One common misconception many website owners have is that people enter their site via the front door. The homepage is probably your main entry point by design and may have some welcome message outlining what the site is about and what users may find if they navigate a little further. But as mentioned in a previous post on measuring online success , visitors to your site do not always enter or exit your pages in an orderly fashion,

Chatting about data and analytics at SES San Jose with Bryan Eisenberg this week, we hit on an analogy that I believe helps to explain how important web analytics and online marketing optimisation is. Thinking about your web site as a piece of theatre is one way of being able to judge how successful it really is. Why do we go and see plays? We go and see old plays like Shakespeare or Miller because they're classics. They've stood the test of time,

When the treemap was first introduced to adCenter Analytics Beta )it was called Project Gatineau back then(, I didn't see the value. Using the size of a rectangle as a visual cue to the importance of a page ranked by page views, entries, exits, or bounces was novel but, well, I simply didn't get it. Then I was shown the value of the treemap as an alternate method of navigating my data. Now I'm a believer.

We're very aware that not everyone who's using adCenter Analytics or reading this Web Analytics Blog is necessarily interested in online advertising. We've made a conscious to make sure the content here is not too advertising-heavy as there's nothing worse than getting sold stuff you don't need, especially if you're quite happy with the rich information the tool is providing you with. However,

We hope you've had a chance to take a look at the analytics beta refresh that went live over the weekend. As promised, this is the first of a series of posts take a deep dive look at some of the new features. My Dashboard The new dashboard feature is really helpful, as it gives you a snapshot of what's happening on your site without you having to run several reports before you spot anything out of the ordinary occurring with your traffic. When you first log in,

If you've logged into your adCenter Analytics account this morning you'll be pleased to see a number of new features have been added by our product teams over the past few days. I'll take you through each one but do expect deeper dives here on the blog over the next couple of weeks! Dashboard This functionality lets you choose which information is most important to you. It gives you an up-to-date snapshot of your website's traffic activity.

We've been listening to your feedback and feature requests, and as a result will be upgrading the Microsoft adCenter Analytics Beta this week with some tools to give you more insight about your website's visitor activity. The new features will help you optimize your online and offline marketing campaigns for higher conversion potential. Starting on Wednesday July 23, as part of the upgrade, adCenter Analytics will be unavailable for up to three days . During this time,

The adCenter Analytics Beta has been live for over 6 months now. As we continue to onboard new customers and add new features, we've had a lot of great feedback and interest from developers wanting to code against the product as they have been doing through adCenter API for the last couple of years. While that may be some way off, it hasn't stopped some programmers from taking the initiative and providing 3 rd party tools for our customers to get up and running quickly.

Today we're asking for your feedback on adCenter Analytics . Our product and engineering teams are busy adding new features to be released in the coming months, but we'd like to know what you think of the tool as it stands today. We're interested to know what you'd like to see in coming releases. What do you think of some of the current features like Treemap Reports , Campaign Timeline Reports and Auto-Tagging ?

Tomorrow is the first day in a new year for Microsoft. Our financial year runs from July to June and so all planning happens around this time as well. Exactly a year ago I was asked to work on some ideas for a Web Analytics Blog and support forum for our new adCenter Analytics tool, formerly known as Project Gatineau. To be honest, I didn't who a whole lot about analytics.........even though I thought I did.

Yesterday I wrote a post on the adCenter Blog for Advertisers which included some presentations and documents about Search & Display Research and adChamps Europe 2008 . Now we believe it's crucial to provide our customers with as much information, data and insight as possible, so uploading it to the blog makes the most sense as it's easily accessible and widely available. Many businesses, large and small, provide their customers and prospects with brochures, white papers,

We held an event here in London last week called adChamps. I'll do a write up over on the adCenter Blog for Advertisers at a later date, but the idea behind the conference was to give our advertisers a voice. We gave them an opportunity to meet developers from the adCenter team and give really detailed feedback on the user interface, tools and editorial processes. It may be a very British trait,

http://en.oreilly.com/web2008/public/content/home The commercial web is now a teenagerâ€"it's been fifteen short years since Marc Andreessen released the Mosaic browser. To put this in perspective, television as a commercial medium reached its fifteenth birthday in 1956â€"the year Elvis Presley made his first appearance on national TV. National news broadcasts were still in their infancy, "As The World Turns" debuted as America's first half-hour soap opera,

You can't do search engine advertising without web analytics. At least, you can't do it well. Getting the click from the search page to your web page is just the first step; everything else depends upon your analytics. If you can't move your visitors beyond the landing pages, you can't close the sale . Web analytics isn't rocket science. It isn't even quadratic equations but it can seem complicated. There are so many reports, so many metrics. Which ones are important,

Running reports for given date ranges in adCenter Analytics is easy. But how do you know if you're meeting your site's goals if you can't say - measure this week's traffic against last week's? We've made it very easy for site owners to compare like for like time periods by adding "Compare with:" functionality. By selecting the drop down menu on the calendar graph bar, you can easily compare any data you're currently looking at with the previous date range,

Jakob Nielsen , the web usability expert's latest report into online habits has been featured in an article by the BBC . In the article he's quoted as saying that users are getting more "ruthless and selfish" when they go online. 75% of tasks are successfully carried out these days, compared with just 60% way back in 1999, because consumers are more likely to know exactly what they want. Websites are getting navigationally better,

One success metric to judge a good website by is whether visitors come back for more. Assuming that your offering is designed for repeat traffic, then knowing how many users return and how often is useful in understanding how well your content is engaging them. What I mean by "designed for repeat traffic" is: Are you expecting users to visit your site more than once in any given week or a month?

I caught up with Jim Sterne at the eMetrics Summit last week in San Francisco and asked him how the conference got started and who it is aimed at. I then asked about the buzzwords I'd been hearing about - "segmentation" & "actionability" - what did they mean? How should marketers and website owners be employing these methods & tactics to increase business success. One of the measurements Jim talks about a lot is "how do people feel when they come to your site?

One of the overriding theme of this analytics conference is using data to back up assumptions. eBay did a very good presentation this morning about how their marketing teams research their customer-base through focus groups, usability studies, lab testing and even home visits. They actually send teams into people's houses to watch eBayers at work in their own environment and in their own time. This kind of approach might yield a small sample,

I'm at the eMetrics Summit here in San Francisco and it's struck me how passionate people here are about data. But it isn't any ordinary data they're passionate about reflecting on. It's data that they manage to put some sort of context around. Context turns that data into information and as one speaker so eloquently put it, "with robust analysis and good controls we can turn that information into actionable insight.