Analytics

Where did all the bankers go from the collapsed / bankrupt banks?

Ever wonder what happens to the "human capital" of an investment bank when it goes bankrupt? LinkedIn decided to do an analysis of the career paths of people employed by Lehman Brothers / Bear Stearns when they hit rock bottom:

Investment banker career paths

(Graphic from LinkedIn Blog)

Don't hire a marketer unless they keep a calculator on their desk

Marketing is an inherently analytical field:

"We undertook the following X activity, with the hopes of achieving Y result. We will have some measure to check whether or not we have achieved Y. If we don't achieve Y, we'll take a closer look at X to see where we went wrong."

That last part is the what some marketers like to skip. "If we don't achieve Y, we'll take a closer look at X to see where we went wrong." No one wants to fail, especially if their employer doesn't encourage failure. So how do you ensure you don't fail? Don't measure! As without measurement, neither success or failure is possible.

Not collecting and analyzing results has nothing to do with marketing medium, style, or just plain being bad at math. Not collecting results is a reflection of the marketer's desire not to be seen as a failure.

That's why so many ad agencies do a poor job of measuring their own campaign's success.

My advice? In general, you probably shouldn't hire someone if their main goal is not to be seen as a failure. They tend to work hard at maintain the status quo, which itself has a tendency to remain unchanged. Hence, why pay extra?

Recognizing a mistake isn't a bad thing. Having a calculator on your desk doesn't make you uncreative.

sometimes a face can be too pretty

Take a look at the following ads:

Now take a look at the heatmap of the ads

This is a case of design distracting people from the product. A quick change in the eyes of the model corrects the issue. original source via grok

New Version of Google Analytics Out

Google Analytics, quite possibly the best free analytics software currently available, has just released a new version. Go Check It Out @ the Google Analytics Blog.

The problem of analytics in a Web 2.0 world

( How do you track the success of a website which heavily uses AJAX, Flash, etc… )

Flash! AJAX! RSS! Java!

While using the aforementioned technologies may impress your superiors (and get you a tiny bit of credibility at your local BarCamp), they can also seriously detriment the validity of your online analytics.

Web 2.0 Cartoon

Technologies like Flash, AJAX, RSS and Java all contribute to the reduction of page views by allowing visitors to access a large quantity of information from a single web page . This causes many problems for marketers: most common javascript-based analytic services requires unique web pages in order to properly track conversions / time on site / goal paths / etc…

There are a number of solutions to this problem. Here are a few ideas on the topic -

If using a flash enabled site, work with your flash designers to ensure proper Flash event tracking information is transfered to your analytic software.

You could also develop your "own" analytic software by programming your Flash / Java / AJAX / etc to generate a log file of significant events, which you then important into a spreadsheet to run analysis on. Depending on what the interaction model looks like, this could be a very complex solution though, as tracking "people" versus "events" can take some extra work.

For news-pushing via really simple syndication (RSS), you could use a service like feedburner.com which specializes in the tracking of RSS subscriber activity.

Again, these are just some of my thoughts on the topic. I’m excited to hear your comments / suggestions on other methods which can be used to track the performance of Flash, Java, RSS, and other plug-in driven website designs.

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