When Daniel Waisberg, the WAA marketing chair told me about this, I simply couldn’t believe it. But here is the official announcement as the prove.

Special thanks for the volunteers who made this annual event possible:

•Judges: Jennifer Veesenmeyer, Judah Phillips, Stéphane Hamel and “Wandering” Dave Rhee.
•Logistic & Organization: Daniel Waisberg, June Dershewitz, Clare Madden, Shannon Taylor, Suzanne Carter-Jackson.

I want to make our paper available on my blog as well and welcome any of your inputs. Enjoy reading!

I stumbled upon www.limogesjewelry.com and like the “My Beloved Top-Engraved Message Stainless Steel Band”.

The product looks great at that price. What attracted me is the beautiful verse inscribed on the inside of the band, “I am My Beloved’s and My Beloved is Mine”. The big red “Add to Cart” button is easy to find, so I clicked.

Nothing happened. Click again. Same thing.

Is there a problem with Chrome browser I am using?

Switched to IE, the same problem.

After a few minutes, I saw a little error message on top of the page “Please type in your Personalized Message”.

Hmm? I thought I had chosen the personalized message?

Then I realized that it actually allows me to put in a personalized message for outside of band, up to 25 letters and spaces. This is written as part of the product decription but just completely skip from my eyes.

Ok, I put in “The Lord is my shepherd”

Click “Add to Cart” again.

A simple yet good shopping cart with candy aisle on the left. It also got some good security messages there such as “Verisign”, “McAfee Secure” and “BBB Online”.

So I continued with “Proceed to checkout”

First page is simple, kind of like Amazon’s which I am very familiar with. I am not a returning customer so choose “new customer”

Oh wow, this is a one page checkout layout. I have heard that before but haven’t got much chance actually using it (I do most of my shopping on Amazon which is one click).

Page layout is clean and simple with clear indication of step 1, step 2, step 3 and a big “Place MY ORDER” button.

It’s nice that it provides different payment options including paypal and bill me later.

With extreme delight, I fill in my shipping and billing information and click the big “Place my order” button.

What? Why I have to create a password?

Check the page again. It clearly states only the field with “*” is required and there is no “*” for password creation. So why I have to create a password?

Tried again, same problem.

Now I realized although the site adopted the “guest checkout” concept but it still requires of creating a password.

For what?

What a shame that a delightful checkout experience was ruined by a simple problem like this!

Since I like the product very much, I was willing to create a password to finish my order. Imagine the sales the site could lose for those users who might just bail in such situation. I didn’t bother to Google but I am pretty sure there are other websites can provide similar services, possibly at lower cost.

So what’s my evaluation of shopping experience on Limogesjewelry.com?

It could be perfect, but now I am disappointed.

Good news is both errors could be fixed pretty easily.

All it takes is somebody deeply cares about customers and know how to use usability and testing tools to identify issues and fix them.

But in reality, there are tons of problems like this everywhere on the internet. While the HIPPOs are bragging about their social media strategies and media are busy predicting what’s the next big thing, there are millions of customers are bothered by such problems and billions of dollars are lost due to less satisfied customers.

It’s sad. Ecommerce is sad. As a web analyst working in ecommerce industry, I am deeply sad.

Believe or not, in about a month, I am going there again. Now this time, in addition to sit down and listen to those mind blowing presentations, I am actually going to stand up and speak about our journey in the last couple of years. The title of the presentation is “Dell’s Evolution–Leveraging Analytics Globally as a Key Strategic Business Driver”. My boss, Gautam Madiman and myself will co-present this topic and we will describe the unique approach Dell is taking to evolve analytics globally and the positive impact it is having on the business. We will cover a broad view of Dell’s web analytics strategy, organization structure, technology and internal processes along with specific key wins that the program has delivered.

Looking back past twelve months, we have made tremendous achievements including:

• Rollout the first enterprise wide web analytics solution with advanced segmentation technology is in development
• Built a process through which multiple functions and business units can discuss and prioritize analytics and optimization requests
• Launched numerous high impact analytics, testing and targeting programs
• Developed a global analytics team with talented and passionate individuals in HQ as well as regional hubs
• Most important of all, now we understand what the vision is and how we can get to there and we are having a lot of fun in the process!

So come to listen to us if you are in DC this year. I understand it is not easy to make the investment to go any conference in the current environment, but if there is only one conference you could go, absolutely go to the eMetrics Summit. Let me know if there is any specific topic you would be interested in hearing.

Here at Dell, we have the luxury to choose from a wide range of computers (have to be Dell of course), both standard and non-standard configuration, although non-standard configuration requires of special approval.
Last time when I had to choose my laptop, without hesitation, I chose Latitude D820, a 15”4 laptop, the largest of Latitude D series, the king of all. The solidness of the build, the size of the screen and the power of core duo processor made me really feel like a king, from the first moment when I turned it on.

I have been happy with it most of the time, although the 6.15lbs weight sometimes dragged me down. I didn’t travel much but every time when I was on the road, I regretted to carry it with me. The battery life after the first year has also become a concern.

By the end of June, my laptop is about to fully depreciate according to Dell policy and I am ready for another laptop. This time, again, without any hesitation, I went to apply for a Latitude E4200, a 12.1″ and 2.2lbs laptop, the second smallest in the e-series. Putting it side by side with D820, they are like the beauty and beast.

So, just in two and a half years, I have gone from big to small. Thinking about my personal experience, I believe the PC market has gone through some fundamental transformation in last several years.

First of all, mobility now becomes the deciding factor among all criteria when choosing a computer. Price and features are still important but mobility has taken the driver seat. As consumers, we can now trade off between affordability and functionality, depending on how and where we are going to use our computers. But mobility is something that we cannot sacrifice. This is very evident when you look at the booming netbook market.

Second, “powerful” is not an adjective reserved for big monster computers any more. My E4200 has and can have as much computing power as my D820 does, if not more. The E4200 I have boasts a 3GB DDR3 memory (can be upgrade to 5GB), a 128GB solid drive, a detached DVD-RW optical drive as well as a backlit keyboard. It runs Windows XP SP-3 and Office 2007 Business. What else I need to do my work?

Finally, the battery has been improved to the point that carrying laptop is not longer a burden but a joy. I never carried my D820 to any meeting, not necessarily because I want to solely focus on the meeting (admit it, most of the meetings are counter-productive and boring), but because I was afraid I am going to run out of battery and I have to find a place to plug in the adapter. The 6 cell batter on E4200 can last up to six hours, which means that I can take it to any meeting (God forbids any meeting longer than six hours), or probably watch two or three movies during a trip to eMetrics Summit.

So you see, just in two and a half years, I have gone from big to small, but the power remains.

What’s the computer you are using? What’s the next computer you are going to have?

In this post, I am going to talk about the first “M”, Monetization. In web marketing, when people talk about monetization, they usually refer to one of the two activities: the first is about how to utilize the real estate on a website and sell the space to other companies who might be interested in showing ads there. For example, if you look at www.dell.com/home you’ll find there is Nokia and Vizio sitelets at the bottom of the page.

The second is actually what I want to address here: “monetization” in web analytics’ sense, refers to the process and methodology to quantify the possible financial impact of an optimization effort based on certain facts and assumptions.

Monetization is a great tool to sell an optimization project. Obviously agencies use it a lot in their fancy presentations. Shane Atchison and Jason Burby from Zaaz wrote a whole chapter “Monetizing Site Behaviors” in their book “Actionable Web Analytics” (You can preview most pages at Google Books They built a simple yet nice template. You can view the sample here.

Of course, the same concept and similar template can be used by practitioners to prioritize the optimization roadmap.

At Dell, we have a site optimization meeting on the weekly basis. One critical item always on the agenda is to review the testing & targeting roadmap. When we first started with testing, we feared that we didn’t have enough testing ideas. But once the ball is rolling, we often find ourselves faces the problem of too many ideas. Almost everybody from HIPPO’s to sales agents has something in their minds that they are curious about and want us to test. Of course, only less than 20% of those ideas are truly valuable. Spending any time on 80% of the rubbish, your testing program is at risk to fail. How do we get to identify the 20%? We do monetization-we estimate potential impact from each test and prioritize based on dollars amount as well as ease of implementation. Using data instead of emotion to argue with those who are passionate about their testing ideas is such a life saver.

In addition to help prioritize test roadmap, it can also help us prioritize the analytics roadmap. Does analytics need a roadmap? Yes, of course! As a web analyst, I always find myself swim in the sea of tons of different requests from executives I support. The only way for me not to drown in the sea is to prioritize by monetizing all requests. The question I always ask myself is “how much more revenue or margin I can bring to the company if I spend this many hours on this request?” Astonishingly, many times I found the answer is “none, not really”. So I move on. I am lucky to have an alignment with my direct management on this process. He and I often sit down, during our weekly meeting, to review the projects I am working on and prioritize it based on monetized values. Of course, we both realize that we still have to do some monkey works nobody wants to do, such as clean up data etc. That is just part of our lives and we all have to live with it. But if you are spending most of your time in the monkey works, I am pretty sure soon you will either burn out, or find yourself replaceable.

Our time is VERY precious. In fact, I believe the most valuable asset a company has to drive site optimization is not any of the tools, either free ones or the ones they pay millions of dollars, but the time of its web analysts. We can either protect this valuable asset or let it be ruined. We shouldn’t do any analytics just for the sake of analytics. Nor we should do any analytics only to satisfy somebody’s curiosities. The end result of analytics should be either concrete recommendations to the business that some parts of the website needs to be changed, or some test ideas that the testing team can take over to execute.

Monetization is a great friend of web analysts and we all should wholeheartedly embrace it. Sadly I find often we rush from “Analyze” to “Optimize”, without really “monetizing” the efforts. Do it now, and it will help you live longer and happier.

First, let me explain what the acronym really means:

“A” stands for “Analyze”; First “M”, stands for “Monetize”; Second “M”, stands for “Mobilize”; “O”, stands for “Optimize” .

See, I managed to find four words all end with “ze”.

“Analyze” is straight forward. That’s what we, as web analysts do every day, so no need to explain, right?

One thing I want to caution is though, we need make sure that the data we are looking at is correct. If the raw data is not even correct, then that’s “garbage in, garbage out”, regardless how sound your analytical framework is. The analysis results might be misleading and hurting the business, rather than helping the business.

In the web analytics world, we usually are dealing with two sets of data. The first set of data is either the overall metrics at the site level or the most granular data at page level. For this type of data, it will be hard to make mistake. And if you ever made a mistake, even your HIPPO will quickly point it out for you!

The second set of data is at “segment” level. At this point, all web analysts should know that “segmentation” is at the core of any web analytics project. If you don’t know how to segment your visitors or traffic and analyze visitor behavior accordingly, then you should really go back to the training camp.

But the risk is also with “segmentation”. Anybody has experience with Omniture Discover on Demand or Omniture Insights (previously Discover on Premise and prior to that Visual Sciences) or similar tools, probably understand what I mean. There are two major factors could screw the data. First, the exact way to build the segments: in Discover or Insights, you have many different ways to build a segment and not all of them give you the same data. Second, the sampling issue: due to huge amount of data, a lot of web analytics applications can only give you a sample rather than the complete data set, depends on how much data you are asking for.

With this understanding in mind, it is imperative for any web analyst to have a healthy amount of suspicion of the data accuracy. Not only the data pulled by somebody else, but also the data we pull. Yes, we make mistakes too!

There are ways to mitigate the issue of course. (we have hope-it’s not the end of world!). What I usually do is to make sure that I can get the data from two different data sources and compare them side by side. If you are using Omniture, you should always try to compare the data you get from Discover vs. the data from SiteCatalyst. For example, if you are building a segment for a group of pages, you should at least compare the total visits for that group of pages from Discover with the sum of all visits of those pages. These two numbers will never match but they shouldn’t be way off. If I see a huge difference between them, that’s a red flag to me. [Bonus tip: if I have to bet $10 on either one, I will definitely bet on SiteCatalyst and go back to review the data I got from Discover]

Ok, that’s all I want to say about “Analyze”, assuming you’ve got the rest. In my next few posts, I’ll touch upon the other letters one by one and round up with a final summary. Stay tuned!

I replied back, “We don’t do cover page internally. Cover page is only for consultants. ”

This got me think more about the so-called “million dollar slide” . The idea is for whatever project / presentation, you need have one page of executive summary which basically tells the audience, especially executives what are the key takeaways.

The format I usually follow is like this and we call this “answer first” internally at Dell.

• Situation: what’s the context for this project?
• Challenge: what challenges/difficulties the business is running into?
• Solution / recommendation: what specific solution / recommendation for the business, both in short term / long term?
• Monetization: what’s the estimated annualized revenue / margin upside the business can expect from these recommendations? If the executives see millions $ upside, they will surely approve to move forward with the recommendations!

I think this is probably a very good format that we should do more as the web analyst community. As analyst, we love data, charts and tables but sometimes we forget our audience. What do they want to learn? How we can make it easier for them to understand what we want them to do? I don’t think we are doing that enough and we should certainly make this as part of the gene of web analytics.

Got your million dollars slide? What is the specific format you typical use for the executive summary?

It all started with a simple question:

I am looking for what you folks call your analytics folks. I am the Digital
Audience Analyst for a media company. I use cutting edge Web Analytics software
and stay current in industry research. I am not sure what folks call the
Analysts who perform their web analytics and administer the codes and analysis.
Please respond and let me know.

The replies are just pouring in:

"I work for a very well known UK Premier League Soccer Club.

They refer to me as their 'Website Analyst' - although my remit seems to reach
far wider than the 2 websites (one content, and one e-Commerce) that we
maintain.

In the last few weeks I have worn more hats than a habberdasher. SEO, PPC
Marketing, Web Analysis, useability testing, management reporting, yadda,
yadda..."

"My current title is "Web Metrics Analyst", at an ad agency."

"Web Analytics Specialist"

"I work for a creative agency and my title is Web Analytics Specialist. I too
wear many hats (some of which are not even related to WA). Hope this helps!"

"While so many other appropriate names were put forth...I'm compelled by this
query to respond with:

'There are those who call me.....Tim!?'"

:Web Analytics Analyst (in the Department of Redundancy Department I think)

By far my favorite title!!?:)"

Jim Sterne, threw in the most authoritative and complete answer:

Among the more interesting titles of people who came to the eMetrics Marketing
Optimization Summit in San Jose:

Advertiser Analytics Engineer
Advisory Solutions Architect
Assistant Director, Business, Management, Legal & IT Programs
Chief Analytics & Optimization Officer
Chief Analytics Officer
Chief Search Officer
Chief Strategy Officer
Chief Visionary Officer
Client Engagement Manager
Content-Management Expert
Corporate Marketing Brand Manager
Creative & Optimization Manager
Customer Experience Consultant
Customer Intelligence
Digital Marketing Analyst
Director of Analytical Consulting
Director of Analytics
Director of Business Analytics
Director of Consumer Marketing
Director of Data Insights
Director of Data Strategy
Director of Decision Support
Director of Digital Research
Director of eBusiness
Director of Insights and Optimization
Director of Online Operations
Director of Optimization Services
Director of Research, Entertainment & Games
Director of Retention
Director of Search & Analytics
Director of Strategic Business Analytics
Director of Solution Engineering
Director of User Experience Optimization
Director of Web Business Strategy
Director of Web Strategy
EBusiness Analytics Manager
EBusiness Metrics & Analytics Manager
Emarketing Analyst
Executive Director of Business and Marketing Analysis
Financial Analyst
Founder, Chairman and Chief Revenue Officer
Interactive Marketing Analyst
Media Analytics Manager
Merchandising Manage
Online Engagement Strategist
Real Time Analytics Architect
Search Marketing Specialist
Senior Analytics Manager
Senior Director UX + Analytics
Senior Director, Global Site Analytics
Senior Web Analytics Researcher
SEO Analyst
Site Optimization Manager
Social Media Marketing Manager
Sr. Customer Experience Manager
Sr. Director, Database Marketing
Sr. eCommerce Analyst
Sr. Manager Marketing Analytics
Sr. Manager, Experience Design
Sr. Manager, Global eCommerce
Sr. Marketing Operations Analyst
Sr. Marketing Strategist
User Research and Analytics
Vice President, Global Analytics and Optimization
VP Analytics
VP Internet Business and Technology
VP Marketing & Analytics
VP of Blogging Evangelism
Web Analytics Analyst (in the Department of Redundancy Department I think)
Web Analytics, Corporate Marketing
Website Optimizer
Worldwide Marketing Operations

As for myself, my formal job title at Dell is Senior E-business Consultant which I don’t like. I actually changed that to Senior Analyst, Web Analytics and Optimization on my business card, as I feel this reflects my real role and responsibility much better. The dream job title I want, is what Avinash Kaushik has, “Analytics Evangelist”. The truth is though, it probably doesn’t matter what your job title is. What really matters is who you are and what you do.

But it is complete ok to have fun. So what’s your dream job title?

Although his presentation is geared more toward beginners, yet the same principle are applicable for those who want to take their web analytics understanding and practice to the next level: learning (books, blogs, eMetrics Summit etc.), sharing (blogging, speaking etc.), networking (web analytics wedesday, eMetrics Summit etc.) and participating (WAA committees, WAA yahoo forum etc.)

I can’t think of any other way to improve myself and this is an ever evolving, life time process too. The moment you start to think that you know everything, that’s when you probably need find another job.

Now let’s enjoy what Alex brought to us:

Essentially we are talking about the same thing. Maybe I am not as bold as Seth but a little more polite by asking “why” question than straightly saying “no”. The end goal is the same: by asking “why” question or saying “no”, we allow ourselves focus on critical few things, rather than millions of ad hoc requests.

That’s the choice we all have to make. Like Seth put it so simply, “you can dissipate your gift by making the people with the loudest requests temporarily happy, or you can change the world by saying ‘no’ often. ”