Chinalytics Longmarch Blog

Those of us using Omniture in China have been facing a big problem
optimizing search campaigns. Baidu’s search terms were encoded
correctly only 50% of the time (I am being generous), the other 50% we
got obscure characters that mean absolutely nothing. That results in
all keyword related reports (most popular keyword etc.) delivering
wrong results. Paid search might be exempted when you use campaign ID’s
to tag the keywords. Anyways… after escalating the issue to Omniture
forever ago (sorry guys, it had to be said), a solution is at hand.
The problem has apparently been on Baidu’s side. They are only randomly
handing over the correct encoding, sometimes they had over not encoding
info at all.

• WebTrends has the same problem (see my response to Leon’s question on this post),
• Google Analytics customer service commented that they had that problem as well, but solved it some months ago.

Now during yesterday’s dinner Omniture’s
commented that their engineering team has found a solution as well and
is implementing it these days. Your truly is waiting with bated breath
an will certainly keep you updated.

While the August Web Analytics Wednesday event is still one week away, this week two illustrious groups of guests are in Beijing and look forward to meet the local analytics community.

1) Cameron Cowan and Darryl Su from Omniture Greater China
2) A team Executive MBA Student at Georgetown University who have been analyzing “Online advertising revenue centers in PRC by looking at ad network structures and large
player’s product offerings” They are now “attempting to identify trends in revenue models (cpc, cpa, p4p) and the role of analytics.” That should certainly make for an interesting discussion. The team members are:

Raghav Vajjhala, e-Government Architect, Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation
Jamie Hammond, Vice President, AOL Money & Finance
Pat Sheridan, President, Clover Leaf Consulting
Matt Luxton, Intellectual Property Attorney
Pavitar Juneja, Partner, Outline Systems
Ben Newhart, Export Licensing

I have reserved a room at Lan Club at 8PM under my name. Please come an join us when your time allows.

For any questions, please email me, leave a comment on this post or call my mobile at 13401191916. Please RSVP if you have time to join so I an adjust the number of reserved seats.

See you around.

Just found a note to myself from last month. It said “If you don’t write up the event review immediately, you will never do it.” So here we go, no bad consciousness this month.
As usually a colorful band of web analyst as sympathizers met up at Club Camp for a merry get together. This time we had the honor to host a presentation by Song Jie, CEO of Banru a local web analytics vendor. They position their product Web -IA as direct competitor to the likes of WebTrends and Omniture, so this promised to be an interesting presentation.

Presentation on Web-IA
This summary will necessary a bit limited since your truly is not as good in Chinese as he should be. What you read here is often only possible through the kind support of WAW attended who help with the translation.

• Web IA started as early as 2001 to provide basic analytics solutions.
• Multiple versions of their products compete is several market segments from medium to high end. In the high end Song Jie believed their feature set outstrips Omniture.
  While I believe this to be a very aggressive claim, their impressive client list seems an evidence of their local success. Song Jie especially highlighted their partnership with Microsoft’s Service, who implemented Web-IA at several corporate clients.
• While none of the attendees was a user of the product, we could agree that have a strong engineering team in town is a strong competitive advantage. Song Jie commented that their tech support team is able to provide custom reports within 24h after a client request.
• Web IA is based on a web interface, and does sport direct data warehouse access, for custom reports their rely on their tech support and engineering team.
• Web IA can be integrated with various BI tools. While it lacks standard API’s, their engineering team has several standard implementations that can be customized to client needs.

Attendees
With about 19 attendees the event size is stabilizing. Interestingly enough the attendees rotate quite a lot. We have a core group of 7 – 9 people who are there every time and some 25 – 30 people who join once in a while. Another interesting trend is the growth of attendees that are not web analysts but advertisers. I see this as an encouraging trend, although the discussion are more detailed with fellow analysts

Discussion
This time discussion were a bit short, due to the late start of the event. After some brainstorming we agreed to change the format a bit. Instead of a formal dinner set up, we will sent the food up in a buffet arrangement, so we walk around and talk to each other. That should facilitate communication and discussion.

Please use the comment section for detailed feedback and idea what we can do better. If you want to join our illustrious line up of speakers, please also drop me a not. We are very interested in case studies and sample analytics reports. Vendors are also welcome to present their products.

So long and until next month.
Florian

With the help of Wu Yong we locked down a speaker for tomorrow’s WAW. Ms. Song is the CEO of the local Web Analytics vendor “Banuo” (litereal translation), whose product Web-Ia runs on several large telecom sites in China. I am sure we are going to have an exciting evening comparing features and learning about their business.