ben robison

Ideas that spread win.

I don’t know if it comes as a surprise to anyone that Omniture knows how to put on a good show.  The SLC Summit 08 meetings wrapped up this evening and now all that’s left is a day’s worth of skiing.  Work hard, play hard, you know how the saying goes.

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.

Tags: marketing, omniture, seth godin, summit

Some Things I’d Like to Say, But Can’t

The fact that I work for one of the vendors, means that I don’t often write about analytics anymore. There are a few reasons for this: 1) I don’t want to be perceived as an official representative for the company and 2) my site isn’t supposed to be an advertisement.

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?

Tags: excel, top 10, Web Analytics

Computers Only Do What You Tell Them To

I was just getting all my screenshots in order for a post on the Google Analytics conspiracy. I went into my GA account the other day and noticed that on November 15, all my tracking went to 0. No Page Views, no Visits, no Visitors, no Referring Traffic, no Nothing. Obviously I find this a little upsetting. I realize that my blog is not a major web crossroads, but I was averaging 30-ish Visits a day up to that point, so I found it a little disturbing.

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.

Tags: conspiracy, google

Guess Who’s Judging the Omniture-BYU Analytics Competition?

Me!  Today I accepted an invitation to serve as a judge in the finals round of this semester’s analytics competition at BYU.  It’ll be my first time back on campus since graduating last April and starting my work for Omniture.

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!

Google Analytics the Best on the Planet?

In my search for quality analytics blogs, I apparently missed one that produced a rather interesting article about Google Analytics being a quantum leap above any other analytics products on the market. So while I work on finding the time to create my own analytics blog, I thought I’d post this up here for a little entertainment.

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 =)