Chinalytics Longmarch Blog

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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• Omniture Site Catalyst training in Beijing this September (longmarch.chinalytics.com)

Attention: Location Change: This month we are back at Luga’s Villa.
Speaker: Yuan Cheng,程渊, GM of Gomez China

Topic: Introducing “performance” in web “performance” analytics

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 as well to.

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:
Luga’s Villa (details and map)
7 Sanlitun North Street, Sanlitun
Right behind 3.3 Plaza
三六屯北里7号楼
3.3 大厦后边
Phone: 135-2013-7915

Schedule:
19:45 – Door open / Buffet open
20:15 – 20:45 Presentation
20:45 – 21:00 Q&A Session
21:00 – 22:00 Networking

I am looking forward to meeting you on Wednesday August 5th.

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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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Attention: Location Change: Now at Club Obiwan (Haidian), Next month back at Luga’s Villa.

Speaker: Mike Pereira, COO at Sinotech Media (TBC)

Topic: Web Analyics Getting Social in China

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

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:
Club Obiwan (Description and Map)
西城区西海西沿4号 离积水潭地铁站300米
Xihai Xiyan No.4, Xicheng district, 300m from Jishuitan subway station

Phone (for directions): 010 8322 1231

Schedule:
19:45 – Door open / Buffet open
20:15 – 20:45 Presentation
20:45 – 21:00 Q&A Session
21:00 – 22:00 Networking

I am looking forward to meeting you on Wednesday July 1st

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• Measuring Social Media at Web Analytics Wednesday (n0d3.org)

Yesterday I had the opportunity to share some of my thought on web analytics with the geeks on a plane guys.  The most impressive part? They had a specific section called “startup metrics” . This fact alone is prove enough that these guys get it.

If you need more prove, please check out Dave McClure’s Startup metrics for pirates presentation that he reanimated for this event.

I had only 15 minutes to speak, so I made it short and sweet. Check out the presentation below and let me know what you think about it. Of course I liberally borrow from Avinash and Stephane Hamel. Standing on the shoulders of giants.

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During yesterday’s May Web Analytics Wednesday I had the chance to share my thoughts about Testing and why it has to be at the core of digital optimization and innovation.  Please see the deck I shared with the crowed on Slideshare.

In my post on “Landing Page Optimization” in early 2008 I have made a point that is still almost unanimously ignored in developing websites in China.

 The most effective way to an optimized landing page is testing,
but testing itself comes as one part of part of an
effective optimization process.”

I took  this opportunity to reprise this post in a presentation. My objective was to help all attendees to take a fresh look at their web analytics and optimization process and come away with new ideas on how to make it work better. Take a look at the slides and let me know how it worked. The comments are open. Let the fun begin.

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One of interesting new features of Google Analytics, we didn’t have time to explore during the March WAW event, is Motion Charts.  Motion Charts are a fascinating visualization idea, displaying up to 5 dimensions of data in a very intuitive format. They were pioneered by Dr Hans Rosling in a famous TEDtalk discussing global health and are now available in Google Analytics to visualize web analytics data.

Motion chart or my blog traffic - click to animate

If you are interested to learn more about Motion Charts in GA, click on the image above to see my blog traffic visualized using motion charts and take a look at this training at the Google Conversion University.

The use of Motion Charts in not limited to Google Analytics however. They are also part of the visualization tools in Google Docs (see an example by the guys from Efficient Frontier) and can be accessed through an API. A good example for using the motion chart API is Eric Peterson’s Twitalyzer tool, that measures users influence on Twitter, and visualizes changes in influence over time. These interfaces open a wealth of interesting usage areas for data analysts, that can be integrated in dashboards and client presentations.

Now here in an idea: Use motion charts to visualize online buzz!

In China, product related discussions happen mainly BBS’s and sometimes on blogs. So these are the platforms we spent most of our time tracking and analyzing for our clients. to visualize user discussions on these two platforms, I propose the following motion chart setup:

The idea, of course, is to use this visualization to identify trending topics that need to acted upon. Those topics would clearly show in the top right corner (many posts, attracting many responses responses) of the chart with large bubble   sizes (many page views) and red color negative aggregate sentiment).

I you have any ideas on visualize social media tracking data? Let us know in the comments!

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• Video of March WAW with Google’s Stephanie Hsu (longmarch.chinalytics.com)

With a record turnout of 60 attendees for last nights Beijing Web Analytics Wednesday (more details about that, including video!! to follow), we are setting our sights to spreading the WAW goodness to other digital hubs in China. Next stop Shanghai.

We have money:

Local Sponsor: Elliot Ng
Global Sponsor 1: Coremetrics	Global Sponsor 2: Sitespect

We have attendees:

Multiple comment and emails on my and Song Xings blog (Chinese) and in out Inboxes  have asked us about Shanghai events.

What we don’t have is someone who stands up and organizes it.

- Is that you? -

If you are interested, please get in touch with me. I am happy to share my experience and advice. Its not rocket science, it doesn’t take much time nor any money. But its very rewarding, seeing the community grow month by month. Sweet deal, right? So what are you waiting for? Shoot me an email florianpihs[at]gmail[dot]com or leave a comment to this post.

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• Free Omniture Online Business Optimization workshop in Beijing (March 11th) (longmarch.chinalytics.com)
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• Upcoming Omniture training in Beijing and Shanghai (longmarch.chinalytics.com)

The first Web Analytics Wednesday of the 牛 (niu – ox, as in year of the ox) year will be hosted on February 11th, one week later than usual, to account for some late returning 春节 (Spring Festival) travelers.

If you are interested in sharing your Web Analytics, measurement or optimization ideas in front of a enthusiastic crowd of 40+ web analytics enthusiasts, please let me know in the comment section of this post, in the Beijing WAW Google group, or just send an email to florianpihs[at]gmail[dot]com.

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One of the major limitations on Web Analytics in China is the lack of skilled and experienced analysts. Once a company or agency has decided on persuing the digital ROI path though Web Analytics, they soon notice that while tools are free (like Google Analytics, Yahoo! Analytics and Microsoft AdCenter Analytics) or can be bought from respected vendors (like Omniture, Webtrends and others), skilled and experienced analysts are in severe short supply. (as I’ve argued before). As a result, most analytics teams are made up of one senior person, spending most of his/her time on training and a bunch of smart young analyst coming staight from university or from a market research background. Most of the trainig is on the job and done informally. Most of it is done “on the job”. I have never met a certified Omniture or GA analyst in China (let me know if you are!).

This is about to change, with Omniture offering their first Site Catalyst Fundamentals training in Beijing and Shanghai in March. The training will last 2 days and will be conducted in Chinese  Here are the dates and prices:

BEIJING – MAR 17 – 18

SHANGHAI – MAR 19-20

Prices per person range from USD 1,500 to USD 1,800. Given current exchange rates, thats beween RMB 10K and 12.5K.

This is a princely price for China, given that it reflects a monthly salary for a senior analyst / senior analytics consultant in the market. While I am excited about this opportunity, I am not sure how many companies can afford that kind of money in the current economic situation. I can only urge my readers to review Avinash’s 90/10 rule.

• Our Goal: Highest value from Web Analytics implementation.
• Cost of analytics tool & vendor professional services: $ 10.
• Required investment in “intelligent resources/analysts”: $ 90.
• Bottom-line for Magnificent Success: Its the people.

Re-read it! Re-read it again! And now go looking for the money. If you are lucky and find a pot of gold, contact your local Omniture salesperson (Darry Su, CY Yueng) or, lacking their contact info, comment on this post to sign up for the training. I will then share the Omniture contact info with you via email.

I am looking forward to seeing you in March.

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