During the last WAW event we agreed to meet more regularly, on a monthly
schedule. I recommend the first Wednesday each month. In May this would
be May 7th. Right after the May holiday. Considering the increasing
size of our group, I will follow Wu Yong guidance to keep the location
stable. So with no further ado I give the stage to my readers. Where
would you arrange a Web Analytics Wednesday in Beijing? We need
- A room for 15 to 20 people on 2 tables
- Good food at reasonable prices (<RMB 80 person incl. drinks) preferably lower
- Internet access
- Somewhere in Chaoyang
Comments are open and highly appreciated.
Many friends ask for a Chinese blog about Web Analytics for our community. And we got one at Sohu blog. But after several months, the experience was not as good as we expected because we can’t use any analytics tool to track the traffic and optimize the content accordingly.
So, it seems a better way out is to have a place for our own and no need to depend on any BSP. That’s what we do this time.
Now, after several days efforts, we got it – a new blog:
http://www.chinawebanalytics.cn
Yes, the web server space and domain name are brand new, but what we want to do hasn’t changed –
- Introduce basic concepts of web analytics, (as China is still in its WA infancy)
- translate articles of this blog and other best oversea knowledge to Chinese practitioners, (you will see articles of Florian, Avinash, Eric T. Peterson and other good writers for web analytics.)
- make more friends, (please pay attention to the event notice, especially WAW notice)
- and build up our community.
So, please fovorite the URL above, visit the blog and give us comments. I will appreciate that.
Thanks Florian, and all our friends. See you there!
My colleague Song Xing (Sidney) is gearing up to translate not only my
posts, but also posts of global web analytics thought leaders on his blog. If you prefer to read about analytics in Chinese, go there! Also tell your less English inclined friends about this great resources. Its a big step forward in our industry.
To take a look at what other thought leader write about analytics in
English, take a look at my blogroll in the sidebar or subscribe to my shared items feed. Or as a comprehensive references, buy
- Avinash’s book “Web Analytics: One hour a day”, which provides much more than the title suggest
- and Eric T. Peterson’s “The big Book of KPI’s” which remains an amazing reference.
While both “guru’s” are engaged in a vigorous debate about how “hard” or “easy”
web analytics is, I recommend you to read them both. They offer amazing
insights and have been my guide on this interesting ride since the
beginning.
Kaiser Kuo at Digitalwatch has an interesting write up of the Metrics and Measurement Panel at Verge. While there focus is all of Asia, there is certainly a lot of meat there about China (did someone say red meat?) Take a look at check it out.
Thanks everyone for joining last week’s Web Analytics
Wednesday. It was the largest and most diverse WAW in Beijing so far. The community is
growing and you are the core. Rock on! Special thanks to Zhou Yang from Google
for presenting on Google Analytics and Google Website Optimizer and to Eric
Peterson and the folks at Web
Analytics Demystified for generously sponsoring the event.
People
With 13 participants this was the largest WAW to date in Beijing (30% growth QoQ 
).
The room was bursting at its seams, so we are looking for a larger location
next time. In addition to the usual suspects (folks from MRM Worldwide,
OgilvyOne and DMG: Thanks for your loyalty), new faces came from Ronghai Consulting and major Chinese
SOE’s like Air China and China Netcom. It was also the first meeting to be
conducted mainly in Chinese. I am particularly pleased with this development (while I can’t understand every word being said). I
see it as a evidence that we finally start to reach the local practitioners.
Most of praise goes to Wu Yong, a leading local WebTrends expert, who has an
amazing talent reaching local users.
Presentations (Google Analytics / Google Website Optimizer)
Google’s Zhou Yang shared two insightful presentations with
a captivated audience and graciously agreed to share the decks with me. I have uploaded the files to a brand new WAW Beijing Google Group. Check it out.
Zhou Yang with captivated audience. (Next time we need Sidney to take pictures again)
Discussion
While the early discussion focused on experience sharing
about these two Google tools, we also had a more far reaching discussion on
communicating analytics findings and reconciling data from multiple tools.
- Google Analytics
- Free
of charge
- Easy
to use interface. New users (and many web analysts in China are new) show a
very steep landing curve with GA. After less than a week they are able to get
all relevant report while packages like WebTrends’ and Omniture’s can take more
than a month to feel comfortable in.
- Strong functionality, can cover 98% of all web analytics needs in China right now
- Data sharing setting allow complete privacy for the data.
- Con’s
- Tracking
servers are hosted in the US, channeling server calls to the US might
impact data quality. The extend of the problem is not clear, but Zhou
Yang assured that it is not a major issue. Google will also work to set
up a tracking server in China, to insure that users feel more confident.
- GA
uses a JS bases tracking strategy and a hosted application (like most
state of the art solutions). For many local users that is an issue,
since they want to control their analytics data themselves. Many users
therefore use server log bases tools (mainly Webtrends). Google log
file solution (Urchin), can address this need, but is widely unknown.
- Use cases
- Most members of the audience are users of “corporate” web analytics tools like Omniture Sitecatalyst, WebTrends and IndexTools.
- GA only used in non standard cases, where the processes of implementing the corporate solution is too time consuming.
- Website Optimizer
- There was strong interest in the capabilities of GWO.
- None
of the audience members are active users of GWO or any other A/B or
Multivariate testing tools. I attribute that to the early stage of web
analytics in China. Clients often don’t buy the value of testing and
find it a waste of money. More advocacy and training is needed to get
the ball rolling.
- Clickmaps provided by current analytics solutions are most often used to make decisions on landing page design
- Communicating Analytics
- Communicating
what web analytics is, and what it can do for decision makers is an
even larger challenge than implementing tools. We discussed some
strategies to solve this problem, but none of use could say is as
eloquently as Avinash in his recent post on the topic. Read it!
- Using multiple analytics solutions on one site
- One
interesting question was about data discrepancies when using multiple
tools on one site. I commented numbers from different tools are
different and may never be exactly the same. The key question though is
if both tools are showing the same trends. If so, you can take action.
More the data consolidation from Avinash and Eric T. Peterson.
To
learn more about these and other web analytics topics, please join the
next event. I am confident we can get together again in early May.
Chinese version of this blog (?????)
During the discussion it became clear that it the community
is looking for a Chinese language platform to discuss about Web Analytics. That
seems to be a good time to bring the Chinese version of this blog out of
stealth mode. My colleague Song Xing has been so nice to translate my post into
Chinese on his blog . Please go there for your
fill of web analytics news and analysis in Chinese. I will also add a link to
Song Xing’s blog directly at the top of my sidebar.
Have I missed anything, did I ignore the Chinese part of the discussion? Tell me in the comments section.
One of the questions that regularly comes up in my discussions with friends like Kaiser Kuo and Bill Bishop,
is the lack of reliable 3rd party data for web traffic in
China. Their beef is that data from sources like Alexa and iResearch
is unreliable and open to abuse.
My answer is usually quite simple: It really doesn’t matter that much for advertisers.
An effectively implemented web analytics program will provide all the
data that is needed for a comprehensive online advertising optimization effort.
- Your media plan will tell you how much you spend on each media and each banner.
- Campaign tagging will tell you how many visits came form each banner and each media. It enables you to calculate cost per landing page visit (CPV).
- Goal tracking and conversion tracking will tell you how many
visit from what banner actually ended in the desired end action on your
site. This enables you to calculate the cost per end action (CPA).
These data sets enable effective optimization of media
spending, without relying on any data from the publisher or the ad
tracking vendor. All data is owned by the advertiser.
-
For campaigns that emphasize brand awareness, CPV is a good key
performance indicator (KPI). It tells you how many times your ad has
been seen by a visitor to the publishers site that found it interesting
enough to click on and interested enough in your content to actually wait until your landing page was loaded.
- I find optimizing for CPV more effective than optimizing for CPM (Cost per 1K impressions) or CPC (cost per click).
- CPM is sub optimal, because an ad impression just means the banner has
been loaded from the ad server (or the tracking pixel has been loaded
from the tracking server to be exact). It does not mean that the ad has actually
been seen or that, if it was seen, had any impact on the observer.
- CPC is
sub optimal because in China many clicks on banners seem to be
accidental and users will abort the loading process once they notice
that are actually leaving the publisher’s site
-
For campaigns with a specific end action (or a set of specific end actions) as campaign goal, CPA is the most
relevant metric, since it allows you to directly link your ad spend
with the desired return.
There are two drawbacks to this approach
- It required continuous testing and regular optimization. (which you should do anyway)
- It does not help investors or VC’s, since their main interest in
tracking publishers traffic is gauging revenue potential by projecting
its revenue potential. Well, maybe it helps to talk to advertiser who
actually spend money on the site. The advertisers ROI could be a metric to understand if a publisher has the potential to grow its ad revenue.
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