Hot “off the press”! The book cover to my new book due out next year is designed and ready to go. To keep up with the book and ideas that my co-author, Lou Rosenfeld, and I are testing check out the book blog.
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13Nov
Tags: Book, book cover, design, Hurst, Rosenfeld, Search Analytics
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04Nov
Today is a big day here in the United States with what is expected to be one of the biggest presidential elections in American history. Not the least of all the issues that have been in the press and on our minds: War, Economy, Energy, Health Care, Taxes, and many more you’d expect. But what also makes this significant is that whatever party wins will make history for having either the first black President, Barack Obama, or the first woman Vice President, Sara Palin. While it’s too early to predict the winner from the polls I thought I take a moment to introduce you to a couple of “superstitions”, yet based upon the data and percent of accuracy you just can’t ignore: the S&P and the Redskins Rule.
Standard & Poor’s (S&P) - In the upcoming month to a presidential election the state of how well or poor the S&P is doing has proven to run around the 80% accuracy. With the recent events on the economy the S&P is down 24%, which then states that the incumbent party (those already in charge) would be ousted, thus Mr. Obamma will win tonight. Superstitions aside, those of us who study statistics cannot fully support this guideline, since we tend to hold 85% as our bottom line for what has enough statistical difference, but it is a decent indicator none the less, but don’t bet the farm on it.
Redskins Rule - Back in 2000 a member of the Elias Sports Bureau coined the “Redskins Rule”. According to the rule, if the Redskins win their last home game before the presidential election the party who won the popular vote in the previous election will win the White House. If the Redskins lose, the popular vote challenger wins the race.
Therefore, if the home team wins, McCain wins. Obama, meanwhile, needs help from Pennsylvania on two fronts: a Steelers win and the state in his column on Election Day. The Redskins Rule has proved correct in the last 17 elections, in fact it’s been true since the first elections that were held in 1936 after the team was formed in 1932. Which means to date the Redskins Rule has held 100% accurate and that is something that any statistician could bet on.
As I started out saying these are superstitions, the S&P may have be a real indicator due to it’s correlation to the economy and possibly people’s midsets going into an election, but the Redskins outcomes of a game doesn’t really hold any weight. That being said the numbers from last night’s Monday night football game results were Pittsburgh Steelers beating the Washington Redskins 23 - 6. So, if superstitions hold true let me be the first to welcome Mr. Obamma as our next president.
Tags: barack obama, john mccain, monday night football, presidential election, redskins, superstition
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09Oct
I recently did an interview with Pek Pongpaet.
1. Who are you and what do you do?
2. Can you explain analytics to us in a way that my diverse group of readers can understand?
3.You’re also working on a book I hear, can you tell me more about that?
4. Tell us a bit about the Netflix contest you’re working on?
5. I hear you are also a avid muay thai fighter. Can you tell us about that? Do you think your martial arts training compliments your line of work and vice versa?Full interview can be found at Pek’s blog.
Tags: Interview, Martial Arts, MMA, Muay Thai, Netflix, Pek Pongpaet, Roundarch
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07Oct
I was talking with Lou Rosenfeld the other day about the book we are currently working on, “Search Analytics: Conversations With Your Customers“, and I proposed the the following…
A conversation is in most cases a two-way dialog that happens in real-time, i.e. someone is speaking, while at least one other is listening and that exchange might go back and forth. But this rarely happens with most websites, it’s mostly a one-way dialog with your users doing all the talking and the site owner just ignoring them. I can hardly call this a “conversation”. To me it seems more of a confession. And that’s not a bad thing if you consider what a confession really is… acknowledgment; avowal; admission; disclosure. Your users/customer/clients/etc. are telling you what they need, what they can’t find, what is frustrating, etc. And the best and juiciest part of every single confession is that it is in their own language! Short of using that all that wonderful info to take action on (hint hint), life on the Web doesn’t get much better than that.
So, is that book about conversations or confessions? We’d love to hear your thoughts.
Tags: Book, Confessions, Conversations, Lou Rosenfeld, Marko Hurst, Search Analytics, SSA
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01Oct
Today I signed a book deal with Rosenfeld Media to co-author a book with Lou Rosenfeld - Site Search Analytics: Conversations with Your Customers.
The book will attempt to bring together what both authors feels is missing from both the UX and Analytics practices, namely each other. UX could take a few lessons from analytics and vise versa. What we see, is a world where the ‘what and why’, i.e. quantitative and qualitative, collide, to not only bring together a much richer and more cohesive understanding of your customers/users, but also to effectively tie your strategy to execution, which in turn will help you create and design better experiences.
Due out in 2009.
Related:
Expansion on the above: Hello. My Name is…
Interview with Lou Rosenfeld: e-consultantcyTags: Lou Rosenfeld, Onsite Search Analytics, Rosenfeld Media, Site Search Analytics, SSA
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28Sep
Your visitors have evolved, have you?
Introduction
Not since the emergence of television fifty years ago have we seen such a metamorphosis in consumer behavior. The good-’ol-days when all that was needed to reach your audience was a product, a strong message, and enough money to keep them both in front of as many eyeballs as possible is a thing of the past. For years, people “behaved” the way they were supposed to and everything was going along just fine. Then all of a sudden, people’s behavior began to change overnight. They stopped “wanting” to listen to you, they stopped “wanting” to read what you wrote, and stopped “wanting” to look at your ads, they simply stopped paying attention to you. I mean seriously, how rude! So, what happened?
Well, in the 1980’s came the first transition with the introduction of cable & satellite TV. The unforeseen result was the beginning of the end – the fragmentation of mass media. Then in the mid-90’s the Internet arrived on the scene and in a short time established itself as something more than just a fad. And just like that, almost overnight the traditional advertising & marketing model was shattered beyond repair. The Internet now competed for the same attention that the other media channels were vying for, but unlike any other media channel in history the Internet was the first channel that was “push & pull”, or a two-way medium that allowed consumer’s to interact directly with systems, companies, other consumers, etc. and the system would react back. To add to this, the low cost of content publishing technologies allowed anyone with an Internet connection and a voice to stand up and be heard around the world, effectively changing Mass Media, into Media of the Masses.
Here Boy! Sit. Good Dog
In 1904, the famous Russian physiologist Ivan Pavlov was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in physiology for his work on digestive glands. Prior to winning the Nobel, Pavlov discovered a physiological phenomenon that his legacy is probably more famous for and remembered by most for today, “conditioned reflexes”, a.k.a. Pavlov’s Dog.
The story goes a little something like this… One day a inside of Pavlov’s lab a colleague noticed that a dog would salivate as soon as it saw or heard the assistant that fed him, before ever seeing or smelling his food. At first Pavlov found this very frustrating, as it disrupted the results of his test. But after a while he be began to wonder why this was happening. So, Pavlov conducted an experiment to see if one could learn to associate a natural stimulus, such as a food, with an unrelated stimulus, this eliciting a response by the unrelated stimulus alone.
Fast forward a couple of decades to the early 1920’s when a man whose resume includes experimenting on infants, leaving the academia world under suspicious circumstances, and established the first psychological school of behavioralism unleashed his brilliance and knowledge of behavior upon the world of advertising. His name was John Watson, 1878 – 1958. And still today, nearly ninety years later, the world of marketing, advertising, and branding are still following his techniques of behavioralism –Brand Association.
Effectively what brand association attempts to do is manipulate the response to a stimulus, e.g. brand name or logo, which initially provides a neutral feeling or response with the objective to train people to make a “false” connection between the a positive emotion, e.g. happiness or feeling attractive, and the particular brand being advertised.
If one lesson was learned from the dot.com era, it is that it takes more than a brilliant mind and money to make your brainchild to come to life and survive. So, how did mass media evolve and survive for so many years? Like primordial stew, the right time, right place, and maybe a Ouija board under the pale moon light contributed, but some very specific criteria are essential to breathing the long lasting life cycle and impact of mass media.
- Society: People lived in localized communities. The number of people in a certain area was relatively small this allowed them interact with each other more often since they went to the same church, shopped at the same stores, went to the same schools, and often worked together as well.
- Technology: People had limited access to the same media channels. There were at best only a couple of newspapers, three major TV networks, and not many more radio stations.
- Market: People had limited choices in brand options.
The result: people were “salivating” for the next greatest product. For nearly eighty years this model of mass media and brand association would thrive, but the Internet would change all of this almost overnight.
Tags: Bryan Eisenberg, Eric Peterson, Process
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16Sep
Omniture announced yesterday the release of SiteSearch. Hooray! This is a major milestone for the major analytics players, since traditionally none of them have ever incorporated site search as an integrated part of their platform. The workaround was for you to have your search results pages export to a designated URL that you could then track with your analytics tool, or you could always look /enjoy a day or so in your log files (remember those???).
Given that there are only two ways in which people find content on your website, the first and most popular “Browsing” - using links and navigation and the second and often forgotten about, “Site Search” - assuming you have search on your website of course. Internal site search is often treated like the red-headed step child - it’s rarely acknowledged, doesn’t get the respect it should, and is not treated as a member of the family. Hopefully Omniture’s SiteSearch will turn the red-headed stepchild of site search into a full fledged member of your website!
Some key points about Omniture SiteSearch:
- Automatically promote best-performing products and content based on business rules driven by SiteCatalyst
- Lead visitors to relevant content or products through marketer-defined information categories—refining search results on-the-fly
- Dynamically change the format of search results based on the type of search, the set of results returned or the context of the search
- Automatically aggregate and display content from the SiteSearch index based on defined business rules
- Provide actionable insight through keyword reporting around what visitors are searching for—including top keywords and failed searches
Tags: Internal Search, Omniture, Site Search, Site Search Analytics, SiteSearch, SSA, WebSideStory
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16Aug
I picked up this book, Always Be Testing: The Complete Guide to Google Website Optimizer, up a few days ago (buy @ Amazon), if you are a fan of any of the other Eisenberg books, you’ll not be disappointed (see below). While a quality book packed with useful tips, tactics, examples, and good mix of strategic & tactical ideas, what I enjoyed most about it is it’s not written for a purely Web Analyst point of view. It’s a great combination of User Experience & Web Analytics/Analyst and this something that is key in our industry today a combination of qualitative & quantitative data, practices, & skills sets.
From the Back Cover
If you want more leads, sales, and profits from your website, then you need to test, test, test. Google Website Optimizer is all about testing, and this book shows you how to use that free tool to discover what is best for your site and your bottom line. Recognized online marketing guru Bryan Eisenberg and his chief scientist John Quarto-vonTivadar explain how to test and get more of your visitors to take the actions you want them to take: contact you, buy something, subscribe, or otherwise engage with your site.- Learn to develop a testing framework and establish goals and parameters
- Determine how well your site calls visitors to take action and learn how to make improvements
- Discover the best approach for selecting and categorizing products
- Optimize your landing pages and revise your content with copy that sells
- Understand exactly which test works best for a given purpose
- Learn what you need to bring to the testing experience to reap the fullest benefits
- Learn how to design impactful tests in sales, lead generation, B2B, and B2C situations
- Get over 250 testing ideas based on all the factors that contribute to a site’s ability to convert online visitors
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07May
Yesterday I spoke on a panel at the 2008 Clickability User Conference : The Failure of Great Design - Learning To Adapt To Audience Need. My other esteemed panelists included: John Broady, Executive Director, Omniture; Tien Tzuo, CEO, Zuora; Clare Munn, CEO, The Communications Group.
Good riddance to the days of Render once, repent forever! Today’s cutting edge design is informed by user feedback delivered through real-time analytics built into the Web Content Management platform. From A and B versioning to pages instantly revised by artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms, our panelists are experts at the art of responsive (ahem) intelligent design. Learn how these design firms manipulate the subliminal for measurable results.
The choice of panelists was to have four very distinct views about how analytics affects “design”. Coming from and working for four distinct types of companies you would imagine that it would have been a street brawl up on stage. But, it was actually quite the opposite. While we approached a problem based upon our primary discipline, on every question and topic we were given we simply built upon and added to the previous panelists answer. At first I thought it might have been boring for the audience, but afterwards (much to my delight) I found it was quite the opposite. Here you had someone from one of the world’s largest analytic providers, a Web 2.0 concept company, a design company, and myself from a UX & analytic background all agreeing on the shortcomings of analytic platforms and how analytics can and should be used to improve every design. A true ‘merging’ if you will of technology, business, design, & analytics to create the ultimate user experience.
Tags: Clare Munn, Cliakability, John Broady, Panelist, Speaking Engagement, Tien Tzuo
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10Apr
Yahoo! announced yesterday that it was acquiring IndexTools, (original post). Having been build from the ground up for flexibility and data analysis IndexTools is a robust analytics platform, i.e. it is superior (and a bit more complex) than Google Analytics. The platform itself offers less canned analysis, which then puts the hones on analysts to think more about their data, to help discover actionable insights. Since Yahoo, Google, & MSN are such fierce competitors in today’s web space I imagine that Yahoo! will offer this as a “Freemium” solution, where some functionality is offered to small and mid-sized businesses at no cost and incremental services will be available at a reasonable cost.
Competition Heats Up
How will this acquisition affect Google Analytics & Microsoft’s Ad Center? Yahoo!’s Michael Wexler, unofficially states that they’re approaching the market from a different angle. The goal, he as he describe it is to provide all users of Yahoo! products, (development, advertiser, shopping, and end user products) to analyze usage data in a comprehensive way to derive optimal use. He goes on to compliment Google Analytics’ success as a basic tool, but criticizes that it’s not designed for people that “really want to understand their data, nor is it aimed at the variety of ways people can work with Google (it ignores all that API stuff, for example).” Wexler views IndexTools as “the foundational start to understanding not just marketing and its impact on site behavior, but how to understand you online site usage to achieve your goals…”
The interesting play here is how this will undercut the other free offerings from Goolgle & MSN, but I expect it to have little impact if any to the enterprise solutions. On the other hand Eric Peterson has different take on the matter. As Eric puts it “this one is potentially the permanent game changer.” Time will tell.
Tags: Dennis Mortensen, IndexTools, Michael Wexler, Yahoo!
