Update from the Trenches

I have been a little lax on my blogging recently, so rather than my usual punditry I thought I would give some updates on the things I have been working on.  As Sitebrand continues to solidify its position as a thought leader on web personalization, we are becoming more involved in interesting industry initiatives (ed: nice alliteration!) and I will touch on two things in particular I am quite excited about.

1) WAA Standards Document first release!

Last week, the web analytics association published an updated version of the Web Analytics Definitions document, which outlines all the key terms that are used by practitioners in our industry in an attempt to codify and standardize.  Believe it or not, but until the first iteration of this document last year, there were no defined terms in the analytics space, only a tribal agreement on certain terms in principle.  I have been on this committee for several months, and it has been both interesting and very informative.

I highly recommend that anyone who uses web analytics as part of their job click here to download a copy of the document, and post any and all feedback to the WAA blog.  A number of very talented people did a lot of work to make this document happen, and it won’t achieve its goals unless it is read, discussed and adopted by our industry at large.  As a further plug, each term has an ‘ask your vendor’ section, so that you can see how different terms are applied in different analytics products.

2) Rise of the First Time Visitor!

Waaaaaay back in March of this year, I referenced in the blog that I was working on a whitepaper regarding the First Time Visitor segment of website traffic, and how it could be understood and optimized.  The ensuing document is entitled “First Time Here?: A marketer oriented approach to optimizing online conversions”.  The always amazing Bryan Eisenberg of FutureNow and Always Be Testing fame wrote a great forward for the piece, and we will be doing a webinar with him next month on this segment.

Jason Burby of ZAAZ also referenced the whitepaper recently in his column on ClickZ.  He is also a prolific writer on our industry, having penned a great book on Actionable Web Analytics.   It has been pretty exciting to have two of my favorite writers in the industry think well of this work, and I hope it inspires debate about how to understand, and talk to, the first time visitor segment. Click here if you would like to download a copy.

Those are the big updates for now, and I will be back online in the next week or so with a more formal post.

Cheers,

Jim

UPDATE - Since the original publishing of this blog, I have been asked to give a presentation on the First Time Visitor Segment at a Web Analytics Wednesday in Montreal, October 15th.  If you are in the area we would love to meet you. Sign up Here if you are interested.

Related Posts

• Update on Outlook 2007: From a Microsoft e-Marketer
• UPDATE: Windows Live includes "unsubscribe" button
• Related blogs you should check out…

Posted in Sitebrand