I've been crazily busy! for past couple of weeks, but this is something which i had post for the benefit of the readers. I have couple of things due, one is to share the experience of "Web Analytics Collective" which happened at Indian Institue of Business - Bangalore which was amazing and also the latest on my new project! :-) .
However there's a Seminar happening hosted by Yahoo! India Research & Development Team Bangalore. Here are the details and register link.
Leave me a note below if you plan to attend:)
In this ocean of hyperlinked data there is explicit and implicit information and knowledge. Web Mining is the task of analyzing this data and extracting information and knowledge for many different purposes. We walk through this process and give specific examples.
Yahoo! India Research & Development invites you to the Big Thinkers India
Series, where Ricardo Baeza-Yates, Vice President at Yahoo! Research for Europe and Latin America will share his insights and experience on ‘Web Mining: The Wisdom of the Crowds’. Ricardo is the co-author of Modern Information Retrieval (Addison-Wesley, 1999) among other books and publications. He is also a member of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), American Mathematical Society (AMS), Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics
(SIAM), and senior member of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE).
Register HERE
Thursday, November 22, 2007
Web Mining Seminar - Yahoo R&D Bangalore
Monday, November 05, 2007
Web Analytics Collectives at BCB5
Barcamp Bangalore is all set to happen again, 5th Version of the Barcamp Bangalore has now e So are you a Web Analytics Analyst in Bangalore or surrounding city, Barcamp is a must attend to keep yourself updated with latest in India internet and technology. See you there, meanwhile if you want to pitch in you can drop me a mail at anil dot umachigi at gmail. 
volved into a great unconference since it started.
Date: Nov 17/18 Venue: Indian Institute of Management Bangalore
For the First time, i was able to gather a "small" crowd (hoping it'll get bigger) to have a Web Analytics Collective - Bangalore in this two day event.
You can register for Barcamp5 Here, and you can meanwhile also join Web Analytics Inida Group on Face book to discuss more.
You can follow the Web Analytics Discussion on Bangalore Barcamp forum Here
Here's what Web Analytics Collective at BCB5 will focus on
Sunday, November 04, 2007
Web Analytics Industry shakeups
Last Couple of weeks Web Analytics Industry has been rocked with big news, starting with Omniture Acquisition of Visual sciences and the latest about Management Shakeups in Webtrends another leading Web Analytics service provider.
There's been lot of discussion about both of the happening by the web analytics industry experts. You can follow both these discussions on the Web Analytics Yahoo Forum.
Managment Shakeups Discussion Here
Omniture Acquitions Discussion Here
Meanwhile here is a excerpt from article from clickz about the Web Trends Management Changes.
Big news rocked the analytics industry for the second time in two weeks as WebTrends's board of directors ousted CEO Greg Drew and three of his top executives.
"We're in a high growth industry, and we're performing quite well and growing
double digits, but the board would like to see us do even better," said Kopp.
"We're fortunate to have a deep enough bench that we can make some changes."
Released along with CEO Drew were Jason Palmer, vice president of product management; Tore Steen, vice president of business and corporate development; and Hamid Bahadori, vice president of product development and hosted operations. Replacing Drew as CEO will be Bruce Coleman, former interim CEO at Websense, while John Rodkin and Leo Chang will lead product management. Both joined through the acquisition of ClickShift last December.
Prior to the executive dismissals, several non-executive staffers fled the company recently, according to Eric Peterson, founder of consultancy Web Analytics Demystified. "Certainly that, combined with Greg, Jason, Tore and Hamid all being asked to leave… raises some concerns," he said.
Peterson added, "This has been one of the weirder weeks in Web analytics ever. One of the biggest publicly traded companies gets acquired, and another lets its executives go. Now I'm afraid to wake up tomorrow and find out what else might be going on," he said.
Complete Article Here
Microsoft Gatineau in beta Phase
Following a series of Web Analytics industry News, October has been a Significant month. Microsoft finally relased it's Web Analytics Product in beta phase, In competition with other ASP's Gatineau allows users of Microsoft adCenter to analyze their site.
Here's a overview of what's in the Beta Phase:
1.) Demographic Segmentation: the ability t0 compare the behavior of men vs women, or different age groups who are using your site - is a key feature of Gatineau.
2.) Custom taxonomies: A neat feature of Gatineau beta 1 which hasn't had much air-time is the ability to define a custom taxonomy (i.e. site structure) as you're instrumenting your site
3.) Outbound link tracking: beta 1 provides automatic outbound link tracking.
4.) Inbound referrals: Same as Referral Traffic
5.) ROI reports: Looks pretty neat, includes Campaign Overview, E- Mail Campaigns, Banner Campaigns and Offline Campaigns.
6.)Goal Analysis:
7.) Client System Reports:
Microsoft Gatineau is only available for US Users as of now. You can view the complete details about the tool and it's features with screenshot at Ian Thomas's Blog .
Source: liesdamnedlies
Saturday, November 03, 2007
Two Word Search Phrases used most on google
Here's an intresting research done of number of words used to search on google, as per the research done by onestat, Internet users who type two words for on a search engine query account for 31.9 percent of searches worldwide while three-word phrases are used for 27 percent of searches. A single word accounts for 15.2 percent of queries, and four words are used for 14.8 percent of searches.
"Search engines like Google, MSN, and Yahoo can drive a lot of
traffic to a Web site," said Niels Brinkman, co-founder of OneStat. "It is
important that a Webmaster or SEO expert knows what kind of search phrases they
have to use."
Instances with five (6.5 percent); six (2.7 percent); seven (1.1 percent); eight (0.5 percent); nine (0.2 percent); and 10 (0.1 percent) words are used in fewer searches.
OneStat.com collects data through its Web analytics services. Numbers are averages. Research is based on a daily sample of two million Web visitors from 100 countries.
Courtesy: Clickz
Click Here to continue reading...
Tailored ads to suite your experience
Media giant AOL recently introduced "do not track" service links thru which constumer can opt out of the list run by large advertising networks.
A new step in behavioural advertising helps gaining insights of visitor behaviour and intrests.
In the Survey done by Avenue A Razorfish on Attituded and Behaviour of US Online shoppers and toward personalized product recommendation on E-commerece website july-07.
72% found personalized recommendation helpful
62% purchased an item as a result of personalized recommendation
34% were concerned about privacy when receving recommendations.
Signing up does not actually stop ads, but it prevents advertisers from tracking surfing habits. The service also explains the benefits of behavioral targeting.Instead of having interruptive ads ... things are hopefully tailored to be
suitable to your experience, said Jules Polonetsky, chief privacy officer of
AOL, in a statement.
Providing links to opt-out of tracking—while promoting the benefits of tracking—makes AOL's marketing practices more open. It says to consumers, "If you tell me something about you, I will tailor the content of my advertising to you." It also makes clear that such personalization is optional.
Content Courtesy: emarketer
Effective Keyword Research Method
In a recent article on Clickz, Julie Batten wrote about Effective Keyword SEO Research.
This is a great article which covers the basics of keyword research in 2 parts. Here's a quick wrap up of the 2 article.
SEO - Short for search engine optimization, the process of increasing the amount of visitors to a Web site by ranking high in the search results of a search engine.
Why do i need SEO? - The higher a Web site ranks in the results of a search, the greater the chance that that site will be visited by a user. It is common practice for Internet users to not click through pages and pages of search results, so where a site ranks in a search is essential for directing more traffic toward the site.
Keyword Research?, yes that's the one of the most fundamentals of SEO activites.Keywords are the building blocks of SEO. Although the days of the keyword meta tag being the golden ticket to top rankings are undoubtedly over, keywords themselves are still one of the most important aspects of good SEO. Just their application has changed. It's not about stuffing a hundred keywords into meta tags or your copy to get rankings. It's about uncovering the keywords that make the most sense for your business and using them in a way that drives targeted, qualified traffic to your site
Defining Keyword Research
The process of uncovering and selecting the appropriate keywords for your site is called keyword research. Very simply, it involves undertaking an often painstaking investigation to discover what terms people search for, how often, and how many and which other sites appear for those terms. Keyword research is a strategic exercise that enables you to determine which queries your site is most relevant for and for which you can feasibly expect a return, then optimize your site accordingly.
Doing It Right
The best keywords have the following qualities:
Without the above criteria, you'll typically land in one of two scenarios:
When you select keywords that meet the three key criteria, you exponentially increase your chances of ranking high in SERPs (Search Engine Result Page).
Helpful Tools
Two free tools to try:
No matter how much time is invested, the knowledge you'll gain from conducting keyword research will be invaluable for any SEO initiative.
Understand Customers' Information Needs
Each person in your audience may have a different motive for searching. If you sell a product or service, people likely undergo a decision-making process before they make their final selection. For some products, this can be very quick (e.g., buying shampoo). For others, it can be very extensive and drawn out (e.g., buying a car or a house).
A simplified decision-making process involves:
1. Initial research
2. Consideration
3. Evaluation
4. Election/purchase.
Knowing these steps, we get an idea of the type of information needs users may have at each stage. Let's revisit the real estate example from part one. Say you're a home builder trying to determine what type of information users might search for. You might come up with the following:
1. Initial research:
2. Consideration:
3. Evaluation:
4. Selection/purchase:
Develop Initial Keyword Lists
Once you have a good idea of what your audience might look for, you can start to think about keywords they might type in a search engine.
Some sample keywords to answer a couple questions from earlier:
By undergoing this exercise, you begin to formulate lists of keywords that may interest your target audience. You might later decide some aren't relevant to your site, but the point here is brainstorming, so anything goes.
Try to build out these themed lists by brainstorming with a variety of methods:
You should emerged from this process armed with multiple lists of keywords that could be relevant for your business. If you started with step one, these lists should be somewhat themed by information need. You may want to begin to group the terms into more focused topics. Loosely aligning these lists with the various content site areas can help down the road.
Employ Keyword Research Tools
Now that you have a good idea of what keywords your audience might search with, enlist the help of an online keyword research tool to find out what keywords people actually search with. (Some useful keyword research tools are suggested in part one.)
Copy and paste your themed lists one by one into the keyword research tool. If you do hundreds of keywords at once, you'll likely miss some important niche terms because they'll be overshadowed by the high-volume terms.
Each time you run a search, the tool will return a variety of different queries that relate to those initial terms (plurals, misspellings, related terms, synonyms, etc.). Some will be well suited to your business; others will be irrelevant. Don't try to scrub the results now. Instead, immediately export the results to an Excel spreadsheet.
Scrub the Lists
Armed with your results spreadsheet, go through the lists to narrow them down to the most appropriate and desirable terms. There's some manual labor here, but use Excel's many sort and filter functions to help automate some tasks. Some tips for scrubbing the list:
Once done, you should be left with a relatively decent list for each area. Depending on how popular your market is, you could be left with 10 terms in each list or 100. If it's 100 in each, you'll need to be more ruthless with your scrubbing.
Make Selections and Allocations
Start to determine which keywords you'll actually use for SEO (define). That means choosing which keywords you'll target for which pages on your site. Check out "Doing It Right" in part one for help with selecting the best terms.
You ideally want two or three terms per site page. Create a new column in your spreadsheet called "URL or Page," and enter a potential page that may be a good fit with each keyword. Then sort by page, and see which pages require more or less keywords. Further edit and refine until you get to the final list.
Read the Entire post (A must read)
SEO Keyword Research Part 1
SEO keyword Research Part 2
Friday, November 02, 2007
Optimizing Landing pages to impact conversion rate
I got an email today to register for an webcast hosted by American Marketing Associtaion, the agenda looks intresting so for the folks who are intrested to join here's the details and the register link. Register Here. Catch you on the Webcast :)
Event Date: 20 Nov 07
Type: Webcast
Small changes to your landing pages can have a dramatic effect on conversion rates and, ultimately, revenue. Google Website Optimizer and Marqui will show you easy ways to create, test, and optimize your landing pages for better results. All marketing professionals interested in getting more leads out of the same marketing dollars should take notice. In this session you will learn:
Agenda:
