SpeedTV did a pretty nice job covering the race. Viewers got to see Hamilton’s and Massa’s family and friends, which reminded everybody that these pilots aren’t robots - they are real people with real sisters, brothers, mothers and fathers. It was touching to see Hamilton younger brother, who sits on a wheel chair, praying for Lewis and crying at the end. Lewis has been hardly criticized for the last couple of months for his driving style, etc - and this was a nice reset for both fans and critics. He’s human.

Business is a little like that. There’s always stress at work, sometimes confrontation, and it’s easy to lose track of the bigger picture. Your employees, customers, partners and even competitors are “real” people too. Treat them like you’d like to be treated, which of course doesn’t take anything away from the fact that it’s a tough world out there and you have to fight, fight and fight.

 ———- Forwarded message ———-
From: Google AdSense
Date: Thu, Oct 30, 2008 at 12:22 PM
Subject: A note from Google AdSense
To: xxx

Dear Publisher,

We understand that the recent economic turmoil has created a lot of uncertainty in the lives of AdSense publishers. During these difficult times, we’re continuing to invest in innovations that improve publisher monetization and advertiser value in the content network.

We’re focusing on further developing our product offerings and boosting ad performance for publishers. We recently announced advancements in AdSense for search and experiments to make ads more effective. We’re bringing DoubleClick technologies to AdSense publishers, and we’ll continue to launch new products and features. We’re also continuing to improve our offerings for AdWords advertisers, making it easier for them to target the Google content network. Features for advertisers, such as the new display ad builder, are designed to improve ad performance on AdSense publisher sites.

We’ll keep driving technological progress, but our best asset will always be our publisher partners. The strength of AdSense lies in the value of the content you bring to users and the quality of the sites you bring to advertisers. Our success is tied to yours. We look forward to partnering with you for the long term, and remain dedicated to helping you succeed.

Sincerely,

Kim Scott
Director AdSense Online Sales & Operations

And he’s got a good sense of humour. Watch him on the Colbert Report:

Prior to that I’m going to be in Seattle for a day to consult with a client and present some of the latest Liveclicker features. It’s going to be an exciting end of the week, that’s for sure. Also nice to catch up with Eric Peterson, whom I haven’t seen for a year or so, and the other great people presenting or attending. This event was put together by Lars Johansson and is part of a series of Internet Marketing conferences around the globe.

I’ve learned a lot while running, windsurfing, biking or playing soccer. Sports is good for the body, but it also tells you tiny little life lessons - many of them apply to my entrepreneurial life. Persistence, hard work, and patience to see results. Motivation and drive to surpass your natural capibilities. Class in defeat or victory. And of course the burning desire to be the number one.

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

Well, I’m sorry to disappoint. It was an email from a PhD guy name Tal who happens to be the CEO of the company. Yes, that’s right, this is where we’ve come down folks — take a feature of your product (anything will do, your new logo, a font change, or even form abandonment), put together an email to a few hundred bloggers, with the words “ALERT”,  “You can’t break the news”,  “There’s an embargo”, and patiently wait for the busy bloggers to bite without doing the research.

And it works. TechCrunch covered the story.  And I’m sure many others will too. Now ClickTale dudes: think twice before sending absurd emails like this to a crowd of people who might know what they’re talking about. Form abandonment was first released in 2003 and all respectable analytics vendors have that feature. I know nothing about your product but you don’t seem to know anything about this market.

Whether this is part of the normal Web analytics space consolidation cycle, or simply the “question du jour” remains to be seen. But I think there is a bigger story here. The chasm is widening between eMarketers on one side, and Web analysts on the other. Web analytics tools keep gettting more and more complicated, to the point where some of the folks out there are simply asking the question: “Can we go back to a tool that’s less complicated?”.

So my personal opinion on the matter is: In 99% of the cases, more reports won’t help. In 99% of the cases, less will be more, and therefore, and yes, you should try Google Analytics.

Usually at that time of the dicussion I get a list of objections, which are:

Objection 1 (most common): We don’t want Google to have access to our site data. We spend ridiculous amounts of money with them, and we are afraid of them using this information against us.

Answer: Google’s got a good track record for business integrity and given their dominant position, I think this is a low risk. In fact, what information could they possibly use, and for what reason? Yes, they could figure out where you’re also buying your clicks from, and the volumes. Then decide to discount or not discount your click costs based on the information. But would that make a huge difference to them anyways? They own the SEM market, and pretty much have all the pricing power they want already.

Objection 2: Google Analytics’ too simple for our business needs.

Answer: While it’s possible that Google Analytics might not meet all your business requirements, it’s highly unlikely. For one, the GA has a pretty competitive featureset. But most importantm, this goes back to the classic mistake buyers make when evaluating Web analytics vendors: i.e. picking the tool which has the most reports and the flashiest UI’s — and ignoring the most important part of the Web analytics equation: people. It’s the people who will make your analytics investment work, not the tools.

Objection 3: Google doesn’t have support.

Answer: I don’t have any information on this. But I’ve used GA for the last 3-4 years now and I haven’t seen many bugs lately (they’ve been very good fixing their initial problems).

Objection 4: Google doesn’t have professional services.

Answer: They don’t but they have certified professional. And if you’re looking for Web analytics services, there are plenty of Web analytics consulting boutiques out there. I have too many friends in this industry to start a list here — but if you’re looking for names, drop me an email and I’ll help you.

Objection 5 (hot question these days): Should we run them side by side with Omniture?

Answer: IT folks will argue that having Omniture and GA side by side will slow down the page (you’re adding to the page load with another JS that’s typically 15-20KB). I think that’s a fair statement. I frequently see pages waiting for the google-analytics.com server response (typically people running multiple analytics technologies), which impacts page performance but also the accuracy of your reports. On the other hand, the average page size is now over 200KB, and another Web analytics tag certainly isn’t going to all of the sudden kill your site.

And my final words of wisdom… Everybody that’s been in this industry long enough knows that people are the critical success factor in any Web analytics project. My recommendation is to under-invest in tools, over-invest in people. That’s what’s going to make it all work.

Now that I’ve cleared this question, can you ask me about my new video commerce startup instead next time we meet at a cocktail ?

posted from iPhoneSlide.com