Analytics spawned yawning among analysts?...is that possible?

By Judith Pascual | Dec 22, 2008 2:50:00 PM

I never thought I'd see the day that I would yawn during an analytics discussion.  But it happened.  I always thought it was my job to motivate people, show them the value and they will move forward.  I get little butterflies as I pull and integrate numbers and find a story to share.  I often feel like the journalist, breaking news.  But this time, I felt like I had been transported to 2004 and I though that was a good year for me, I was not pleased.

The lack of analytics mobility is starting to get boring. Apparently, I am not alone.   After so many years, let's move on folks!  I keep hearing things like, 'analytics is our focus, we need to act'...okay so why do you shy away from tracking based on your goals, not just the 'data' you are able to get at this time?  Why when you are given insights you don't act on them.  Segmenting is a bad word and you still find geography 'views' valuable.  This is just all very lame.

Now, during this economic turmoil, more than ever we need to stop making excuses for why analytics funding is not a priority and why you cannot act on customer requests.  Don't get me wrong, we have worked with so many clients that have grown and are now data driven businesses. But far too many are stagnant.  Ensure that you are not on that list. 

For 2009, you have already asked yourself, what am I spending money on?  Now, ask yourself what are you spending time on?  What are key stakeholders focusing on?  How is that growing or even maintaining your business?  Look at your analytics maturity level and if you see yourself having the same discussion you had in 2004. Stop.  Start the roadmap on moving forward and monetizing your business so you can optimize. 

Of course I know you are still thinking about costs so...put together a cost benefit worksheet (yes, it takes time and you do need to understand what you are doing) and among the obvious ensure to include:

1. Speed - what customer driven projects can we quickly turnaround that is going to influence return?

2. Better Results - improvements in results because actions were taken - savings included -

3. Shorten the meetings and discussions on items you have action plans for or documented a roadmap...and use them already...you'll be surprised how much time and money you'll save.

You can adjust things as you go...but take the step.

Remember that yawning is contagious.  Don't put yourself in a position where your analyst' yawn, de-motivate your stakeholders and it all transcends to consumer behavior.

The ZAAZ Go Library

By Graeme Asher | Jun 9, 2008 8:14:05 AM

It's my pleasure to announce the launch of the ZAAZ Go Library, developed by the Flash team at ZAAZ of Jud Holliday, Cole Peterson, Graeme Asher and Eric Mathiasen.  This represents ZAAZ's first foray into open-source software and the start of many releases to come from the talented developers at ZAAZ.

So what's this library all about?

The ZAAZ Go Library is a suite of classes built upon the the GoASAP platform that addresses the needs of animation, sequencing and other related tasks within ActionScript 3.0. Our goal is to create an open-source, object-oriented, strongly-typed library that is light weight, standardized, intuitive and easily expandable.  If you liked FUSE you should love this library.

The library allows you to quickly create complex sequences of animations that are easy to read and work with. Your projects use only the classes you need, keeping the file size down. Within the library you will find classes (with detailed examples) to meet your most common needs as well as others to handle more abstract situations. As we identify needs and dream up new possibilities we will release them to the library.

The GoASAP project is a versatile, generic base library for building animation tools in ActionScript 3.0. built by Moses Gunesch.  We have been using GoASAP internally since it's inception, working closely with Moses to develop these tools that are critical in our day to day development of interactive sites.  We have been very pleased with the GoASAP platform and how quickly we can bring concepts to concrete implementations, this library is proof of that concept.

If you are at FlashBelt in Minneapolis today you can see Moses and Jud speak about GoASAP and the ZAAZ Go Library in person at 10am.

Today's release is the culmination of several weeks of work and the start of many good things to come from the Flash team.  In the following days and weeks we will be expanding the library and posting extensive tutorials on blogs.zaaz.com to help you easily get into the flow of working with GoASAP and the ZAAZ Go Library. In the meantime the library is available via SVN and can be downloaded as a .zip on the GoASAP Playground, which is a Google hosted project. To find out more about the project click here.

Site Redesign: The Best Time for SEO Strategy, Part 1

By Rich Devine | Apr 10, 2008 3:50:10 PM

Because Search Engine Optimization is generally considered a demand generation or marketing activity, firms and marketing professionals usually consider the timing of a formal SEO strategy the same way they would for other demand-gen acitivites like email, paid search, display advertising, etc.

For example, if your site is undergoing an extensive design or redesign effort, it just doesn't make any sense to roll out a grandiose paid search strategy until after your site has been launched. You need to allow for some seasoning to the site so you can evaluate relevant, post-launch analytics. You'll want to identify what landing pages are now appropriate for paid search campaigns. Perhaps there are new content and keyword considerations that need to be incorporated.

However, the timing for SEO is entirely different. There is no better time to plan and execute an SEO strategy than during and in concert with a redesign effort. In fact, not being consious of SEO considerations during a redesign can cause significant damage to what ever SEO position you had achieved from your former site.

There is also a huge cost efficiency. Much of the recommendations that come from a formal SEO project are design and architectural in nature anyway; but the cost associated with executing those recommendations is often to great, or the ability to drive such change and recommendations is limited. During a redesign, those activities are happening anyway -- so it is crucial that SEO strategy inform redesign efforts.

USER EXPERIENCE & SEO

At ZAAZ our User Experience (U/X) Team pratices and advocates User-Centered Design. This approach involves understanding your goals as a business and the purpose of your digital and site strategy. This informs a conscious identification of who your audiences and users really are. Then, you seek to understand those users through user research, usability studies, analytics data, industry benchmarking data, and survey data. Based on a solid understanding of who your users are, you can design a user-centered site that achieves business and site goals. You're able to appropriately organize content, apply taxonomy, create navigation, build wireframes, and inform any kind of interactive or application based experiences that are appropriate for your users.

But, all too often, the practice of User-Centered Design forgets one singularly important type of user: those silent robots from Google, MSN, and Yahoo.

Understand that in essence, all these robots or crawlers try to do is pass some kind of judgement as to how usable or user-centered your site really is. This affects your position in search engine rankings. The challenge is that search engine bots are obviously not nearly as smart as humans. What may be a highly effective user experience for humans may be deemed in-effective by bots or even ignored altogether.

The other consideration is keyword relevancy. Information architecture, or how content is organzied on a site is usally performed based on what is most appropriate and effective for the user, as it should be. But it is critical that attention also be given to which keywords are used and how they are positioned within that information architecture. Using and placing the right keywords in the right position during the initial stages of information architecture and during latters stages when actual content is positioned -- provides significant SEO results.

Keyword-content efforts are most successful when U/X and SEO teams collaborate at the right time. Before the teams convene, make sure the following tasks are complete:

1. Your U/X team must perform the initial sorting and content organization activities that inform general information architecture, navigation, sitemapping, etc.

2. Your SEO team must conduct throrough keyword research, prioritization, and categorization. They need to discover all potentially relevant terms, categorize those terms into appropriate groupings, and then prioritize those terms based on potential traffic volume, rank difficulty, and value.

SEO and U/X teams then convene to share learnings and inform how high-value keyword targets can be inserted. This affects navigation, naming conventions, file structure, etc. Both teams will be surprised at what they thought was logical from their perspective versus what will drive performance both from a user perspective and a search engine perspective.

Todd Friesen of Range Online Media shares a classic example of this in describing some of Nike's site efforts. As part of their brand proposition and messaging strategy, Nike prefers to use the term "footwear" to describe their product and experience. They feel it is more representative of what Nike offers than the limited term "shoe". But both common sense and some basic keyword research will indicate that terms involving "shoe" drive far more search volume than "footwear".

Again, a balance has to be struck between U/X and SEO -- SEO doesn't always have to win, but at the very least, the decision should be informed based on the impact and opportunity cost related to SEO.

NEXT TIME, PART TWO...

Check back next time when we continue to address SEO and Site Redesigns. We'll cover considerations for site development and production, including a discussion of negotiating dynamic techniques with SEO such as Flash, JavaScript, Silverlight, etc.

We'll also discuss how to preserve the footprint that you've already achieved from your current or former site as you launch your new one.