Data Rich, Information Poor
the challenge with web analytics is the very first time somebody plugged in a web server into a wire, it turns out that it spews out data.And I think there is a website, robots.org or something, do a quick search in Google, and you'll find a list of all the robot user IDs.It's a magical thing that happened You plug in the ethernet cable and lots of data comes out And the approach for the last 10 odd years with web analytics has been that we have all this data, why don't we add, subtract, and multiply it, and puke it over the fence and the people will figure out what to do with it And that model worked for a few years But it does not work anymore Web analytics is incredibly complex, and simply puking data out is not a good way to solve the problem Because what happens is that if you sit in the eyes of the customers and I've spent sort of ten odd years sitting on the practitioner side of things all of these data just simply provides questions and numbers It does not provide you with answers And it rarely provides you with any insights that you can take action on And so the model that existed thus far with web analytics is broken, because data puking b Analytics Challenge> is no longer an option And so, I think that we're Not-So-New Paradigm for Web Analytics living in this nat-so-new

paradigm that I definitely want all of you to take away from today, is to live in a world where data is at the service of driving action  
And in the book, I have this three layers of so-what test And essentially, it is that if you look at a metric, anywhere, on the dashboard or in the report, and you ask it so-what three times, and at the end of the third time, it doesn't give you an action, you're wasting your time, no matter what guru or thought leader pontificated about the use of the metric Data should drive action If it doesn't drive action, you're wasting your time And the interesting thing with web analytics, unlike other things in the world, is there's a lot of data to waste time on. So what I want to do today is talk, there are two sort of parts to my presentation 
The first thing I want to talk about are The six odd principles about how I think Google Analytics helps you understand your data much more efficiently and drive action And the second part of my presentation I want to talk about this thing I call rules for revolutionaries.So in combining a quick little survey methodology with what you saw in GA with these metrics, you can truly begin to understand if your content website, if your non-e-commerce website is performing as well as it should.But a lot of people don't realize is you can escape from the 62 tab world because you don't have to accept what is by default available for you in Google Analytics You can go in and say, you know, I have somebody who is purely responsible for doing all merchandising on my website.I know overall story, nice page view trend, I have my strip, I have my context, and now

I'm ready to move beyond the summary level data to know at the nitty-gritty level what's going on. And when you go to that level, it's kind of overwhelming to say, this is cute and, dare

I say, sexy, but it's a lot of data.Or you have somebody who is responsible for all your affiliate marketing or a particular website or your relationship somewhere Just send Laura exactly what she needs Not 62 tabs The thing that needs, she needs to do her job It's easy for you to do that in Google Analytics And a lot of people don't realize that it's that easy.The other thing that I think the current version of Google Analytics does a magnificent job at is data discovery Because the model thus far has been that we'll give you lots of tables, we'll give you graphs, and they'll show up at your desk.So Yahoo, MSN, and Google decide what to do. They decide what the homepage of your website is, not you Based on what people are typing into a search engine, the search engine will do its best to figure out what's the right page on your website to show them.My recommendation to you is when you look at the data, assume a level of comfort with it.

When I analyze data and I know the web decently well, so I'll say, you know what, I have approximately a million subscriptions.Most non-humans, our beloved friend robots and crawlers, actually mercifully

do not execute JavaScript tags.Remember, the crawler from Google is not executing those JavaScript calls and it will not index that content.And make sure, because if you're using some agency in New York who is playing with things

and redirecting traffic through their servers and sending it over here, there's a bunch of stripping going on and adding, in that process, it actually gets pretty hard for any analytics tool to actually figure out the split between organic and paid.It is extremely easy to use, it's extremely efficient at helping you discover data and trends and insight, and it has many, many things built in to make sure that even the most

expert person or the most simple person can understand the data that's there and take action from it. It's very, very good at it. I especially love the AdWords section of the Google Analytics tool.So notice that it's, I walk into lots of different companies, I do consulting for some companies and I walk in and they'll say, here is our dashboard and it has 62 tabs This is not a dashboard, it's a frickin' report.With Google Analytics, it's actually pretty easy for you to go and create your dashboards It's nice It's pretty You can look at your data You can look at your performance And the nice thing about it, I think as Brett touched upon, is that you can schedule and email this, which is wonderful.So not only do I know what pages are more popular on my website, but I can actually compute how well are those pages performing in terms of sucking people into my website

and getting them to spend more time so I can show them my banner ads.And the nice thing is that there is a really wonderful

area in Google Analytics that you can use to track effectiveness 

I contribute $20,000 of that, and he contributes $100 billion a year.So notice, most people actually just come once to this hardcore content site that's trying to spam people with banner ads.And my recommendation for non-e-commerce sites always is throw a survey up. Throw a simple little survey, three or four questions, and ask people what they thought of the content.And yet, when I do seminars or go talk to companies, I'm

stunned at how few people actually know what the bounce rate of their website is. So I encourage you to do this.It's very important that for your web businesses, you actually figure out what a process is.

In this case, an example is I want to improve the merchandising capabilities of my website.So if you use Google Analytics or many other tools that are now standardized on using JavaScript tags to collect data.Non-human traffic was more of a problem during the weblog days because when crawlers crawl

your website, they do leave all the entries behind in your weblogs.There are a few robots, some obscure ones that are smart and execute JavaScript tags, but it's very, very rare that that happens.If we don't see any marketing campaign information associated with the inbound traffic that's coming to your site, then we will then assume that this is an organic search or natural

search and we will put it in that category.But if you sign up for shop.org, it publishes study every year, couple times a year, that creates and provides standards for conversion and things like that.If you could fancy up one of every enterprise solution that's out there, uses live reports,

uses Omniture website, and give me a picture as to where does Google Web Analytics fit in that picture?Omniture has its own proposition,

HBX its own, Webtrends its own, GA its own.And so there are lots of different options and lots of great ways in which you can look at data in Google Analytics, but also you can share it with people who need to take action on it If somebody's responsible for the checkout process on your website.A lot of organizations have relied on very few people to actually look at the data, analyze it, find insights, and then take action.So what GA does is you can say, oh, here is nice, OK.
Page views are dipping over there.One of the things that a lot of people don't realize, I really love this one, is a lot of people obsess and have their egos tied in homepages of the websites.And the thing that people don't realize is that you actually don't have control anymore about what the homepage of your website is. 80% of the people start surfing at a search engine An astonishing number, by the way.But what is actually better is no matter where you go in Google Analytics, by default the team is trying to give you context from your data.You get this by default in most reports in Google Analytics, you get context.If you don't have goals in Google Analytics, that's very suboptimal.If page views is what you're trying to drive at, find the best possible metric that would give you context with the data that allows you to take action.So for your metrics, as you analyze the data, never ever on any dashboard or report look at one metric by itself.Exactly the same data, exact same metrics, but now it's

comparing performance of every page in Timeite site to average amount of time people spend on your website.The wonderful thing about these distributions is that it truly helps you understand the value of a non-e-commerce website from your web analytics data.And if you're cnn.com or you're sap.com, you're any website that does not do e-commerce, if you want to

measure success of your website, it's a powerful way for you to get started.You will segment this data, and you'll begin to understand a lot more effectively what's actually going on the website and what action you should be taking.And that's OK.

At some point, we will all have RFID chips in our brains that will communicate with our website.This is actually a graphic, and it represents the Six Sigma Demake process.Test it. Why should you let your HIPPO decide what the customer experience, the promotion, the content, creative, bullets, font, what should it be?How does Google measure that with regard to tabs, people being on your page when you browse over the page?And if it detects 30 minutes of inactivity, you will automatically terminate your session.The robots, so the non-humans, are actually not executing them, so they're automatically excluded.On your homepage, all the links, or most important links, are wrapped in JavaScript tags because you click on the link and it pops up a window.So it's very important to know robots don't execute JavaScript tags or JavaScript.And later today, I know Alex is going to show you how you can split organic traffic and paid, let's say, for Yahoo or for other search engines because you can filter out.Now the interesting thing is most web analytics tools do tell you that we will automatically,

brilliantly, geniusly figure out what the difference is, but most of the time, no matter what tool you use, ask that question.So you do affiliate, AdWords, Overture, whatever, it's called something else now, YSM.I believe that according to terms and conditions for Google Analytics, it does not mix and merge data across sites and things like that.In my mind, the core strengths of Google Analytics are some of the things I've covered today.And next month, the delta is two, something funny is going on. You want to investigate that, but you'll notice the trend is the same.If you want to go back and revolutionize your approach, your implementation of data, I have sort of five, six principles that I have learned through my painful experience that I want to share with you today.It does a fantastic job of creating a data democracy And unlike our adventure in Iraq, this one actually works.And there, the person in the company who makes decisions about the website has their secretary print the reports and put it on his desk every week, which is, I cannot believe it. But the interesting thing is. It's really hard for you to make decisions based on a printout or a spreadsheet that's
sitting on a desk.You want to make the most optimal content for your websites.So as I browse around and look at content reports, I'm on the root directory.I get all this data with an easy reach that helps me understand where are people coming

from, what is driving them to my website, and do I have relevant content on that page for these people.In this case, if you look at this trip, it's actually telling you, it's comparing the numbers to site averages and actually giving you a hint of where you should be focusing on. And that's very nice.It's giving you an initial indication that you're doing kind of okay over there.When you show most senior executives the first strip of data, just this data with no context, the question that they ask you is, what is the definition of time on page?Very simple strategies in which you can give context to your data so you can actually make decisions from it, rather than arguing about what the definition is. Here's another way.If you don't know what the outcomes of your website are, no amount of analysis will tell you what you should be doing.To know that you're up 7% rather than knowing you've got a million visits on your website?You go to your content, this exact same screenshot I had a few slides ago.In GA, you press one button, that button up there, and it actually allows you to compare two different metrics quickly.One of my new principles, PETA, People for Ethical Treatment of Animals, that's a great organization.And so I came up with a new acronym, and it's called PALM, P-A-L-M, and it stands for People Against Lonely Metrics.It's very easy for you to find a best friend for your metric that allows you to define performance.In this case, if you want drive conversion, actually Yahoo seems to be more important than Google.So one of the more popular posts I had written on my blog recently was that on non-e-commerce.So for example, rather than measuring the number of visitors and the unique visitors that come to a content site, in this case, you would assume that approximately each person comes twice.Again, purely for non-e-commerce websites, it's important to know if that's your business.If I have good content about providing value to you, you will probably come more frequently.So this goes back, literally, this website has had Google Analytics for more than a year.The next thing you would probably do is you'll say, OK, let me segment this data.This piece of data still does not, it's kind of, sort of, the value of content and other fuzzy metrics.So if you want to do fuzzy metrics, throw up a quick survey, and I can say, hey, as a result of my experience, is my

brand getting better?Only exception today is a metric called bounce rate.The other thing is you all spend tons of money on AdWords and direct marketing and affiliate marketing and all of those things.And what this metric can help you understand is where are you acquiring crappy traffic from very quickly.That's the average conversion rate in the United States of America, whether you're selling elephants or iPods.And I think if you look at the graph, you'll notice it actually is trending up and to the right.Maybe this is not a great place to go.

Well, bounce rate is a great qualifying metric.And so I'd done a presentation at E-Metrics Summit three years ago, and I'd created this rule, the 1090 rule.I'm stunned that companies invest a million dollars in a tool and they give it to the admin.But the rest of the time for somebody whose title says analyst, this is what they should do. Not all these days analyst should actually be spent in doing analysis, unstructured analysis.You cannot expect to get massive insights from any analytics tool simply by implementing the tool.Define, measure, analyze, improve, control.It is very, very common for me to interact with people in black turtlenecks with torn jeans.The nice thing about testing and experimentation, this is why I'm a huge fan of it, is it creates a democracy.You can now get a multivariate tool, an A-B testing tool, and you can say, if we have eight great ideas about what this page should look like, or what kinds of promotions we should run, or what is the best creative for an AdWords ad?Every single person, every one of you, no matter what tool you use, should figure out what your testing strategy is. Because it will be the difference from you swimming in data and taking no action to simply

throwing up experimentations and hypotheses on the website and let the action be taken for you by your customers.Now the challenge with time on page, this especially affects blogs for example, is if

you only see one page on a website, the tool actually has no idea how long you have spent on this page.So almost everybody who comes to the blog sees one page, gets every single thing they

want and then they leave because essentially it's a one page website.So if you use weblog files as the source of your data, you have to manually filter them out.So if you want to filter out, you can do it, but with most tag-based analytics solutions,

this is not that much of an issue.Most robots, 99.99% will not execute JavaScript.Paul is the director for engineering for Google Analytics.As long as you have campaign tags on your landing pages, and we will pick those up and we'll be able to determine that that's paid traffic.And I think the days of somebody, some analyst or author or random guru through telling you what tool you need.The nice thing about GA is I would say, you know, you can get it for free, and you can install it on your website.You cannot import data into Google Analytics at the moment.There are lots of case studies and real examples that we'll make sure you get to talk to Nick today.So like click to call, or ads in a magazine, or flyers on your Office Depot store.So you can do online, offline tracking with web analytics tools now.The way that they actually start and end sessions, most tools differ in when they terminate a session.There are solutions now where you can download and do things like that, or some solutions of data warehouses, things like that.But your core analytics data, once collected for every vendor, is fairly well set.It's just the way the data is collected, stored, and processed.The easiest thing to find in Google Analytics is not a report.So the first thing is. Google Analytics does a fantastic job.In more than one way, Google Analytics makes it easier for you to get data in the right hands of the people at the right time.Maybe I want to run AdWords campaigns in Africa Now you can do that.So it's like, oh, all these people came to my website I wonder, oh. We do have good errors.And that is the homepage of your website.Don't let your egos be tied up to the homepage.I wonder what keywords are driving them to my page, or actually what sources they're coming from.Sure enough, Google, Indeed, Yahoo, right?But to do all of this, this, this, I've dived really deep into the data.And I've only pressed three buttons.It's much easier for you to just start at any level you want of your data and simply explore the data and find insights.This is really hard for you to do with Excel spreadsheets that might come from any tool.One of the most wonderful things about the internet is that if you're half-competent at your business, all your web analytics numbers go up and to the right over time.Even server errors go up and to the right over time.I think one of the things that, the team that builds GA is sitting at the back over there.So one of the things that I think they've done a really great job of is provide you context as you look at your data.So for example, rather than looking at one solitary number, you can actually get a nice performance overview.I got 300% more page views on the website.You get so many more new people coming and consuming content.So this website, spectacular success.And the next thing I wanted to share is data in service of action, just to sort of reiterate the theme of what I've been talking about so far.So you can look at all your search data for goals, outcomes, exactly the same thing.Although Google brings a stunning more amount of traffic.And some analysts amongst you want to try and spend time understanding data.And I'm sure there are many of you here today who might not be actually have e-commerce websites.The averages hide the truth effectively.The distribution paints a radically different story.You have to understand that this is a very, very they're coming to your website, wouldn't you design the site differently?Wouldn't your content strategy be different?If you are a content site, you want to know if people are loyal to your website.On this non-e-commerce website, 66% of the traffic was brand new.Because they had designed all of their content navigation

structure based on the fact that you knew them really, really well.This is very effective in you making decisions and measuring success of your website.How much content do people consume?How long are they spending, and how much content they consume?How do the numbers look for my marketing campaigns?Is the likelihood that I'm driving people to offline sales better?So I am a huge fan of the metric bounce rate.Because I fundamentally believe that there's no such thing as, oh, here are God's KPIs, and if you measure them, you're fine.So my mindset is, here's the data, here's an effective way for you to navigate the data.Rather than me pontificating on it. This is the one exception I will make.I love it. I call it the sexiest metric ever.And the reason I like bounce rate is because it is so powerful and so, I call it brilliantly dumb.Because it's really easy to understand what a bounce rate is.

There's no need for definition.It, bounce rate, defines this experience for your customer.Actually, for most of you, if you do e-commerce, I bet you your conversion rate is 2%.If you're really good at direct marketing, your conversion is probably close to 30%, 35%.On average, you'll find the bounce rate for your site will fall between 40% to 60%.Loveindeed.com and mail.google.I wonder what the bounce rate performance is. And they all are sending quickly unqualified traffic.My keywords, what's my bounce rate?Definitely look at the top 20, 30 entry pages to your website, where people are.Measure bounce rate for your core acquisition.Measure bounce rate for your top entry pages.If you're spending money on AdWords, measure bounce rate for your landing pages.Then you can say, is it that I'm bidding on the wrong keyword?It's a quick qualifying metric.At an aggregate level, it's hard to find tons of insights quickly.So this is the last part of my presentation, rules for revolutionaries.Until recently, I was the director for research and analytics at Intuit.And the goal for everyone, every single one of you in the room, if you're here and paying

attention to me and not sleeping, the goal is you actually want to get lots of value from the implementation of analytics.It's really, really, really important that if you want to get serious about analytics, that you don't simply throw a tag on your website.You throw a tag and forget about it.

You will need somebody intelligent who is going to analyze the data, who's going to understand your business, your goals.And I find that a lot of people underestimate the value of business acumen and common sense

that you need to attack the data with.So no matter what web analytics tool you use, the differentiator for you between success

and failure will actually be, well, maybe all of you.I understand your businesses and can analyze the data.The next rule I have is that reporting is not analysis.Only 20% of the time spent doing reporting because you can't get away from it. But you saw so many different ways today early in my presentation in which you can do data discovery.The web is changing at the speed of light or even faster than if you can imagine it.

And it is probably the most perfect medium to collect imperfect data.But the interesting thing is the web still provides probably more data and more valuable data than any other medium on the face of this planet.Because ads in magazines to me is a faith-based initiative.Because you say a Fortune magazine gets a million subscriptions a year and I will put my ad in it because I have a faith-based hunch that it will drive sales.Or I will do a quick market survey and ask my mom if she saw the ad. That's a faith-based initiative.He's always printed catalogs and he knows nothing about the web.I was giving a speech at a very big company last month and I said, look, if I have 80% of the confidence in data and I come to speak to Rob, Rob is the CEO of this Fortune 10

company, Rob would say, whoa, let's go buy Google.You might not want to send a rocket to the moon right away, but start assembling the engine.Then what you want to do over time is you want to take micro-segments in your data.So you can say, I want everybody who comes to my website to buy Google.Right, on the keyword Avenash sucks.I will take that keyword traffic, just that, and over time I will try to understand why quality might be differing.It's very important, if you want to create data-driven organizations, that you actually have a process and a

structure around data, around analysis, around taking action.Because most people say, and this actually happened to me when I first got to my prior company, people said, we have a report publishing schedule.It creates a repeatable process.As you go back and look at your analysis, you look at your reports, you look at your dashboards, you look at what

needs to happen in order to take a decision, to create a test.The lesson is that most web experiences are created by HIPPOs.HIPPO is an acronym that stands for the highest paid person's opinion.You take all this data you have, all these brilliant insights and all this great understanding, and you walk

into a room and the person who gets the highest salary, no, no, no, no, I want a woman running in slow motion against a blue background.And the interesting thing is HIPPOs come under all ways, shapes and forms.Other HIPPOs are cuter.The wonderful thing about testing and experimentation is you can figure out how to be wrong quickly and efficiently.And you're going to hear later at the end of the day from Tom about all of the wonderful things you have at your disposal to do this, but when you go back to your offices, you should...Paul can correct me if I'm wrong, but Google measures it exactly the way every other tool does.And the way all tools will measure time on site is most tools now use cookies and hence

when you first come to a website, they will start a session for you.The time on site for the last page is the tricky problem for every single web analytics

tool because the way a web analytics tool will measure how long you have spent on this page is you look for the time stamp when you saw this page, you will look at the time stamp on the next page you saw.And it will compute the delta.This is literally how most analytics tool compute time on a page.On my blog, all my latest entries are on the home page of the blog.And DOM on logs.There's a lot of code and pinging things you can do that will allow you to compute how long people spend on every single page including the last one.And the time spent on the last page is a tricky proposition for now.On your AdWords campaigns or on your site?Just Google Analytics.Oh, in Google Analytics?Or your campaigns are coming from other searches?He's going to show you how to segment and filter your data, but this is exactly what you would use.Data in aggregate is really hard for you to understand what's going on, so, especially wherever you're spending money, segment that data.You segment the data out so you can truly understand what populations make up the kind of traffic that you want.You should use profiles and filters.Your business of selling Sony bios is very unique.Also sometimes bounce rate is a tricky one.I don't know of a source where somebody's publishing bounce rate.If you don't like it, just stick with the enterprise class tool that you have

because it's as good as the other one that somebody's anointed it as an enterprise class tool.I've got a bunch of exams, all over the place.I should not have been obviously, but I was surprised at how good the AdWords reporting is.

It's a core strength.I wrote a really long post last month, I think, on my blog and

it says, what is an enterprise class tool?Because the one core difference is that if you use any other tool, you will learn what it does by a bunch of marketing slides.And you can talk to him about tracking online, offline.There are many different things you can actually do to track online and offline.I think Jeff, at the end of the day, is going to give you a might be touching on audio ads, for example.And he has some real examples and case studies where he can show you exactly how this tracking can be done.Because that's probably one of the largest ones we face, where someone has an Omniture.Well, Google Analytics shows this.And there is, so the core, usually, usually, the differences fall into these buckets.Usually, usually, most of the things will fall into these three categories, the differences, why the numbers are different.If you do have a paid vendor, stress them and say, why are your numbers different to GA?But most, and that's true for most analytics tools.So the question was, if I, you can have four goals in GA, what if you run, create a site,

put the tag, and you're running it for a few days, and then you realize, oh, I forgot goal four.You cannot go back in history and retroactively reprocess data.And this is true for most analytics tools.What's the privacy policy for Google Analytics?They're very explicitly stated out and they touch exactly what you said.Actually it's, and there is actually a two paragraph section that touches on that.Are there plenty of examples of companies that have policies and change them?And it's very important for her to know all of the data around visitors, okay?Somebody's responsible, in this case, news or excavation.Just send them this little snippet of data.You can schedule it. You can email it And they can get on with their life without ever having to come and bother you.2%.2%.