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Nov 29 2010

Expedia Gets $12MM Overnight

Expedia analysts realised the site needed to be changed after investigating why many customers who clicked the 'Buy Now' button on the company's site did not complete the transaction.

"This is someone who was on our site, found the right location and hotel, put in all their billing and travel information and clicked the 'Buy Now' button," Megibow said.

"As far as leading indicators of purchase intent go, this is as good as it gets and yet we weren't taking the money."

Frankly speaking, this is a sad story. Company that has millions in revenue never analysed its key funnels - how stupid is that? $12MM per year.

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Nov 23 2010

Xbox Serial Numbers

Between October 2003 and January 2005, the Xbox Linux Project asked all visitors to their website to enter their Xbox serial numbers, date and country of manufacture, ROM version, hard disk and DVD drive brand and other properties, and gathered more than 14,000 entries. The original idea was to find a rule to deduce the hard disk and DVD drive types in an Xbox by only looking at the serial number, which was visible through the unopened packaging.

This guy has spent a lot of time putting numbers together. And, frankly speaking, while I don't see much value in the findings (as one of the commenters pointed out: just go a talk to the Microsoft!), it's always exciting how numbers that are put in order can tell a story.

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Jun 16 2010

Mixpanel v. KISSmetrics v. Google Analytics

I didn’t see a clear winner after poking around with the three tools so I decided to try all of them together. I’m really glad I did because this is the comparison table (based on my experiences from above):

Mixpanel KISSmetrics Google Analytics
Tracking Events Great Poor Poor
Measuring Funnels Poor Great Average
Analyzing Traffic Poor Poor Great
Real-time Yes No No
Setup Difficult Moderate Easy

They’re all great at different things! And since what you need to learn will change over time, you really need more than one tool in the long term.

Arthur Klepchukov has posted a nice comparison between Mixpanel, KISSmetrics and GA. While I believe that GA can be quite good in everything, with a little bit of Mixpanel sauce, it's still a decent pros/cons table to consider.

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Jun 3 2010

Google Analytics can be more than just counter

Google Analytics comes with two very useful tools that aren’t enabled by default: Site Search and Event Tracking. When used, these tools can help give more meaningful statistics about users on your site.

Mike Takahashi briefly describes Site Search and Event Tracking features available in Google Analytics. It's also a good thing to take a look at Ian Harris' intro in extending Google Analytics with jQuery (http://www.carronmedia.com/extend-google-analytics-with-jquery/).>

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May 6 2010

Google Apps To Become More Connected

Google says 9 of the top 20 requests from Apps customers are for their accounts to work with more services from Google. Currently, Apps works with Gmail, Docs, Chat, Groups, Video and Calendar. Later this year, Google will roll out functionality with Apps for Picasa, Google Reader, AdWords, News, Finance, and other products. Users won’t need to switch between their personal and work account to interact with these products from within the Apps interface.

What a terrible choice to expand. The only thing I would agree is *Reader*. It was ridiculous not to have it in place before. However, damn, who cares about AdWords, News, Finance and all other crap? What about Analytics instead?

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Dec 19 2009

Improving bounce rate with Google Website Optimizer

As many of you already know, Google Website Optimizer (GWO) is a nice add-on to Google Analytics (GA) to run A/B/.. and multivariate tests for your pages. And while A/B test is pretty simple thing to do, multivariate tests are more fun.

However, working with some sites, you can't always specify the conversion page very well, the goal of your tests. If it's not an ecommerce one, or lacks a typical login / sing-up pair, you're probably hitting an "information resource". But such sites still need some work to be done, to get a better feedback and user retention. I would say, testing them for bounce rate and improving it later would be the nice thing to do.

Unfortunately, it's not very straightforward with GWO. You're still supposed to specify a page that will serve as conversion trigger.

One solution is that the bounce rate can be calculated by looking backwards, by looking at the conversions to any page. It's easy to do if you've got only one or two outbound links on your page. However, in the real life, it's unlikely to happen. Pages have dozens of outbound links. Going for all of them and putting a conversion script is probably doable, but such a headache.

But likely this can be done with a very simple Javascript. Let try to test the sample landing page. First of all, let's put the control script at the top.

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Define the testing blocks.

Image and video hosting by TinyPic

And put the tracking code right before the body.

Image and video hosting by TinyPic

The landing page is set up. Now, we can start with the conversion page. You can use the same one as conversion page in your GWO experiment. However, you don't need to add any tracking code to it (yet).

What we should do know, is to add a simple Javascript that will re-write all outbound links and will add an onclick action to them. In this action, Javascript will do the call to GWO and register a conversion. This simple JS should be put right before the closing body.

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[code lang="html]



[/code]

That easy. You might get an error while validating the conversion script, but you can easily copy & paste the content of script into file, and do offline validation for it.

Basically, that's it. You can finish setting up this experiment and run it. Here's how you will see results.

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Have fun!

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Nov 14 2009

Funnel Analysis from Mixpanel

Figuring out your funnels is one of the most important things you can do to increase your quantitative understanding of your website. It's critical to get the starting measurements - the dropoff and conversion rates - before you change anything.  That's the only way you can know the effect of the changes you make. By constantly tweaking and measuring, you should be able to really improve your number of conversions.

Mixpanel has a set of functions that can be really useful for a company in the Web. While I still had no chance to compare their functionality to what Google Analytics provides, other than being real-time, I'm planning to spend some more time playing with it.

Mixpanel has a free 10K "data points" account (http://mixpanel.com/pricing) which is sorta confusing for a person like me. I'm more like thinking in visits, page views or things like that. But thanks to Tim Trefren from Mixpanel, who explained this to me:

"A data point is counted every time you track a visitor action. So, in terms of pageviews/month - if you track one event per page, you will use exactly the same number of data points as pageviews."

And, well, Mixpanel wouldn't be something you'll use to put on every page (like you can do with Google Analytics). You'd want to put it only on subset of them, linking to specific actions. Or you will probably use Mixpanel's API to assign "data points" to some triggers in your Web application' actions. This is, by the way, could be also a pretty useful feature.

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About Olexandr Prokhorenko

My name is Olexandr Prokhorenko. I am passionate about building products that users *love*.

My LinkedIn profile is www.linkedin.com/in/white.


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