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Last week I wrote about a browser plug-in that will allow people to opt-out of the Google Analytics cookie . The release of this plug-in seems to be a proactive step towards another announcement. Eric Peterson, on his blog, voiced his opinion on why Google is rolling out this plug-in . I think Eric has a point in his post about Google trying to make a push into Federal Government web sites and this roll out is a check-box to satisfy the needs of privacy advocates. However, I am still not entirely clear on what Google will get if it can’t use all the data that it will collect on Federal Government website? It won’t be able to use in any way…well maybe at an aggregate level to compete with the likes of ComScore . So what do I think the reason is? Behavioral Targeting I think the real answer to Google Analytics’ rolling out Opt-out is “ Behavioral Targeting ”. Google Analytics is deployed on thousands of websites and collects a wealth of data. However, so far this data is used by ind...

This week Google Adwords announced that it is rolling out a feature called "Remarketing" . This feature is essentially "Retargeting" which I described in my blog post Retargeting 101 How does it work? You visit a site, look at some products, maybe add some of the products to the shopping cart but then decide not to buy them because you need some more time to think about it. You close your browser and are done with that site. Few minutes later you go back to your computer and browse to another site, say a news site. As the page of that site loads so does an Ad that is from the site that you visited yesterday (where you looked at some products but did not buy). For Google Remarketing to work, the news site will need to be a part of Google content network. So far Google used to show Adsense ads based on the content of the page but now it will start showing ads that match the interest of the person viewing the page (as identified by a cookie and retargeted by a market...

During 2007-2008 I wrote a lot about online privacy on this blog. Most of the online privacy discussion at that time revolved around online targeting based on tracking users online behaviors also knows as behavioral targeting . It amazes my how many privacy advocates and senators are concerned about anonymous online tracking and behaviorally targeted ads based on peoples click behavior when the consumers are voluntarily giving all the private information on social media sites. Last week Google Analytics announced a plug-in that will let users opt-out of Google Analytics . Really...is web analytics tracking detrimental to visitors' privacy? Google Analytics collects click stream data anonymously. It does not know who you are, it identifies you via a cookie and tracks what pages were viewed by that cookie, what buttons were clicked by cookie etc. This data is then used by individual sites using the tool (Google Analytics) to understand the behavior of their visitors and optimize the...

Late last week Google Analytics announced a browser plug-in that will allow users to opt-out of Google Analytics tracking. Here is an offical statement from Amy Chang , group product manager at Google Analytics: As an enterprise-class web analytics solution, Google Analytics not only provides site owners with information on their website traffic and marketing effectiveness, it also does so with high regard for protecting user data privacy. Over the past year, we have been exploring ways to offer users more choice on how their data is collected by Google Analytics. We concluded that the best approach would be to develop a global browser based plug-in to allow users to opt out of being tracked by Google Analytics. Our engineers are now hard at work finalizing and testing this opt-out functionality. We look forward to make it globally available to our users in the coming weeks. How does it impact the website stats reported by Google Analytics This is the biggest question everybody is ask...

Last week I was on a “Measuring Success” panel at PR+MKTG camp in Seattle . Someone from the audience asked if there were any tools for a newbie to start measuring PR & Marketing efforts and learning. I uttered the names a few tools that came to my mind. Considering that there might be many others in the same situation I decided to write this blog post. In this post I am listing some of the tools that you can start using for free. Please note that this is not the most comprehensive list of the free tools. Side Note: All the panelists unanimously agreed that you need to first figure out your measurement needs based on your business requirements and KPIs and then find the tools that meet your needs. One of the biggest mistakes most companies make is that they pick the tools first and then try to modify their measurement needs according to the tools they have in place. However, I recognize that someone who is not familiar with the various measurement tools needs some exposure to the t...