My own (very basic) implementation of SiteCatalyst tells me that variations on “Site Catalyst” are my most popular internal search terms, and since I don’t write much on the topic anymore, you may find some value in what Adam is writing.

For those who attended the event, I imagine that Lance Armstrong’s keynote and the Flight of the Concords performance will be top-of-mind and tip-of-tongue, but the keynote that really made me think about things belonged to Seth Godin.

First of all, his delivery is fantastic.  He’s entertaining, he’s funny, and he’s spontaneous, but his subject matter is also fascinating.  He didn’t talk about analytics.  He talked about how marketing is changing and how it’s no longer enough for marketers to shout at people and expect them to listen.  We don’t have to listen to marketers anymore, because we have so many other things we can pay attention too.

A marketers new role is to make a remarkable product.  He defined remarkable as something worthy of making a remark about.  That’s all.  People talking about your product means people are spreading your idea.  Ideas that spread win.

So I was delighted when I read this article by June Dershewitz over on the Web Analytics Association’s blog. June created a list of the “Top 10 Things I Wish I Knew When I Started In Web Analytics.” She says a few things that I often think about, but resist the urge to write about. Some of my favorites are:

4. Dirty, dirty, dirty. Numbers won’t match, they won’t add up, they won’t make sense, sometimes they won’t even exist. Know how much dirt you’re willing to live with, then accept it and move on.

5. You will learn to love the query string. You will come to see it as a beautiful haiku…

8. Don’t fall into the “report monkey” trap…

I also got a laugh when she said that CSV files don’t have to be comma-separated. That’s wrong. CSV files still have commas in them, even if they don’t show up in Excel. Those mysterious commas that you don’t see are performing a wonderful technology magic to keep your data organized.

What do you wish you had known before you started doing web analytics?

I wondered why Google would possibly bother to penalize a site as small as mine. I had them though. I visit the site to post, and people were leaving comments on the blog. Can’t have comments without visits, so I knew they were deliberately messing with me. So I got all my dates in order, took GA screenshots, and then had a stroke of brilliance. I remembered that I had flipped AWStats on for this site back in January. AWStats is a log-file based analytics tool for those who don’t know, but it meant that I had another source for the same data that was missing GA.

I had photographic evidence of the conspiracy now. I had all my screenshots lined up and ready to go, when I suddenly had one final stroke of brilliance. Back on November the 14th I upgraded to the latest WordPress, downloaded a new version of my theme compatible with the new version, and in the process, overwrote my GA collection code.

So I relearned the lesson that I’m always repeating to others when they’re mad at their computers. Computers only do what you tell them to.

My team won the competition during the Winter 2007 semester (the winnings funded my Wii) and one result of that was my eventual offer to work as a Business Consultant for Omniture Consulting.  I have been working there for just over 6 months now, and Matt Belkin thought it would be neat if I showed up as a judge in the finals, asking all the hard questions now that I’ve got a little experience under my belt.

Matt Belkin, Cam Barnes, and I will be judging the finals this Friday, November 9th.  I’m definitely looking forward to the opportunity!

I found the original post here, when Eric Peterson of the Web Analytics Demystified blog ran the refutation. I’m not in the business of copying content, so I’ll let you read the posts for yourselves. Hope you enjoy the strangeness as much as I did. Mom, you won’t enjoy this one =)

According to the article,  right now it can guess age and gender fairly well, but there are very high hopes for it’s future potential.  Online privacy advocates get your guns ready.

According to this analysis by Andrew Girdwood at e-Consultancy, the way that Google’s Website Optimizer changes the content on your page in order to increase conversion, conflicts at a very basic level with the things you should be doing for your long-term SEO.

On the list of concerns:

• Google dislikes pages that present one set of content to GoogleBot, but which appear to say something else to users
• Probable heavy use of javascript to run the optimizer does not play well with long-term SEO objectives
• Creating seperate PPC landing pages creates duplicate content on your site which means your own internal pages are competing with each other for rank in the Google search result

One possible solution is to protect the URLs to your PPC landing pages from GoogleBot through use of the robots.txt file while still allowing AdBot to get to them. That way you can create duplicate SEO friendly content for your PPC pages (remember, you want a good Quality Score) without conflicting with your other long-term SEO goals.

More Info
http://www.e-consultancy.com/news-blog/363042/why-to-be-great-at-ppc-you-have-to-be-good-at-seo.html

Apparently the law only applies if the ad is displayed in Utah or the advertiser/keyword vendor is located in Utah. How on Earth does one control that? In reality, every advertiser would have to check a Utah registry before buying keywords that might contain a trademark of a competitor. In fact, the language of the law is even more vague. It defines a trademark as an “electronic registration mark…[a] word, term, or name that represents a business, goods, or a service.” How does the state of Utah possibly expect to enforce this law?

If all this doesn’t spell S-T-U-P-I-D-I-T-Y, the law passed despite the fact that Utah’s general counsel informed the legislature that the law violated the dormant commerce clause.

The bills champion, Dan Eastman, is trying to protect against so-called trademark hijacking, which he refers to as a new form of identity theft. While that is a problem, this is one solution that will never work. The consitutional issues involved are only one massive obstacle in the road, not to mention the lack of support from anyone with a brain (OK, maybe that’s a bit harsh).

The likely outcome is that the law won’t stand up under scrutiny or even a slight breeze, but before we can bury it, our tax dollars will have to pay for the litigation and resulting court cases so the judges can strike it down. Couldn’t the state be doing something worthwhile with our money, like working on the new Real Salt Lake stadium? (And yes, I’m glad the stadium is being built)

More Info
http://blog.ericgoldman.org/archives/2007/04/utah_bans_keywo.htm
http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/archives/005185.php
http://www.schwimmerlegal.com/2007/03/utah_electronic.html