Monthly Recap: April 2007

April was a busy month both on the work and blogging front. I had 17 blog posting, 18 including this one.

This was the first time I made it in Avinash’s top 10 web analytics blog list.. When Avinash released his rankings on April 16th, my blog was ranked 48,459 by tachnorati. In last 15 days the ranking has gone up to 38,710



Here is the list of articles that I posted

Behavioral Targeting

• Search Retargeting – My View – Behavioral Targeting companies offer a service called “Search Retargeting”. My views on this offering are presented in this posting.


• Google and Behavioral Targeting Part II – In my post "Google and Behavioral Targeting" last month I talked about how Google is putting its footprint all over the web and could be preparing for the largest Behavioral Targeting Ad network. I got several emails in response to that article. Two main questions that were raised are:
  
  1. Won’t there be technical challenges to aggregate all this data and make it meaningful for behavioral targeting?
  
  
  2. Won’t there be privacy and trust issues if Google were to go that route?
  
  This article is to address these two concerns.
  
• Google and Behavioral Targeting Part III – Google Buys Doubleclick – In this post I discuss how this is a huge step brining Google Close to building Behavioral Targeting network.


• Google Doubleclick deal concerns Privacy Advocates
  The Electronics Privacy Information Center (EPIC), The Center for Digital Democracy (CDD), The U.S. Public Interest Research Group (U.S. PIRG) has filed a complaint with Federal Trade Commission (FTC) that Google’s acquisition of Double will compromise privacy of internet users.


• Google Web History: Google and Behavioral Targeting - The Beginning - Google launched a new service called Google Web History. This service will allow users to keep an archive of their web browsing history. The service will also allow integrated web and search history to personalize results based on previous search and viewing patterns.


• Google Web History - My Experience– My experience with Google Web History


• Behavioral Targeting Moves by Yahoo and Google - A recent article by Brandweek, talks about how Yahoo is betting big on Behavioral Targeting.
  

Web Analytics

• Web Analytics Jobs Trend Update: April 2007 – An update on Web Analytics Job. Also included jobs requiring web analytics tools experience.
  
• Several Web Analyst interviewed for my series on Web Analyst Interviews
  
  • Web Analyst Interview: Scott Baldwin
  
  
  • Web Analyst Interview: Pere Rovira
  
  
  • Web Analyst Interview: Apurba Sen
  
  
  • Web Analyst Interview: Jaisri Chety
  
  
  
  


• Books Recommended by Web Analysts – In this posting I summarized all the books recommended by various web analysts I interviewed.


• Top 10 Web Analytics Blog – I made the list of Avinahs’s top 10 blog list.


• Cookie versus Panel Based User Counting – comScore came out with a study saying that cookie based measurement might be over counting unique users by 2.5 times. My views on this topic.


• The Great comScore Debate – My response to Gary Angle’s comments on my above posting.


• Seattle Web Analytics Wednesday (WAW) May 9th 2007... I made my blog as the unofficially blog of WAW Seattle. This is where I will post any updates to WAW Seattle.

Behavioral Targeting Moves by Yahoo and Google

A recent article by Brandweek, talks about how Yahoo is betting big on Behavioral Targeting.
Yahoo has been testing its BT like targeting since 2003 or so. I am from India but has been living in US for years, I signed up for my yahoo account in US. Sometime around 2003 when I logged out of my yahoo email, yahoo served me an ad related to an Indian company. I don’t remember explicitly telling yahoo that I was from India. I asked my co-worker (sitting next to me and who was not of Indian origin) to browse to the same location but she did not get the same ad. My thinking at that time was that that they were somehow reading the content of my emails (just like gmail), since I didn’t remember using yahoo search engine to find that content related to India, but I am not 100% sure though) and serving ads based on it.

According to this Brandweek article, critics say behavioral targeting is an invasion of privacy. Jeffrey Chester, CDD founder and executive director said he has no problem with behavioral targeting if advertisers disclose to consumers that they are tracking information. "They need to fully disclose and get permission, but they're afraid to do it," Chester said. I am not a critic of BT but I agree with Chester as I wrote in my posting on Google and Doubleclick privacy concerns.
Yahoo! rep Dina Freeman said the company protects its users' privacy. "It's anonymous. It's never tied to your name," she said. "Consumers in general are coming around to the fact that they like the relevancy."

I agree with the above statement but let’s disclose this to consumers so that everybody can feel comfortable.

Google on the other hand has been saying that it won't consider behavioral targeting. Even though Google is resisting Behavioral Targeting so far but a lot of people (including me) are predicting that Google will soon get into Behavioral Targeting. According to Brandweek article, however, now Google is saying they won’t consider behavioral targeting without getting consumers' approval. So they are thinking about it too if they get consumer approval. Richard Holden, director of product management at Google says "We're not opposed to it in principle, if it means showing fewer ads but ones that are more relevant." Yes, Behavioral Targeting is about showing relevant ads, so when can we expect first BT Targeted ads on Google network?

Google Web History - My Experience

As I wrote two days ago, I took Google Web History for a test drive. Here is what I found

1. Even though I signed for Google Web History on April 23rd, my history went back to April 25 2006. Not sure how that happened, I think it has sometime to do the google personalized search. It had all the searches and the sites I clicked in history dating back to April 25 2006.
2. Google Web History as a spy tool? – I signed on a computer which my wife and I both use. I forgot to signoff from my Google account and my wife started using it. I went back to my personal laptop, signed into my Google account again and started looking at web history. Guess what? I could see what my wife was searching on and the sites she was visiting. Pretty freaky…uh. Maybe you can use google web history to check on what kids are doing online.


Will update if I find anything more interesting.

The Great comScore Debate

comScore came out with a study saying cookie based system could be reporting 2.5 time more visitors.

I wrote a post with my view on the topic last week. My take was that we should not worry about this study for two main reasons
1. We don’t know the comScore methodology of this study
2. We know that two web analytics systems don’t report the same numbers so we were dealing with estimated numbers anyway. This is the reality of Web Analytics. We should make decision based on trends more than raw numbers.

Gary Angel from SEMphoice wrote a blog post where he disagrees with me and says he is worried about the accuracy of the data after this study.

Side note: Gary took my view and made them appear them as ZAAZ’s (my employer)view. One thing I want to make clear is that these views are mine only and do not represent the views of ZAAZ or any other employee of ZAAZ.

Back to the issue: Well, even before this study we all knew cookies were being deleted but we accepted this fact till comScore study came. We should have been worried all along but we were not. Why? I guess we had to work with whatever we had.

The point I was trying to make is that you have to take everything in context. Going to Gary’s example of a conference, let’s say conference A tell you they attract 5,000 visitors and the other conference B says they get 4,000 visitors. Next day a third party comes out and says that all the conferences numbers reported by any conference are inflated and actual number is 75% of what they state then what’s the net result? Well Conference A is still better than conference B. Only thing is that they each now have 3750 and 3000 visitors respectively. Every conference in the world will have the same issue, their rank is still the same. I don’t think based on this information conferences will start charging less for the booth. However the rate per visitor has gone up for you but you can’t do much, that’s the market rate. Same argument goes for sites that sell advertising based on how many users they reach.

I recently moved a customer from one web analytics tool to another, guess what? The unique visitors count was different (so was repeat visitor and visit count). They were using old system for 3 years, all their decisions were based on those numbers. We could have spent days to figure out which one was correct old or new. Was it worth it? No, I don’t think that would have made any difference to their business. We could have waited to get the perfect data but that was not going to happen no matter what. So what did we do? We verified the new system to make sure it is accurately configured. We have tagged all the pages, proper excludes and includes are there, Cookie is first party etc. and the accepted it, developed our baseline and started working from there.

I strongly believe in accuracy of data but accuracy is also within context. The system you are using has to be perfectly configured, has to be accurately measuring but accuracy is defined based on how that system works.

I am pretty sure that if you take logs from your server and process them with an old version of any tool of you choice and then with the latest versions you will get different numbers (DisclosureI used to work for a tool vendor). Which one is correct? Old or new? If new is correct than all your old decisions based on wrong numbers were wrong. How do I know for sure that new is good? All I know my trends were similar in both new and old system.

Now lets say based on cookies counting, one site reaches 2 times visitors than their competitors (assume both use same 3rd party cookie). Will this site be more or less valuable if both the sites were told they were over counting their visitors? They would still be the same. How they will compete is how much more visitors (or visits) they get. Panels have a potential to be faultier than cookies if panels are not true representation of the site’s visitors. Panel based counting is just like log file sampling, sampling at least is a true representation of your visitors but we all know that those numbers are not accurate.

I understand Gary’s issue about repeat users and new users. But again, if you use two different systems they will report different numbers so which one is correct?
As Jacques Warren pointed out as a response to Gary’s post, the right solution (at this time) is to provide a reason for users to not delete their cookie (or give a reason to login). If Gary care’s about repeat users then I am sure he has strategies to get them engaged and give them a reason to login (or not delete cookies). Give users a reason to be loyal and they will be. Then you won’t have to worry about cookie deletion and hence your numbers will be accurate. Till you get to that level any number is a close estimate weather it is panel based or cookie based; and is not worth loosing sleep over.

I am not going to be worried till I have concrete proof that 1st party cookie system is completely flawed. Right now I don’t have any basis to be worried. IAB has asked comScore and NNR to show their measurement process, let’s see what comes out of that

Google Web History: Google and Behavioral Targeting - The Beginning

Google launched a new service called
Google Web History This service will allow users to keep an archive of their web browsing history. The service will also allow integrated web and search history to personalize results based on previous search and viewing patterns.
This service requires a Google account and the Google Toolbar, and users will be able to access their histories from any computer with the service enabled.
As I have been talking about Google and Behavioral Targeting, this is one of the steps towards that goal. Google will track everything you do (of course with your consent) and then in near future will show you targeting ads based on this information.
Side Note: The most interesting thing to watch will be the effect on organic search listings. This is the free source of traffic (sort of free) that a lot of sites have become dependent on but with all the personalization they are bound to get hit.
To ease the privacy, this service is not enabled by default. It also requires PageRank feature in Google Toolbar to be manually enabled. Also, there is an easy way to remove items from you history, however not sure if Google will still keep those in their logs to understand a users behavior.
Giving user an option to opt-in instead of opt-out is the right approach to Personalization and Behavioral Targeting. I believe if you show the users the value and benefits for targeting and let them make the choice then you will create loyal customers and won’t have to deal with privacy backlash.
Stay tuned for more data integration news from Google, this is just the beginning.
I just enabled this services so am going to take it for test drive.

Seattle Web Analytics Wednesday (WAW) May 9th 2007

Web Analytics Wednesday (WAW) is the world's only distributed networking event for web analytics professionals. Open to everyone, practitioners and vendors alike, Web Analytics Wednesday is a free event allowing you to meet folks with similar work interests.

ZAAZ will be hosting the WAW on May 9th. I won’t be there as I will be attending eMetics, however Michal Watts and other members of my team will be there.

To read more about WAW, please visit http://www.webanalyticsdemystified.com/wednesday/waw_faq.asp

Snack and drinks will be provided at ZBar (ZAAZ Bar), sponsored by ZAAZ.

Location:
ZAAZ Headquarters
414 Olive Way
Suite 500
Seattle, WA 98101


Driving Direction:

ZAAZ is located on Olive Way between 4th Ave and 5th Ave

FROM SEA-TAC AIRPORT
Get on I-5 North
Follow SIGNS to SEATTLE
Take SENECA Exit on the LEFT
Turn right at 4th Ave
Turn right at Olive Way

FROM NORTH I-5 TO SEATTLE
Get on I-5 SOUTH
Take the Stewart St. Exit
Stay straight on Stewart until 5th Ave


RSVP at http://www.webanalyticsdemystified.com/wednesday/?event_id=1677 or write a comment (with your name, email and company name) on this blog post.

Google Doubleclick deal concerns Privacy Advocates

The Electronics Privacy Information Center (EPIC), The Center for Digital Dempcarcy (CDD), The U.S. Public Interest Research Group (U.S. PIRG) has filed a complaint with Federal Trade Commission (FTC) that Google’s acquisition of Double will compromise privacy of internet users. Read the complete detail of this complaint at http://www.democraticmedia.org/PDFs/google_complaint.pdf

I have been talking about Google and Behavioral Targeting even before the acquisition of Double click was announced. As I wrote in my first post on Google and Behavioral Targeting Google has been putting it’s footprint all of the internet even before Doubleclick acquisition. Acquisition of Doubleclick bought them way closer to building the biggest behavioral targeting network.

This is what these Privacy advocates are worried about.


According to CNET:

Privacy advocates are particularly worried that Google will merge the data from users' search queries with DoubleClick's records of people's general Web-surfing habits in order to build a centralized database of consumer profiles.

Google executives have said that for now, the company does not plan to merge personally identifiable information such as names and e-mail addresses, with search histories and Web-surfing habits. Rather, it hopes to combine both companies' (Google and Doublelclick) non-personally identifiable data, such as search histories and Web-surfing habits linked to a computer's IP address, so that it could better target advertisements.
But EPIC's argument is that an IP address can, with a little work, be linked to an individual, even if a name or address isn't associated with the IP number.
"Identity can be inferred," Marc Rotenberg, executive director for EPIC and author of the complaint, said in an interview with CNET News.com. "We believe that this complaint provides an opportunity for (the) FTC to look closely at whether the online-advertising industry provides adequate privacy protection for Internet users and (to) consider the privacy impact of non-personally identifiable information collected through search histories."
Source: CNET

We will have to wait and see how Google responds to this complain and the next steps by FTC. I will keep you posted as I get more information.

So what is the solution to all these privacy concerns?

I believe that if consumers are provided proper education (I will write about consumer benefits in one of my future posts) than they can infect benefit from Behavioral Targeting. It will be a win-win situation for all the parties involved. Proper education and disclosures by advertisers, publishers and networks will ease the concerns regarding Behavioral Targeting. Consumers have the right to opt out of Behavioral Targeting but what is lacking is proper education on how to do so. The networks currently opt-in users by default; however, in my opinion the proper process should be opt-out by default and opt-in if user chooses to opt-in, just like we do for emails and newsletters. This process will move the burden from users to the advertisers, publishers and networks.

In short run this could result in a lower reach for BT providers. But if the benefits to consumers are properly stated then most of the consumers will be willing to participate. If you (network or advertiser) tell a consumer that he/she does not need to go looking for deals or offers of products/services that he/she is in the market for, these deals/offers will be provided to him/her based on her online behavior no matter where in the network she is in, I think consumer will love it. If a consumer knows the process and she knows that she is willingly participating in the BT, the click-through rate on the ads will be higher too. Why force users into Behavioral Targeting and raise privacy concerns when you can offer them what they want (when they want) and make them your raving fans.