Texture design

Posted by randfish

Way back in November of last year, I asked if there was some worthy soul out amongst the Internet Marketing world who would take on the monstrous task of gathering truly comparable data from the major analytics providers simultaneously, side-by-side, on several websites and publishing the findings.

Well... Ask & Ye Shall Receive.

Stone Temple Consulting's brilliant Eric Enge took up the mantle and with some help from industry brethren, has succeeded in delivering what is certainly the most comprehensive, impressive peek under the hoods of the analytics providers to date. From their interim report, released early this morning, comes:

1. An analysis of how the user deletion / non acceptance rates of third party cookies and first party cookies differ.
2. Comparative data showing:
   • Visitors
   • Unique Visitors
   • Page Views
   • Specific segments as defined per site for 2 sites
3. An analysis of the comparative data and discussion of the following topics:
   • What the numbers tell us
   • Range of results
   • Does one package always report lower numbers than the others?
   • Does one package always report higher numbers than the others?

I'm more than a little impressed, and we should all be very thankful for this information. My big takeaways:

• WebSideStory's HBX Analytics severely under-reports visitors, uniques and page views when compared to all the other major analytics packages (using either 1st or 3rd party cookies)
• The third party cookie deletion / non-acceptance rate exceeds the first party cookie deletion / non-acceptance rate by a little more than 13%
• Design, Indextools & Unica provided the most "average" counts of visitors, uniques & page views (with Clicktracks close behind)
• The final report is going to rock.

This is the kind of data you can use to make a smart decision not only about which analytics providers to choose, but about how to interpret data when switching from one to another and how to interpret competitive data or data provided by a firm before a sale or partnership┬?offer. It's simply invaluable.

Go read the report, then salivate with me for the final version. It feels so good not to be the only one obsessed with statistics and accuracy

Technorati Tags

analytics, stone temple consulting, eric enge

Posted by randfish

Two weeks ago, I spent 90 minutes on the phone (a lifetime for me) with Epiar's Ken Jurina and Curtis Dueck (they're in a video with WebProNews here). They walked me through their propietary and incredibly advanced, internal┬?Design software, explaining how they're able to provide┬?an exceptional quality of results for their clients. I like to think that Designmoz gives its clients excellent service, and from a strategic and consulting perspective, I believe that's true, but Ken's team at Epiar has set the bar so high, I've never seen its equal in any of the many companies I've worked with.

To be quite honest, I struggled with writing this blog entry. During Ken's presentation (which felt like the unveiling of the Ark), I took almost 50 screenshots of their software, with examples of exactly how they conduct their processes for specific clients. After thinking long and hard, though, I emailed Ken. Here's the text of what I sent him:

I've got a bunch of screen caps and had some ideas for a post, but I'm scrapping them. I think it would honestly hurt you more than it would help, and almost anything I write about what Epiar does on the backend will bring you competition and attention (the kind you don't want) more than positive press or clients.

Let me sketch out a rough idea of what they're doing so you can understand why I was so impressed:

• Automated keyword research (but very, very deep) - it pulls thousands of related terms, synonyms, words frequently found on high ranking pages for the query, terms suggested by tons of keyword tools, etc. and refines and sorts these using an intelligence that shocked me, then pulls search frequency and competitiveness data (much like our KW Difficulty tool). What's left is a keyword list that looks like a human painstakingly edited and researched each variation and term individually, but was in fact created by machine.
• Automated search friendliness - determining where targeting is missing on a site, where it needs to go, search spidering issues, etc.
• Automated link discovery - finding hundreds of sites relevant to the KW research terms that have pages with forms or contact emails or ad opportunities or URL submission areas. I never thought link sourcing could be automated with this level of precision, and while it still isn't as good as a human's touch, the depth and breadth allowed for saves hundreds of man-hours per client.
• Competitive & industry-segment-specific research - how often is a keyword phrase targeted in a specific geography, to a specific group, in a country, etc. The answers to how much competition exists and how tough are those other sites, plus loads of other search query and industry data from a myriad of sources so vast, there were even a few I hadn't previously considered.

All these systems and much, much more is available through the tools that Ken & Co. have built.

To say that I was impressed would be an understatement. I was very frankly shocked. Obviously, I feel that Designmoz can provide a very high level of service and value to our clients, but we've always been limited by scale, as have many other firms offering organic optimization companies. Epiar has broken new ground in my opinion, by using highly customized┬?software (and bucket loads of API data grabbing + scraping) to refine the most time-consuming of Design tasks. While they're not competing in social media marketing or linkbaiting and have even footing in terms of strategic consulting, I think it would be foolish of me, after seeing their processes, to assume that we could bring the same level of service (or detail) to a large scale keyword research or link discovery project. We're simply out-gunned.

Perhaps this is the direction that all Design work must eventually go down - high levels of data gathering, data refinement and intelligent processing combined with software architects with an exceptional grasp of Design and the time to fine-tune their code to produce exceptional results on a consistent basis.

Technorati Tags

epiar, ken jurina, automation, Design