Here at Pure Visibility, analysts recently used competitor data to find a decrease in Time on Site for a client competitor’s site. Is this evidence of an improved site design, perhaps a redesign? Happy visitors, quickly finding what they need? But isn’t Time on Site also sometimes used as an indicator of successful engagement, in the absence of Conversion Rates, to determine whether a page is successful? (albeit with a bit fuzziness due to the way time on site is calculated online). Should we celebrate a trend toward long sessions, or cringe in horror?
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Anyone can throw together a description of a website’s primary users. You just string together some facts about the users’ skills and knowledge and tasks that they are trying to accomplish. That’s not a user persona, though. When you create a user persona, you create an artifact that makes people care about the user’s experience.

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Wouldn’t life be easier for web analysts if we could easily look at our data with full knowledge of the context in which it was gathered, including what was happening on competitor websites? Google’s Site Overlay Report is one example aimed at providing a “data + context” tool. But this report’s simplicity (not to mention technical limitations with many site codings!) make it pale in comparison to a cool new system that allows interacting with archived websites.

MIT’s Technology Review today came out with news on a new system and interface for tracking and analysis of temporal changes to websites. It’s called Zoetrope, was designed by researchers at Adobe and the University of Washington, and could really up the bar for analytics intelligence!

Features:

• a query language
• indexing that allows quick processing
• visualizations

What you can do:

• temporally scroll entire sites, or just portions of site (multiple at once, if desired)
• view news stories on a time line
• generate visualizations of temporal data on multiple sites at once
• export data to present elsewhere (Google docs and Motion Charts are plugged as a suggestion

It’s easy to see how useful this could be. One of the biggest causes of analytics “murkiness” is the fact that in saturated markets, where innovation is rapid and constant, it can take hours to investigate why numbers might be down, usually by researching the actions of competitors, consumers, etc. By allowing quick, easy comparative monitoring across sites, Zoetrope could revolutionize business intelligence mining. We could scroll through and visualize competitors’ price data, for instance, in order to investigate why purchases on an e-commerce site might be unusually low (or high). At the same time, a relevant news source for the industry could be scrolled through or the topics visualized over time, providing a comprehensive view of the market.

The only drawback? We have to wait just a bit longer, while additional features are being designed, before Zoetrope can be released.

A provocative piece on Search Engine Journal incited some interesting comments about tension between marketing strategies and the interests of Internet users.

The author’s job is doing SEO for a company that sells eyewear, and one of his initiatives recently flatlined. One of his strategies was to create an account for his company on the Flickr (the Yahoo-owned photo hosting and sharing service) account for his company, and post pictures related to their business… movie stars wearing their products, pictures of the stuff they sell, etc. The idea was to create images with keyword rich titles that would show up in search engine results, and get people to the company’s website by linking to it in each Flickr picture description. In December 2008, the account got shut down for violating terms of service regarding commercial use.

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Most large companies have at least some online data with an outside vendor or agency. Since even good agency relationships aren’t permanent, there will be a point where the data managed by that agency needs to come back home or migrate to another agency.

Yet many companies don’t have the simplest legal or procedural checks in place to make sure that their precious marketing data stays with them. In fact we have even worked with agencies that insisted the company’s sales data was theirs and could not be transferred at all.

We have also been utterly surprised to find agencies that are not interested in taking on the existing data during a handoff. As a result, that company had to start from scratch when creating their paid search campaign, delaying effective marketing for nearly two months.

Don’t let this happen to you! Your online traffic data is one of the most important sources of information for future sales effort that exists. Here are three simple steps for protecting your precious online marketing data:

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Stop! If you plan to read this post, I will need your detailed itinerary for the day, your most recent ingestion, and your most secret hopes and dreams, all of which I will oneday use against you.

Or this appears to be the fear of many people responding to the discussion of privacy from the New York Times this week. It is no new concern that the digital pervasion of our world has led to more comprehensive data on what people do, and that there are many companies eager to profit from the collective intelligence movement.
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