Giving Thanks

Eric Peterson recently put a very kind post on his blog (www.webanalyticsdemystified.com/weblog/) and it drove quite a few new visitors here. So I couldn’t go on without honoring the holiday by thanking him (and Matt Jacobs too for his very nice comment on that post). It made for a very pleasant Thanksgiving which I squandered – or so it feels now – on Apple Pie, Chocolate Cheesecake, Cookies and Ice Cream.

Eric probably has a self-interested stake in this – he’s an evangelist (and a good one) for a tool so sexy it’s the analyst’s equivalent of dating a porn star! But his words are much appreciated, and I hope you won’t find his recommendation misleading!

If you are new, I thought it might helpful to give a quick recap of what this blog is about and point you to some of the more interesting posts from the past plus some new stuff I’ve been meaning to talk about but which have been queued up behind this series on tools.

You may be wondering why a Blog call SEMAngel that is the corporate posting site for a company called SEMphonic is so heavily concerned with web analytics. Well, the funny thing is that despite the name we are – and have always been – a web analytics firm. However, we’re a practice that is heavily focused on customer acquisition – with about 90% of our clients engaged in either e-Commerce or lead generation. As such, we have a practice specialty in analytics for Search Engine Marketing (we are neither a PPC Buyer nor an SEO firm) – and we believe that it’s pretty much impossible to be a good web analytics company for acquisition sites these days unless you have a deep understanding of Search Engine Marketing. In addition, we actually market a software tool called CampaignTracker that is designed to provide PPC and Competitive Reporting in the SEM space – and the blog was intended partially to support that product. But since a blog is intensely personal, it tends to revolve around whatever is holding my interest at the moment – and recently that’s been "pure" web analytics. There is, however, lot’s of SEM Content in the archives and I have quite a bit more in the back-of-my-mind that will be coming shortly.

You’ve probably already noticed that my blogs tend to be ungodly long and are usually part of an extended series. I know that violates all the "rules" of blogging, but it’s what I’m comfortable with and so that’s probably how it’s going to stay. Regular readers also know that I tend to post on Sunday (my writing day) and occasionally on other days as well.

So here are some things and places I thought it might be good to mention – first, our website is www.semphonic.com and it has quite a bit of useful stuff – especially in the resources section. I write a lot of articles and they usually find their way to the web site eventually. There are also several pretty good white papers there (including the one Eric mentioned).

Before this series on tools, I wrote a very extensive series of Posts on Functionalism. This post (http://semphonic.blogs.com/semangel/2006/08/functionalism_a.html) is the kickoff. The series spans ten or eleven substantial posts and I think has some pretty good stuff.

Here are some highlights:

Basics: http://semphonic.blogs.com/semangel/2006/08/functionalism_a_1.html

Engagers and KPIs: http://semphonic.blogs.com/semangel/2006/09/kpi_stew.html

Routing Pages: http://semphonic.blogs.com/semangel/2006/09/store_planning_.html

Internal Search: http://semphonic.blogs.com/semangel/2006/09/measuring_inter.html

Ad-Based Measurement: http://semphonic.blogs.com/semangel/2006/10/adbased_sites_a.html

Thank You Pages: http://semphonic.blogs.com/semangel/2006/10/say_au_revoir_n.html

Before that, I did a long series on SEM Measurement. I think some of the most interesting posts were these:

Cherry Picking and SEM Measurement: http://semphonic.blogs.com/semangel/2006/07/cherrypicking_t.html

Conversion Proxies: http://semphonic.blogs.com/semangel/2006/06/measuring_searc.html

Cost of SEO: http://semphonic.blogs.com/semangel/2006/06/cost_of_seo_opt.html

SEO Holes: http://semphonic.blogs.com/semangel/2006/06/identification_.html

Which brings me to a related topic: last week I did a webinar with Paul Bruemmer of Red Door Interactive on establishing a "Measurement and Process Discipline for SEO." It was nerve wracking, but fun. You can get the webinar from the WebSideStory site (<http://www.websidestory.com/resources/webinars/view-event.html?docid=seowebinar) – or, if you’d just like a copy of the presentation, drop me a line. This whole issue of SEO and measurement is one I find pretty interesting and I’m going to be writing about it soon.

That’s about it for the recap. I’m still going to write a "real" post – covering my last area of tool evaluations for visitor segmentation - "locking down" segments and exporting them for CRM. Expect that on Sunday as usual!

Happy Thanksgiving!