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Forrester released the results of a survey in an report called What’s On Web Analytics Users’ Minds? The report mirrors a lot of the issues we see here at Yahoo! (instrumentation concerns, multiple sources of “truth”, no silver bullet for counting users) but there’s one sentence that jumped out at me - this was regarding [...]

I’m at the point where a quick scan of my spam folder tells me if I want to read anything in it. I may even go days at a time without reading anything, and then just dump the whole folder. I’ve had a few false positives — email that wasn’t spam, but looked [...]

Great advice from David Schatsky on governing your web site . This passage struck me:

Some guidelines are about navigation, some are about product information, some are about promotions. Each of those are different competencies. Delegate responsibility for each of those areas to different folks.

Why not also look at specific metrics for each? Designers think [...]

If you have a blog, you may already know about FeedBurner, a “feed enhancement service.” I don’t serve my feeds from FeedBurner, but lots of people do.
They’ve always provided some free statistics, and recently enhanced the free stats with ad summary performance and circulation trend charting. But they now have a premium service called [...]

If you’re a Windows user and don’t mind getting raw web log juice under your fingernails, check out Gary Cooper’s Log Parser Basics, which has a good introduction to the free SQL-like Microsoft command-line utility for unearthing gems from your log files.

While browsing the Web today, I read the statement:
Web analytics are a necessity…
Is “web analytics” a collection of things (as the writer suggests), or a single thing?

Rajesh Jain claims that ASPs Failed - But Are Now Making A Comeback. Most of the article discusses well-trodden areas, but ends up saying that web services plus focus on the small business will result in a rebirth of the ASP model. I have no opinion on his conclusion, but in a narrow [...]

We’ve seen web analytics firms merge with SEO/SEM firms, we’ve seen them team up with e-commerce, content management, and even campaign management solutions.
So, here’s another take. WebAbacus (in an announcement with one of the strangest URLs ever) merges with the Usability Company.
Clearly, vendors think there’s value in offering one-stop collection of services. Do clients [...]

Nostalgia time. Here’s a true story.
Back before the bubble hit — way back in the late summer of 1996, in fact — Accrue (which wasn’t called Accrue yet) was doing its A round of financing. Many top-tier VC firms passed, but many also wanted in, and a number made an offer. Some made [...]

Normally I wouldn’t mention a press release citing a company landing a customer, but yesterday WebSideStory announced it signed up Knight-Ridder.
I know the Knight-Ridder Digital sites well - they were a long time Accrue customer, first through the “renegade” San Jose Mercury News, then all the K-R properties, and then on to Classified Ventures. These [...]

I’ve been meaning to read this profile of Usama in Intelligent Enterprise Magazine. Some good stuff. I particularly liked his favorite quote:

“All models are wrong, some are useful.” - George E. P. Box

Not sure what to make of some of the numbers in Media Life’s article Long slow win over illegal downloads. Numbers from ComScore show about 19.5 million visits to the top five P2P sites (a huge drop), versus 26.44 million visits to the top 10 retail music sites (a modest increase).
That’s big news. But [...]

Some happenings in the web analytics industry that caught my eye today:
Omniture announced a new line of executive chairs that have built-in LCDs. This could be just the thing for busy folks to keep tabs on their site stats. The new division, Omni Furniture, has promised additional pieces in the future.
Urchin Software announced [...]

Over at Coffee, Sun & Analytics, Xavier has a couple posts on session length. Some good thoughts there, but I was surprised at the statement
Session length = number of pages users viewed during their session on the site.
Call me old school, but I thought session length was the amount of time a user spent.
I [...]

In other news, Google announced that they acquired Urchin, a web analytics vendor and service. This makes a lot of sense for Google, but not for some of the reasons I’ve seen speculated on.
One speculation is that it gives Google web analytics capabilities to analyze their site. Actually, no, it doesn’t. Google [...]