Noise or Music?

Avinash Kaushik is a great measurement thought provoker (up there with the likes of Tufte imho), all-round nice guy and friend of mine. I always come away from his posts challenged and simulated – quite a feat to achieve for your peers in a niche industry. The following post from him – Multi-Channel Attribution Modeling: The Good, Bad and Ugly Models – is a great reference read, though I disagree on a couple of items. Once you have digested Avinash’s thoughts, here is my input…

My thoughts on why the Guardian and the Washington Post are barking up the wrong tree with their constant side-stories. It is disappointing to read the story degrading in this way.

“Analysing this type of meta-data is exactly what companies such as Google, Yahoo, Twitter, Facebook etc. openly do.”

Seriously… what is the problem with collecting and analysing meta-data?

Let me explain the story…

A global white-goods brand, lets call them GlobalBrandlux.com, sent me a survey asking what I thought about my recent website experience. Here’s my response – I wanted to be honest and constructive:

Online privacy is a complex subject. Hence I use this slide to neatly sum up the issue by analogy. Essentially, to illustrate the different levels of privacy I use the scenario of an organisation wishing to understand the impact of traffic on their community.

When speaking at events I am sometimes accused (light heartedly) of drinking too much of the Google Koolade – meaning I endorse the good parts and skip/skim the pitfalls. However this post is a criticism of Google for what I consider to be a flawed thinking with their recently announced support of multiple currencies in Google Analytics.

SEO is getting harder! If you are active with search engine optimisation (SEO), then you will be aware of the issue of not provided showing in your Google Analytics reports for organic visits. This post updates the situation plotting the growing impact over time and the differentiation of tech-savvy versus tech-savvy web users.

A busy day…

– Tag Management Systems (panel)
– Privacy Q&A with the UK data privacy authority
– Fiduciary…

I have been to all of the London events (I think) since 2004 so its been interesting to see how things have changed over the years. Here’s my thoughts:

What’s Out
Talking about cookies i.e. deletion rates
Feature wars – tool X has 10,000 “must have” features Beauty Parades – vendors lined up to pitch their products
KPIs – How to select/choose your key performance indicators
Data accuracy questions

What’s In
Big data – we all now have it
Tag Management – the CMS of third-party script placement
Privacy – good/practise, how does Google fit in
Case studies – more examples of what works, what does’t, search marketing and content optimisation

A very quick poll to help me understand book sales. This is to help me understand how to approach future editions, the value of an ebook, and how updates can be managed.

Last week I attended my 8th GA Summit in Mountain View (the first one had just 10 people in the room! Four of that original group where there this year*). For a change, I summarise the highlights – and why I consider them important to you the GA user – as an infographic