e.g. viewed Sports section).

We especially celebrate this enhancement! We really had a clear need for extra parameters especially to create new visitor segments. This will also allow you to create drill-down reports based on this extra parameters. We’ll publish some fine examples on this blog later on.

Website Optimizer – Over time charts

With over time charts you can see the cumulative conversion rate of each combination over the life of an experiment. This can give you a better understanding of how your site is performing. The new charts are available for all Website Optimizer experiments, and you’ll find them on the reports page.

In addition, Google will also luanch an API for the Google Website Optimizer, which will allow you to integrate the tagging (without touching your website code) and the data into your CMS in order to create a ‘more or less’ automated platform.

Overtime Charts

Other new features are:

• Advanced Analysis Features
• Share Segments and Custom Report Templates
• Unique Visitors as a new metric in Custom Reports

With the above new additions Google Analytics / Website Optimizer positions itself as a “powerful, flexible, and intelligent” enterprise-level analytics platform (more details at their blog) .

More features also means more data to investigate, more questions and more reporting capabilities. As an authorized Google Partner, These Days offers Google consulting services to help you properly configure, analyze and optimize your visitors online measurement to deliver insights that help you to increase conversions, page views, and revenue.

And to finish a small quote by Avinash  ”HITS: How Idiots Track Success”.

Interesting read by Nick Moore who’s our Chief creative officer at Wunderman, and I quote:

“Remind me,” said the surgeon as the patient slipped under the anesthetic. “Which hand are we operating on today?”

“Hand?” replied the patient, fading fast. “It’s not my hand. It’s my…”
That’s not much of a joke. We want surgeons to know how to conduct an operation, just as we want airline pilots to know their routes and lawyers to be on top of the facts of their cases. 

And advertising people? Is it different for us? Shouldn’t we be basing our creativity on the facts, or data? You know, the customer purchasing patterns sitting in our clients’ databases, the lists of search questions pouring out of Google and Bing and the real-time insights uncovered by online listening platforms.

Apparently we do think it’s different for us. Too often, we continue to base our creative decisions on the flimsiest of focus group data. And we seem to take a perverse delight in the separation of data and creativity in both client and agency organizations.

“I find this bizarre”, says Nick.

Do you think this is bizarre too? How do you balance between data insights and creativity? Feel free to share comments below.

Continue reading on ADWEEK for the full article

The full-service interaction agency These Days, part of the international Wunderman network, has been invited to join the Yahoo! Web Analytics Consultant Network (YWACN).

The network includes 48 partners across the globe, each independent web analytics specialists who have proven their expertise in online conversion through actionable analysis, and the deployment of Yahoo! Web Analytics in particular.

“Our web analytics product portfolio includes most of the leading analytics packages on the market and Yahoo! Web Analytics fits in perfectly. Real-time reporting, flexible custom dashboards and advanced ad-hoc segmentation offer a clear added value. Thanks to Yahoo! Web Analytics, we can provide our clients with an even more detailed insight into customer behaviour in their online channels.” says Siegert Dierickx, Web Analytics Manager at These Days.

As a member of YWACN, These Days offers a number of free Yahoo! Web Analytics accounts to organisations. If you would like a demo or access to a free Yahoo! Web Analytics account, you can contact These Days at analytics[at]thesedays.com

Fact

Breaking news on Tuesday, September 15, 2009:

On Sept. 15, 2009, Adobe Systems Incorporated (Nasdaq: ADBE) and Omniture, Inc. (Nasdaq: OMTR) announced the two companies have entered into a definitive agreement for Adobe to acquire Omniture in a transaction valued at approximately $1.8 billion on a fully diluted equity-value basis. Under the terms of the agreement, Adobe will commence a tender offer to acquire all of the outstanding common stock of Omniture for $21.50 per share in cash.

Source: The official press release – Adobe to Acquire Omniture

Surprise

Hardly anyone in the analytics world saw this one coming! Although the speculations about about major online and database players such as Microsoft, IBM, Oracle (who acquired MoniForce in the mean time), … entering the web analytics market via an acquisition of a current vendor have been around for a few months now, I didn’t think it was going to be Omniture that would be acquired, and definitely nobody thought about Adobe as a possible player.

Omniture has been acquiring heavily the last few years (Instadia, WebsideStory, Mercado, Offermatica, …) and seemed really to be moving towards 1 ‘full-service’ integrated marketing platform. That was their goal, and promise towards clients and partners, but when Adobe puts $1.8bn (= 1.23bn €) on the table, I guess Josh James, founder and CEO, forgot quite quickly about that objective. But ok, this acquisition doesn’t necessarily mean that they can’t and won’t still move towards 1 enterprise platform.

Web Analytics is gaining importance and ROI is probably the most used word during the current recession. So if you really think about it, Adobe’s move is not that strange. The time for ‘creativity only’ is behind us, it’s about efficiency and conversion nowadays. With the current merge the developers and creative content builders will now have the opportunity to measure and optimize their creations, or at least they won’t have an excuse anymore to neglect measurement and optimization. This is more or less what we could conclude from the graph below:

In addition, there is a major increase of flash/flex/air desktop and web applications. Some people think that these applications will push pure html out of the picture within 5 years , so based on that assumption I understand Adobe’s interest in measurement and web analytics. (by the way, our Production Director completely dis-agrees with the html-disappearance thesis, and probably he is right if you take a look at the recent HTML5 development)

So what does this mean for the web analytics market? What can we expect, feature-wise, from this merge ?

• Less and less independant web analytics vendors, but I guess the Omniture solutions will still be positioned and sold as stand-alone tools or integrated optimization platform.
• Web analytics is still a marketing tool so the website production team will need some education
• Easier measurement implementation for rich internet application and flex/flash, but hopefully this will also mean an easier implementation process for non-RIA
• Omniture can further develop its video and streaming measurement
• Free analytics???
• What does this mean for WPP, who invested $25m in Omniture common stock? Stéphane Hamel (Immeria) tweeted: Adobe + OMTR + WPP = Art * Science * Skills, but will WPP remain a part of this deal, or will they take a step back?

Anything you think about? Let us know!

Can we conclude anything?

Not much at this stage. It’s clear that the interest in and the importance of web analytics keeps on growing. For the real impact of this acquisition for Omniture, Adobe and the whole web analytics industry , we’ll need to wait a bit longer. But it’s clear that this industry keeps on moving, and is more fascinating than ever before. I’m curious what’ll be next…

Useful readings

Definitely read following reactions on the acquisition:

• Eric T. Peterson, WebAnalyticsDemystified: http://blog.webanalyticsdemystified.com/weblog/2009/09/thoughts-on-adobe-omniture.html
• Gary Angel, Semphonic: http://semphonic.blogs.com/semangel/2009/09/adobe-buys-omniture-what-are-they-thinking.html
• John Lovett, Forrester: http://blogs.forrester.com/customer_intelligence/2009/09/adobe-flexes-its-online-muscle-and-acquires-omniture.html
• Alex Yoder, Webtrends: http://blogs.webtrends.com/alex/adobe’s-acquisition-of-omniture-benefits-the-entire-industry/
• Bill Bruno, Stratigent: http://analyticsinsightblog.stratigent.com/2009/09/my-take-on-omtradobe.html

We’re looking for an experienced ninja to strenghten our analytics & optimization team at These Days!

If you’re interested in a new challenge, want to work from our Antwerp or Amsterdam office in an inspiring environment, want to serve clients such as Telenet, Pioneer Europe, Microsoft, Citibank, Nokia, and many more major brands, … and have at least 2 year experience with the Omniture platform and especially with SiteCatalyst, you are the man or woman we might be looking for!

Check out the full job description on our Job section, and contact us via challenges@thesedays.com to schedule a face-to-face talk!

We’re expecting you…

On August 4th 2009, Webtrends Analytics 9 was released. No major historical news, but I thought it was a good reason to write down my personal thoughts about one of the leading web analytics vendor in the market.

My first experiences with Webtrends already go back about 6 years. I’ve always been on the consultancy side in web analytics, having done and still doing business development, implementation, analysis and optimization, and trainings. I am a Webtrends Certified Consultant and Authorized Trainer since 5 years, so I think I know Webtrends and its solutions pretty well. But my relationship with Webtrends has been one with ups and downs from the start. Nevertheless I must admit that I am totally loving the new spirit that seems to live within the company since Alex Yoder and Jascha Kaykas-Wolff have taken over the ship.

A small recap of the last 6 years, from version 6 up until 9:

6 years ago Webtrends was still written with a capital T (WebTrends) and was owned by NetIQ, a leading provider of integrated systems and security management solutions. The products I first lay my hands on, the Log Analyzer 8.0 and the WebTrends (eBusiness and Enterprise) Reporting Center 6.0, were still sold in a box with software cd and printed manuals included. Webtrends was the worldwide market leader and provided the most robust solution of all existing web analytics solution. Their product was targeted towards and used by the IT team within the enterprise clients, more focusing on the number of hits and the time to load, rather than on marketing ROI. But that was the general trend in web analytics those days. For me web analytics was all quite new but I was enjoying all aspects of it and learned a lot.

A huge turnaround came only a couple of months after my introduction to Webtrends with the release of version 7, in April 2004.  The new product got a major facelift and WebTrends 7 had become a marketing solution rather than an IT tool. The new release was built around the ‘Acquire, Convert, Retain’ process with the calculation of ROI as prime goal. Besides the fancy facelift, a bunch of new features and reports were included such as:

• Campaign, Commerce, Merchandising and custom reports with drilldown capabilities
• Extensive and Visual Scenario (Funnel) and Path Analysis reporting
• Excel plugin for SmartReports
• Smartview, the site overlay plugin for IE
• Data Integration

WebTrends 7 came in 3 flavours: Small Business, Professional and Enterprise. Version 7 was followed by some smaller upgrades including the release of 7.1 and 7.5 in 2005. The taglines now were ‘actionable analytics’ and ‘accurate data’.
The enhancements that were added included extended Visitor Segmentation, extended Email and Search Marketing report capabilities, more drill-down functionalities, onsite search, and data accuracy via first-party cookie tracking. Webtrends also integrated a quite extensive Customer Center to its UI with lots of useful manuals, white papers, knowledge base, webcasts, etc.

In the mean time, March 2005, Webtrends was acquired by Francisco Partners, a private-equity firm, for approximately $94 million in cash. This acquisition was not really a big surprise. Web analytics was not an IT tool anymore and therefore not really in line with the core business of NetIQ. Francisco Partners announced major investment in the product development which, amongst other minor product enhancements, resulted in the release of the Markting Lab 1 year later.

The WebTrends Marketing Lab was the new product family that would “revolutionize marketers’ ability to improve the performance of online campaigns and direct marketing”. The MarketingLab was a 1st step towards a broad marketing platform consisting of Analytics 8, Dynamic Search, Score, and the Visitor Intelligence module. This platform was launched in March 2006.

In my opinion, WebTrends Analytics  8 didn’t change that much from the previous version, except for some smaller UI enhancements and integration in the MarketingLab platform. And now, depending on the number of page views and features, you had to choose between 4 packages: Standard, Marketing, Advanced Marketing, and Commerce.
Dynamic Search (now Ad Director) was/is a semi-automated bid management solution, but especially targeted to end-user with quite a big media budget. Except for a demo I never used it or sold it to a client.  WebTrends Score on the other hand was very promising. This solution allowed you to attribute scores to different events in your online platform in order to measure the visitor engagement and create segments based upon these scores, in order to target your future marketing communication on these different segments and even on the individual. Only one minor disadvantage, but you needed the Visitor Intelligence in addition in order to make use of it…

Visitor Intelligence was the integrated version in the MarketingLab of the actual standalone WebTrends Marketing Warehouse solution. This was the first step towards a real data warehouse, but the first release was actually far from being a warehouse and far from being flexible or actionable. The release of version 2  changed little compared with the original version. And the warehouse was only available as OnDemand, and not as software.

In addition Webtrends disclosed very little information about this new solution to its partners, and hardly provided the opportunity to play around with it, probably because of the previous mentioned limits. Being a Webtrends Insight Network (WIN) partner, we were never asked any feedback about the solutions or marketing activities, and we received very little insights in any future product development.

It was only from version 3 of the Marketing Warehouse that we actually got valuable data out of it, but although it all looked very nice, still it wasn’t an very open solution that you could easily plug into an existing BI environment. And at that time, the market showed a clear demand for a solution which included an open (relational) database and offered easy integration with internal warehouses. At the same time other web analytics vendors such as Omniture and WebSideStory (later on re-brand as Visual Sciences) gained market share and some of them did offer a product with open database or warehouse included.

During this period Webtrends had some internal managerial issues as well, which finally ended with the resignation of CEO Greg Drew and three other executives in October 2007. Webtrends was clearly struggling: no great success with their Marketing Warehouse, more competition and some internal conficts.
After the internal turbulence in 2007, my guess was that Webtrends would be acquired by Microsoft or another big player in web analytics or business intelligence, and my hope in a resurrection of the former market leader had decreased heavily. In addition, the new management couldn’t really get the train on the rails again, until…

Until Alex Yoder (CEO since August 2008) and Jascha Kaykas-Wolff (VP Marketing since October 2008) became the new captains of the ship. It seemed like a complete turnaround, and a new positive and open culture had taken over:

• They got rid of the capital T !
• Yoder (http://twitter.com/yodera), Kaykas (http://twitter.com/kaykas) and Webtrends (http://twitter.com/Webtrends) on Twitter
• The Webtrends team is being proud again of working at Webtrends, and tell this to everybody via their blog and tweets
• Re-branding to blue
• WebTrends Engage 09: first in Vegas, now finally in Europe (London) as well
• Integration with buzz monitoring solution Radian6, baptised as Webtrends Social Measurement
• Release of the Webtrends Marketing Warehouse On-Premise
• Acquisition of testing and optimization provider Widemile (according to me, it’s a must for each web analytics tool to have at least an integrated testing solution)
• The Webtrends Digital Maturity Model (DM3), through which they clearly show that web analytics is much more than just a tool
• And finally, on August 4th, the release of Webtrends Analytics 9

Webtrends Analytics 9 is still completely based on the same analytics engine as version 8, and feature-wise doesn’t differ much from its predecessor. The major difference is the UI, which went through an incredible make-over and is more intuitive than ever before with some extra enhanced data exchange possibilities as a bonus. In addition to the current  capabilities there are now 2 new capabilities:

• Analytics 9 Insight: a complete new approach of looking at your data, with easy and quick to use metrics and account drilldown options, comparative reports and very nice RSS overlay feature

• Analytics 9 Open API: a complete self-service application programming interface (API) for integrating Webtrends data with Excel or your own analytics reporting apps, or importing data from external data sources into the Webtrends reports.

Although this latest upgrade is focused on UX and open API’s, and is not really a major upgrade on new functionalities, it clearly shows once again the intention of Webtrends for future product development and expansion of its platform (through the recent acquisition of Widemile). I’m really looking forward to the Webtrends Engage 09 summit in London in October, and I’m curious to hear and see what’s next to come. But first let’s play around with Analytics 9!

What’s your experience with Webtrends as a company, and with their tools? Let me know!

89 years ago the Summer Olympics were held in Antwerp (Belgium) and hometown of our agency These Days part of the Wunderman/WPP Network.

Also 89 years ago Lester Wunderman, one of the living legends of the advertising agency world,was born. Lester started the Wunderman multi-million-dollar business, coined the term “direct marketing” and anno 2009 our agency remains a thought leader in the industry. But read on since Lester’s early days  story is still relevant to all of us. To summarize:

• Lester and his brother, Irving, started an advertising agency in New York City during the height of  The Great Depression “because no one would hire us.”
• Lester had no clients and used to walk around from office to office selling himself.  At one point he saw a man about to jump out of a window and pulled him off the ledge.  The man thanked Lester and asked how he could repay the favor.  Lester asked for his advertising business, and thus won his first client.
• The pressure to win in this tough marketplace drove Lester Wunderman to “promise clients that their advertising would deliver results.”
• According to Wunderman: “We couldn’t sell on our experience or awards, and we didn’t have an education in advertising.  All we could really say was that we got results.”
• “No matter how much firepower other agencies had they couldn’t win if we had results.”

Obviously, in this case the pressure to survive as a business led Wunderman to innovate in a way that drove improvement for both his clients and his business.  The idea of results-based-marketing is seen today in marketers’ focus on Return on Investment and, eventually, the idea of relationship and data-driven marketing.  Here’s Lester addressing all Wunderman creative directors worldwide, talking about our agency’s mission of accountable creativity.

Today the idea is that to win in a world of consumer control, you should listen instead of shouting and create marketing that people actually choose to engage with.  Advertising becomes a dialogue that becomes an invitation to a relationship. Thus, the legacy of improvement doesn’t stop with one man or one business, but can echo through the generations.

For those who have been a sleep for the last 3 days, let me give you a small recap of Kimberley.

Kimberley Vlaeminck, an 18-year old Belgian girl, wanted to be even more beautiful than she already was (uhm…). So she decided to have 3 little stars tattoo’d on her face, next to her left eye.  But poor Kimberley was so tired, probably from the school exams or the partying afterwards, that she fell asleep during the tattoo-process (or how do you call it?). The tattooist, never a real genius with numbers, and so pleased with the few stars he had already put on Kimberley’s face, suddenly felt that his moment of glory had arrived and started tattooing stars like crazy. Finally, after a well deserved nap, Kimberley woke up, and was so NOT pleased with…. 56 stars on her face.

The news of this truely sad, sad story was frontpage news on almost any Belgian newspaper and was covered by all television news shows. But even faster than the tottooist could count to 10, Kimberley’s 56 stars travelled around the world and was covered on multiple international media such as The Daily Mail, The Mirror, Algemeen Dagblad, and even the BBC!
And of course everyone else talked about it Facebook, Netlog, Twitter, and tons of blogs. The YouTube video below was already viewed 143252 times within 3 days after the facts. The agency Famous even came out with the ‘Kimbelizer‘ app, or check the screenshot in this blogpost if the App would be down.

I don’t know about you, but in my humble opinion and being a down-to-earth guy, this smells like a hoax and is appearing to become 1 of the most wide-spread buzz-campaigns in Belgium  (and beyond). How can you fall asleep while being tattood on your face? How can you tattoo 56 stars when your client only orders 3? Something is not right.
My hunch is that this is a buzz campaign for MNM, a Belgian radio station, as they have the same stars in their logo and Famous was their agency that rolled out the strategy when the radiostation was launched. Some of my colleagues think that Starbucks is behind it, other thinks it’s all about ‘K2 zoekt K3‘ (which I’m not going to explain ;) ).

But hoax or not, I was quite interested in the impact of this story on the social media channels, and wanted to know how fast the ball is rolling. So I did a quick scan with Radian6, a powerful social media monitoring solution which we, at These Days, use for our social media research and analysis of our word of mouth campaigns.
Here are some quick reports I cam up with within 10 minutes:

1. Topic Trends: From this widget we see that the most buzz was created at day 1 when this ‘drama’ was first made public. At the speed of lightning the news traveled very fast. Then the storm went down a bit but from day 3, probably due to the ‘Kimbelizer‘ app. Buzz buzz buzz…
2. River of News: Via the River of News we can take a look at all post, tweets, comments, video’s, etc that have been published. This widget allows the marketeer to verify what is being said about his campaign, and if this hoax is being experienced as positive or negative.At the same time, via this widget you can take part of the conversations by adding comments, tweeting, replying, etc directly from Radian6.
   In addition some content could bring new ideas to the marketing/communication team, so they can build their buzz campaign further on top of it.
3. Top Influencers: Who is taking part into the conversation, or in this case the hype? Who is spreading the word? Who can the marketeers use for future steps in this campaign? In other words, who are the (positive and negative) influencers? At the same time this widget gives you an idea about the network of each influencer so you get an idea how big his or her reach is.
4. Media Type Analysis: Via which channels is this story spread? This will help you to decide on which channels to focus for the remaining of the campaign, or help you identify where you need to put a bit more resources.

I have not taken the time to really analyze the collected data and evaluate the real impact of this campaign so far. As said, these reports were created with Radian6 within 10 minutes. But of course you need some human resources to validate the different posts that were tracked, to do the analysis and optimize the further campaign strategy.
But almost on the fly you can get your hands on an incredible amount of extensive and powerful data on what is happening with the conversation that was launched.

Anyway, I hope Kimberley will be happy again at some point. And hopefully MNM will get more listeners due to Kimberley. Although it will not include me!

Tonight, the third Web Analytics Wednesday is taking place at the officies of These Days.

Follow the live twitterfeed or browse through numerous articles on web analytics here at waw.thesedays.com

Web Analytics Wednesdays (WAW) is going social!

This 3rd WAW of 2009 will be held in the These Days offices in Antwerp on the 3rd of June 2009, starting at 6:30 PM, and will be all about social media: listen, measure and engage!

Bart De Waele from Talking Heads will kick-off the evening with his view on the value of social conversations, and why listening is critical nowadays.
His session will be followed by Siegert Dierickx from These Days who will cover the possibilities of of social media monitoring, based on the Radian6 monitoring solution. And to close this WAW Maarten Sambre from Webtrends will share more details regarding the recent partnership between Webtrends and Radian6 and explain us why they are a perfect match.

So the agenda of the day would look like:

The event is completely FREE, and is targeted towards anyone interested in Web Analytics & Optimization, Online Marketing & Communication, etc. The goal is to meet peers, share experiences, educate the market (and move it forward), AND have fun. Come and join us whether you are from Belgium or from any surrounding countries!

Drinks and appetizers are generously offered by Webtrends!

!!! Register now !!!
You can find full details (address, map) and register on the official worldwide Web Analytics Wednesday site by Eric T. Peterson, the founder of these events.
To stay informed of any update, do not hesitate to join the Web Analytics Wednesday Belgian group on Facebook or on Web Analytics Belgium group on LinkedIn (pick your favorite… or both).

See you in Antwerp on June 3rd!