18-Feb-07 4:00 PM  CST  

New Media Metrics: Interview with Judah Phillips 

Interview Summary:

"New Media Metrics" --Campaigns that use new media. Tricks for tracking new media. Challenges in measuring new media. Interview with Judah Phillips,Director Web Analytics, Reed Business Interactive (RBI) www.reedbusiness.com Interview date—February 2, 2007 by Wendi Malley with the WAA Research Committee. Time--19:16

MP3 File

Time (min:sec)	Podcast Contents
0:00	Introduction
1:48	Q: Describe the size and scale of your sites.  About 100 different properties.
2:42	Q: What interactive media are you using on your sites? Name it and it's there in some form. We don't roll it out until we are sure of its return. Ajax, soap envelopes, blogging infrastructures, xml, rich media architectures, user generated content, user tagging.
3:53	Q: Can you give us an example of a campaign using new media? Buying keywords using dayparting, geotargeting, local targeted search to drive subscriptions to magazines. Drive them to centralized landing pages well-instrumented with web 2.0 features--widgets, rich media that provides strong user experience and calls to action that lead to conversion. Because it is web 2.0, we use hybrid data collection--not just logs but page tages too. Our [analytics software] has excellent business visualization and reporting features that allows the data to be easily consumed. The return is huge on some of these campaigns because we have well qualified audiences that our advertisers want to reach.
6:23	Do you have any specific KPIs that you monitor on a regular basis for these campaigns? Eric Peterson talks about low, medium, high frequency or duration visits. When you have events on a page, you can value score them and start to calculate low, medium, high engaged visitors. Join the Web 2.0 working group.
7:35	Q: Were there any measurements that you were unable to track due to challenges in the tool? Not really. We've picked the right tool. Our company adequately funds these initiatives. What's the benefit and business impact of tracking it? There's nothing I have to deal with that's causing me problems tracking web 2.0.
9:12	Q: Any additional tips or tricks for tracking new media? Standard metadata naming conventions, IDs or codes applied to all pages. Need to understand events, actions, how to apply scripting languages like javascript or php. Do you need x vendor or x scripting language to do flex tracking or can you just use javascript? Insure you have meaningful layers of metadata.
10:34	Q: How do you integrate new media metrics into dashboards or company reporting? We have the ability to build ad-hoc reports that are not cube based and allow for n-dimensional analysis. Able to name attributes and fields and reports different things, filter and add metrics and dimensionalize the data so can build unique report that are specific to portions of the page in addition to web analytics 101 stuff.
11:30	Q: Explain how the metrics have enabled you to take action. Huge question involving more than technology--organizational behavior, egalitarian management, shared vision, open honest communications. Great question. You have to have execs that are savvy and intelligent to understand the internet and allow you to do this stuff when justified to drive strategy to drive finance beyond simple marketing to drive editorial to drive circulation.
13:21	Q: How much time is spent on reporting? My team is structured well, with another director identifying business requirements, which becomes a project management process with actions and tasks delegated. Things happen--reporting gets impacted with thought. Sometimes necessary to say this report will take some time before it is available or some of the sutff they are asking is not as meaningful as needs be. By the time you start doing the reports, it's pretty easy if you've done the analysis. If you don't do the analysis and start doing design, you are constantly building reports and people aren't happy. Worth the time to do analysis before the design.
15:00	Do you still see any big surprises? Absolutely. Always challenges and room for improvement. Some business are further along than others.
15:38	What are some of the challenges you encounter today? Lots of challenges: Vendor tool challenges, application challenges, management challenges, technology challenges, standards challenges. I tend to look at technology challenges as significant. There's a reason why concepts like interoperability and portability exist and why open software standards are smart and it's in the best interest of companies to support them. If you don't have applications, tools, or data that aren't portable and systems that aren't interoperable, and you don't have the ability to leverage open software standards, some of the stuff can be challenging. Lack of public interfaces to the systems. Challenges to me are a lot of technolgy, applications, people. Getting the organization to understand this stuff and work with it.
18:18	The application of statistical methods to the data is interesting. I use a lot of stats day-to-day. With some of this new media stuff across the portfolio you don't have a lot of data so you have to do non-parametric statistics--generally people don't get, so you have to be careful in reporting.

Research Committee Project: Measuring New Media

In the 2005 Membership Survey, WAA members expressed a strong interest in better understanding analytics best practices. This Research Committee project, Measuring New Media, tackles the impact new media and technologies (Ajax, flash, RSS, blogs, streaming media, podcasts) are having on our sites and on our analytics. Measuring New Media interviews experienced analysts to uncover best practices and lessons learned with these new media technologies. Presented in podcast form, Measuring New Media's interviews address questions as:

• Can we determine the business impact of new media?
• Can we determine adoption/operational performance?
• Are new media metrics being integrated into existing site metrics, and how?
• What measurement challenges do analysts face with these emerging technologies?

 

For additional information on this Best Practices article, please contact:

Jim Humphrys
(410) 506-4559

Source: Research Committee Web Analytics Association
http://www.webanalyticsassociation.org/en/cmt/?6

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