Yay for alliterative titles. As I watch the new season of the Real Housewives of Atlanta, I also have to think about a web analytics reporting challenge.

Imagine you have a large, complex website with data pulls for monthly scorecards/dashboards, but the stakeholders viewing the scorecard have diverse, possibly mutually exclusive interests. For instance, one stakeholder might want to look at visitors to one section of the site, and another only wants to see the number of downloads for a different section. And you have to create one scorecard (for some reason I was just reminded of LOTR “one ring to rule them all”) to make everyone moderately happy.

Do I argue for creating more specialized scorecards or try to make a one-size-fits-all report? If I do choose the 2^nd option, do I try to include basic traffic reports along with a few more specialized metrics? I could also make the executive decision that a metric like average time on site is a metric that will not lead to actionable insights, and replace it with one of the stakeholder’s ideal metrics. Probably no one will be 100% happy but we’ll see how it goes. I’m open to suggestions.

Here’s the latest cool data visualization found on information aesthetics that shows a tool leveraging media aggregation and overlaying it on a map of New Orleans. Pretty cool, but kind of confusing. I’m also looking for data visualization tools (free and online accessible preferably) to try out with my own data sources–any recommendations?

Citymurmur New Orleans

Seattle finally cooled down, which is nice because I have a gross bruise on my leg from soccer that no one should be able to see.  Also I’m excited for Web Analytics Wednesday this week!

Page Tagging

As promised, I said I would post about social media and page tagging. Even though I haven’t done much page tagging outside of Google Analytics, I had a few discussions about it at ZAAZ this past week.  Omniture and WebTrends have some structure around the variables you can tag links/onload events within a page, such as campaign variables and traffic counting variables.

One co-worker showed me her process for keeping track of what she was tagging and how you could use the tags for a variety of purposes when thinking creatively. She had to create a data dictionary to keep track of what she was tagging and why she was tagging it that way for herself, the developer, and any future people working with these pages.

To me this seems like a less than ideal system, and the information science training kicked in and made me think that there should be some kind of taxonomy or controlled vocabulary for page tagging within a company or group.  At least on a project, or in the long term, it would make it easier on everyone if people were naming their variables in a similar way, especially if someone has to decipher your tags later.  It seems almost necessary for Google Analytics, where the user has complete freedom in naming each part of the event tracking tag. I will want to discuss this idea with other people, maybe there’s some obvious reason I don’t know about that prevents people from creating a taxonomy.

Social Media

So I won’t repeat how to do this because I just followed the instructions on this very useful post, but I created a custom advanced segment matching a regular expression in Google Analytics to track the social media traffic sources as a group.  Very easy to setup, you basically just list all the sources you want to track (e.g. “Facebook | Twitter”). It showed social media traffic as much lower than I expected based on the referrers, especially from Twitter, but I’m not sure why that is. I had an interesting discussion today at lunch in the Microsoft Commons, about whether there is really an ROI in social media, and basically I thought that it was more about brand perception and viral marketing, and he thought you had to rely on organic interest and creating a tsunami effect with your sphere of influence.

Side note: GA now offers pivot tables?? But is rolling them out gradually. I am not one of the lucky first.

Why so low social media?

Other Things

Last night FC ZAAZ 99 lost, 4-2 (I think?).  It was a frustrating game not because we lost but just the playing style and some of the issues that come when playing with new people and boys. I felt like I was running like a maniac all over the field and not getting the ball enough to make it worthwhile. Also how ghetto does a high school have to be when they lock their toilet paper dispensers to the wall?

Today I officially became a real person at Microsoft because I show up in the system and have my ID badge. So now I’m not just a pseudo-person getting locked out all the time.  I’m working on a laptop that runs Windows 7, and so far I really like the new features. Then I got to play with a Surface table for the first time, which was very exciting after all of the videos/discussions/projects I’ve worked on this year that relate to it.  It does work pretty much as I thought it would, though this one was not interacting with devices.

Just for fun, the Microsoft Surface parody video:

Information overload, but I think I’ve survived web analytics boot camp. Except now its all I can think about all the time. I’m excited to go to Web Analytics Wednesday at POP on July 15th so I can start meeting more web analytics nerds and talk with them about social media and other stuff. Now I need to play more in Web Trends and Omniture and test out the reports and things to have a sense of the UI and capabilities.  Also I need to practice making things look pretty in Excel. I used to think that was an oxymoron. Mainly I’m looking forward to playing around with data.

FC ZAAZ 99 represent

I played my first outdoor soccer game since Ireland with FC ZAAZ 99 (why 99 I don’t know) last night. We lost, but it was still a lot of fun. I hate playing against teams with people that are 20 years older than me and also unskilled, because they think they are really good and get mad if you touch them at all. I also hate playing on sand. It is the worst to feel like you can’t run as fast and its like there’s a sandstorm in my eyes. Still, I’m looking forward to the next game.

Since I won’t start at Microsoft for a couple weeks, I’ll be spending my free time reading nerdy books, hiking, tanning, and visiting interesting places.

Also Rachel’s wedding is officially coming in June of 2010!! Congrats!

This is my secret shame, but until today I never tried using event tracking.  Probably because I assumed (until I was informed today) that event tracking and page tagging involved writing complex JavaScript, when in fact all you’re doing is calling a function and adding variables.  I should have guessed that Google Analytics (and other software) would try to make this a painless process, but JavaScript still intimidates me sometimes.

I tested it out today by inserting events into the tabs in my portfolio pages in a simple onclick call:

<a href=”#” onClick=”pageTracker._trackEvent(‘Tabs’, ‘Click’, ‘Project 1′);”>

I won’t get any data until at least tomorrow (assuming anyone clicks on it, but I clicked on all of them to make sure it works).  Basically this code can be put into any section within your code that you want to track, such as downloads, video plays, clickthroughs, etc. Its a really powerful capability that I wish I would have tried out earlier but I think I’ll be using it plenty from here on out now that I see how easy it is.

All I had to worry about was the things inside the parentheses which translate to: ‘category’, ‘action’,'label’, ‘value‘.  The last 2 things are optional, but what is nice is that you can name these in almost any way you want so that they are descriptive and unique.  You can also keep categories and actions the same in different events if you want to associate like categories and actions.

Most depressing graph ever

Now I feel especially empowered to segment data further and drill down into the data of sites and pages to see what people are doing on the page for specific sections and dynamic elements. Web analytics is nerdy fun for me, don’t judge.

Aaaand…just as I quit all my soccer teams for the summer, I decided to play with the ZAAZ team. Oops.  Today I got to play some with Web Trends and Omniture and I’m looking forward to learning more about the cool things they can do. Though apparently Google Analytics is catching up quickly.

I also wonder if I will be able to take the Microsoft Connector to work even though I’m part-time there. I hope so. I’m always jealous of their wi-fi and clean looking shuttles.

UPDATE: Huzzah! It worked.

A less depressing table

So if you were ever wondering how to tell what people are doing on your site, how they’re getting there, or where they are going instead…Avinash Kaushik tweeted this ginormous (but valuable) list of 75 resources that are mostly free: http://designm.ag/resources/website-analytics-toolbox/. I’m still in the process of checking some of them out.  There are a couple cool ones that do heat tracking so you can see what areas of your site are “hot” or “cold”, and are getting the most or least attention.

I can think of a number that the Burke Museum should use, such as one of the rank checkers for Google, but chances are no one will have the time or interest when I leave.  I’m not sure which (if any of these outside of Google Analytics) that ZAAZ uses, but I from what Chris Kerns told me, the tools are fairly interchangeable with variations depending on what metrics you are looking for, or the size of the site.

Here is a really good article that I think explains how important web analytics is to understanding the user, and how it integrates with user experience (which is my ultimate goal): http://www.boxesandarrows.com/view/web_traffic_analytics_and_user_experience.

Also we lost our indoor soccer game last night. Vacca Patrol has gone way downhill with all the flaky guys not showing up. Now I’m trying to decide if I should play soccer this summer or not? Or do bikram yoga instead?