Chinalytics Longmarch Blog

Florian's GA certificate

If you think you can do that, too, just go to starttest.google.com, pay 50 bucks USD and give it a go. I warn you, tough. This is harder than you think! Well, at least it was harder than I thought. To prepare yourself, you can go the Google Conversion University and join the free online classes.

Be warned tough, that while the classes seem very straight forward at times, the test is not. They have a couple of tough nut to crack in there. Especially areas that I am not handling on a daily based proved tricky. Here are some areas I should have taken a closer look at before taking the test.

1. Adwords – Adsense Integration
2. Regular Expressions (Regex)
3. Tracking of sub domains and cross domain tracking
4. E-Commerce tracking

Be smarter than me and study those in advance. I hope my experience helps those of your still planning to take the test. I definitely encourage you to do so. It was certainly worth it for me. It forced me to up my GA game and become a better analyst. Now I can proudly put the “Google Analytics Certified” batch on this blog.

Thank you. You may stop applauding

P.S.: Also a big thanks to Google’s Avinash Kaushik, for his encouragement and inspiration.

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For those of you who couldn’t join yesterday’s Adworld 2009 event, please find the presentations of the Web Analytics session attached. Regular readers of this blog will have seen my 10 Rules for Winning through Analytics presentation already.

Among the other three  decks I want to highlight the “Measurement and optimizations at Qunar” presentation Charlene Ng gave. Qunar is one of the leading travel portals and the leading travel search engine in China. They have presented atthe June WAW but the current deck is more detailed and provides a much better understanding about how they do analytics.

Thanks again to DCCI for hosting this event and of course for all the Speakers & Sidney Song (OMD) – as the moderator

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Adworld Beijing 2009

The Data Center of the Chinese Internet is organizing their big advertising bash tomorrow at the Grand Hyatt Hotel at Chang’An Jie. You can find more details at www.adworld.ord.cn.

I will be giving a quick presentation at the Web Analytics Salon in the afternoon (3PM to 6PM). While I can’t figure out why people in Beijing are so enarmoured with the word “Salon”, it sounds like a fun opportunity to spread the Web Analytics word.

So say hello if you are around.

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• Web Analytics Wednesday Review: Sinotech Group: Web Analytics Getting Social (longmarch.chinalytics.com)

Image via Wikipedia

If you are based in Shanghai, you cannot miss the inaugural Shanghai Web Analytics  Wednesday. Kudos to the team around Min Guo and thanks to the sponsors at Uptake and CIC. Great job.

Time & Date: 7pm, July 15, 2009 (3rd Wed.)

Speaker: Dave Zheng,  Chief Analyst at Newegg.com (US)

Topic: Web Analytics in E-commerce and KPIs
Dave will share how to apply web analytics in e-commence, and the importance of web analytics in operation. He will also focus on the discussion of Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) of ecommence industry from his experience in Newegg.com.

For more details, please visit http://www.shanghaiwebanalytics.com

The Shanghai WAW has been a long time coming. Tracy and Xu Hai first started talking about it on this blog in March 2008 in the comment thread of a post talking about a Beijing WAW event. There was some momentum but it fizzled a bit when we could not find a lead organizers.

The second wave stated when Uptake’s Elliot Ng joined a Beijing WAW in March this year and offered to sponsor a Shanghai WAW. That got the ball rolling again and after fits and starts it is done.

I feel like a proud godfather. Thanks to all who make this happen. The Beijing team is proud of you!

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• Will the real Shanghai Web Analytics organizer please stand up? (longmarch.chinalytics.com)

Yesterday I had the pleasure to host the July WAW here in Beijing with John Wang, Product Manager at Sinotech Group sharing Sinotech’s perspective on Web Analytics and Social Media Analytics. Thanks John for sharing.

While John had only a couple of slides, it was slide 8 (the SinoBuzz dashboard) that caught most attention and started a discussion that lasted almost half an hour. Thanks John for being a great sport answering all the questions in detail (especially the more pesky ones from Paul Denlinger )

Some take aways from the presentation and the discussion:

• The Social Media tracking field is getting crowded, with pioneer CIC, BBS aggregator Daqi, Ogilvy One’s OBuzz and now Sinotech’s SinoBuzz. That’s great news for advertisers and ad agencies. It keeps everyone on their toes
• Sinotech has been working of Sinobuzz for more than one year. Especially the natural language processor part had been tricky, but they are confident that it produces reliable results now.
  FP: Chinese is a very difficult language to interpret with software. None of the natural language processing tools I have seen for Chinese have worked at an acceptable level. I would love to see a more detailed demonstration of Sinotech’s system on a post and aggregated level to understand if they have cracked this particular nut.
• SinoBuzz is working with connectors to plug into BBS, Blog, Social Network, Video sharing and other conversations. The platform is flexible to add other connectors to any upcoming platform or network.
  FP: This flexibility is a clear competitive advantage, given the more static nature of most competitive products.
• SinoBuzz is trying to aggregate unique metrics from various platform
  • #of BBS post, BBS clicks, BBS replies, Post Sentiment
  • #of Blog post, Blog replies, estimates about Blog post PV’s, Blog post sentiment
  • SNS #of Friends, #of status message, #of posts, # of relies, post sentiment
  • etc

  into general metrics like “reputation” and “attitude”.
  FP: I am highly sceptical of this approach since is a) lack transparency b) ignores unique characteristics of different platforms, their audiences and their impact c) uses unreliable third party resources like Alexa to gauge the impact of sources that do not publish reach (PV) data.

• The Sinobuzz dashboard is well designed and provides a good overview of brand performance. Like most dashboards (see Avinash’s Action Dashboard post), it suffers from the lack of analysis and actionable insights.
  FP: A good rule of thumb for any Dashboard: Handle with care. Dashboards without analytics and recommendations usually end up as pretty charts without impact. The key resource is not the dashboard, but an analyst who understands these numbers and your business and can provide actionable insights and recommendations based on that data. John mentioned that there are more reports to dig deeper and it would be great to understand what these reports can do. The critical queastion remains: How does the tool enable brands to take action?

What are your thoughts? Did I miss anything important? Let me know in the comments section.

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