Web Analytics Roundup – Recent Links of Interest
Omniture Summit
I started the month with a visit to Omniture’s Summit in Salt Lake City. The conference was great, even without swell keynotes from Lance Armstrong and Seth Godin (which were both awesome in their own way). Omniture has an ambitious vision for their product line. I’m especially excited about the deep automation they are building with their Genesis platform. If it works even half as well as they claim, it will change the game for many of Omniture’s customers.
Recent Links of Interest:
Avinash Kaushik has a great article on the importance of putting context in web analytics reports.
Debbie Pascoe gives us a look at the new page load time calculations being used to grade AdWords advertisers.
Charles Thrasher has a bitty note about Gord Hotchkiss’ recent presentation at Microsoft. Gord’s talk revolves around Malcolm Gladwell’s thin-slicing hooptedoodle from Blink. Here is a snippet from Charles’ post to whet your appetite:
On a SERP, thin-slicing occurs at the very first listing, either sponsored or algorithmic. The very first listing determines the credibility of the rest of the page. If the reader finds the first listing relevant to their intent, the rest of the listings get a lift in credibility, even when the only thing changing between test SERPs is the first listing! Conversely, poor relevance in the first listing can taint all other listings on the page.
Interested in the Taguchi method? Billy gives a nice overview of the Taguchi Method in this post:
The Taguchi method (also known as robust design) belongs to an engineering discipline called Quality Engineering. The main objective of the Quality Engineering design is to minimize variability in the performance of a product under different environmental conditions.
[By the way, like Dave Taylor, I always think about Tamagotchi when I hear or read Taguchi.]
Ian Thomas gives a solid overview of Gatineau Microsoft adCenter Analytics. Big congrats on the launch of 2.0, Ian!
I hate the term customer engagement, but I respect Eric’s attempt to bring mathematical rigor to his framework. I hope he can devise a decent and reproducible model, but I pray that he can get a better name for his concept. 
VeenAndy has some super links in this post about learning AB testing from the pros. I really appreciate his recap of the 7 pitfalls of controlled experiments on the web.
And to round out the lot, here is a post from Matt Belkin at Omniture about spending smart money on internet advertising during tough times. I attended this presentation at the Summit (it was packed). Matt is a great speaker (funny and knowledgeable) and the information in his long post is timely. I wish he would post the crappy PPT his team made. Very funny.
Hey, thanks for the link to my writeup of the 7 pitfalls… I link to Jeffrey Veen’s 2005 writeup of their SXSW talk, but the pitfall summary is mine — and I’m not nearly as tall as Veen, even at 5′11. (Andy Edmonds)
Thanks for the correction, Andy. My bad.
I was looking at this post in a feed reader and Jeff’s name was at the bottom of the post. I zipped past it too fast and didn’t see that it wasn’t an author attribute. Doh!