Some colleagues were taking the measure of a new flash site built for one of our customers. The analytics numbers seemed to show people were spending more time on it–and since it’s one of their goals to have people spend more time on the site, this seemed a good thing.

Until they noticed that the new site was also taking quite a bit longer to load. The way measurement was set up, there was no way to tell whether the longer visits were a result of longer wait-time or not.

We’ve built a tool called Dynamic Response that specializes in measuring time-to-serve; we’re probably going to customize it so it can deliver a measure that equals “time spent on visit minus time spent waiting for page to load”.

Since visit length is such an important KPI for so many companies, I thought it would be of interest that: a) visit length is not always what it seems and b) there is a way to tease out the truth with the right kind of measurement tools and approaches.

Have you heard?

Now you can make better decisions. With Bing, the new “decision engine” from Microsoft!

Ads for the new Google-competitor from Redmond actually suggest you can change your life with this wonderful Bing thing–avoid getting a Mohawk, for instance (I think that’s what they were driving at)? Or learning to play guitar at the age of six or seven? Bing will help you decide.

How exactly does this astonishing new decision engine work? Maybe I am missing something, but I could swear the decision engine, having responded to my quest for an answer about “clean energy”, gave me–and let’s not get too excited waiting for the revelation here–a list of links with the words “clean energy” in them! And the top spot in the “sponsored” section was for the clean energy giant we all know as ExxonMobil.

I don’t have a problem with ExxonMobil–somebody’s got to sell me all that gasoline I use–but if I can have just a brief word with the guys over at Bing, I would like to tell them that they need to fire their ad agency.

I don’t have a problem with Microsoft, either. They’ve managed to produce a suite of tools that somehow satisfies about a trillion people last time I checked and there’s not a lot of smoke belching out of the smokestacks at Microsoft HQ either. So it isn’t as if they don’t create a pretty popular and a pretty green product out in the land of Gates.

But the ads for Bing are nothing less than insulting. Okay, MSFT wants to have a Google-killer. Good luck with that. At one point they thought MSN was going to kill the Internet (you can choose not to believe that, but it’s a real-live data-point from the mid-nineties). Aside from a wonderful spin-off called MSNBC, I can’t see where they created anything better than Hotmail with that gargantuan effort.

But back to my annoyance with Bing, and how the ads are insulting. What’s with “decision engine”? That’s not what it is. It would have to be far more sophisticated to approach that realm–something like an expert system (still a chimerical goal for visionary developers) that would somehow divine your intent and deliver wisdom.

It’s like calling a car an airplane. Bing is a search engine–it’s just like Google! The notion that we should be encouraged to “Bing and then decide” is worse than cute and silly. In my opinion, calling Bing a “decision engine” borders on misrepresentation and falsehood.

But then, Microsoft has always seemed to have a tin ear for marketing. That’s a whole ‘nother blog post.

For now, just remember that Bing was a Crooner popular back during World War Two. He was not a decision engine.

Journalists have been under virtual house-arrest as the mullahs in Persia try to squelch what started out as a stolen-vote protest but is now evidently a youth revolution. Youth revolutions, as we know, are tough to squelch without either pots of money to bundle kids off to college and the suburbs, or a deep roster of brutal bench-players ready to come on the field with brickbats and piano-wire.

As the mullahs whirl and wobble in the wind of protest, and as journalists speak sotto voce into secure phones, what’s kept CNN and the rest of the West informed are the so-called “social networking” technologies now come of age.

Witness Twitter–of which much fun has been made when, say, an Ashley Tisdale-level celebri-star lets her followers know her hat-size. Now it is the single best source of immediate news coverage on the scene of what is certainly the most important political movement in Iran since they took the hostages. Like a thousand tiny salamanders slipping through grasping clerical fingers, these brief missives from the angry streets are letting the world know of thousands on the march, men and women, of beatings, of tear-gas, of open revolt against the foundational, turban-bedecked figures of the regime itself.

Witness Facebook–where the opposition leader Moussavi has pronounced his readiness to commit himself to martyrdom. Proving itself more than just a place for posting pix of beer-pong escapades, Facebook has now given voice to perhaps the most profound promise every posted to it.

During the new Iranian revolution Facebook and Twitter, streaming out images and commentary banned by the regime, have combined to make quite obvious the power that the atomization of mass media has long promised.

Facebook and Twitter prove that media–and information–really do want to be free. And they prove that when in the hands of those not just longing for freedom but with little left to lose, they become powerful weapons beyond the control of even the most sullen official opprobrium.

We have yet to see what happens when the youthful string of Iranian frustration plays out to its fullest length. But however it does so, we know even now that “social media”, heretofore considered a lightweight in the world of communications, will have helped define it.

I’ve been talking about tracking video using analytics tools and attempting to debunk some popularly held myths about the subject (see my prior two posts).

Here is Myth #3: You can’t track video ROI any better than you can a TV commercial, so why bother?

Fact: By using a simple technique, it becomes much more measurable than a TV commercial.

TV viewers wouldn’t stand for it—but online viewers probably expect it. You simply need to tell your on-line audience what url to go to for “more”–whatever more is in your case.

The reason I bring this up is because, while it’s true you can place live links into video (or at least underneath video) where you control it, you can’t see this carried over into viral video, since all the coding gets stripped away when someone downloads and re-posts virally. In order to gain some additional ROI measurement out of even viral video, make sure you put a campaign URL into the video itself—maybe it’s an offer?—and then set up your analytics tools to measure traffic to that unique landing page. Then, track it just like any on-line campaign. It may require some customization, but if you’re advanced enough for viral video measurement, you’re likely to have some idea how to customize your analytics tools.

Conclusion:
Online video is a new frontier and enormously popular. There’s clearly more of a “fun” factor in video than there is in even the most inventive web site. For some reason, even in an age of hyper-interactivity, users still find it almost irresistible to sit and watch something entertaining and informative. We’re moving towards an online paradigm that blends interactive and passive interaction with content (instant Netflix, anyone?). Therefore it becomes extremely important for marketers to understand how they can leverage video content for online marketing purposes.

In a word: measure. And yes, it can be done–even when you don’t control where the video is playing.

On my last post I talked about  whether video can be meaningfully measured using analytics tools. And I indicated that by placing the right kind of tags inside your video or flash modules, of course you can track video–where started, where stopped, how much viewed and things like that. The presumption was that these videos are on your site, and that you control them.

But what about when your video goes viral? Can you still track it? See the next myth (below) for my answer:

Myth #2: You can’t track video on sites you don’t control.

Fact: Using certain tools, you can track viral video usage robustly and you don’t have to control the content area to do so.

This seems to run counter to every assumption we have about web analytics. Companies have a tough enough time getting their developers and partners to tag pages they pay them to host—never mind trying to measure content on places like YouTube, Facebook and dozens of others!

But there’s at least one tool from a company called Divinity Metrics (it’s called “Scope”) that allows you to do just that. Once you set up this tool, you’re able to define videos you want to track as “campaigns,” and then set up some keyword criteria. Scope uses a kind of “scraping” technology to pull data off the YouTube’s of the world—there are dozens of viral video sites it can search—and it presents the data to you in an understandable analytics format. You’ll know how many times the video was viewed, which logged-in users viewed it, whether they forwarded it, whether they qualify as “influencers” and more. It’s pretty cool. And like the last post, I have to let you know that we know the folks at Divinity Metrics pretty well and that their products are available through Technology Leaders.

I am not currently aware of any other tool that manages to do quite what Divinity does–but am willing to hear about them!

My next (and last, for now) post about tracking video will be about tracking ROI on video content. Look for it soon.

I know a couple of kids who are pretty good with a digital video camera. They make videos of themselves romping around, they do a light edit using iMovie, and then they post the video on social networks like Facebook. They get lots of page views.

Make no mistake: online video is like candy and we’re all like four-year-olds at the candy counter. We can’t seem to decide which 10 candies we want most. According to The New York Times, the latest viral video from China involves a song about an oddly-named horse that is not only a sound-alike for an epithet, but is also a thinly veiled protest against censorship. It’s wildly popular.

Companies are taking advantage of the craze. Or are they? One could also say the craze is taking advantage of some companies.

The companies who’ll win in the digital video space are the ones who can effectively measure. The rest will just be having some rather advanced and maybe even expensive fun, kind of like the kids using iMovie.

This brings me to the first myth about measuring online video:

Myth #1: Viewership of online video can’t be meaningfully measured.

Fact: Yes it can. First, you need to decide whether you’re going to measure just the video on your own site, or whether you’re going to include how that video is used in places you can’t control (see Myth #2 on my next post).

For now, let’s focus on video measurement in content areas under your control. Sure, it’s fairly simple to equate a “page view” of a web page containing a video to a “video view,” but that would be making too many assumptions for a meaningful measure. More important would be to properly place java script tags “inside” the video so you can measure whether users played the video, where they paused, where they stopped, whether they replayed it, and more.

Some tools Like Divinity Metrics’ “Scope 3” product even allow you to track whether they forwarded it to friends, including demographics of the people who forwarded it. So—yes, you can measure online video meaningfully. Explore.

Disclaimer: Technology Leaders is a reseller of Divinity Metrics tools.

During the next few days, look for my second and third ” Measuring On-line Video myth v. fact” postings.

A week has gone by and I am finally blogging about the WebTrends Engage event. No doubt others have had their say by this time, but I wanted to give it a few days to settle before I decided what it looked like in perspective. I often find the salient points continue to stand out several days after an event, while the flash and dash fade and become the unimportant things they really are.

First: Did WebTrends really need to re-brand? Absolutely not (though I like the cool new little black and blue cards). But it doesn’t hurt, either.

That said, I think there’s an important re-positioning going on at WebTrends, and it is that they don’t seem to want to chase around after Omniture anymore (and for good reason, I believe). They’re focused now on “numbers”, which means measurement, which means they are now playing to their strength as a web analytics platform, rather than a fully-blown website optimization platform. And while they made a key announcement about measuring social media with Radian6, and continue to be a reseller of our Dynamic Alert tool, these are both squarely in the camp of measurement rather than the more amorphous and perhaps too far-reaching “optimization” space. Also it looks like Teradata is getting serious about helping WebTrends customers take their data farther, faster, when they get to the point where their data has a need for speed.

Second: If anyone was wondering whether WebTrends was somehow “going away”, or that “you don’t hear about them that much”, there was no evidence of that at the Red Rock in Vegas, which was packed with WebTrends aficionados, consultants (like us), end-users and industry-watchers like John Lovett from Forrester who stopped by our booth for a lengthy chat.

We were also excited to see that Criz Posadas, an ex-employee of TL, is now working at McGraw-Hill in a management capacity. Good work, Criz, and we still miss you.

Third: Given the state of the economy, you’d have expected a pall of gloom hanging over the place, and maybe folks were just hiding the stress by taking advantage of the excellent spa at the Red Rock, but there was more a sense of “business is a little worse but we’ll get through it” than “oh my god what are we going to do”.

Because the fact is, no one who expects to be in business in 2010 can ignore analytics in 2009. And it looked like lots of people are continuing to use WebTrends to solve analytics problems in 2009.

We’ve been partners with WebTrends since the days of NetIQ and have probably done more with their tools than any other consulting company. We’ve seen some changes at the company over the past couple of years—some good, some not so good. Today, with some old friends back after having left and gone elsewhere, they seem fresh, focused and in execution-mode.

From a sponsor’s point of view, it was an exciting place to be and well worth the trip. Oh, and one more thing: thanks to whomever decided to have the show at the Red Rock rather than on “the Strip”–it was a classy choice.

Just a quick note: don’t miss this informative webcast run by the WAA and presented by David Millrod of Technology Leaders:

Thursday, April 2, 2009
12:00 PM ET / 9:00 AM PT

Register:

http://register.webcastgroup.com/event/?wid=0800402094585

Details:

You’ve got lots of analytics data–but not enough useful information. In a sophisticated analytics environment, why does this keep happening? In today’s economy, there’s no time (or money) to waste. You’ve got to find actionable data–the gold in your analytics–now. We’ll show how you can cut significantly the time you spend looking for important ROI nuggets; how you can locate winning and losing campaigns, pages, links and strategies in real time. If you’ve got lots of analytics data to mine, and feel like there’s gold undiscovered, this webcast is for you.

David Millrod is running for a seat on the board of the Web Analytics Association. He is my co-managing partner at Technology Leaders. I am a founding member and former board-member of the WAA.

I’ve worked with David since 2002. Together we’ve built what I like to think is the world’s most experienced web analytics consulting company–and lately, because of David’s inventiveness–we’ve come out with some pretty cool products to enhance the analytics experience (Dynamic Alert, Dynamic Response and Auto-Tagger).

The first thing I would say about David is that he is tirelessly dedicated to the success of his customers. He views analytics not through the lens of a vendor or consultant but through the lens of the end user: the person or organization who is trying to build a better business by leveraging the web.

Because of his  technical depth and because of his ability to think through complex issues, he has found unique solutions for major organizations. And all of his solutions have one thing in common: they actually work.

I know what it’s like to have a solution architect lay out a grand plan that seems like it will work–only to find, once half the money is spent, there was a fatal misconception at the foundation and that the solution will, in fact, fail. This is not what happens with David’s solutions. Many of them are still in use years after the initial implementation.

Finally, let me say that David is easy to work with. He puts his ego aside when it’s time to create solutions. He is able to listen as well as share ideas.

The WAA can expect this same level of intelligence, planning, dedication and insight from David should he be elected. It will have a tough time finding anyone who has been performing enterprise-level analytics for so long, and at so many companies, and having taken to heart the customer’s problems in such a way that they actually get solved.

If elected, I expect David will apply this valuable expertise to any challenges faced by the WAA and I expect he will go a long way towards helping to solve them.

Vote for David Millrod.

Recently a family member accepted a subscription to the New Yorker. The first issue that came seemed hardly a magazine in thickness–more like a brochure. Missing were the pages and pages of ads that used to fatten the most successful (and some of the not-so-successful) print magazines (remember Wired?–it was like a phone book in the 90’s).

When you buy the NY Times these days, it feels miniaturized and sadly less relevant than the heavy, inky, no-color Newspaper of Record from a decade ago. The Times has of course become smaller in width but lately it seems they have also been downsized by their print-advertisers. The physical newspaper is not just small these days, but thin. Can we say scrawny?

It isn’t just the economy–it’s also about measurability.

The news–if it is news–about non-broadcast advertising is that it’s moving heavily, rapidly on-line. Partly this is because it’s awfully cheap to run ads on line and partly because it is very possible to track the success–not the focus-group success, but the actual success–of an ad. An advertiser can know if its on-line ad is driving desired actions–use the coupon, buy the shoes, book the ticket, download the pdf–in a way that it can never hope to do with its universe of print.

The other part is, of course, about the economy.

As companies look for efficiencies and bang-for-their-media-buck, they don’t think “two-page spread” anymore. They think–perhaps–”interactive module” or “social media launch/viral video”. If they weren’t looking for ways to find any port in an economic Nor’easter, these advertisers would probably put money behind both print and on-line. But mostly, they’re not putting money into print like they used to.

The end of the print versions of most newspapers and many magazines may be a little bit more than a dot on the publishing horizon. The future will have thousands of interesting “print” venues–blogs, twitterings, facebook pages, new on-line information cocktails as yet undreamed–and it will include great news sites from the great Eastern Seaboard newspapers that have not decimated their reporting staffs–but if you think about Newseek (for instance) turning itself into something other than a newsweekly, you can’t help but figure that the next few years will include the end of inky publishing as we have come to know it.

And as for how companies communicate with their customers? That’s going to be more heavily on-line–much more heavily than anyone thought even a year or so ago.

Because if it’s in a browser, you can measure it–and these days, you really have to measure it.