Articles

We contribute regularly to industry magazines and news. Here's a list of the articles that we have written for ClickZ, Google Conversion University and others.

Report from Emetrics DC 2008
As I write this, the Emetrics Marketing Optimisation Summit in Washington DC is drawing to a close and I am trying to process all the inputs and turn ...
Friday, October 31st, 2008

Understanding multi-channel dynamics – Part 2
In my last article I looked at the measurement aspects of understanding multi-channel dynamics. This week I’m going to look at some of the analy...
Friday, September 26th, 2008

Understanding multi-channel dynamics – Part 1
There is a generally accepted view that an organisation’s multi-channel customers are its best customers. The theory is that if a customer buys ...
Friday, September 19th, 2008

Recession looming: Analytics to the rescue?
Here in the UK recent statistics have confirmed that the economy has stopped expanding and that it’s possible that we may head into recession. W...
Wednesday, September 10th, 2008

Where Web Analytics Tools are Headed
A couple of weeks ago I met up with executives from Omniture here in the UK to get a bit of an update on the products and the product roadmap. After a...
Friday, August 8th, 2008

Tackling the basics of Web Analytics: Measuring content consumption
In his series I have been looking at some of the basics of setting up a web analytics programme. Often when organisations come unstuck with getting th...
Friday, July 18th, 2008

Tackling the basics of web analytics: Campaign tracking
In my last column I outlined how organisations can come unstuck with their web analytics if they don’t pay sufficient attention in general to th...
Friday, July 4th, 2008

Tackling the basics of web analytics: Getting the right numbers right
It was one of those moments. I was working on a client’s data and I began to suspect that something was wrong. Not with the client’s busin...
Friday, June 27th, 2008

The state of web analytics in the UK
An interesting report was published recently by E-consultancy that gives a useful insight into the state of play of the web analytics industry here in...
Friday, June 13th, 2008

Emetrics London round up
I have just finished attending the Emetrics Optimisation Summit in London. It has been a busy two days with a variety of presentations on different su...
Friday, May 30th, 2008

Report from Emetrics San Francisco
As I write this I’m on my way back to the UK from the Emetrics Marketing Optimisation summit in San Francisco. After three days and having watch...
Friday, May 16th, 2008

Is there much of a difference?
As you read this I will be getting myself ready to head over to San Francisco to take the pulse on the developments in the online marketing analytics ...
Thursday, May 1st, 2008

Digital Marketing Optimisation: Part 4 - Retention
The classic digital marketing processes are acquisition, conversion and retention and so far in this series on digital marketing optimisation I have b...
Friday, April 18th, 2008

Digital Marketing Optimisation: Part 3 - Conversion
Last time in this series on digital marketing optimisation I looked at the process of campaign optimisation. But as the saying goes: “You can le...
Friday, April 4th, 2008

Digital Marketing Optimisation: Part 2 - Acquisition
In this series of articles I am looking at the subject of digital marketing optimisation. At its core optimisation is a combination of philosophy, pro...
Friday, March 21st, 2008

Digital Marketing Optimisation: Part 1
In my last column I looked at the concept of “data driven marketing” and outlined what I believe to be the for key components for successf...
Friday, March 7th, 2008

What is Data Driven Marketing?
I was recently asked to put together a workshop session on “Data driven marketing” for a class of digital marketing students. Part of what...
Thursday, February 21st, 2008

Web Analytics: Insights from the frontline – A conversation with Avinash Kaushik
A few weeks ago I took stock of the web analytics market, particularly looking at some of the key trends in Europe. This week to get a sense check fro...
Thursday, January 24th, 2008

Web Analytics resolutions for 2008
It’s a new year and with a new year come new resolutions. Other than the usual New Year’s resolutions to eat less and to exercise more, I ...
Monday, January 14th, 2008

It’s that time of year – time for a review
Since ClickZ are kindly giving me Christmas Day off, this is my last column of the year. So, there’s only one thing for it and that’s to h...
Wednesday, December 12th, 2007

Web Analytics for small businesses
I have just got back from presenting at a seminar on internet marketing which was targeted at small and medium sized businesses. Pulling together the ...
Wednesday, November 28th, 2007

What do we mean by Engagement and is it all that useful?
It was a mistake. I didn’t mean it to happen but the word just popped out of my mouth. I knew as soon as I said it that there was going to be troubl...
Friday, November 16th, 2007

Report from the frontline – Emetrics Washington DC
Wow, that was the week that was. As I write this I have just about recovered from a 3 day intensive immersion in the whole area of online marketing pe...
Saturday, November 3rd, 2007

Predictive analytics Part 2
In part one of this series, I examined visitor segmentation, a data-mining technique. Now, let’s look at how data mining can be used to understa...
Friday, October 19th, 2007

Predictive Analytics Part 1
In my last article I outlined my belief that what we call “web analytics” is becoming a more diverse and complex field. What we have traditionall...
Friday, October 5th, 2007

The increasing diversity and complexity of “Web Analytics”
This week I’ve been starting to get my head around the presentation that I will be giving at the Emetrics Summit in Washington in October. I was loo...
Friday, September 21st, 2007

Is web analytics that difficult?
A couple of months ago WebAnalyticsDemystified published a report sponsored by the Web Analytics Association on the use of web analytics in organisati...
Friday, August 10th, 2007

Getting educated in web analytics is getting easier
We having a saying here in the UK “You hang around waiting for a bus for ages, and then three come along at once”.  Although there is a p...
Friday, July 27th, 2007

Untangling the Gordian Knot of campaign tracking – Part 4
When it comes to online campaign tracking there’s a new buzz phrase in town: “attribution management”. In our business you know wher...
Friday, July 13th, 2007

Untangling the Gordian Knot of campaign tracking – Part 3
In this series I have been taking a look at some of the issues and challenges in tracking the effectiveness of online marketing campaigns. More and mo...
Tuesday, June 19th, 2007

Untangling the Gordian Knot of campaign tracking – Part 2
Last time I started to look at the knotty problem of campaign tracking. Since the birth of offline marketing we have been using simplistic views of ho...
Tuesday, June 19th, 2007

Untangling the Gordian Knot of campaign tracking – Part 1
One of the challenges that any business that does any level of online marketing these days is the proliferation in systems and data that they will be ...
Friday, June 1st, 2007

Measuring buzz
At the recent ClickZ web metrics event in New York there was an interesting range of topics from measuring non-transactional websites through to compe...
Friday, May 18th, 2007

Web reporting or web analytics?
Last week I was doing a presentation at a conference organised by one of the web analytic vendors. In one of the sessions, the vendor was showcasing o...
Friday, May 4th, 2007

London Emetrics round up
A couple of weeks ago I got my annual sense-check of the state of the web analytics industry in the UK and the rest of Europe at the Emetrics Summit i...
Friday, April 20th, 2007

Measuring non-transactional websites - Part 3
During this series I have been taking a look at approaches to measuring the effectiveness on non-transactional websites or websites where the primary ...
Thursday, April 5th, 2007

Measuring non-transactional websites - Part 2
Last time I took an initial look at the differing needs of transactional sites and non-transactional sites when it comes to tracking and measuring suc...
Friday, March 23rd, 2007

Measuring non-transactional websites - Part 1
Last week I was delivering one a workshop on measuring web effectiveness to a mixed group of people from different business sectors. One of the things...
Friday, March 9th, 2007

Customer loyalty management
Last time in this series I looked at a number of different ways you might think about and measure customer loyalty. My view was that it’s not re...
Friday, February 23rd, 2007

Measuring customer loyalty
In my last article I started to explore the notion of loyalty. What do we mean by loyalty? Is loyalty about the way we behave or is it about the way t...
Friday, February 2nd, 2007

What is customer loyalty in the online world?
One of my predictions for this year is that retention marketing will increase it’s importance in the online marketing mix. My thinking is that a...
Friday, January 19th, 2007

How do you measure the success of websites that don’t sell?
I have no idea whether this is true or not but I once heard someone say that 80% of all websites don’t sell anything. Yet, probably 80% of all w...
Monday, January 15th, 2007

2006 and all that
Yet again another year whizzes by and we end up another year older and hopefully another year wiser. At this time of year there is only one thing for ...
Tuesday, January 9th, 2007

Why web analytics won’t necessarily tell you how well you’ve done this Christmas
I can’t believe I’m writing about this already but Christmas is coming – fast. Probably like a lot you, I’m going to be doing most...
Monday, December 4th, 2006

Why I don’t like Web Analytics
There - I’ve said it. There’s no turning back now. I’ve come clean. I don’t like web analytics. That may seem a somewhat stran...
Monday, November 20th, 2006

Web analytics as part of a customer centric organisation
There were many great presentations that I saw at the Emetrics summit in Washington DC a couple of weeks ago. There were presentations on all aspects ...
Saturday, November 4th, 2006

Web analytics and data privacy
During an interview with John Marshall, CEO of ClickTracks for our blog recently, the thorny issue of web analytics and data privacy came up. It’...
Saturday, October 21st, 2006

Data: It’s messy but get over it
It was busy week last week for the online marketer in London with the conference season getting into full swing. There was an inaugural Internet Retai...
Friday, October 6th, 2006

What makes a good analyst?
One of the features of the web analytics market at the moment is not some much the advances in the technologies but the desperate lack of talent on bo...
Friday, September 22nd, 2006

Listening to the voice of the customer
I got a bit of a wake-up call this week. An event which I thought was a long off is getting closer. The Emetrics summit in Washington DC in October is...
Friday, September 8th, 2006

The Analyst’s Toolbox: Explanatory forecasting techniques
In my last article I started to look at forecasting and investigated a set of methods called time-series techniques. Using these techniques you make y...
Friday, August 4th, 2006

The Analyst’s Toolbox: Time-series forecasting techniques
Over the past few weeks I have been taking a look at various analytical techniques that may be appropriate for understanding more about visitor behavi...
Friday, July 21st, 2006

The Analyst’s Toolbox: Segmentation (2)
In my last article I started to take a look at the subject of segmentation. Something that is all the rage at the moment in the wacky world of web ana...
Friday, July 7th, 2006

Google Conversion University: The Four Parts of Web Optimization
Neil contributed an article to Google’s “Conversion University” on the need for a holistic approach to measuring online business per...
Friday, June 30th, 2006

The Analyst’s Toolbox: Segmentation (1)
Segmentation. There’s a word. It’s a word that quite often means different things to different people and it’s all the rage in web analytics. Ev...
Friday, June 23rd, 2006

The Analyst’s Toolbox: Decision Trees and other classification techniques
In my last article I had a quick look at some other tools for the analyst toolkit other than their web analytics system. These included Business Intel...
Thursday, June 8th, 2006

The Analyst’s Toolbox: Introduction
There is a tendency when we talk about analysing web data that we focus on the use of so-called web analytics tools such as Google Analytics, Omniture...
Thursday, May 25th, 2006

The health of the web analytics market in the UK
About a year ago I had the opportunity to visit the Emetrics Summits in both Santa Barbara and London. In my first article for ClickZ I compared the s...
Friday, May 12th, 2006

The web analytics toolbox
When we talk about analysing website data we always tend to think about doing that in a web analytics tool. Last time I described my perfect web analy...
Friday, April 28th, 2006

My perfect web analytics system
At around the same time that I was talking about macro and micro integration in my last columns, an interesting thread appeared in the web analytics f...
Friday, April 14th, 2006

Micro data integration
There is one thing about the digital marketing world - we are not short of numbers! Typically we may have numbers coming in from our web analytic sys...
Friday, March 31st, 2006

What do we mean by macro data integration?
During the session on Multi-channel Metrics at Search Engine Strategies in New York a couple of weeks ago, one of the questions that came up was about...
Friday, March 17th, 2006

Views from Search Engine Strategies, New York
Last week I attended Search Engine Strategies in New York. I was taking part in the ClickZ track on Multichannel Metrics with fellow columnist Jason B...
Friday, March 3rd, 2006

Implementation guidelines
Last time I shared some thoughts about the process of selecting analytical systems, particularly web analytics systems. These included: Being clear a...
Thursday, February 16th, 2006

Selecting analysis systems
There was a bit of research publicized recently about organizations’ satisfaction with web analytics systems. It reported that 62% of the respon...
Friday, February 3rd, 2006

Data visualisation: Insight or eye candy?
I was talking to a web analytics systems vendor in the UK the other day. He was bemoaning the fact that they had lost a pitch for a potential client t...
Friday, January 20th, 2006

To cookie or not to cookie?
I’ve noticed over the past few days that there has been a lot of debate in the US press and on other places over the issues of cookies again. Th...
Friday, January 6th, 2006

Looking back over 2005
Since it’s that time of year, I thought I would take a take a personal look back over the past 12 months and maybe try to look forward a bit at ...
Friday, December 23rd, 2005

Add value by adding insight
In my last article I talked about some key themes that had been running on Eric Peterson’s web analytics forum recently; setting KPI’s and...
Wednesday, November 23rd, 2005

The importance of the “K” in KPI
There have been a couple of interesting threads running on Eric Peterson’s web analytics forum over the past few days. One was on setting Key Pe...
Friday, November 11th, 2005

A word about averages
A lot has been written recently in this publication and others about the development of Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). Increasingly businesses are...
Friday, October 28th, 2005

Understanding key customer journeys
Over the past few weeks I have been taking a look at the variety of data sources available for evaluating e-business performance in addition to the da...
Friday, October 14th, 2005

Recipes for successful online surveys
In my previous article we looked at the need to combine detailed data from site analysis systems with additional consumer insight gleaned from surveys...
Thursday, September 15th, 2005

Why online businesses need market research
During the heady days of the dot-com boom in the late 1990s and early 2000s there was a common perception that this “new media” meant an e...
Thursday, September 1st, 2005

The need for market intelligence
In my previous article, I outlined the need for measuring and optimising web site performance to be a more holistic and consumer focus discipline than...
Friday, August 19th, 2005

What do we mean by web analytics?
There’s one thing that worries me a bit about web analytics and that’s its name. Web analytics… Sound’s a bit scary doesn̵...
Friday, August 5th, 2005

A segmentation primer
One of the things that you hear being talked about a lot more about these days in the wacky world of web analytics is “segmentation”. But ...
Wednesday, July 27th, 2005

A view from this side of the water
Having agreed to write for ClickZ, I then immediately got writer’s block and started thinking  “what am I going to talk about?” I e...
Thursday, July 21st, 2005