First, answer this question: How does your organization make most of their important and smart business decisions?

1. By gut feel and intuition
2. Using analytics
3. Primary gut feel while using analytics
4. Primary analytics while using intuition and gut
5. None of the above (we don’t make smart business decisions)

A recent online poll tallies voters with these results:

• 41% of voters feel their company is using primarily gut feel while looking at analytics
• 29% are looking at analytics first while sometimes relying on their gut
• 20% always use analytics
• 8% always use gut feel (never looking at data!)
• 2% don’t know (why fill out the poll if you don’t know? seriously.)

Looking at the results here, I would say that 30% of people are in trouble (using nothing but analytics, using nothing but gut, or don’t know) and 41% need to switch the way they do business. “Using nothing but analytics is bad?” I’ll get into that in a moment…

Now, anyone who has read the book Blink by Malcom Gladwell would argue that you can give me all the analytics you want about certain topics, but the things that separate good ideas from great ideas are intangible. You would then say that the analysts of the world are trying to push analytics into places where they don’t belong. For major, ground breaking, and business altering decisions – analytics is only of modest usefulness. I have heard this from more than one CEO or top decision maker in a company, “my gut has never been wrong.”

My response to that? “Hogwash.” Ok ok ok, maybe I didn’t actually say “Hogwash” but that’s what I was thinking. The truth of the matter is that once we dug into these “gut” decisions, they were actually using months – if not years – of analytical data to make those important decisions that shaped their careers. In Blink, Gladwell is saying that intuition is useful only in the context of a great deal of experience and expertise (essentially a lifetime of A/B tests). And that in the absence of these things- intuition is dangerous.

The beauty of Web Analytics is that you don’t need (and sometimes don’t even have) a lifetime of experience to help you make that next great decision – the data is available, SO USE IT. Throughout this blog, I will touch on how to create a culture of analytics and optimization and it starts with understanding that it is not about promoting a culture that makes blind decisions (using only data or gut), but a culture that makes decisions BASED on the data that is in front of them and then uses that decision to make the next decision better.

Upcoming posts will include:

• The Five Houses of Web Analytics Zen
• Depersonalizing decisions – stop all the board room fights
• How to lead an analytics culture from the top down
• Doing analysis and not just reporting

How would you describe your companies analytics culture?  Tell me in the comments.

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I will update my WordPress blog. I will update my WordPress blog. I will update my WordPress blog.

Keep repeating those words in your head over and over again, because believe me, trying to reinstall a custom WordPress blog is absolutely no fun. After struggling with moving hosting providers, getting my theme back, and installing all the plug-ins, I am finally back in business.

In the meantime I did find some good WordPress plug-ins that I think everyone should check out:

• CR Post to Ping.fm – Automatically sends new blog posts to Ping.fm that will then send it out to all of your social networking sites. I found dealing with this feature through Ping.fm to be easier than trying to manage it within WordPress.
• Google Analyticator – In a previous post I mentioned another WordPress plugin. When looking at the landscape of GA plugins again, I decided to go with this one. #1 reason? More updates recently.
• Google XML Sitemaps – Automatically creates and submits a new sitemap XML every time you post.
• LinkedIn Resume – Grabs your resume on LinkedIn and brings it into your site. Perfect if you just want to update in one place.
• Social Bookmarks – Puts sharing icons on each post. Not the best plug in for this, but I like the unobtrusive manner of just a “Bookmark It” line at the end of each post.
• Surveys – Quick little survey tool.
• WordPress Firewall – Alerts you if anything weird is going on.
• Yet Another Related Posts Plugin (YARPP) – Great plugin that automagically suggests related articles based on the content of the current article.

At least this whole thing allowed me to explore some new aspects of WordPress. Hopefully it never happens again.

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For those who are also in the same boat, here are the links to get you started:

• Conversion University (Google Videos) – Watch these first!
• Google Testing Center - Are you ready?  It’s $50 to give it a try and you have to wait 14 days before you can try it again.
• 3 Tips for Taking the GAIQ - Fairly helpful article discussing her run in with the GAIQ
• Full Copy of Conversion University Notes – Just copy and paste of the notes sections of the videos in the ConversionU

Just a quick note from the 3 Tips from above:

First, even if you’re a regular user of Google Analytics, make sure you prepare for the IQ Test; because there is no demo or sample test to take first, our advice is to prepare by reviewing the extensive series of Conversion University videos. Not only is each one clear and thorough, but you’ll probably learn a trick or two (I know I did). This will take a few hours of your time altogether, but it’s well worth the investment.

Wish me luck!

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Please enjoy this in the meantime.

UPDATE: Everything is now fixed though I lost some posts in the mean time. Hopefully will be replacing them with new ones soon!

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Since I was a kid, I have been taught that the shortest distance between two points is a straight line.  How many times have you been traveling a straight line to Point B only to find out either you missed life along the way or Point B isn’t really what you thought it was.

Often times the joy is in the journey.  You can’t wait until your career takes off, you get that promotion, or whatever your Point B is, to enjoy life.  So it’s really important to take everything, especially yourself, less seriously.  Stop and smell the roses… and don’t get lost in the journey.

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In the world of analytics, this is very true.  At the end of the day, you want to throw as much paint (tracking) on whatever you can.  And in this world of microblogging and link sharing, tracking how many people click on your links is becoming more and more important.  While there are countless (well, I’m sure we could count them) ways to track links like campaign codes and the like, I want to focus on using tr.im’s service exclusively.

tr.im is a URL shortening service that packs a strong analytics punch.  Much like other shortening services like tinyurl or bit.ly, tr.im takes any long URL and spits you back a much much shorter version.  In fact, it will take any URL and shorten it to just 17 characters.  Wow!

Here is where you say, “Ok ok ok, we are already using a shortening service, why should I use trim?”  Well, on top of the truncation of URLs, tr.im offers stats for each link that you shorten.

And this tracking is present automatically for each URL that you shorten.  No manipulating the URL, no setting redirects, no fuse… just tracking.  Oh yeah, link it up with your twitter account and it will automattically tweet the URL with a message for you.  That’s what I like.  Trust me, you’ll like it too.

Tr.im tracks your tr.im URL’s visits: when they happened, the visitor’s location, the refering website, and, simply, the number of clicks that it got.  With tr.im statistics, you know a link’s popularity.

On top of the extremely easy to use web interface, tr.im also offers:

• Firefox Extension
• Dashboard Widgets
• Bookmarklets
• Ubiquity Scripts

Here are some screenshots to whet your appetite:

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As I’m sitting here creating new dashboards, this quote (or proverb) keeps ringing through my mind.  Am I showing the stats here that merely suggest but conceal insight?  Or I am making a dashboard of a nude woman?  Wait… is that what that quote means?

In all seriousiness though, you want to create dashboards that are going to have the same effect on Sr. Management, as a bikini-less woman would have on the beach.  You want to turn heads, create buzz, generate discussion, and stimulate action.  Are your dashboards turning any heads?

 Here are some helpful blog posts to get you started:

• http://www.kaushik.net/avinash/2007/03/five-rules-for-high-impact-web-analytics-dashboards.html
• http://www.imediaconnection.com/content/21142.asp
• http://theartofwebanalytics.com/?p=8

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For most of you, if you run a blog, RSS viewers are a common goal. It would be nice to know where, how, and why people are finding the RSS feeds from your site. This would fall under what is called a “Goal” in Google Analytics. Setting goals in Google Analytics is a fairly straight forward process, you pick a URL that you want to be your goal page (a lead generation thank you page, check out page, user sign up page, etc.) and anytime a user accesses that page, it counts a goal.

The problem with setting your RSS feeds as a goal, is that the page you are sending users to subscribe does not support the Google Analytics tag.  This means that you cannot use that specific page as a goal.  The work around for this, is using link tracking that will simulate a pageview when a the link to your RSS feed is clicked.  Here I will walk you through not only editing your links, but also setting up your goals in Google Analytics.

1. Setting Up the Goal

I’m assuming at this point you have already have Google Analytics fully installed on your blog \ website.  The first thing we will need to is define the goal.  Go into and edit your blogs profile settings in Google Analytics

On this page you will the Conversion Goals and Funnel section.  This is where you are going to set up your goals.  You can configure up to four goals for your site.  For the purpose of this, we are going to use two.  Let’s start editing the first goal.

This is where we will define our goals.  For a complete breakdown on how to use this page, you can check out Google’s Conversion University help video (about 8 minutes long).  We are going to mark the goal as active and set it to Head Match.  The next part is defining the URL.  Since we are artificially creating this page, we can name it anything we want.  I want with goal/<type>/<location>.  Type a name for the goal and optionally set a goal value.

Since I have multiple places that you can sign up for RSS feeds, I set up one for the header and one for the footer.  Feel free to set up any additional goals the same way.

2. Editing Your Links

The next step will be adding the tracking to the links to your RSS feed.  Remember, we cannot use the feed itself, it will be triggered when they click on the “RSS Feed” button.  This does not mean that they followed through and actually subscribed.  For those types of numbers, see the “Other Possibilites” section.

To tag an outside link, you will add an onclick event to the anchor tag.  See the screen shot for an example.

onclick="javascript:pageTracker._trackPageview('/goal/feed/footer');"

Full Screen Shot, Click to Enlarge

All you need to remember is that the part in the between the single quotes needs to be the same as the Goal URL you set up in Google Analytics.

Other Possibilities

While this solution does not give you a full count of subscribers, it will give you an idea of how many people at least took the first step to subscribing.  There are 3rd party feed managers like FeedBurner that would enable you to track how many subscribers you have.  Unfortunately, their counts aren’t really the numbers of subscribes you have, but actually is just a report on how many people requested your feed that day.

How are you tracking your RSS subscriptions?  Got another way?  Let me know.

Resources

• http://hamletbatista.com/2007/07/24/tracing-their-steps-how-to-track-feed-subscriber-referrals-with-google-analytics/
• http://www.problogger.net/archives/2007/08/16/why-does-my-feedburner-subscriber-count-fluctuate/
  

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While the actual use of wakoopa somewhat escapes me, I think the team feature could be very valuable in building a list of analytics tools.  With the introduction of teams into Wakoopa we now have the ability to focus our software usage together and recommend applications for each other.  So come join me and let’s get a good list of analytics software (desktop and web) that everyone uses.

Join here: http://wakoopa.com/teams/wa

Some software applications I am using:

• Omniture
• Google Analytics
• Web Position 4
• Compete
• TubeMogul

What are you using?

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