Coffee, Sun & Technology

For quite some time now I’ve been using analytical tools to slice and dice user data on “small sites” (Wambo gets about 50K visits a month roughly, and I have 2 other small B2C service sites that I’m managing on the side). In doing so, I’ve realized that the kinds of metrics you look at for these sites that need to grow fast are very different from traditional analytics.

While traditional sites look at “improving” existing business processes (increasing conversion rates, enhancing the customer experience, etc etc ), startup sites are laser-focused on finding the right formula for their site or service. Startups are always building. And speed is what matters.

For us early stage sites, we look at a completely different set of numbers. And, we compare data ALL the time. Month-over-month, week-over-week, even sometimes, hour-over-hour. So I’m thinking of another kind of analytics that’d be useful for me, let’s call that growth analytics. In an ideal interface, I’d like everything presented in the context of velocity. Velocity been the uber measure, similar to a session or a page view in traditional web analytics.

I’d want to see user acquisition velocity by hour, day, week and month. I’d like to be able to compare velocities for different time ranges (this week vs last week). I want to be able to track acquisition velocity  for different segments. I want to A/B test my site and see what the impact is on the velocity metrics. And I want to project in the future what my KPIs will look like if I can sustain the current velocity levels (i.e. if I keep growing my users by 3% a week, that will get me to the 1Million user mark by ___). A new calendar type but with dates in the future too, not just in the past.

Yes, you see where I’m going now. I think what’s a little broken with the state of analytics today is the fact that we spend 90% of our time trying to answer the “what happened” question. And that’s soooo yesterday

Finally got a moment to login to my hosting provider and pay the dues, which means the ugly “account suspended” message is gone and the blog’s back up. I don’t know about other bloggers, but after close to 4 years of blogging now, I’ve realized this blogging thing isn’t really something I feel is high priority in my life. Besides, I don’t have anything smart to say every week, not even every month… or in a year. And Twitter, Facebook and others are better places for publishing informal content from time to time. Just easier.

I know I’m not the only one. Amongst my blogging friends, I’ve found two groups forming over the years. Casual bloggers — and serious bloggers. Casual bloggers drop a blog post once in a while, say every quarter, to share some general updates or just to say something. Serious bloggers put a lot more thinking into it, some people I hear put in 10-20 hours a week, every week. And there are other groups too. The personal journal group. Or the corporate bloggers. In fact I keep hearing about these companies like IBM which encourage all their employees to have a blog, use Twitter, etc etc. Maybe that’s where it’s all going — blogging as a profesional tool.

Let’s move on to a few personal updates. Earlier this year I’ve started a new business called Liveclicker, in the video commerce space. I am really excited about this project because it’s got a grand vision, but also very exciting tactical steps to get to it. I will have many opportunities to share this vision later this year, early 2009 when we launch. Currently we are working with top-notch beta partners in the eRetail space, which is highly motivating.

And now a few words about a conference I’ve just attended, Internet Retailer 2008. Gigantic event, with lots of interesting people and many vendors pitching. I have three candid remarks,

(1)  Some vendors still think they call pull up the buzz words, the free tee-shirts and fine dinners to impress their prospects. On Tuesday at a sponsored evening event, I got a non-stop 15-min pitch of a “marketing” dude talking about some personalization technology invented by another dude from Amazon, that’s supposed to increase sales between 10 and 13% with no implementation work, etc, etc. I tortured the guy a little and asked the tough tech questions. At the end of it, the 25-something year-old guy just gave up on me and dropped exactly this: “Well, I’m a Stanford Computer Science Major so you have to believe me when I say this”. And he still had not asked me a single question about what my background was, what were my interests, etc.

(2) I was actually impressed by the large number of new companies in the personalization/recommendation space, and we do seem to have gone full-circle on that too. I personally think that the algorithms haven’t gotten better than 5-6 years ago, but with eCommerce platforms maturing and everyone looking at that micro conversion increase, anywhere, such technologies become interesting again.

(3) I’m under the impression (perhaps I’m mistaken) that affiliate marketing is making a strong come-back. All the major networks were at the show, and I saw a few new interesting approaches that blend social networking concepts with actionable and credible marketing programs.

And this last thought as a mental note for the future - the hot question on everyone’s lips: what’s social e-commerce?

These days I’m running into more and more eMarketing folks with engineering backgrounds. I think this happens for a couple of reasons. First, e-business is about efficiency. Online you can track the effectiveness of your campaigns, promotions, changes in site design. Something you can’t do easily in the offline world. So it’s not too surprising to find people who can crunch numbers taking key roles in companies - even in the Marketing departments. Second, we live in a Google world. Google has become such a powerful force in e-marketing that it was able to push its spread its analytical/math based culture on to their partners and customers. It’s all about results as they say.

Coming from an analytical background, I certainly am happy to see this happening. As long as analytical folks realize they still need to work hand-in-hand with their more creative counterparts, this is a promising evolution.

Here’s a bonus… eBags.com first sketch, dated 1998, from Jon Nordmark and Peter Cobb.

I’m planning on going to eTail 2008 in Palm Springs (February 11-14). I’m hoping to meet interesting people, learn about the latest and greatest in retail technology (Web analytics, online marketing, SEM, etc), and collect feedback on a new idea I’m working on. If you’re around and want to chat/brainstorm/just say hi, send me an email: xavier at liveclicker.com and let’s find a place and time to meet.

Raw thoughts on this one from my iPhone at Starbucks…

1) Superb corporate move by OMTR, which one again impresses everyone. I saw their market cap topping $2B this AM, incredible.

2) Nice outcome for the WebSideStory guys! $400M is a big payout and I’m sure Coremetrics and others are feeling good about their exit options right now.

3) New opportunities in the Web analytics and digital marketing space to emerge: as all the web analytics vendors are all busy fighting omniture, and omniture is busy buying off companies, I bet smaller/ agile startups will try to enter this market which must now be on every VCs radar.

4) Now most important: is this good for the customer? Yes. More M&A activity = more investment = more innovation. We have a few interesting years ahead of us.

posted from iPhoneSlide.com

My friend Guillaume Cohen giving me a tour of his new startup Veodia: very very cool tech! Check it out at www.veodia.com

posted from iPhoneSlide.com

Argentina 34-France 10. Ouch. We’re talking about rugby here, world cup. 2 weeks earlier France had beaten the All Blacks (best team in the world) and of course, we felt like WE were the best Rugby team… Then we lost against England and now Argentina. So French - capable of the best, and the worst. Alas, next chance to win the title: 2011.

posted from iPhoneSlide.com

Just discovered InstantDomainSearch.com this weekend and I’ve been
hooked since then. Of all the tools I’ve used in the past to check
domain names, this one is the absolute best. Proof that there is still
room (and value) for UI development.

posted from iPhoneSlide.com

Website conversion rate specialist Robbin Steiff nicely summarizes a nano-confrontation between Eric Peterson (WebSideStory) and Matt Belkin (Omniture) at eMetrics. For Peterson “Lack of methodology is responsible for the failure of web analytics”. Peterson has written a number of reference books in the area and has been on both sides of the fence - vendor and customer.
Belkin too has been on both sides of the fence. He responds to Peterson “that analysts should find quick wins (”I saved us $30K on Google Adwords with the use of our web analytics last quarter,”)” and that with those quick wins, the rest of the organization would quickly get on board the web analytics train.”

Belkin’s an outstanding marketer, his answer is tactical, exactly what a prospective customer would want to hear. But his “instant gratification” strategy assumes quick wins come by easy - they don’t. Peterson fails the marketing test - but he’s more thoughtful, and does provide the correct answer for sustained analytics success. There ain’t no magic bullet!

I’m giving a talk about Web analytics today in San Fran, at the Web Publishing Conference (4PM - Web Analytics: What to measure and why).