Keep Your Log Files, from Ian Lurie.  Good advice, although I haven’t done post-hoc logfile analysis since clickstream analytics tools only did logfile analysis.  My advice: set up a cron job and compress files by month.  Once a year, archive them, just make sure that your backup solution handles the current set.  Someone once told me that logfiles were needed for Sarbanes-Oxley compliance, I did not believe them.

Dave Naylor explains systemic discrepancy between bit.ly vs. Google Analytics referral in Why Google Wants You to Use it’s Url Shortener.

Google Uses Hours of Search History to Serve Ads from WebProNews – this is pretty cool.  Having just taken the AdWords certification exam for the second time, I see this change making a few of the questions potentially confusing.

Via Kottke, a visualization of Twitter’s codebase changes and developers over time:

Twitter Code Swarm from Ben Sandofsky on Vimeo.

From SmartData Collective, Huffington Post: Crawling with data addicts.

From Silicon Alley Insider, Google Is Wrecking DoubleClick, Says Unhappy Client.  I’m not sure if “wrecking” is appropriate, especially if Google starts to allow third-party ad serving through AdWords.  Note to Google: please start doing this, it would be highly disruptive to the entire online advertising market!

From Dave Chaffey, Customising Google Analytics for your business – 6 key types of customisation.  Great summary here of GA functionality.

From Chandoo, an open thread on Excel Keyboard Shortcuts.  I have to admit, the only one I use with any regularity is F4 and CTRL+Arrow Keys.  CTRL+Space and Shift+Space are awesome ones that I always forget about.

From Search Engine Land, 20 Metrics to Effectively Track Social Media Campaigns.

From Logic+Emotion, Six Ways to Find Social Media Talent.  This advice is really applicable to finding any talent.

What are you doing for lunch today?

If you are the type to eat quietly at your desk, why not spend your lunch listening to two Web Analytics gurus discuss testing?

The other day, I found a great podcast that Bryan Eisenberg produced with Avinash Kaushik that was created in support of Bryan’s book: Always Be Testing: The Complete Guide to Google Website Optimizer.  Their discussion focuses on the importance of testing and the usage of Google’s testing platform, Google Website Optimizer.  There is really some great stuff in there from two people that are passionate about testing.

This podcast, recorded on September 11, 2008, is available on Avinash’s web site from the Videos, Podcasts, and Media Mentions page.  The podcast is 24 minutes long.

Download the podcast here (5 MB).

NYC Mayor Michael Bloomberg just delivered (via Skype) the keynote address at this year’s Personal Democracy Forum, one of the top conferences that deals with the convergence of the internet and government and politics.

The main point of the speech was to highlight the city’s efforts to bring accessibility to city services using internet-based technologies, including making the city’s famously successful 311 service available through Skype and Twitter.  According to the Mayor, “the more accessible we make it [city government], the more accountable we make it.”

Of note to the Web Analytics community, the Mayor also mentioned that the city is going to be taking to look at the traffic to the site for the purpose of changing the “site architecture” to improve the online experience for city residents.

The Mayor also announced that the city is going to partner with Google to study “anonymous usage data” to “allow us to optimize the content on the web site based on what people are most often searching for.”  Could it be that NYC.gov is implementing Google Analytics?

It is great to hear that New York is committed to both using cutting-edge technology to connect to its residents (Twitter, Skype, whatever Google technology they are using) as well as optimizing user experiences so that New Yorkers have a more positive and effective experience dealing with their government online.

Given the amount of social media participation with the 2008 election, and the subsequent appointment of Vivek Kundra as our country’s first CIO, I expect that there will be increasing pressure on government agencies to not only move services online (for example, see DC’s API’s), but do so in a way that is most useful to those agencies’ constituencies.

An excellent, and timely, resource that examines the state of Web Analytics in the public sector is the recently-released Web Analytics Asoociation’s Public Sector Survey Analysis.  The study describes and analyzes survey data from web managers within government, academic, foundation, non-profit, and other public-sector focused organizations.  The report describes the web analyst roles, metrics, and optimization strategies of these organizations.

The Web Analytics Association is a great resource to organizations and people in the public sector seeking to make their sites more useful to their constituents and (perhaps more importantly) developing and fostering a culture of analytics within their organizations’ web management.

As an aside, I am currently attending the PDF conference.  If you read this post and are at the conference, I would love to have an opportunity to meet you.  Email me tom*at*tomsanalytics*dot*com or DM me on Twitter @tomsanalytics.

I am a panelist at this year’s Politics Online Conference next week.

The title of my session is “Social Media Analytics: Monitor, Measure and Manage Your Reputation on the Wild Wild Web of Social Media.”  I will be sitting on a panel with the following people:

Kate Kaye, Clickz (Moderator)
Peter Corbett, iStrategyLabs
Stan Magniant, Linkfluence
Joe Mansour, David All Group

I am extremely excited about our potential discussion since we are all hands-on practitioners with different perspectives and experiences related to Social Media and politics.

My session runs from 2:00pm – 3:00pm on Tuesday, April 21st.  The conference runs from Monday, April 20 through the 21st in the Reagan Building – hopefully I will see you there!

Earl Devaney, chairman of the Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board, has a tough job – bringing transparency to the government outlays mandated by the recently-passed American Recovery and Reinvestment Act.  The main vehicle envisioned to bring this information to the public is Recovery.gov, which is administered by Devaney’s board.

Last week, Devaney was before Congress touting the demand for this information.  His testimony was picked up by several news outlets, including these stories at CNN, Federal Computer Week, and the L.A. Times.

In his testimony, he described traffic levels at Recovery.gov to be about “4,000 hits per second” (emphasis mine).  This means that in a day, the site would get about 350 million hits per day (4,000 * 60 seconds/minute * 60 minutes/hour * 24 hours per day).  To most people, this would imply a traffic level equivalent to every internet user in the United States visiting the site more than one time, every single day.  However, this statistic is misleading.

A “hit”, commony confused with a “page view” or a “visit”, is a single HTTP request from a web server to a browser for a specific resource.  HTML pages, images, flash objects, CSS sheets, external scripts, and other other files requested by a browser to render a page each generate a single hit upon their request.  The net effect is that single pages can generate several hits for the display of a single page to an individual user.

In the case of Recovery.gov, the home page loads 30 files to fully render.  If the 4,000 hits statistic is accurate, then there are really about 11.5 million page views per day.  Assuming that the average visitor views 5 pages on the site (which is a big assumption), the true number of visits to the site is more like 2.3 million per day, or about 27 new visits per second.

27 is a lot less impressive than 4,000, but it may be a much better picture of the true nature of traffic to the site.

I just wrote a little ditty for the WAA about how great eMetrics is in DC, I will post linkage once it is up.  The ditty:

Why am I lucky enough to have an eMetrics in my city: Washington, DC!

I love DC.  I am lucky enough to live in one of the greatest neighborhoods in one of the greatest cities in the world.  However, the point of this article isn’t to discuss life in DC, it’s to make the argument that DC is the best possible location for the eMetrics Marketing Optimization Summit.  The reasons why:

It is easy to get here. And not just for me.  There is great transportation infrastructure in this city.  You can take a train from New York or Boston, a direct flight into National Airport from nearly every regional airport in the States, and direct flights from the Americas and every major European city into one of our three airports – National, Dulles, or BWI.

It is easy to get around once you are here. The Metro trains that service the city and close suburbs are clean and inexpensive.  We have approximately two taxis per resident in the city (I made that up, but we do have more taxis per capita than any other major American city).

We have tons of hotel options. Since the summit is in late October this year, you‘ll have a wide variety of options.  If you have the means, stay at the Willard Intercontinental – it is worth every penny.

We have tons of conference hosting options (that aren’t the Hilton Alexandria Mark Center). DC hosts lots of events and hosts them well.  From the smallest trade show to a multi-million attendee Inauguration party, we’ve got events covered.

We have fantastic opportunities for extra-Summit activities. Most of my best conference experiences have come outside of conference venues.  We have great bars and world-class restaurants.  The Smithsonian museums and the National Zoo are free.  If you come to DC and don’t take advantage of these “touristy” activities, you are truly missing out.

But most importantly, there are some great people that attend eMetrics in DC. DC is a city of networkers.  Attending eMetrics in DC, you will have the opportunity to meet people that work for trade associations, lobbying firms, political organizations, interactive agencies, e-commerce companies, NGO’s, non-profits, social networks, government agencies (just don’t ask them about third-party cookies!) and web analytics vendors and consultants.  Meeting this wide variety of people at eMetrics who are enthusiastic practitioners of their particular craft and are willing to share their experiences in a collaborative manner makes the summit a great experience, year after year.

It’s true: a big reason why the conference is so good is because it is here.

In a great article for Marketing Profs, Avinash Kaushik asks: Is Bounce Rate “the Sexiest Web Metric Ever?”

I agree with Avinash in that Bounce Rate is one of the most important metrics for any type of site. A high bounce rate negatively affects Time Spent on Site in ways that may not be immediately apparent; have a look at my article on Life Tables and Time Spent on Site to see how. However, we need to take a closer look at our data collection methodology before we assign too much importance to this metric.

Bounce Rate Defined

The classic definition of a Bounce is a visitor that views a single page and then immediately leaves without viewing any other pages. A site’s Bounce Rate is the ratio of single page visits by the total number of visits. Anil Batra defines it (in his post “Bounce Rate Demystified“) this way as well, but with an added definition adding people that visit a single page, but exceed some predefined time limit on that page.

Problems with Bounce Rate
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