Web Analytics 2.0: The Art of Online Accountability and Science of Customer Centricity

If your goal is to determine how much to spend on each media channel, then why not answer that question directly with a randomized media mix experiment rather than attempting conversion attribution analysis?

The essence of the best web analytics report is that it highlights two questions to focus on first: who? and how much?

You can also ask the vendor about first-party and third-party cookies, including which type they use as a default as well as the pain and cost of using first-party cookies. You should almost always use first-party cookies, and most vendors enable this.

Sure, I had a whole bunch from my web analytics tool. But given the nature of the long tail, there were more phrases that people typed into the search engines that never ended in a visit to my site (all those people went to my competition!). This problem was recently solved by Google’s Search-based Keyword Tool (SbKT; http://zqi.me/s-bkt). The two

That is because my experience suggests that you need some context from your web data to even think about visitor actions clearly. Often, sans the web data, you don’t have enough understanding of basic web reality to help you answer these questions correctly.

you have 90 percent confidence in the data, then make a decision. Don’t

For example, the number-one search by people who come on the keyword Avinash is “compare analytics platforms.” How interesting!

Q4: “What are Visitors actually doing?”

So, don’t measure the Bounce Rate for a blog in aggregate. Segment your data, and measure Bounce Rate for your New Visitors. You don’t want them to just come and leave after reading the post. You want them to subscribe to your RSS feed. (That’s one click! No bounce!)