We have had overwhelmingly positive feedback from our book: A Strategic Framework for Emerging Media. Have you read it yet? This week we are offering a promotion price of $20 for the book if you buy through this link: Buy the Book. That’s $10 off the regular price!

If you are a business owner with questions about emerging media practices such as mobile marketing or social media, or if you are a marketer interested in knowing more about how you can utilize the data coming from your emerging media channels this book provides details, case studies and a step by step instruction on what you need to do.

This deal is good this week only and you must buy through our website (link above)!

Thanks,

Carlos and Jeff

After two protracted debates on Twitter about keyword referrals and SERP tracking I want to make some more cohesive statements than is possible on Twitter.

Keyword Referrals

Today Google announced that the default login behavior for users will be secure and encrypted. They also announced that query data for logged in users will no longer be passed to Google Analytics unless the user clicks a paid link. I think that default to secure is fine and good, but not passing the query data unless you are paying is shady. Knowing what people are searching for is very helpful for businesses in choosing what they change about their site. Not just for optimizing for traffic, but also optimizing for online experience and usability of the site in general. The people that are most likely to be hurt by this are the small and medium sized business that are dependent on Google products, and industries that are heavily skewed toward users of Google products. As an example:

• People who use Gchat
• People who keep Gmail open
• People that use Google Analytics
• People that us Adwords
• People that use Google+
• People that connect to Google Labs Products
• People that comment on Blogger
• People that comment on YouTube

Many of the changes that Google has made over the last few years have been working toward making ”Google” a more embedded experience on the web and more individualized. The trend is toward more people being logged in, which means we will see a continuing degradation of data. This is particularly worrisome for countries where Google has over a 90% share and for business that have fewer than 100 search visits in a day. For small businesses making smart data-driven decisions was already hard, now it will be harder.

Search Engine Rank Page (SERP) Results

Search is becoming an amorphous term. Some people argue that Facebook and Twitter are search portals. Even if we restrict the conversation to just Google there are multiple separate, but interconnected, search channels: Web, Mobile, Local, News, Blogs, Image, etc. Many people are very focused on tracking rank. The problem with tracking rank is that it is not entirely connected to traffic. There are vast difference in traffic between phrases in the same conceptual space and a very different position in the buying cycle between search channels. For some people traffic is the only thing being monetized, so all visits are equal, but most people have a conversion to consider. In many competitive cases you are also triggering universal search that pulls in multiple search channels, which means #1 Organic result can be visually the 11th result.

(Click to see full size)

No Organic results show up above the fold for that search: Locksmith. Who is getting those clicks? Rank is NOT a performance indicator. Traffic is a performance indicator, money is a performance indicator, phone calls are a performance indicator. Rank is an interesting bauble that has interesting information at the beginning of a campaign to see your competition and a very steep curve once you are in the top ten. There is often much more to gain from focusing on getting traffic from phrases that aren’t getting traffic yet, particularly because of partial match links. Applying strategies that value diversity and monetization of traffic over SERP rank will win in the long term.

{EAV_BLOG_VER:d30533b60ed7d360}

We are having a book release party at Belltown Pub on 10/6 from 6-9 pm. If you can make it out we’d love to see you and will have new and old books on hand to autograph. We’ll also raffle of a book or two for free. There will be a free food spread and beverages available for purchase.  Please click one of the links below to RSVP:

If you have a Twitter account:

http://twtvite.com/2gy8te

If you have a Facebook account only:

https://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=180906625317307

Or if you have neither, just contact us and we’ll send you all the details!

Thanks,

Jeff and Carlos

It’s amazing how fast paced the internet and in particular the social media / geo location / mobile app spaces are moving. Thanks to hackathons the companies who own these spaces are able to make adjustments, updates and new additions much more quickly than your typical website. While this is not always viewed as a positive thing by the users, it does lend the ability for flexibility and creativity. The days of saying, “wouldn’t it be great if we could do X” and then having to wait 6 months for that to happen are over. X now takes a week to be created by a developer and is then tested, approved and released.

Ok, maybe it’s not tested, which could be a part of the reason why there is pushback when redesigns happen and become more annoying than helpful. Then again, when Facebook went through a major redesign several months ago, the users pushed back initially, then accepted. Now they push back again with their most recent redesign, but my guess is that it will be widely accepted within a few weeks.

What’s more interesting is how quickly things are merging together. These new media are learning how a shared space is better than a separate space. Mobile and Geo-location almost always go hand in hand, but being able to add in the social aspect really starts to pay dividends for companies. In our latest book “A Strategic Framework for Emerging Media”, we provide some ideas for improvement between social, mobile and geo location media. Many of the ideas are things that co-mingle these technologies. Unsurprisingly, some of these ideas must have been common ideas because they’ve been mentioned or have been put into place by these technologies before our book was put into publication or is being released just weeks after our book publication.

I discovered an example of the types of ideas that we talk about in our book while checking in on Foursquare last night. Upon check-in I noticed that I had unlocked a deal. When I opened the deal, I was informed that there was a ‘Groupon Now’ deal for the restaurant that I was at. I was able to save $5 off my meal, just by checking in! Had I not checked in, I would not have known about this deal. I probably could have checked Groupon and possibly would have seen the deal without going to Foursquare (geo-location app). I could have even checked Groupon from home and possibly would have seen the deal without using my mobile device. But in this perfect storm, I checked into a geo location app, using my mobile device, and made a purchase through a social site.

I talked to the manager of the restaurant about this and told her how cool it was that all of this transpired. She mentioned that in a month I could repeat the process. This is where there is still a step missing which we talk about in our strategy section of our book. You most likely have my info through Groupon, so why not either email me in a month, or start serving retargeting ads with a new Groupon deal for repeat business? Most likely the people that use these three technologies are going to be comfortable with a company targeting them.

Find out more about these types of strategies in our book!

After a long wait and a slight re-write A Strategic Framework for Emerging Media is finally out and available on Amazon!

Tweet:

This tweet entered me to win a copy of “A Strategic Framework for Emerging Media” http://bit.ly/nWbrfj via @userdriven #measure #socialmedia

Or

Share us on Facebook

On Tuesday September 6th we will randomly choose a 3 winners.

Regardless of your role in an e-commerce or non-commerce web company, you rely on data and technology in order for you business to survive. As such, there is always a chance of critical failure for any particular portion of your business.

http://lamblegs.files.wordpress.com/2010/09/criticalfailure_image_400x260px_banner.jpg

Critical failure could be any number of things: server/technology failure; data loss; corrupt test environment; broken coding deployment; hacking; third party issues; act of god; etc. While you’ll never be able to prepare for every possible scenario, it’s advisable that you develop action plans for some of the more common scenarios.

In this post we’ll review some possible technology and data loss issues that you might run into.

Your website probably consists of multiple pieces of technology – data storage server, sequel search engines, motherboard processors and miles of cables, just to name a few pieces of equipment. You should keep multiples of each type of equipment on hand in case the one in use decides to quit working. Further, you may want to keep a backup system with a duplication of all data active and ready to be deployed. You might consider keeping this backup in a separate location – in case this issue is some sort of emergency such as a fire or water damage.

Technology issues can often lead to “site down” time. This will frustrate your customers and could cause you to loose some retention. A good suggestion is to have adequate and clear messaging if possible. The last thing you want is an error500 page to pop up (though with certain technology issues this is unavoidable so do your best to get the issue fixed quickly).

A brief message such as “Our site is currently down” along with an anticipated time of being fixed can go a long way toward easing the pain of your customer. It could also create some positive anxiety if you have customers who need to constantly have access to your site.

Site down time also leads to inconsistencies in your data when comparing vs. another time frame.

If you rely on a 3rd party to collect your data, you should consider keeping a “hard copy” on hand as well. Typically a daily file transfer of the previous days’ activity will be sufficient. If the 3rd party data is unavailable or seems suspicious when viewing it you’ll need to verify several things: a) verify any processing issues with the 3rd party; b) verify tagging code on your site; c) verify any supplemental actions required by your 3rd party; d) verify data is being received by your 3rd party site.

Thorough testing is the best way to avoid data loss due to tagging errors. (Ok, technically using log files might be the best way to avoid, but log files can be cumbersome) Ensure that your test environment matches what will go into production and make sure that you utilize all tools to make sure that code functions properly and indeed gets passed to the 3rd party (if applicable). For most third party analysis tools, the javascript calls themselves are not enough to render data, most vendors also require a library file which helps define the javascript actions.

More often than not though, test environments seem to not have an exact replica of the production environment. Or even more oddly, sometimes your data my render in test, but not in production. So it may be worth your while to “go live” at a low point in the day where you can do a live test to ensure that production data is rendered properly, with the lowest chance of data loss.

Finally, another common reason for a technology/data loss issue is a spike in volume. You will need to prepare your hardware, and/or your 3rd party for any anticipated increases in data volume.

Data loss is a critical pain point for your business users who use the data to make decisions about your site. Having inconsistencies in the data can bring forth questions about legitimacy of the data, or questions about why the data falls outside of an accepted level. Good documentation of dates and times of data loss will help alleviate those questions. Unfortunately, there’s usually nothing you can do about data loss unless you have a back up storage.

Technology issues and data loss can lead to a lot of frustration for many roles within the company. Having an action plan in place, or just simply having the proper backup tools in place can help ease the pain of these types of critical failures.

The NFL is back in business. Though if you solely judged it’s functionality based on it’s social prominence, you probably would not have known any different since the overall volume of mentions of @nfl and #nfl have stayed consistent. Thanks to our friends at Rowfeeder, we were able to monitor the term NFL on Twitter from just after the Superbowl (in February) through Monday July 25, when both the Players Union and Owners agreed on a new Collective bargaining agreement. Supplemental data was found on Tweetstats and Twittercounter, however Rowfeeder allowed us to actively monitor each and every mention – roughly 4 million data points when it was all said and done.

We decided to look at three key things to see if we could glean any info: mentions of @nfl or #nfl in tweets, actual number of tweets from @nfl, and the follower count for @nfl. Actual tweet counts from the main account allow us to understand how active @nfl was during this period. Follower counts show whether @nfl’s effort resulted in an engagement increase. Total mentions allows us to gain a robust understanding of the effects or “social prominence” of a term such as “NFL”.

Let’s review some key dates that will give context (all of this takes place in 2011):

• 2/6 – Superbowl
• 3/4 Proposed Lockout date
• 3/5 and 3/11 extended Lockout dealines (24-hour extension was announced on 3/3 and on 3/4 a 1-week extension was approved)
• 3/11 NFL Players Association Decertifies
• 3/12 “Lockout” begins
• 4/25 Judge rules in favor of Players and temporarily lifts lockout
• 4/28 Day 1 of the NFL Draft
• 4/29 Lockout is reinstated
• 7/21 NFL Owners vote to approve a new Collective Bargaining Agreement
• 7/25 NFL Players Association approves new Collective Bargaining Agreement
• 7/26 Free Agency Begins – the NFL is back

Based on these dates, I would assume that the mention counts might look something like this:

Further down is a graph showing how accurate or (inaccurate this graph is). However to gain further understanding of the affects that the lockout might have had on the term “NFL”, we explored actual tweets from the @NFL account itself. The tweets were mostly news based tweets with links to stories about which teams might draft which player: (summing the Rowfeeder data by month)

• ~310 tweets in February (mostly during the Superbowl)
• 100 tweets in March (no football related events this month, but lots of news about the pending lockout)
• 500 tweets in April (NFL draft at the end of April, court rulings)
• Roughly 200 tweets per month for May
• Less than 100 in June and July
• 200 tweets a month seems to be the rough average throughout NFL season, not counting February (which is when the Superbowl is held) and April (which is the NFL draft) – thanks to Tweetstats for the monthly info prior to our data collection

Finally looking at total mentions, from mid February through mid April traffic for the term “NFL” averaged between 15-20K tweets per day. Peak days were as follows:

• 40K on 3/3 when it was announced that the deadline for the lockout would be extended 24 hours
• 34K on 3/4 when no deal is reached again and the deadline is pushed out one week
• 90K on 3/11 – the day that the NFL Players Union decertified
• 58K on 4/25 when a court ruling  temporarily lifted the lockout)
• 198K on 4/28 – Day 1 of the NFL Draft
• 77K on 4/29 – Day 2 of NFL Draft; Lockout is reinstated
• 52K on 4/30 – Day 3 of the NFL Draft
• 50K on 7/21 – NFL owners vote to approve the collective bargaining agreement
• 74K on 7/25 – Players Union votes to approves the collective bargaining agreement

Our prediction was a little off but was surprisingly accurate for most of the data (ok, maybe a cheated a little bit).

So what this seems to indicate is that the lockout news definitely generated social buzz and helped produce additional followers that might not have been gained had there not been a lockout. The NFL draft seems to be the biggest news interest for NFL fans, though we have no mention data for the time during the Superbowl or playoffs preceding, so we cannot say that it is the overall biggest story of the year. A follow up post might show that the days following the lifting of the lockout and corresponding signing of Free Agents/start of training camps and pre-season games will probably also show a larger volume of traffic. Also, it would be interesting to visit these numbers next year and see how the averages compare when there are no labor issues to discuss over the off season and also compare it to playoffs and Superbowl week.

Back in March, and again last night, I presented on putting Regular Expressions (Regex) into Google Analytics Advanced Segments and Non-profile Filters.

Last Night I shared:

^\s*[^\s]+(\s+[^\s]+){1,2}\s*$

This Regex selects 2 & 3 word grouping. This makes it very useful when applied to Keywords. For many sites 2-3 word phrases are the bulk of the search engine traffic (in some cases 50-60%). This group also has the quality of being the first place where action intent starts to appear. Consider the difference in intent between ‘Dog Costume” and “Batman Dog Costume.” Who is most likely at the end of their buy cycle?

There are two places that applying this Regex in to Google Analytics can be fairly useful.

The filter at the bottom of the page:

This allows you 2 dimensions to filter on and a variety of metrics.

Advanced Segment:

This allows you a larger number and variety of dimensions and metrics that can be used simultaneously. Advance segments are my preferred method because they are added to your user account, making it easy to apply them to multiple profiles.

In either method if you export your data on Keywords and Landing Pages into your favorite database and order by landing page you will quickly see where your traffic is headed to the wrong place. You can save some time by separating anything that is landing on your home page this will reduce the number of entries you are sifting through by dealing with that set of data a later time.

And now for those of you that want to change the number of keywords this Regex selects:

^\s*[^\s]+(\s+[^\s]+){1,2}\s*$

^ start at the beginning of the line

\s* match zero or more white space characters

[^\s]+ match at least one or more non-white space character

( open unit

\s+ match at least one or more white space character

[^\s]+ match at least one or more non-white space character

) close unit

{1,2}    repeat once AND twice

\s* match zero or more white space characters

$ end of string

Changing the numbers changes your number of words; these values return n+1 words.

• {2} returns 3-word phrases
• {3} would return 4-word phrases

The comma indicates AND

• {1,} returns 2 or more words
• {4,9} returns 5 and 10 words

Thank you to SEMPDX for having me out last night. If you have any questions please leave them in the comments.

Google has announced Google Wallet and states that by 2014 50% of all smart phones will have NFC built into them. NFC, is a set of short-range wireless technologies, typically requiring a distance of 4 cm or less. Google Wallet will allow you the capability to “tap” your smart phone against an NFC terminal (similar to tapping your credit card against said terminal) and make a payment.

While I can see the benefits of this, and it seems to fit in the stream of current capabilities (you can already swipe virtual gift cards on your phone with a scanner), I shudder at this idea. Mostly because I assume this will require you to store credit card info either on your phone, or via an app that you access on your phone and will most likely keep “logged into”. Granted, you can put a password on your phone and probably can have some sort of password on the app to access it, we all know that passwords can be broken.

So, this will most assuredly increase the chances that someone would opt to play the part of bad samaritan when your phone is left somewhere and not turn it it (like a good samaritan would). Further, theft of smartphones is surely to go up. At minimum this would come in the form of a pick pocket, and worse case would be an aggravated robbery.

Assuming you escape unharmed from the theft, or you instantly realize that you’d lost your phone, you can fairly easily have the phone deactivated and report it as lost or stolen. So no harm, no foul, other than some loss in pride.

However, my biggest fear, relates to a report that I recently happened across regarding a newer type of pick pocketing – Electronic pickpocketing. This involves an iPad looking device that the thug walks around with and picks up your credit card information via the NFC. Again, that whole “4 cm or less” thing comes into play so the perp will have to walk very close by you, but standing on any form of public transportation or at the airport usually incurs a close proximity.

We all want convenience, but should it come with a cost? Am I being too paranoid? Would love your thoughts on this!

From SAS.com

As a web analyst you are privvy to a lot of  information. Some of this information is probably personably identifiable information. You should understand what that information is and what is your responsibility in protecting that data.

I’ll be the first to admit that I am no expert on PII, but I continue to learn more and more about it every day. I encourage you to research it yourself if your company hasn’t already given you documentation on it. Further, I encourage you to particpate or initiate steps to ensure that PII is not leaked out of your corporation. It’s not just the company’s responsibility to ensure that PII information is not divulged. Your stake in managing PII covers anything from ensuring that your laptop / desktop has the proper anti-virus software and password protection, to ensuring that the data you share does not contain anything PII. The WAA has created a code of ethics for the analyst to strive to abide by, and while I agree with the intent that went into this code, there are those who wish to see even stricter adherence and governance of our accountability and drafted an alternative version of the code.

Neither of these codes really define what PII is, and I think it should merit some consideration of inclusion.

I think that the WAA covers a lot of bases with their code, but I feel that it’s written fairly non-binding and leaves open for a lot of interpretation of exactly what I’m agreeing to adhere to. It does seem to appease the typical corporate definition of administering to a policy without fully committing to the cause, and is probably the best we can hope for from the WAA. But I do give them a lot of props for taking the first stand and creating this.

Carlos’ version goes a bit in the other direction and may be too much of a commitment for most people. That said, I don’t think what he said would be a detriment to a company or analyst to try to strive toward. While committing to the evangelization of boycotting a particular browser lacking in security may be a bit hard to swallow at first, it doesn’t necessarily mean that you are pledging to not utilize said browser, just that you are committing outwardly condemning the shortcomings of said browser. I do wish that Carlos would add back in the bullet point about education, and in fact this would help him to cover what I stated above that both were lacking – a complete definition of what PII is and how I should protect it.

So, while it is great that the WAA and analysts like Carlos have taken a proactive approach in their pledge to keep PII protected, having a code of ethics and signing this code is not enough. We should lead the charge to have companies create a full education program on PII for all employees. I know that some companies have this, but I’m sure they are the exception and not the rule. As Web Analysts we are the evangelists of the data and that should include improving the understanding of PII and it’s ramifications if the data is compromised. Just remember, the PII could be your information.