Web Analytics

As the web becomes more and more important to business and marketing, understanding the ways that we measure it also rise on a marketer's list of priorities. For this podcast I connected with Aurélie Pols of OX2, a leading European web analytics firm to further my and hopefully your understanding.

If you're like me, you're drowning in a sea of data. From Google Analytics/Adsense/Adwords to Excel to SPSS to Powerpoint, I spend my days trying to make sense of data and then present the essential insight visually. So, for my next podcast, I connected with Clint Ivy to talk about data visualization and how to do it better.

In my continuing thread of interviews with web analytics and web analysts, I connected with Jeff Cram of iSite Design. Jeff recently wrote an interesting article entitled Building a Website for Analytics and I wanted to pick his brain about this subject. We also talked about how rich media (Ajax, et al.) is changing page view-centered approach of web analytics and online marketing.

Enjoy!

Gerry McGovern, my 107th interviewee, has two huge factors going for him in life. The first is an uncanny knowledge of website content management and how to design powerful user experiences. The second is an accent that is ridiculously cool. I can't decide which I'm more jealous of.

Gerry was generous enough to share his knowledge about the long neck, how to design better web experiences, and more.

Enjoy!

As a former marketing analyst and social media fanatic, I love trying to understand the flow of influence and traffic online. For my 96th podcast interview, I had the chance to talk with a leading expert on measuring influence, popularity and social media online - Flemming Madsen of Onalytica.

Flemming and I chatted about the challenges of and approaches for measuring online influence, what to watch out for when you measure online conversations, the next evolution and more.

Given how much time I spend online struggling with bad websites, I'm fascinated with companies that promise a better way. NextStage Global is a pioneer in using "behavioral metrics" to help companies to better understand their website visitors in a non-intrusive way and give those visitors a better experience.

For my 75th podcast, I was lucky enough to sit down with Jeff Turner, the founder of Blogbeat. Blogbeat was one of the leading companies in blog analytics and was recently purchased by Feedburner.

Jeff was nice enough to take a few minutes away from his vacation to chat about how Blogbeat was founded, how the Feedburner acquisition came about, the future of blog analytics and more.

Enjoy!

Every since I interviewed Garrett French, he's been after me to sit down with one of his coworkers (JP Sherman, an expert in competitive intelligence in search marketing). Emails, phone calls, etc., they always ended with "whenever you're ready, JP is too." Well, Garrett, you got your wish and, man, am I glad I took your advice.

For my 60th podcast, I connected with Robbin Steif of LunaMetrics. Robbin is an expert on website conversion, an aspect of online marketing that is too often overlooked in a mad pursuit for traffic.

In our conversation, we chatted about conversion, the mistakes companies make in their online marketing, RSS vs. email marketing, what to look for when hiring an internal seo/web analytics person vs. an external consultancy and more.

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Listening to your customers and community is crucially important to any marketer. But how do you make sense of the millions of blogs, forums, etc., on the Internet? One way is to engage an online intelligence firm like Umbria.

For my 51st podcast, I was lucky enough to connect with Howard Kaushansky, President of Umbria. He chatted with me about how their solution works, the importance to drilling down to the lowest level of content in order to analyze the meaning, how Umbria determines demographics from language and more.

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