Chinalytics Longmarch Blog

Oh, the joys of blogging! About 4 weeks ago, when I wrote a short post about Baidu’s own web analytics tool, I got an interesting comment from Mathew McDougall of SinoTech Group, telling me and my readers that his firm developed a successful local web analytics package in house. Now that piqued my interest…

Fast forward 1 month and, China being a small place after all (at least in the tech industry), I got in touch with him and we had nice lunch at Kerry Center. It seems SinoTech has been offering their own solution to advertisers and agencies for a while, mainly as a value add to their ad server and / or ad network. After AllYes started asking us about tagging our landing pages with their tags, I start to believe that the local web analytics market is more vibrant after all. While this was a pleasant lesson learned, and I rejoiced hearing that even government owned sites start to run their tool, we agreed about the key roadblocks in the industries development.

• Lack of ROI focus on the advertisers side.When advertisers have no clear, measurable goals for their campaigns, and do not have to justify the ROI of their efforts, the value of web analytics is limited. Without a good business case there is a pronounce unwillingness to pay for analytics.





• Lack of Analytics talent. Advertisers s and agencies who get web analytics struggle to find talent to leverage the available data to create actionable insight that drive performance (wow Imagethief would have a ball with this sentence). While the industry in the US was build the back of business intelligence, market research and  e-business talent, all of these are in short supply in China (well with possible exception of market research)





• Lack of an e-commerce industry. The earliest web analyst in the west worked at companies like amazon and eBay. Comapanies that had direct revenue on the line, when they optimized their campaigns, creative and landing pages. Since e-commerce has be languishing for so long in the middle kingdom, there is no large analytics market either.





• Lack of a long tail. While this is not strictly when looking at traffic, it is certainly true, looking at ad revenue. Kaiser and Bill has some fun with the numbers and ended up with 60% to 70% online ad market share for the big five listed players. Turing the argument around it becomes obvious that the remaining 400 – 500 million US dollar cannot sustain a large number of small bloggers, webmaster, online family businesses or CPC arbitrageurs . It is these people though, manually optimize their sites for the smallest amount of Google juice, that  drive innovation in the industry and form another great pool of talent.

Some of that is changing, we both agreed and we are here of the ride. Welcome aboard, and please, dear readers, let me know if the Matt’s analytics tool is any good, how it shapes up compared to Baidu and AllYes or Google Analytics and Omniture. My curiosity knows no bounds.

These seem to be rich days for those of us fishing for nuggets of insight on how to improve our reporting. In addition Monday’s post about simplifying key insight slides here is one more morsel the reporting wonks out there.
Eric Schaffer writes about researchers vs. practitioners. and Stephane Hamel adds some Web Analytics perspective. My key take away comes from Stephane’s post "Clients are looking for solutions". On the first glance this sounds very obvious. When looking at most web analytics reports you will find that they highlight the problems, while the solutions are buried somewhere at the end of the PPT. We present (our 40 to 50 slides), have some discussions on the way and when we come to the solutions part everyone is tired or alternatively on the way to the next meeting.
So here is the challenge for you and for me.

• Put the solutions to key problems front and center. That means on slide 1 or 2 and  as the last slide (to facilitate discussion).





• Prioritize the key solutions with most leverage





• Spend enough time during the presentation talking about the solution (after the client is persuaded that they have a problem)





• Limit the slides talking about problems (I guess 10 -15 is a good rule of thumb), but make your points clear. More detailed slides can go into the appendix to support your point when necessary





• Get agreements on actions and take down action items (with person responsible and time line)





• Follow up on the action items and include progress in future reports.

Best,
Florian

While I will not start running naked around town , I felt like something large moved in my brain after reading Gary Angels post on reporting today. While the first 5 graphs look like ordinary web analytics report, the like of us produce daily. It was the last graph that hit me like the proverbial apple. This is how want my reports to look like…
I have been thinking about how to simply reporting almost constantly after normal reports started to exceed 40 slides on a regular basis. This seems to be the golden path.
<out torturing Excel>
P.S.: Gary seems to be the only blogger that uses Omniture for his blog tracking. Now if somebody would please give me a machine gun… there is a fly on my wall.