Archive for the ‘analysis’ Category
Gatorade’s Analytics Mission Control
I love that Gatorade is taking analytics seriously enough to give it its own campaign. Check out their mission control area where they monitor their website, commercials, twitter, and facebook interactions.
via: Mashable
2008 Stats Summary
The year is pretty much up, and the results are in. Here are the top posts and search terms from my site!
Top Posts/Pages – There is a huge drop off after the top 3 posts. The Garmin post was linked to from a GPS review site and the Zantac post has been linked to from Wikipedia, and turns up in the top search results when search for “Zantac ” + drinking/alcohol, etc..
10. Trip to Grundy, VA
09. Verizon FiOS Interactive Media Guide
08. Create Flashcards Online
07. About Me
06. Pictures from Juniper Lane / Coldplay
05. Jake & Amir: Ace
04. Fully Loaded Nachos
03. Recover Your iTunes Library with CopyTrans
02. The Wonders of Zantac
#1. Review: Garmin Nüvi 650 GPS
Top Search Terms – These almost line up with the top posts of the year…
10. amir ace
09. recover itunes
08. jeffchin.com
07. zantac alcohol
06. fully loaded nachos
05. axl rose
04. bjorn borg
03. recover itunes library
02. jeff chin
#1. tennis costume
Can you pick out the random ones? (#5, #4, #1) These all resulted in viewing the Halloween Kegger 2005 Pix, but search volume was too low overall to push it into the top 10. Also that post received the bulk of traffic during the Halloween season of 2007:
Those Darn Skins
The season is over, and we ended the year at a boring 8-8. I do think that Jim Zorn did pretty well despite the crash and burn in the second half of the year. He brought fire and emotion back to the sideline that the second coming of Gibbs never even came close to showing. Our defense had a phenomenal year (thanks to the pro-bowl snubbed London Fletcher, and rookie standout Horton), while the offense struggled to score in the double digits each week.
There are obvious gaps in how the Redskins are building the team. People blame Jason Campbell, but what quarterback could make throws when linemen are busting through the line in under 2 seconds almost each play?! People blame Zorn for having Mike Sellers fail to smash it in from the 6 inch line, but that becomes pretty hard when your line doesn’t move the other team forward. It’s amazing Portis even came close to 1,500 yards this year. We are terrible at drafting and overpay for big names that don’t ever produce (favorable) results. Which brings us to the point of this post: Vinny Cerrato. Each year, we call for him to be fired. With Wikipedia, people are publicly documenting Cerrato’s shortcomings. This is awesome – if only Dan Snyder would listen.
What do you think? vote in the poll below…
Digg.com Townhall / Web Analytics
I frequent digg.com fairly often, but just happened to notice that they were going to have a live broadcast via uStream.tv to address users issues and questions. This is something that I have never seen before from any (albeit a startup) company. Before the townhall meeting, they collected comments and questions from users on this Digg story and went through the top 20 questions.
This townhall meeting could be viewed as very successful in my eyes, because it achieved two things:
- Allowed users to submit issues to the creators of Digg.com about usability and features that are/aren’t working for them – and have them addressed.
- Allowed the creators of Digg to collect opinions about the site and have them essentially ranked in order of importance by the avid user base.
Now, as a web analyst, one thing pops into my mind about the value of this type of forum. The goal of being a web analyst is not just to to learn what the user is doing, but to understand why the users are at your site and how they are using it. It is rare that you will have a very clear cut survey telling you exactly what users are concerned about. Currently I am working with my main web developer at my new job to create event tags on main functions of one of our sites to find out if they are actually using certain features or not. This requires man-hours, testing, implementation, and this method is not scalable for a massive site (we’re only measuring clicks on the home page) – and that’s just to measure a behavior, not to add a new feature/functionality/content! In the townhall format, they ended up with a much more dynamic and democratic version of a user survey from real users. (extra reading: Kaushik.net – the importance of surveys) They also appear to be more open to the public (in addition to diggnation) which builds trust from the user base that they are actually doing it for “us”.
Anyways, that’s enough nerdy web analytics talk for one post. I also wanted to point out that while having Digg.com CEO Jay Adelson answer some of the questions was good, he comes off as a huge dork, and definitely needs more time on camera before stepping up to another live Town Hall broadcast. Kevin Rose should not let him talk as much as possible. Don’t believe me? Watch the archived live broadcast for yourself on Mashable or Digg.com/Townhall. Jay’s the one on the left.
In web analytics news, I will be attending the Web Managers Roundtable tomorrow in DC…see you there!
