Allison will be speaking about “Advanced Analytics” at SearchFest 2011, which will take place on February 23rd at the Governor Hotel in Portland, Oregon. Tickets are available now. To purchase, please click the following link.
1) Please give us your background and tell us what you do for a living.
I’ve always worked in the internet space. I used to be a wild internet entrepreneur and have run several start-ups (see Linkedin profile), some which were quite large. This has given me a lot of business experience and technical knowledge to bring to the Web analytics field. While I no longer code the pages, I understand how technology works and what makes it fail. I’m currently the VP of Analytics at Semphonic (www.semphonic.com) and blog regularly (a8llison.blogspot.com).
I am often asked how to integrate data from 3rd party tools, such as Radian6, Compete or OpinionLab, with Web analytics tracking tools such as Google Analytics, Omniture and WebTrends. The question behind this is not just integration but also location (where to join and store it), presentation and automation. I do a great deal of strategic planning work to help the many companies who are trying to form a 360 degree “actionable” view of their customer segments.
2) What are some important analytic metrics that frequently get overlooked but shouldn’t be?
It’s not exactly a metric but visit segmentation is probably the number one driver of action that is usually overlooked. For example, it’s nice to know if 1000 visits arrive at my website and 33% leave right away. But there’s a great deal more to know there. Did the remaining 67% come in on brand (people who know you) or non-brand (people who do not know you) terms? SEO or PPC? Did they hit the products and services pages or the jobs page? Segmenting traffic, when done effectively, can make the actions and motives of your visitors clear.
3) At what point does a company really need to get off “Google Analytics” and investigate a premium analytics solution?
I’ve found that many of the most effective companies never truly “get off” Google Analytics (GA). GA is an excellent free data backup and running it alongside a premium tool offers many benefits. GA serves well as a backup if something were to happen to your premium tool, say you suddenly find out a site enhancement took down a chunk of tracking 3 weeks ago, GA will enable you to still have some accurate data for that period.
GA is also great for people to get the basic success metrics they need. GA continues to come up with really great enhancements such as the new inpage metrics which can often be very difficult to extract in other tools. That said, there are some things GA cannot do and data integrations are, in my opinion, one of its weakest points. As you look to correlate data from multiple tools together, you simply cannot do it within GA. You can extract to a spreadsheet, however, and join data there.
My advice is to choose a tool of record, but not to cut off usage of GA.
Todd Mintz knows PPC…knows Social Media…knows SEO…knows Blogging…knows Domaining…and knows them all real well. He runs growth marketing for )and is also a Director & Founding Member of SEMpdx: Portland, Oregon’s Search Engine Marketing Association, and he can be found here on Twitter and Facebook.
Hands-on analytic experience in your own data remains the best way to proceed. GA is good, but you are still looking trough other peoples glasses to you own data.
Start clustering and segmenting yourself to look for undeveloped or areas of interest you can gain.
If you would just explore using clustering engines like http://www.matchdata.com/ ( give it a test run ) you learn way more than tools that show you meta data.
When you got your analytics in your fingers, than proceed to Ga.
Success all!