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.

If you're running numerous advertising campaigns over various media and channels, it can be very difficult to extract and aggregate the relevant data necessary to construct a good view of your spending, the media mix, and the performance of campaigns relative to each other. To spare you time and pain, the adCenter Analytics team decided to bring you a new visualization called the Campaign Timeline.

There'll be a host of Microsoft adCenter Analytics folk attending the eMetrics Summit in San Francisco from 5th to 7th May. We'll be working booth )number 40( on the expo floor and Esco Strong will be delivering a keynote speech on Atlas's Engagement Mapping Technology too. Register here and do swing by and say hello!

Late last year we did some research in the small business community in the UK. The research which questioned 400 UK SMBs, revealed 62% of small businesses are not investing in search engine marketing. 44% of SMBs not doing search marketing think it is too time consuming; 56% think it is too expensive; and 33% too complicated. However, 76% of SMBs promoting their website on search engines see an immediate increase in sales.

I'd guess most of you who have web analytics configured for your site are paralyzed by reports. You're adrift in a sea of numbers, at risk of drowning; hoping management will be distracted by another colorful pie chart and not notice. Every analytic solution can generate a perfect storm of data that obliterates the horizon in innumerable details. Where's the insight? What's important? What should be done next? Reporting isn't analysis. That's far from obvious for most of us.

Traditional charts and graphs typically show only a single metric: page views, visit duration, and so on. Sometimes, it can be useful to get a combined view of how two metrics are interacting. We've added a new visualization to adCenter Analytics to provide this " The Treemap. You can find The Treemap Traffic View Report in the Reports tab under Pages & Content Traffic View Consider the following example, based on the Treemap Traffic View.

One of the best things about attending search marketing conferences, is the opportunity to get up close and personal with the speakers and moderators who are always willing to impart their wisdom and experience. At Search Marketing World in Dublin a couple of weeks ago, Vanessa Fox kindly agreed to have a chat for 10 minutes )in a very noisy corridor( about search engine optimisation )SEO( and analytics,

One of the best things about attending search marketing conferences, is the opportunity to get up close and personal with the speakers and moderators who are always willing to impart their wisdom and experience. At Search Marketing World in Dublin a couple of weeks ago, Vanessa Fox kindly agreed to have a chat for 10 minutes )in a very noisy corridor( about search engine optimisation )SEO( and analytics,

Digital advertising"whether via search engine advertising, email marketing, display ads, web sites, whatever"is about relevance. It's about matching your message to the intent of your audience. If you understand this one bit"if you truly, totally, and unequivocally get it"you're already well ahead of your competition. The value of adCenter Analytics is in tracking behavior in increasingly granular segments in order to provide increasingly relevant content.