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I hope you have heard the famous words of John Wanamaker "I know half of my advertising is wasted, I just don't know which half." Today the phrase should be something like “Half my Advertising is wasted because I do not advertise responsibly” or “Half of my advertising is wasted; I can stop that but I fail to use the data”. Yes that is correct. We have an abundance of data today to help us save the wastage. There is no shortage of tools that will collect all sorts of data. Yet many marketers fail to act responsibly and use this data to stop advertising waste and also save customers from unwanted ads. Here are some examples that will show you what I mean Newsletter – Nordstrom - In my blog post on email and relevance , I showed an example of an email from Nordstrom that had irrelevant offers. As result of this, not only did Nordstrom waste time, effort and money but also lost a subscriber. Advertising was wasted. Newsletter – Drugstors.com – Same as Nordstrom. Not only d...

The news of Omniture Acquisition by Adobe came as a big surprise to me. I was not surprised that Omniture got acquired just the fact the Adobe acquired them. I always thought that Omniture would be a good fit for Oracle as an extension to their CRM tools. Adobe was not even on my radar as a company who could potentially acquire Omniture. I was also surprised at the valuation Omniture got. 1.86 billions for a company that is still in red and had 335.5 Million in sales in last 12 month (source: MSN Money) is way too much in my opinion. So why did Adobe pay such a premium to acquire Omniture? What does it bring to Adobe? I am not entirely sure what Adobe has in mind. Following are the ways that I think Adobe might use Omniture: Measurement Ready Interactive Media  – Flash, PDF, Adobe Air application will all come ready with Omniture tags for measurement and optimization. Self optimizing flash widgets/ads – Designers will be able to put all assets (copy, images, etc.) in a f...

People are bombarded with hundreds of email messages each day. However a majority of the emails end up in the trash because of their irrelevance to the recipients. On Oct 30th, 2008 I write a blog post on relevancy and emails . To state my point I showed an example of an email that John Song received from Nordstrom. John, who had never purchased any women products from Nordstrom, was receiving emails promoting women products. During our conversation John said that he was a big fan of Nordstrom and was ok with receiving and ignoring irrelevant emails but he wished that they would send him relevant products/offers though. No matter how big a fan a person is of brand, eventually the patience runs out. Guess what happened recently? John got so tired of the irrelevant emails that he finally hit the small “unsubscribe” link on the email he recently received. Done. Gone. Here is what John wrote on his Facebook status (came via his Twitter update). Companies work very hard to get people t...

Despite slow economy many companies are hiring web analysts. A quick search on Simplyhired.com, a site that powers the Web Analytics job board on my blog, shows that there are currently 2,007 open positions and indeed.com, another job sites shows over 4800 open positions. That is a huge number. However, many job seekers I have talked to feel frustrated because most of the jobs have a laundry list of requirements and they don’t feel that they are a right fit for most of these open positions. A lot of “Web Analytics” job openings ask for many of the following: Experience in online marketing Experience in Web Analytics Experience in – Google analytics, Omniture, Webtrends, Coremetrics etc. Experience in implementing Omniture, Google Analytics, WebTrends etc. Experience in A/B and Multivariate testing Experience in Search engine optimization Experience in search engine marketing Experience with SQL Experience in email marketing Experience in Social media The mismatch in what a company rea...

CAPTCHA acronym for “Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart” is a way for sites to block spam. According to Wikipedia it is “A CAPTCHA or Captcha (pronounced /ˈkæptʃə/) is a type of challenge-response test used in computing to ensure that the response is not generated by a computer. The process usually involves one computer (a server) asking a user to complete a simple test which the computer is able to generate and grade. Because other computers are unable to solve the CAPTCHA, any user entering a correct solution is presumed to be human. Thus, it is sometimes described as a reverse Turing test, because it is administered by a machine and targeted to a human, in contrast to the standard Turing test that is typically administered by a human and targeted to a machine. A common type of CAPTCHA requires that the user type letters or digits from a distorted image that appears on the screen.” Below is an example of a CAPTCHA on craigslist. Though CAPTCHA ...

About two months ago I got involved in developing a URL shortener called Clop.in . This service was inspired by the Twitter Google Analytics URL Builder that I had on my site. Since then few people have asked me about the URL Shortner and the benefit of using them. This blog post is to answer those two questions. What is a URL Shortener URL shortener is a service/tool that takes any URL (long version) and converts into a short version with fewer characters compared to the original version. When someone clicks on the short version they are redirected to the actual URL (long version). Example: Long Version of URL: http://sfindian.com/bay-area?utm_source=anilblogpostt&utm_campaign=urlshortener&utm_medium=blog Short URL: http://clop.in/JHErZM Anyone clicking on http://clop.in/JHErZM will be redirected to http://sfindian.com/bay-area?utm_source=anilblogpostt&utm_campaign=urlshortener&utm_medium=blog Why do you need a URL Shortener There are several reasons why you might wa...

Should web analytics tool track visitors as unique individuals or at the aggregate level? John Squire, Chief Strategy Office of Coremetrics says that tracking at Individual level is the way to go and this is how his company is differentiating itself (from Google analytics) . Brian Clifton, former heard of Google Analytics in EMEA, responded by saying that aggregation is the way to go . In my opinion both of them are right. Which route to go really depends on what you want from the web analytics tool? Aggregate Data If you are new to web analytics or you just want to track and analyze the overall health of your website, aggregated data will work for you. If you want to know how your marketing efforts are performing in terms of driving traffic or online conversions than aggregate data will just work fine for you. If you want to know which pages of your site are bleeding and then conduct A/B testing or Multivariate testing to improve them then aggregate data will work for you. Individual ...