Thoughts, musings, and, hopefully, not too many redundancies on the world of business data. If you missed the irony in the previous sentence, you may struggle with my writing style.
I attended the Foresee Results user summit last month, and John Lovett of Web Analytics Demystified was the keynote speaker. It’s a credit to my general lack of organization that I wasn’t aware he was going to be speaking, much less keynoting! John showed this diagram when discussing the importance of recognizing your capabilities: The diagram [...]
I was flipping through the slides from a workshop that Teradata put on at The Ohio State University several months ago, and one of the diagrams jumped out and resonated with me. As I did some digging, it turns out this diagram has been floating around since at least 2004, if not for longer. It [...]
Anyone who has been working with web analytics for more than a week or two has inevitably asked or been asked to explain why two different numbers that “should” match don’t: Banner ad clickthroughs reported by the ad server don’t match the clickthroughs reported by the web analytics tool Visits reported by one web analytics [...]
Last week’s Columbus set a new record for the meetup — we had exactly FIFTY attendees, which was a great showing. Part of the large draw was undoubtedly the event sponsor, CRM Metrix (@crm_metrix on Twitter). Pre-Meal Networking (and a Friendly Wave from Jonghee!) Hemen Patel, CRM Metrix CTO, facilitated a lively discussion about incorporating [...]
If you are a marketer, Facebook is important — the number of active users of the site exceeds the population of the United States, and it’s growth is going to do nothing but increase. Check out the Facebook statistics page for a slew of numbers that are all…big. Because of the growth of Facebook as [...]
I’ve been using an anecdote of late that Malcolm Gladwell supposedly related at a SAS user conference earlier this year: over the last 30 years, the challenge we face when it comes to using data to drive actions has fundamentally shifted from a challenge of “getting the right data” to “looking at an overwhelming array [...]
Judah Phillips wrote a post last week laying out why the answer to the question, “Is web analytics hard or easy?” is a resounding “it depends.” It depends, he wrote, on what tools are being used, on how the site being analyzed is built, on the company’s requirements/expectations for analytics, on the skillset of the [...]
I stumbled across a post by Don Campbell (CTO of BI and Performance Management at IBM — he was at Cognos when they got acquired) today that really got my gears turning. His 10 Red Hot BI Trends provide a lot of food for thought for a single post (for one thing, the post only lists [...]
Stephen Few had a recent post, Can Computers Analyze Data?, that started: “Since ‘business analytics’ has come into vogue, like all newly popular technologies, everyone is talking about it but few are defining what it is.” Few’s post was largely a riff off of an article by Merv Adrian on the BeyeNETWORK: Today’s ‘Analytic Applications’ — [...]
How’s that for a book title? Would it pique your interest? Would you download it and read it? Do you have friends or co-workers who would be interested in it? Why am I asking? Because it doesn’t exist. Yet. Call it a working title for a project I’ve been kicking around in my head for a couple [...]
Three things I know: 1) My wife got the raw end of the deal when she married me, 2) I blog because it keeps my e-mails shorter, and 3) If you have the urge to talk about data usage in business, I'll do so until long after that desire has passed (for you). If you want to know more, check out my About Gilligan on Data page.