Google Analytics: Creating Advanced Segments and an Issue

Last month Google Analytics released Advanced Segmentation functionality. I am very impressed with it so far, however this functionality is still in beta, which means it could potentially have some issues. In this post I will show you how to create an advanced segment and one issue that I found with it.

Business Problem: I want to see all the data for visits that originate from Google.

Solution: Create an Advanced Segment that will have all the visits that has the source as google.

Let’s see how to create such a segment. (Not this is a very simple segment but the same steps can be used to create more complex segments).

Creating an “Advanced Segment”

1. Click on the “Advanced Segments” link on the left navigation bar under the “Settings” section.

   

2. In the next screen you will see all the “Advanced Segments”. In this screen you manage all the advanced segments. Google Analytics has predefined some of the segments and they are grouped under “Default Segments”. The segments that you create will be listed under “Custom Segments”. To create a new segment, click on the “Create new custom segment” link on the top right hand corner.

   

3. The next screen is where you create the segment. The segments can be created by using one or more dimensions and metrics. On the left hand side you have 2 sections “Dimensions” and “Metrics”. I chose a dimension of “Source” listed under “Traffic Source” as I wanted to see all the visits which originated from Google (i.e. the source was Google). I chose “contains” as the condition as I wanted to get all the visits that originated from anything that contained Google in the source. Finally I entered the word “google” in the value.

   

4. Click on “Test Segment” button to do a sanity check and see if the segment size is as expected. Once you are satisfied with the segment, give it a name in “New Segment” filed and click “Save Segment” to Save the segment.

   

5. Once you the save the segment you will be taken back to “Mange Segments” where your new segment will appear. See below, a new segment called “Google Visits” show up. The new segment is now ready to be applied to various reports.

   

So far so good. However, I found one potential issue with the data.

The Issue

I applied this segment to one of the pages in my Content Report (see below) and chose the date as Nov 3rd.

As you can see my “Google Visit” segment is reporting 328 pageviews while my “All Segments” is reporting only 175 pageviews. That does not seem right. Similarly Unique Views is 112 for “All Visits” while 201 for “Google Visits”. As you can also see from the graph, “Google Visits” are higher than “All Visits” on several dates not just November 3rd. Has anyone else seen something similar? Am I not reading these reports correctly?

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Site: AnilBatra.com
Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/anilbatra
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Mobile Analytics

According to Nielsen Mobile the adoption of the mobile web has reached a critical mass. Nielsen says that, as of May 2008, 15.6 percent of mobile subscribers in the US make regular use of the mobile Internet on their devices, totaling some 40 million subscribers. This is just a subset of the 95 million US mobile subscribers who pay for access to the mobile Internet (through data plans or some other setup) but don’t use it quite so regularly.

Despite such a surge in mobile internet usage business are lacking in measuring the mobile traffic. A recent survey by Omniture found that 71% of businesses are not measuring mobile traffic to their sites. It also found that 50 percent of businesses do not even know how many unique users landing on their sites originate from a mobile device.
Measuring Mobile internet traffic, also called “Mobile Analytics” is not easy, we are still dealing with the accuracy issues with web analytics and now Mobile analytics provides its own set of unique challenges.

Judah Philips in his post on Metrics insider covers a comprehensive list of challenges that Mobile Analytics faces.

Some of the key challenges he lists are

• Data Collection –JavaScript is the most common way of collecting data for web analytics, but not all the mobile browsers execute JavaScript.
• Unique visitor identification – due to lack of cookie support and the changing of IP addresses it is a challenge to uniquely identify a user.
• Traffic source detection – Determining the source of traffic, such as search, email, direct entry, RSS feeds, and marketing campaigns can be challenging in the mobile space.
• Geographic identification – Where are the visitors viewing your site coming from? But not all devices enable geographic detection because the gateway’s IP address is used, not a GPS signal.

Mobile Analytics Solutions

A lot of Mobile Analytics solutions have sprung up in past year or so and more are coming up (See my prediction for 2008). Some of the established web analytics vendors are also now offering Mobile Analytics solutions. These solutions widely differ in their technology, process and capabilities. Which solution will work for you will depend on your needs (In future I might compare some of these vendors on this blog, but meanwhile if you would like help in evaluating a solution you can email me at batraonline at gmail.com). Below is the list of current mobile analytics vendors that I am aware of.

• Admob
• Amethon
• Bango
• Coremetrics
• DeckStats
• mobileStats
• Mobilytics
• Motally
• Nedstat
• Omniture
• Tigtags
• XiTi

Other Resources you might be interested in

• The challenge of mobile analytics – Part 1
• The Challenge of Mobile Web Analytics
• Mobile Analytics: Omniture and Bango
• Gartner Says Worldwide Mobile Advertising Revenue to Surpass $2.7 Billion in 2008

Did I miss any tool/solution? Email me at batraonline at gmail.com

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Site: AnilBatra.com
Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/anilbatra
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Multichannel Marketing: Book Review

We live in a multi-channel world today. Customers are everywhere Online, Print, Mobile, Email, TV etc. Marketing efforts in one channel have an impact on the other channels. Customers interact with various channels before they take the final action i.e. to buy from you.

Mutli-channel customer behavior poses a problem for marketers who need to analyze impact of various marketing efforts and decide how to allocate their budget. It is one of the biggest challenges that face the marketers today. Akin Arikan provides a very practical approach to Multi-channel marketing measurement and optimization in his book Multichannel Marketing: Metrics and for On and Offline Success.

This book shows how to effectively measure and optimize the multi-channel marketing efforts using web analytics. Akin looks at multichannel measurement methods from web analysts, brand marketer and direct marketers point of view. He then takes these various methods to create cross channel analytics.

I highly recommend this book to all the marketers and web analysts. Great Job Akin!

Have you read this book? What do you think? Chime-in.

Here is a list of other books that web analysts recommend.

Online Data Tracking and Privacy

Online privacy is a hot button these days. Privacy advocates and lawmakers are putting a lot of pressure on several large internet companies such as Google, Microsoft and Yahoo to be transparent about how they intend to use users web surfing data (behavior). Mainly they are concerned with the companies that collect a huge amount of user data and then engage in Behavioral Targeting.

However online data tracking is not limited to companies who engage in Behavioral Targeting. Any companies which collects users’ web surfing data or user provided data needs to make sure do not compromise user privacy (actual or perceived). They need to clearly state how they are collecting data and how that data will be used.
Enterprise web analytics tools like Omniture, WebTrends, Coremetrics etc and free tools like Google Analytics and Yahoo IndexTools have made it very easy for website owners of any size to track users’ online behaviors. Most of the web analytics tools use a first party anonymous cookie to track users and their behaviors on any given site.

Side Note: The data is called anonymous because it mainly uses a cookie value to indentify a user (there are other ways which I am not covering in this post) without knowing who the actual user is. Say John Doe arrives on AnilBatra.com, a web analytics tool will drop a cookie with a random id say 123ASXBA12. This cookie id is not tied to any personally identifiable information (see below) of John Doe. So Web Analytics tools (in most cases) do not know who the person is, they just know that cookie id 123ASXBA12 came to the site. They use this id to track current and future site visits.

Even if the data is anonymous the potential of it being tied to personally identifiable information is there and that can cause privacy concerns. It is critical that every company that collects any sort of consumer data, anonymous or personal, needs to clearly state its data collection and usage policy in its site’s privacy policy.

Usually Web Analysts do not tackle this issue and it is left to the legal department. However, a lot of times the web analytics tracking and any kind of targeting is implemented without getting legal involved. As a result companies sometimes do not have proper privacy policy in place. This is a huge blunder, companies need to take privacy issues seriously and pay due attention to their privacy policy.

Do we need Privacy policy even though we use Third Party Web Analytics Tool and they collect the data.

It does not matter who is collecting the data. The data is collected on your site and is collected on your behalf so you are responsible for clearly stating how you are collecting and using the data.
Those who use Google Analytics, need to be aware that Google Analytics requires such disclosures. Here is what Google Analytics states in its Terms of Service

You will have and abide by an appropriate privacy policy and will comply with all applicable laws relating to the collection of information from visitors to Your websites. You must post a privacy policy and that policy must provide notice of your use of a cookie that collects anonymous traffic data.

Tracking Personally Identifiable Data

In simple terms Personally Identifiable Information (PII) can identify a particular user, example last name, first name, email address etc. Most of the commercial Web Analytics Tools have the capability to track Personally Identifiable Information. In other tools such as Omniture, Webtrends etc. you can pass the personally identifiable information either via JavaScript variables or via importing an outside file which ties the anonymous cookie with identifiable information.
If you collect or track PII data then it becomes even more important that you disclose what information you are collecting or tracking and how you intend to use that information. Before you start collecting PII information, think hard what information you need and why you need it. Once you have figure out the information then make sure to fully disclose it on your site’s privacy policy.
I am a big supporter of giving users an opt-in option before using PII data for tracking and targeting. If you do decide that opt-in is not the right for your business model then at least provide an easy way for users to opt-out from being tracked and targeted using PII information.

Note: Google Analytics does not allow any Personally Identifiable information to be tracked via Google Analytics, period. Here is what Google Analytics Terms of Service says:

You will not (and will not allow any third party to) use the Service to track or collect personally identifiable information of Internet users, nor will You (or will You allow any third party to) associate any data gathered from Your website(s) (or such third parties’ website(s)) with any personally identifying information from any source as part of Your use (or such third parties’ use) of the Service.

Google Analytics even considers IP address as PII. It uses IP address to populate Geo Report but will not show IP address in any report. Other tools such as Omniture, WebTrends etc. can display IP and other PII data.

Optimization and Privacy

Most of the Optimization (A/B and Multivariate Testing) tools allow you to segment users based on IP, cookie or user provided data. For examples if you want to test a page on Males, age 35-45 from Redmond, WA, then you need to collect data from users so that you can create the right segment to test. However this type of data crosses the line of PII data, even though there could be thousands of users in that segment it can be used to identify a particular user. So make sure you are clear in your privacy policy that you might be (or are) using the data to test the optimal layout of the page and provide a better experience etc.

Examples of good privacy policies
Smart Money
Amazon.com
Proflowers.com

As marketers and web analysts lets do our part, let’s make sure to be clear and forthcoming in our privacy policies.

Also see Jim Stern’s view on giving users the control on privacy.

Questions? Comments?

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Site: AnilBatra.com

Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/anilbatra

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New Position

(Web Sales) Conversion Marketing Manager at Hewlett Packard (American Fork, UT)

Whereabouts

In early days of ZeroDash1, I started a tradition of sending out an email titled “Whereabouts” to let everybody else in the company know where we are going to be. With small size and flexibility to work from home, client site etc. made it difficult for people to know where others were and this email was a way for us to notify other team member about their whereabouts (it was our version of Twitter).

Well anyway, I have not written a blog post in pat 2 weeks so I think I owe you all an explanation of what happened and my whereabouts.

New addition to the family

We had a baby boy on September 3rd, his name is Neel. We were mostly busy with shopping for him before birth and then getting used his eating, sleeping and pooping patterns. Life has been hectic. At times it feel painful to get up in 2-4 times in the night when he starts crying, but as soon as we look at his innocent face all the pain goes away and he becomes our top priority. Finally I think (and people warn me that I am wrong) we have figured out his pattern and I will be back to my normal working schedule.

Internet Marketing Conference

Yesterday I made a day trip to Vancouver, Canada to speak at Internet Marketing Conference. The topic of my session was “Monitoring Website Performance”. In this session, I discussed what Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) are, how they’re defined, what the difference between a KPI and a metric is (web analytics tool provide you lot of metrics, not all of them are KPIs), and how to effectively present KPIs.

You can read the recap of the presentation at

• http://techvibes.com/blog/imc-monitoring-website-performance-by-anil-batra-of-zero-dash-1
• http://www.miss604.com/2008/09/imc-live-blog-monitoring-website-performance.html

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Source: http://www.flickr.com/photos/miss604/2848559853/

WebTrends Appoints New CEO

Management shakeup at Webtrends continues. The shakeup started last year when Greg Drew left Webtrends. After Greg, Webtrends appointed Bruce Coleman as the interim CEO, till it found Dan Stikler as the new CEO of the company. Today Webtrends announced the departure of Dan and appointment of Alex Yoder as the new CEO.

Here is the press release from WebTrends:

The Board of Directors of WebTrends Inc. today announced the immediate appointment of Alex Yoder as the company’s new president and chief executive officer following the resignation of Dan Stickel. Yoder was also appointed to the company’s Board of Directors.

In naming Yoder as CEO, the board turned to a WebTrends insider with seven years of experience at the company, and who most recently led WebTrends to its most successful quarter in history as its vice president of sales. He also has been one of the key executives leading the company’s long-term strategic planning, and has over 20 years of global business experience.

Commenting on the management change, board member Neil Garfinkel of Francisco Partners said: “Alex has a proven track record and has demonstrated clear leadership at the company over the years, helping to form our strategic vision and drive customer success. He’s the right person to lead WebTrends’ business forward.”

Yoder joined WebTrends in 2000 and has served in various management capacities in the sales organization. From 2007-2008, Yoder was the vice president of sales at Touch Clarity, a behavioral targeting company, before leaving to rejoin WebTrends as vice president of sales.

“I’ve spent seven of the last eight years focused on expanding the WebTrends brand and delivering business value to our customers,” said Yoder. “I’m excited to partner with other WebTrends leaders such as Nick Sharp, vice president and general manager WebTrends EMEA, to achieve our next phase of growth and become the clear worldwide leader in marketing optimization solutions. We will achieve this with an unwavering commitment to product innovation, by delivering valuable and compelling solutions to our customers and by building strong relationships with our partners.”

WebTrends recently announced its highest revenue quarter in the company’s history, and tomorrow will unveil its new search engine marketing optimization solution—WebTrends Ad Director™.

My best wishes are with Alex and team and I hope that now Webtrends will be able to find the stability and growth that is long overdue.

Career in Web Analytics

Web Analytics is one of the hottest fields these days. A lot of people are planning to switch careers and many students are looking to start their career in Web Analytics but don’t know where to start. This article is for aspiring web analysts to help them make a transition into web analytics field.

Skills required to be a Web Analyst

First and foremost you need desire and passion to be a web analyst. Desire and passion will get you where you want to go. I believe (and this is my opinion only), if you have the desire and passion then you can acquire other skills. Not everybody will agree with me but again, that’s my view.

The other most important skill that you need is analytical skill. If you are a person who always looks at the problem from a different angle than most of the other people, you have what it takes. If you can put different pieces of the puzzle together to form a complete picture you have the skills to be a web analyst. If you can critically look at things, you have the skills.

Other skills and education that will come in handy are:
1. Business
2. Marketing
3. Statistics
4. Technical

You don’t need a college degree but a lot of employers look for it and I look at it when hiring a candidate. Business, Marketing, Accounting, Statistics and Technical degrees will be very helpful in getting you the job but I have seen Web Analysts with very diverse educational background.
I highly recommend reading the series of interviews I conducted with several web analysts. This will give you an idea of what they think are the skills required to be a web analyst. They also have advice for people who aspire to a career in this field.

Checkout what other web analysts think about the skills required to be a web analyst.

Learning about web analytics

There are several resources available to learn about Web Analytics. There are several blogs on Web Analytics where you can get all levels of information on this subject.

First and foremost you should join WebAnalytics group on Yahoo. This forum is a great source of information. You will find all levels of web analysts in this forum. This is a free for all forum, even if you want to stay on the sideline and just read messages, you can learn a lot. If you have any question on this subject, feel free to ask at this forum.

Buy a copy of Web Analytics Demystified by Eric Peterson and a copy of Web Analytics: An Hour a Day by Avinash Kaushi. These are the two best resources for all levels of web analytics, especially for those who are just starting. Here is a list of books recommended by other web analysts

Online Course by University of British Columbia

If you are prefer to learn in formal way then I recommend the course offered by University of British Columbia. You can learn more about this course at http://www.tech.ubc.ca/metrics/curric.html. (Full Disclaimer: I am one of the associate instructors for this course). This course is offered in partnership with Web Analytics Association (WAA).

Online Reading

Reading blogs, articles and whitepapers is another way to expand your knowledge. There are several blogs out there which touch on various topics on Web Analytics and other related topics. I would recommend you familiarize yourself with the Web Analytics field (see above) before reading these blogs. Both of these blogs have a list of lots of other blogs on Web Analytics. I won’t give you a list of top 10, top 20 blogs because it all depends on what topic you are trying to learn more about. The more you read the better you will understand this field. If you do not have time to go to each and every blog every day you can setup blog alerts on Google for “Web Analytics”

Gaining Practical Experience

This is one of the biggest challenges facing people who want to start a career in Web Analytics. Employers don’t want to hire you if you don’t have experience and you can’t get experience if you don’t have job. (See Getting a Job for more information)

Google Analytics has made it really easy for anybody to get a web analytics tool. This tool is completely free with all the documentation to help you get rolling. If you have a website, deploy this tool and play with it. This will help you understand how web analytics tools and reports work. To gain further experience, tap into your network, I am sure somebody (a friend of a friend of a friend…) will allow you (especially if you are willing to do it for free) to provide reporting and analysis on their site (real site).

Getting a Job

Bloggers and analysts write about the shortage of Web Analysts all the time. There are plenty of companies who are looking for web analysts but are not able to fill the open positions. But when you look at open positions they all need at least 2+ year of experience in omniture, webtrend etc. So what do you do when all you have is some Google Analytics experience on your blog and a certificate from UBC?

As I said before, you don’t need any experience to find a job in this field, all you need is analytical mindset and desire to learn and grow. There are companies who will hire you, train you and provide the support to help you grow. Even though the job requirements asks for 2+ numbers of years in web analytics or web analytics tools, the fact is that there is indeed a shortage of experienced web analytics people. So the companies might be willing to settle for someone without any experience as long as the candidate can demonstrate analytical thinking, desire and passion, and of-course a certificate from UBC will help. Chances of you getting a job without any real experience are pretty good. However, keep in mind that these companies might not be able to relocate you, so you will be limited by the opportunities in the companies in your geographic area.

My advice is that if you see such a job opening, go ahead and apply. If the company has a senior analyst who is willing to teach then you will get a call.

During the interview process make sure that there will be someone who is willing to provide you on the job training. That will make your life easy. You will probably learn faster than those who don’t have that kind of support.

Also, make sure to understand what your role will be. I am amazed to see that some of the job postings want everything on the earth: Omniture, .Net, SQL, Marketing Analysis, Business Objects and the list goes on. If you do apply and get a call from these companies, make sure you clearly understand what you are getting into and that’s what you want to do.

Go ahead and email me (batraonline at gmail) your resume and I will see what I can do for you.

If you have any questions please feel free to email me or a leave a message with your contact information.

Note: This post is an updated version of the blog post that I wrote in 2006.

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New Positions

• Mktg Web Analytics Manager at NetApp (Sunnyvale, California)
• Web Data Analyst at Alzheimer’s Association (Chicago, IL)

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Goal Attribution to Organic Keywords – Google Analytics Tips and Tricks

In April I wrote a blog post to show you why some of your keywords show 0 Visits and 0 page views in your Google Analytics Report. In this post I am going to show the attribution of goal to the search engine keywords, when a user searches multiple keywords on the search engines to visit your site (all within the same session) and converts from one of the keywords.

Note: The past post and this one are both based on the Organics keywords searches and clicks.

I conducted two following two experiments

1. Converted on the Last Keyword
   1. Searched “1 page no register seattleindian” on Google, arrived on http://www.seattleindian.com/ , viewed one page and existed the site by typing Google.com in the browser address bar
   2. Searched “2 pages no register seattleindian” on Google, arrived on http://www.seattleindian.com, viewed 2 pages and then exited the site by typing Google.com in the browser address bar
   3. Searched “4 pages register seattleindian” on Google, arrived on http://www.seattleindian.com , registered on the site (converted, Goal 1), viewed total of 4 pages and then exited the site by closing the browser
   4. All of the above was done within 30 minutes and using the same browser session

   Visit and Page View Attribution

   As you can see my visit resulted in 3 keywords, total of 7 page views and 1 visit (visit time out is 30 mins and all of it was done in 30 minutes). As I showed you in the last post, 1 page view is shown and attributed to 1st keyword. The other keywords do not get visits or page views attribution (Figure 1). The total pages are accounted and counted in the keyword report even though 6 pages were not attributed to any particular keyword (Figure 2)

   
   Figure 1 (click on the image to enlarge it)

   
   Figure 2 (click on the image to enlarge it)

   Goal Attribution

   In this scenario, the Goal is attributed to overall search engine keywords but not to any particular keyword.

   
   Figure 3 (click on the image to enlarge it)

2. Converted on the First Keyword
   1. Searched “SeattleIndian 4 pages register test 3” on Google, arrived on http://www.seattleindian.com , viewed 4 pages, registered on the site (converted, Goal 1) and then exited the site by typing in Google.com in the browser address bar
   2. Searched “SeattleIndian 3 pages no register test 3” on Google, arrived on http://www.seattleindian.com, viewed 3 pages and then exited the site by typing Google.com in the browser address bar
   3. Searched “SeattleIndian 1 pages no register test 3” on Google, arrived on http://www.seattleindian.com , viewed 1 page and then existed the site by closing the browser
   4. All of the above was done within 30 minutes and using the same browser session

   Visit and Page View Attribution

   In this case I converted (Goal 1) when I arrived via the first keyword. When I look at the Site Usage of keywords, the first keywords is credited with 1 visit and 4 pages, the other two keywords did not get any credit of the visit or the pages that were viewed as a result of click on those keywords. So the 3 pages are not attributed to any keyword. This is what I showed in my last post.

   
   Figure 4 (click on the image to enlarge it)

   
   Figure 5 (click on the image to enlarge it)

   Goal Attribution

   In this scenario when the conversion happens from the first keyword, the goal is properly attributed to that keyword.

Conclusion

When a user searches multiple keywords to arrive to the site,

1. The visit is attributed to the first keyword only
2. The page views directly related to the first keyword are attributed to that keyword and other keywords show 0 visit and 0 page views
3. Total page views from all the keywords are counted in the overall keyword report
4. If the conversion happens as a result of the first keyword then it is attributed to that keyword
5. If the conversion happens as a result of any of the keyword other than the first one, then the conversion is not attributed to any of the keywords
6. The conversion from any keyword is counted in the overall keyword report

What’s next? I will be testing how attribution works when a user clicks both Organic (SEO) and Paid PPC (search result) within the same visit.

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New Position Mktg Web Analytics Manager at NetApp (Sunnyvale, California)
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Web Analytics Buyer’s Guide, Assessing Vendors’ Competencies and Value

John Lovett from Jupiter Research released his new report titled Web Analytics Buyer’s Guide, Assessing Vendors’ Competencies and Value. In this report he analyzed the web analytics market and various vendors, and concluded:

The Web analytics feature race is largely over and we are left with Web Analytics providers competing on Price and Flexibility.

John provides great analysis and insights in this report but I do not fully agree with his conclusion that feature race is largely over. I believe that as new trends in web continue to emerge so is the need for new features. As Phil Kemelor, another great analyst, writes that audio and video are becoming an important part of the web, so there are clearly features needed to support their tracking. Other features currently missing are for Mobile Analytics. Mobile web is clearly gaining momentum and so is a need for Mobile Analytics. I am sure Product Managers of these tool providers are not ready to quit yet.

I do agree that most of the vendors are mostly competing on Price and Flexibility (post-data-capture segmentation, reporting on custom data elements etc.) at this time. (In my view, flexibility is also a feature though). However competing on price when there is still a lot of room for innovation and differentiation is a very myopic view by current web analytics vendor and will provide a way for someone to disrupt their business very quickly.

Satisfaction with the current tool

One of the surprising results in this report was that more than 69% of the web analytics clients have decided to stay with their current web analytics tool. This is a big change from the trend that we have seen in past. A lot of this has to do with education about web analytics tools, what they can do, how they operate and the fact that several most used features and reports are comparable in various tools.
72% of those 69% where completely satisfied with their current provider.
47% of the customer said that the biggest challenge they were trying to solve with Web Analytics tools was Vistor Segmentation. 47% also said that customer engagement was their biggest challenge.

And the Winner Is?

This report has a great 3 dimensional chart showing how different tool vendors rate in terms of business value, market suitability and breadth of company.
Omniture, Unica, and Coremetrics emerged as industry leaders for large enterprises while WebTrends, Google Analytics, IndexTools and Lyris HQ ClickTracks emerged as industry leader for small-to-midsize businesses along with the three listed for large enterprise customers.

It was surprising to see that WebTrends was not considered an enterprise tool anymore, though WebTrends was the only company to score 100% on availability of basic features. (Sidenote: A customer of ours is replacing Coremetrics and going with WebTrends).
Another surprising result was that Omniture was the overall winner even for small-to-midsize businesses.

You can get the complete report at http://www.jupiterresearch.com/bin/item.pl/research:vision/79/id=100411

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New Position
Mktg Web Analytics Manager at NetApp (Sunnyvale, California)
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Free Y! IndexTools

As you might already know that IndexTools, a web analytics tools that claims to offer 80% of the functionality of omniture, was acquired by Yahoo in April. Within few days after the acquisition, Yahoo announced that it will be giving away the tool for free. 2 months went by but there were no sign of Free IndexTools.

Well, last week Yahoo announced that IndexTools is available for free but it is not freely available yet. At this time, all the new account activations will have to go through existing IndexTools partners. IndexTools is limiting new accounts to ensure they have proper infrastructure and capacity to handle new accounts.

In a letter to their partners, IndexTools wrote:

We here at IndexTools are now pleased to announce that the ‘Add New Account’ function has been reactivated on your partner account, but with some limitations.
Please bear in mind that our current server capacity was based on our original projections according to where IndexTools expected to be in 2008 in regards to volume and revenue. The acquisition by Yahoo! rendered this forecast obsolete. Our number one responsibility is to ensure that our existing partners and clients are not negatively impacted by an oversubscription of accounts on the IndexTools system. These limitations will be reviewed in the coming months.
So, what are these limitations?

• You will be limited to three projects per client account—should you require more than three please contact your account manager
• We are limiting the monthly page volume to 20 million page views/month for the immediate future (this limit is per client account); data collection will occur up to that 20 million page view mark, but not beyond
• You will be able to add 5 accounts within a 30-day period ( based on former invoicing period)
• Note: all new accounts will be created as Enterprise accounts from this day forward—furthermore, as there are no longer fees there is no longer any need for trial accounts

ZeroDash1 is a partner of IndexTools and that provided me an opportunity to get free accounts. I have implemented the code on one of my customer sites and will be sharing my thoughts about free Y! IndexTools in coming weeks.

Other post on this subject
It is official: IndexTools is now free for everyone!. He started his post by saying
Y! IndexTools – Add New Web Analytics Accounts Feature reactivated!

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New Positions
1. Director, Web/E-Commerce Analytics at World Wrestling Entertainment, INC (Stamford, Connecticut)
2. Sr. Web Analytics Manager at NY Times Company (New York, New York)
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