Data

This article, written by Neil Mason, was originally published on Clickz.com on 11/10/10 and is republished here with permission.

Fragmentation, optimisation and integration. Those were the themes that stood out for me at last week’s Emetrics Marketing Optimization Summit in Washington DC. First of all I was reminded that “web analytics” is not was it used to be, it’s an increasingly complex space. Secondly, I was shown some great evidence about what’s really required to be an optimisation orientated organisation and finally we’re beginning to see some case studies from organisations that have made the investment in multi-channel data and the benefits they’re accruing from that. Read more…

There’ve been two news worthy football events in the last week. The first was my return after 2 years ‘resting’ to my local 5-aside league, the second was the return to our TV screens of Uefa’s Champions League. While I stood around in the pouring rain wishing I was a decade younger on Tuesday, on Wednesday I rested my aching legs on the sofa and watched Arsenal demolish Braga. Grudgingly I’ll have to admit they were quite good.

Given my interest in football, advertising and data I often think about the numbers behind the game. Sometime that is match statistics, sometimes it is financial data. Read more…

This article, written by Neil Mason, was originally published on Clickz.com on 01/07/10 and is republished here with permission.

Last time I looked at some of the characteristics of data collected from surveys, particularly data collected from surveys run on websites where you have no control on who is answering the survey. Generally this lack of control can cause some bias in the data which can cause some issues if you are looking at the aggregated reports. For example the data on the profile of visitors (i.e. gender, age etc) that you collected from survey data may not actually reflect the true profile of visitors to your site because of the different propensities of different groups to respond to surveys. So, does that mean that survey data is useless? Not really but it does means that it needs to be handled with a bit of caution. Read more…

Even the very largest gaming businesses online today may be playing a weakened hand when it comes to delivering a truly efficient web analytics strategy.

Over the last year I’ve spoken to numerous companies who, although generally data rich about how their customers bet and how they acquire those customers, often have little visibility of what those people are actually doing on the site. Without ignoring the value of customer data, they have still forgotten to focus and invest in key areas of their customers’ behaviour and lifecycle – missing out on valuable analytics. Read more…

This article, written by Neil Mason, was originally published on Clickz.com on 21/05/10 and is republished here with permission.

In courses and workshops that I run on web analytics these days I often find myself talking about “data governance”. As the amount of data we get exposed to explodes from web analytics systems, voice of the customer programmes, social media listening tracking and so on, we need to know where this data comes from and how it’s created. By understanding how our data is created we are in a much better place when it comes to interpreting it. So I always think its worth going back to “analytical basics” every now and then and reminding ourselves how some of these metrics are created and what that means in terms of the way we use them. Read more…

This article, written by Neil Mason, was originally published on Clickz.com on 23/04/10 and is republished here with permission.

When the graphs are going up and to the right, people are generally happy. Life feels fine when there’s good growth in the right kind of metrics and despite the tough economic trading conditions over the past 18 months, the digital economy has generally been doing OK. Here in the UK spending on online advertising grew by just under 5% in 2009 compared to 2008 with spend on Search up by just under 10%. Whilst that isn’t the kind of stellar growth seen in previous years, the indicators are positive. Business confidence amongst advertisers is higher than it’s been previously and we’re continuing to see growth in the active online audience (up 10% vs. a year ago), some of that being driven by the growth in population of social networking sites such as Facebook. Read more…

This article, written by Neil Mason, was originally published on Clickz.com on 26/03/10 and is republished here with permission.

When working with web analytics data I sometimes think of it as an iceberg. On the surface it all looks fine and we know what we are dealing with. However, most of the data is under the surface and we’re not always sure what dangers are lurking beneath. As tools such as Google Analytics and Yahoo! Analytics have brought web measurement and reporting to the masses, more people are exposed to the part of the iceberg that is above the waterline. Good user interfaces can make access to the data in a web analytics system easy and intuitive but they can also manufacture an impression of quality which may not be appropriate. So it’s important to look beyond the pretty graphs and reports and ensure that you understand the quality of the data that’s being collected and how to interpret it. Read more…

I’m delighted to be able to share a recent conversation I had with Frank Ma, a close associate in China for the last two years now, and the man who will be responsible for ensuring the success of Foviance’s exciting new venture in Shanghai – Foviance Asia.

Frank, can you tell me a bit about your background and what attracted you to research?

I started out in research over 13 years ago right out of university. Like many fresh graduates I had little clue of what I wanted to do except that I wanted to get exposure to a number of different industries. This is what the research offers – a chance to work with a broad range of companies and learn how they do things. Read more…