faulker046

I have few open positions in Web Analytics, Search Marketing (Organic and Paid) and Social Media Analytics. Job Requirements One of the following Web Analytics Tools Implementation : Omniture, WebTrends, Coremetrics, Google Analytics, Yahoo! Web Analytics etc.? Any one tool experience is good. Analysis : Do you have experience making sense of the data collected by the web analytics tool? It does not matter which tool. Optimization – Do you have experience with A/B , Muti-variate testing or targeting? Experience with Google Website Optimizer, Test&Target, Widemile, Optimost etc? Search Engine Optimization – Do you have experience doing search engine optimization? Are you passionate about it? Show me some examples? Show me your process. Paid Search – Have you run campaigns on Google Adwords? Bing or Yahoo? What has been the outcome? Social Media Analytics – Do you have experiencing analyzing and making recommendations based on social media conversation? Do you have experience usi...

Last week I wrote about 404 errors and how to track them in your web analytics tool . In this post I am going to look at how various sites are dealing with 404 error messages and provide your 7 ways of handling 404 pages on your site. The best way to handle the 404 error messages is to not have any by properly setting redirects in case of a redesign, proper sitemaps etc. But despite your best efforts there will be cases when your visitors will get the 404 errors so you just have to be prepared. This post will show you how other sites are doing it so that you can decide what will work for you. I looked at few of the top converting online retailers and few others random sites to see how they are handling 404 error messages. Here is what I found Schwan.com Schwan.com, the site with the best conversion rate, notifies the visitors that the page does not exist and then provides a link back to the home page. It also keeps the top navigation intact on the 404 page so that the visitors can eas...

404 errors are a fact of life on the internet. 404 error is a message returned by a server in response to a request for a page that does not exist on the server (http 404 error code). Let me illustrate this with an example: A visitor comes to a site, bookmarks a page and then leaves the site. Next week the owner of the site decides to launch a new site completely replacing the old pages with the new pages (urls were different). Next month the visitor comes back to the site via the bookmark but the page she bookmarked does not exist as it was removed during the site redesign. She will get a 404 error message from the server. Reasons for 404 Errors 404 errors can occur due to numerous reasons: Misspelled links – A misspelled URL in a hyperlink on the site can causing a broken link and hence a 404 error message. Bad Site Map – A site map is an xml file containing a list of all the pages on the site. It is usually meant for the search engines to index the pages on a site. A misspelling i...

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...