Chinalytics Longmarch Blog

2009 is slowly running out of steam, but the Beijing Web Analytics Wednesday is moving from strength to strength. After a huge event in November, where more than 70 guests listened to DCCI sharing their research about the state of the industry, we starting off December with a presentation by Jackson Huang , who is leading Gridsum’s development team to expand the capabilities of their Web Analytics Tool Web Dissector.

Two month ago Gridsum’s CEO Guosheng QI and Michael Xu who runs Gridsum’s Marketing and Operations gave me a private demo of their tool. I walked away very impressed with the tools strong usability, the broad range of functions as well as tools flexibility to run custom reports and segments on the fly. So far Web Dissector is the strongest local tool I have seen, and it will certainly give  Omniture, WebTrends and Google Analytics a run for their money on China.

Always remember though, that it is rarely the tools that drive business results. Its committed, smart and creative people using these tools, that deliver results. To meet such people and to skill up your own team, join us on Wednesday, December 9th.

Speaker Introduction

Jackson Huang co-founded the Tsinghua Software Industry Association with Guosheng QI and other alumni in 2005, and was responsible for technology development and project monitoring. After Gridsum Technology was formed, Mr. Huang took charge of company’s technology roadmap, product structure, R&D, and project management.

Mr. Huang graduated from Tsinghua University in 2006 with a software engineering degree. He won the first “Shanda (NASDAQ: SNDA) Cup” China Adolescents gaming software competition.

Address:

Pullman’s Steak (details and map)
Gong Ti Dong Lu Zhongguo Hong Jie Bing 2 Hao,109
Phone: +86 10 8587 1055

Agenda:

Call to Action!

Join Jackson, Wu Yong as well as 50 other web analytics enthusiasts to learn about web analytics, meet cool people and have an all around great time. Bring any friends who might be interested to join our community along as well.

We will have a buffet dinner and soft drinks available for our guests. Be prepared to spend RMB 50 for the evening if you register in advance, and RMB 100 if you visit us without registration. As usual, the knowledge you get in exchange is invaluable.

We are looking forward to meeting you on Wednesday December. 9th

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Web Analytics Wednesday logo

Web Analytics Wednesday is maturing and its very rewarding to see the number of attendees and speakers grow in Beijing and around China. This week will mark a new milestone, as it will be the first event I cannot attend and host in person. On the one hand I am sad not to be able to join and meet all the great analysts who come, on the other had I am excited to see that the event goes on, even if the demands of my job keep me from joining.

This week our guest from DCCI, an up and coming local market research firm, will share their perspective on the Web Analytics market and its importance in understanding the customer journey and brand touch points. You can find some examples of their research and opinion online.

• Hu Yanping blog post on “9 Web analysis and optimization development trends”
• DCCI sample on audience insights:  “2009 Nokia brand contact points and customer journey”

Address:

Pullman’s Steak (details and map)
Gong Ti Dong Lu Zhongguo Hong Jie Bing 2 Hao,109
Phone: +86 10 8587 1055

Agenda:

Call to Action!

Join DCCI’s Hu Yanping and Fu Zhihua  as well as 40 other web analytics enthusiasts to learn about web analytics, meet cool people and have an all around great time. Bring any friends who might be interested to join our community along as well.

We will have a buffet dinner and soft drinks available for our guests. Be prepared to spend RMB 50 for the evening if you register in advance, and RMB 100 if you visit us without registration. As usual, the knowledge you get in exchange is invaluable.

We are looking forward to meeting you on Wednesday Nov. 11th

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• Beijing Web Analytics Wednesday: 99click CEO Experience Sharing (longmarch.chinalytics.com)

Web Analytics Wednesday logo

Both Sindey Song at Chinawebanlytics.com and I have extensively written about the importance of bounce rate as a success metric in Web Analytics (see here and here). This Wednesday we will hear from  Mr. Ma Tianyun, President & CEO of 99click, one of the most popular local Web Analytics tool providers, about their perspective on the importance of bounce rate.

His presentation will cover the following topics:

• Web Analytics Industry trends
• Site analysis, key performance indicators and best practices
• How to interpret bounce rate as well as exit rate and the usage of both metric to improve the effectiveness of web marketing

Speaker Introduction:

Mr. Ma Tianyun: CEO Business Assistant Technology (Beijing) Co., Ltd (also referred to as 99click)

In 1998 Ma Tianyun received  a Ph.D. at Yale University. After graduating, he joined Oracle Corporation in the United States with a focus on data analysis, software development and management. There Mr. Ma mastered Internet software development and system development, built his technology knowledge and skills and became familiar with the Internet industry. In 2004, Mr. Ma Tianyun joined the Tsinghua Technology Park and founded Business Assistant Technology  Ltd. (hereinafter referred to 99click), and has been focused on Internet marketing, data analysis and application of research in the field.

Please join me and 40 other web analytics enthusiasts to learn about web analytics, meet cool people and have an all around great time. Bring any friends who might be interested to join our community along.

We will have a buffet dinner and soft drinks available for our guests. Be prepared to spend RMB 50 for the evening if you register in advance, and RMB 100 if you visit us without registration. As usual, the knowledge you get in exchange is invaluable.

Address:

Pullman’s Steak (details and map)

Gong Ti Dong Lu Zhongguo Hong Jie Bing 2 Hao,109

Phone: +86 10 8587 1055

Agenda:

19:45 – Door open / Buffet open

20:15 – 20:45 Presentation

20:45 – 21:00 Q&A Session

21:00 – 22:00 Networking

Sidney and I are looking forward to meeting you on Wednesday October 14th

The topics I have been struggling with most in my Google Analytics Individual Certification exam was regular expressions or Regex, because honestly I had never used them in my work with GA, ever. The exam forced me to beef up my knowledge (which is still pretty shaky), but now I keep on discovering new uses or Regex every day.

One of the simplest applications or RegEx in Google Analytics is the Filter that GA displays are the bottom of every list.

Usually you would just enter a keyword to narrow down the items in the list. Google gives your two standard options “containing” and “not containing”.  Pretty limited, huh? Regular expressions allow you to significantly boost the power of this filter.

Say I want to check how many of my visitors come to my little blog using  vendor name of WA tool as keywords, say “Omniture“, “Webtrends” and “Google”. Using the RegEx “Or” operator “|” (not capital I, but |), the query looks this “Omniture|Webtrends|Google”.

Pretty cool, right? This is especially helpful in the Keywords report, for example to catch various spellings of a brands term, bout works just as well in any other report that allows you to filter. Most popular pages? Sure. Length of Visit? Sadly, no.

You can also find queries that start with a specific term (e.g. “^Omniture”)  and end with a specific (e.g. “Omniture$”) term using RegEx.

And last but not least, remember that Google Analytics’ filters are greedy. The “containing” filter will show you any list item that contains the search term (Broad match), which can be pretty annoying at times. So always remember your RegEx when you want the exact matches. Combining the “begins with” and “ends with” expressions from above, the exact match for my “Omniture” search term looks like this: “^Omniture$”

Good luck playing around with this.

For more information on RegEx (well at least a little more) you can go to the Google Analytics’ Help section posts What are regular expressions?. Or get a deep dive at  this great resource on the Lunametrics blog. Thanks Robin for putting this together.

Any questions or comments? Please let me know in the comments or by email.

Best,

Florian

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Over the years I have been following Omniture’s (slow) engagement with China with ongoing interest. Especially since we have clients who use SiteCatalyst and have seen strong interest in SearchCenter in the market. While I understand that China is still a comparatively small market for the big analytics vendors, I would have hoped for more leadership from Omniture, sooner, in the largest Internet market by number of users.

Finally their  leadership looks like it is forthcoming with Omniture naming Arics Poon as their MD for China. Arics is a HK native and a very experienced China executive with roles  as Vice President & MD at Oracle and later as GM for Microsoft China.  During the last two month I had the chance to talk to Arics a few times and could clearly see his vision  for Omniture in China.

Congratulations to Omniture for recruiting such a senior leader. You can reach Arics by email and at Omniture’s China offices.

Beijing Office Address:
Office 511, 5/F., South Block, Tower C, Raycom InfoTech Park
No. 2 Kexueyuan South Road
Zhongguangcun, Beijing
100190 P.R. China
美国安力卓有限公司北京办事处
北京海淀区科学院南路2号融科资讯中心C座南楼5層511室
邮编100190

Hong Kong Office Address:
Level 15, Nexxus Building
41 Connaught Road
Central, Hong Kong
+852 3757 9666 ext 9663 tel
+852 3757 9401 fax

香港中環干諾道中四十一號
盈置大廈十五樓

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Shanghai Web Analytics

Last week I finally got around to editing my interview with the gracious Min Guo from Shanghaiwebanalytics.com. They even found a picture of me, attending their Shanghai WAW event. Nice touch.

Take a look and let me know what you think.

Image via CrunchBase

Omniture is getting more serious in China, with a new GM in town and some upcoming trainings. Each training is a full two day workshop and will cost RMB 8,000.

If you want to bulk up on your Omniture skill and add a line to your resume, please leave a comment on this blog or email directly to Omniture at cloh[at]omniture[dot]com. If you email them, just let them know you heard about it here.

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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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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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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