Bochum

A few days in Germany - in the delightfully dull City of Bochum.

Here is the view from my hotel room (photo stitched together from sketchy Blackberry photos)

Click to enlarge.

The ongoing search for Good Steak took me to 'Steakhaus El Toro' - who's Argentinian steaks didn't disappoint.

(despite the seats being covered in hairy cow hides)

Reading List

Blogs

This is a quick list of worthwhile blogs to help in getting and keeping up-to-date in the world of web analytics.

Occam’s Razor by Avinash Kaushik

Lies, Damned Lies... (Ian Thomas)

Multichannel Marketing Metrics with Akin

MS adCenter Analytics

Web Analytics Princess by Marianina

Chris Clapham - Marketing Demystified - but still with a healthy measurement/analytics subtext.

Eric T. Peterson

Matt Belkin

Official Google Analytics Blog

And not forgetting:

bob-o-rama analytics feed

Books

If you want something that you can read on the train or hold in your hand then these may be of interest.

Mr Kaushiks book Web Analytics: An Hour a Day will give a good gentle introduction to Web Analytics for complete beginners, but should also have something to offer someone who is working on WA full time.

Akin's book Multichannel Marketing is a more advanced tome, best for people that are committed (one way or the other) to a multichannel customer-centric approach and need some way of figuring-out what works.

While not directly WA related, the SEO: An Hour a Day book is worth a read. Many of the things that make a site SEO-friendly also make it analytics friendly.

WAW - March

This is not really a review of Web Analytics Wednesday (WAW) that was held in London on Monday 31st March 2008. The revised date was to allow our special guest speaker, Mr Eric T. Peterson.

Yes, this is stupidly late, but out of completeness I still feel compelled to post. Besides, these images have been sitting on my desktop for the past weeks and I need to do something with them

Mr Peterson spoke on the subject of the 'Future of Web Analytics'. His presentation was both entertaining and insightful.

Here is the 'official' March WAW round-up post. Unfortunately there was one picture missing:

Here is Mr Wayne Byrne on the left with his eyes almost shut. Dr Alan Hall (with his eyes shut) in the middle and myself, sporting open eyes and my stupid attempt at a beard.

The beard competition that I was sort-of competing in was started by the web team of a customer of ours - they will be playing this until the end of May, but I had to quit early.

The next London WAW will be on the 20th of May (a Tuesday - designed to interact with e-metrics).

untitled

Last night passed without further interest, I slept well - nothing to moan about.

The company here is just as I remember it - although web analytics isn't going to just 'happen' for them. They have to realise that the need to use WA as a tool and that they will need to drive its use.

I didn't bring a coat with me, but it's damned cold out there - bright sunshine but still about minus one, worse when the wind blows. I just went to look for a coat, but didn't see anything that I liked, other than the thought of having one to match the one I brought back for Linus the last time I was here.

My drink is nice.

Reykjavik again

I find myself in Iceland again - arriving at the same late hour as last time, except this time it's properly dark. This is a dumb excuse to try writing an entry for my site using my 'phone. So far it seems to work.

The Flybus, as it's called, is a smelly old bus that should eventually take me to my hotel, I costs 1300ISK, which at today's rate is just a bit more than a tenner, slightly cheaper than my thirty-five quid return ticket between Gatwick and Heathrow this afternoon.

The ride out of Keflavik, which was originally a US airbase, is quite smooth, ape far we still have the lights of the airport around us, the smelly coach isn't that full, most people on the flight seemed to be locals, so I would guess that they mostly have better ways home.

Toyota, Subway... Familiar names shine-out from the left, while to our right is nothing but a thousand miles of darkness. I don't think I'm exaggerating.

Here they drive on the right. Not that it matters, the road is empty.

And now it's dark to our left as well. The darkness of another few thousand miles, this time over water. Could be worse, they could have put a drive-through McDonald's out here.

...

I forgot to mention, but, you know how when you land at an airport and it smells funny, like Edinburgh airport always smells of cow poo? Well, landing here, it smells slightly of rotten fish. Which is nice. Don't worry, you seem to get used to it very quickly. I wonder if that smell is 'real' in any meaningful sense?

...

The coach is warm. Too warm. I know that it's only about 1 degree c out there, but this seems to be over-compensating a little.

All of this road is lit with sodium street lights. I guess it would be a dangerous road, but it seems silly somehow. I can't help but think of all the unlit motorway in the UK. The light of the street lights illuminates just a little of the landscape to either side.

Oooo! Proper lights. Are we nearly there yet?

First drop-off. Two guys that have clearly left a car somewhere odd. Just noticed, although the roads are clear and dry, there is a bunch of snow by the roadside. The odd monochrome light makes it kinda hard to see what's what.

Nesti, KFC, N1, Snogg.

Hotel can't be far now.

Red roadside sign says minus three degrees. Chilly.

Back To School

It looks like I'm going back to school, except this time I'll be the chap at the front of the room waving his hands around.

I have been asked to present the Web Analytics section of the 'Consumer Metrics' module that is part of a couple of the University of Southampton's school of Management MSc programmes.

More information, links, comments and stuff will follow - but at some point I need to settle down and put the slides together for the session.

The department is lauunching a blog :

http://thirstforknowledge.wordpress.com

Also, references :

http://www.management.soton.ac.uk/StudyOpportunities/pg-ft/marketing-analytics.php

http://www.soton.ac.uk/postgraduate/pgstudy/programmes/2007/management/msc_marketing_man.html

August WAW Review

The August Web Analytics Wednesday in London seemed to be a success - although we don't have all the feedback yet to make objective measurements.

I had missed the July session, having been in Iceland /travel/reykjavik - so this was my first time at the venue (A big thank you to the Crown and Anchor - who provided us with our own bar. Fools!)

I have been asked to publish the presentation that I used for the pre-networking session, while there isn't a lot of context on the slides, it may give you a little flavour of what happened.

You should be able to click through the slides below :

swf:2007SeptWAWpresentation.swf

We didn't manage to cover all of the points, but here was the gist of the discussion :

• Not everyone agreed that 'mobile content' / 'mobile sites' were worth doing at all.
• Effectively measuring mobile sites is non-trivial, although it should be possible to get something of use (even if it's not 100 percent good (not that anything is)
• Some people are waiting on standards support from operators and manufacturers before attempting anything.
• I figure (maybe someone agrees) that we may need to remember what the web was like 10 - 15 years ago and just get on with it and code defensively around lack of standards / support.
• There is a greater requirment to support the mobile multi-channel mix, but having %somewhere% for an online 'campaign'/message to go back to would be a good idea.

Also - BlackBerry quirk

I have an interesting trick (noooo, not %that% one, the other one!) If you want to track the network that a mobile device belongs to then you can simply use the IP information and look it up in a sensible GeoIP database... BUT if you try to do this with enterprise BlackBerrys then it will tell you the organisation that they are attached to (useful in it's own right, but still doesn't tell you the network). So, IF you get in touch with me (email address on /bob ) then maybe I'll tell how you can add the network operator for the BlackBerry into the mix.

References :

November WAW : http://www.sclanalytics.com/resources/events/waw_november2007

The WAA : http://www.webanalyticsassociation.org/

Reykjavik

It's been a long while since I've had a chance to sit down and

write anything. I have spend a few weeks working in Bracknell and this week I have been in Iceland.

This terrible URL (to be fixed) http://tinyurl.com/34dlop will take you to an annotated Google map (with extra bits to be added) that shows the highlights of my visit.

Places that I ate :

• Silfur http://www.silfur.is/ has a more 'fusion' menu than their site suggests. Their signature chocolate dessert and anything that has Wassabi ice-cream is a good pick.
• Hereford Steakhouse http://www.hereford.is/ is a generic steakhouse, not quite good enough to feature on my 'all time' best steak list but perfectly alright. Their fish soup starter was good, but the tentacles lurking at the bottom were a little off-putting (despite being very nice).
• Salt
• ...more to follow.

As I'm writing this I realise that I am starting to think in the idiot English that I have found myself speaking all week - despite the fact that most of Iceland seems to speak better English than most of England. Go figure.

p.s. Sorry about the mis-spelling of Reykjavik, I've had character set issues with the RSS feeds and this was the easiest thing to 'fix'.

May WAW Review

And so another Web Analytics Wednesday passes. This is the second such even that I have assisted with and I think that it was even more successful than the first.

The most obvious change was the new venue - from some deep-underground basement bar, that anybody could wander through we have moved to the rather more up-market Royale room in the RubyBlue bar located off Leicester Square. Plenty of light and even some fresh air from the balcony overlooking the square itself.

The dedicated room made it much easier to mingle, as there was much less of a chance of wandering up to somebody at random and launch into some conversation about long tails before realising that they'd just come in for a drink.

The 'Networking' aspect was also helped by the lovely name badges that we managed to hand-out to just about everyone ... no more guessing that you already know someone and really ought to recognise them by now.

The main session (1800h onwards) was prefaced by an open discussion about the use of Web Analytics tools for SEO tasks (part led by myself and part by m'colleague Matt). This was the first time that either of us had done anything like this and I think we have learned the following lessons :

• Make sure that people are expecting to contribute with an opinion or questions.
• With the above point in mind, pre-announce the full agenda.
• Less, but better (perhaps more inflammatory) points. :-)
• Make sure that everyone can hear (duh!) and that there is a real 'circle' effect in the seating.
• Try and avoid a focus in the circle (although with a projector this can be difficult)
• ... any other ideas?

This time we (the remaining SCL mob decanted ourselves into a nearby restaurant where we mostly had really manky salmon fishcakes. I wish I knew the name of the place so I could suggest that you avoid it.

This time we all made it home without drunkenly disgracing ourselves.

Next event : http://www.sclanalytics.com/resources/events/waw_july2007

Work

At work I do some things.... honest.

Web Analytics :

/netinsight/pretty_dashboards

Web Analytics Wednesday :

/waw/07/may/review

/waw/07/aug/review

SGD :

/ssgd/fc6

Other Stuff :

/work/xen

TFM show this week

This Wednesday I will have the pleasure of attending the TFM show at London Olympia where I will be mostly stuck on stand D56 and trying not to have hurty feet.

http://www.sclanalytics.com/resources/events/tfm2007

If anything exciting happens on the day I will keep you informed.