Playing catch up again after a family outing to SeaWorld!
Right after I got a new hair-do I took a quick trip to San Diego for BusinessOnline’s Online Marketing Summit which was great. Aaron Kahlow really did a fantastic job getting over 300 marketers to attend his first-ever event and the conference was very well done. If you’re in online marketing, definitely keep your eyes open for this event in the future.
I was fortunate enough to take my kids to SeaWorld and enjoy two crowd-free days in the sun, watching Shamu and petting the bat rays. While I was away, I missed a few things that I thought were worth passing along:
- Gary Angel from SEMphonic who I am fortunate to speak with frequently had an interview he and I conducted published in ADOTAS. Gary prefaced the interview by commenting that he wasn’t much of an interviewer but somehow he managed to get the single most interesting interview I have ever given on the subject of web analytics ever. We talked about a variety of subjects including my AMA/Aquent webinar on March 6th, the Web Analytics Business Process, and the notion that web analytics professionals are very much craftspeople.
- Jim Novo, a true web analytics guru, picked up on my recent rant about the death of page views … NOT! and did a little analysis of his McAfee anti-virus application and how the application treats tracking cookies. The thing I love the most about Jim is how practical his guidance is, especially regarding sessions as a replacement for unique visitors and page views. Jim closes his post with this:
“My advice to you is to start shadow tracking now using Visits or Sessions as the base in your most important metrics, the ones you are on the hook for. You don’t have to show them to anybody, just keep track of them in Excel or something and note the trends. Then when you start seeing your Unique Visitor based metrics collapsing on you, you can whip out the Visit / Session based metrics and say, “See! See! It’s really not happening! We’re doing much better than you think!”
- The often-cited-and-always-delightful Mr. Avinash Kaushik was interviewed by SearchEngineWatch’s Eric Enge. Avinash is always delightful to read, especially more so for me when Mr. Enge asks him about me an my recent work on measuring visitor engagement and Avinash replies:
“You know that Eric is obviously a leader in the industry. We are all following the trail that Eric has blazed. He is just an awesome guy and a really great thinker.”
I am truly humbled. If you’re not reading Gary, Avinash, and Jim … you should be!
