Lies, Damned Lies...

My face, on the Internet

I have just noticed (rather belatedly, to say the least) that Laura Lee Dooley has posted a complete video of my encounter with Avinash Kaushik at the May E-metrics Summit in San Jose on Vimeo. The sound quality is a little poor, but you can more or less follow the thread of the conversation.

I come across as a cross between Prince Charles, Alastair Campbell and my Dad. Avinash does rather better, particularly around the 26 minute mark. Anyway, watch it for yourself and see who comes out on top.

Does Display help Search? Or does Search help Display?

One of the topics that we didn’t get quite enough time to cover in detail in my face-off with Avinash Kaushik at last week’s eMetrics Summit (of which more in another post) was the thorny issue of conversion attribution. When I asked Avinash about it, he made the sensible point that trying to correctly “attribute” a conversion to a mix of the interactions that preceded it ends up being a very subjective process, and that adopting a more experimental approach – tweaking aspects of a campaign and seeing which tweaks result in higher conversion rates – is more sound.

I asked the question in part because conversion attribution is conspicuously absent from Google Analytics – a fact which raises an interesting question about whether it’s in Google’s interest to include a feature like this, since it may stand to lose more than it gains by doing so (since the effective ROI of search will almost certainly go down when other channels are mixed into an attribution model).

Our own Atlas Institute is quite vocal on this topic, and has published a number of white papers such as this one [PDF] about the consideration/conversion funnel, and this one [PDF], on which channels are winners and losers in the new world of Engagement Mapping (our term for multi-channel conversion attribution).

The Atlas Institute has also opined about how adding display to a search campaign can raise the effectiveness of that campaign by 22% compared to search alone – in other words, how display helps search to be better.

However, a recent study from iProspect throws some new light on this discussion. The study – a survey of 1,575 web consumers – attempted to discover how people respond to display advertising. And one of the most interesting findings from the study is that, whilst 31% of users claim to have clicked on a display ad in the last 6 months, almost as many – 27% – claimed that they responded to the ad by searching for that product or brand:

This raises the interesting idea that search can actually help display be better, by providing a response mechanism that differs from the traditional ad click behavior that we expect. Of course, this still doesn’t mean that search should get 100% of the credit for a conversion in this kind of scenario – in fact, it makes a stronger case for “view-through” attribution of display campaigns – something that ad networks (like, er, our own Microsoft Media Network) are keen to encourage people to do, to make performance-based campaigns look better.

All this really means that, of course, it’s not a case of display vs. search, but display and search (and a whole lot of other ways of reaching consumers). Whether you take the view that it’s your display campaign that helps your search to be more effective, or your search keywords that help your display campaign to drive more response, multi-channel online marketing – and the complexity that goes with measuring it – looks set for the big time. And by “big time”, I mean the army of small advertisers currently using systems like Google’s AdWords, or our own adCenter. So maybe we’ll see multi-channel conversion attribution in Google Analytics before long.

What would you like to ask Avinash Kaushik?

The gloves will be tied tight. Brightly colored silk dressing gowns will be shrugged to the floor; gum-shields inserted. In the blue corner: yours truly. In the red (and blue, yellow and green) corner, web analytics heavyweight, Avinash Kaushik. As the crowd bays for blood, battle will be joined. The Garden never saw anything like this.

Well, ok, it’ll probably be a bit more civilized (well, a lot more civilized) than that. But at next week’s E-metrics Summit in San Jose, Avinash and I will indeed be going head to head in the “Rules for Analytics Revolutionaries” session on Wednesday May 6 at 3.25. In that session, I’ll be asking Avinash some genuinely tricky questions to really get to the heart of some of the thorniest issues around web analytics today, such as campaign attribution, free versus paid tools, and what, really, the point of all this electronic navel-gazing really is.

But I could use your help. In my comments box below, or via e-mail, suggest the question(s) you’d most like me to ask Avinash next week. This is your big chance to ask Avinash the question you’re too embarrassed/polite/nervous to ask him in person. If you’re going to be at the Summit, then be sure to come to the session to see if your question gets asked; if not, I’ll post a follow-up post here after the event and shall be sure to include Avinash’s answers to any questions from the blog.

So come on – what have you got to lose? It’s not like it’s you who’s going to be picking a fight with one of the industry’s most revered and respected advocates, is it? Leave that to old numb-knuckles here.

Google adds rank information to referral URLs

An interesting post on the official Google Analytics blog from Brett Crosby appeared last week, in which he announced that Google is to start introducing a new URL format in its referring click-through URLs for organic (i.e. non-paid) results. From Brett’s post:

Starting this week, you may start seeing a new referring URL format for visitors coming from Google search result pages. Up to now, the usual referrer for clicks on search results for the term "flowers", for example, would be something like this:

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=flowers&btnG=Google+Search

Now you will start seeing some referrer strings that look like this:

http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&ct=res&cd=7&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.example.com%2Fmypage.htm&ei=0SjdSa-1N5O8M_qW8dQN&rct=j&q=flowers&usg=AFQjCNHJXSUh7Vw7oubPaO3tZOzz-F-u_w&sig2=X8uCFh6IoPtnwmvGMULQfw

Brett points out that the referring URL now starts with /url? rather than /search? (which is interesting in itself in its implication for the way Google is starting to think about its search engine as a dynamic content generation engine); but the really interesting thing, which Brett doesn’t call out but which was confirmed by Jason Burby in his ClickZ column today, is the appearance of the cd parameter in the revised URL, which indicates the position of the result in the search results page (SRP). So in the example above, where cd=7, the link that was clicked was 7th in the list.

As Jason points out, this new information is highly useful for SEO companies, who can use it to analyze where in the SRPs their clients’ sites are appearing for given terms. Assuming, of course, that web analytics vendors make the necessary changes to their software to extract the new parameter and make it available for reporting (or, alternatively, you use a web analytics package that is flexible enough to enable you to make this configuration change yourself).

As you can see from the example above, there are various other new parameters that are included in the new referring URL, which may prove useful from an analytics perspective (such as the source parameter). It’s also worth noting that whereas the old referring URL is the URL of the search results page itself, the new URL is inserted by some kind of redirection (this must be the case, since it includes the URL of the click destination page).

Using a redirect in this way means that as well as providing more information to you, Google is now also capturing more information about user click behavior, since the redirect can be logged and analyzed. Crafty, huh?

In New York on March 30? Drop by

Curmudgeonly hermit that I am, I don’t often leave my Pacific Northwest aerie and venture out into the wider world (unless you count the Eastside as the wider world, which I don’t). But next Monday, March 30, New York City will be blessed by my mysterious presence, as I participate in a panel at the Advertising Research Foundation’s annual convention, re:think, at the Marriot Marquis.

The name of my session is “Maximizing the Value of Your Digital Media Measurement Strategies”, and is on Monday 3/30 at 3pm. I’ll be joined by some smart folks from the world of online audience & campaign measurement from Carat Digital, Mullen, RAPP and Datran Media.

If you want to come along and and heckle, the nice folks at Datran have kindly sponsored some free passes (just for this session, not the entire event) – you can register for one here. Alternatively, if you’re in New York at that time, and would like to meet up, drop me a line – I’ll be around until the end of the day on Tuesday.

adCenter Analytics beta closing: Goodbye, Gatineau

If you’re an adCenter Analytics (ACA) beta customer, or you’ve read my colleague Mel’s posting over on the adCenter Community site, you’ll know that we’ve decided to close the ACA beta program at the end of the year.

In some senses, this is a sad day for me, since ACA (then known as Gatineau) was the first project I worked on when I came to Microsoft back in 2006, and even though I moved off it early last year, I’ve stayed in close contact with the ACA team since. But in assessing my own reaction to this news, it’s important to separate out the damage to my ego from a more level-headed assessment of this news. And in the latter regard, I’m full of optimism.

I know from the time I spent on the project and from talking to the team since that we have learned a great deal about the kinds of analytical capabilities that we need to provide throughout our ad platform to enable our advertisers and publishers to get the best value out of working with us. And let me be clear: analytics is tremendously important. But this announcement reflects a conclusion that we’ve come to that, for us, providing analytics in the form of a standalone tool like ACA doesn’t present the best value or utility for our customers.

Of course, it’s not my place to be making ad hoc pronouncements about our analytics product strategy, especially not at a moment like this; so I’ve probably said enough already. But I’d like to add my personal thanks to all of you who took the time to try out ACA and provide us with valuable feedback and ideas. Hopefully we provided some value for you along the way.

Expert help for my new job

My new job is going splendidly so far, thanks for asking – and I’m already busy enough to have to be making excuses about a lack of posts. But how could I hope to succeed without the excellent advice of some of the finest minds in technology and business?

First, xkcd offers a helpful primer on the distinction between causation and correlation:

And then today Scott Adams weighs in on the new power that I will wield:

A return to more weighty subjects will occur soon, I promise :-)

A new new job

I have exciting (for me) news to share with you today – I have a new job, with the somewhat tongue-twisting title of Director of Yield Business Intelligence Product Management. I know, cool, huh?

In case you’re left a little non-plussed by precisely what Yield Business Intelligence is, let me enlighten you: I’m in charge of the systems that Microsoft has to analyze the yield of our online advertising inventory. My more long-standing readers may remember that I’ve blogged about yield before, in my Online Advertising 101 series of posts.

For an online publisher – in fact, for any advertising-funded business (hell, for any business) – yield and cost are what it’s all about. If you can’t sell your stuff for more than it cost you to make it, you’ve not got a viable business. So understanding yield, in detail, is essential. And that’s my new job. Should be a great opportunity to return to my analytics roots, but this time with a slightly different data set. And I get to continue to think about online advertising from the publisher/network perspective – something that I’ve really enjoyed doing in the past year.

So you can look forward to more posts here about the trials and tribulations of making money from online advertising inventory. Given the convulsions some parts of the industry are going through, it should be an interesting ride.

What do you get the data geek in your life for Valentine’s day?

This, as it turns out:

 

Ah, Mrs Thomas, you know me too well. The only problem with it is that it’s just too perfect to actually eat. As you’ll have no doubt already worked out just by looking at it, it’s made of 70% milk, 20% dark and 10% white chocolate. From the wonderful Mary & Matt.

Googopoly vs Micropoly

The excellent Tom Slee (aka. Whimsley) has been on my blogroll for some time. Tom writes longish posts about a range of interesting topics – at the moment he’s in the middle of a dissertation about whether Amazon’s recommendation service really does help unknown authors to find an audience and side-step the ‘evil’ publishing business (I have a suspicion about how the answer will turn out).

Part of Whimsley’s appeal is that he seems to toil away in the same kind of semi-obscurity that I do [violins]; but recently he’s had a burst of traffic to his site thanks to a link from Jeff Atwood, who referenced an excellent Whimsley post about the role of Google in shaping the Internet. The short version of Whimsley’s thesis is that because of the way Google’s ranking algorithm (especially the PageRank part) works, Google is as much as driver of what’s popular on the Internet as it is a reflector of that. You should read the whole post to get the full story.

But the interesting point raised by Jeff Atwood is, is Google a monopoly? The comments to Jeff’s post are full of people echoing Google’s official response to the accusation of monoplism – which is that users are free to switch their search engine at any time.But Whimsley makes the point that it’s extremely difficult for an advertiser to switch away from Google. This is not because Google makes it difficult, but because Google provides such an essential service – AdWords – to advertisers that it’s almost impossible to run certain kinds of businesses without it. And, of course, it’s the advertisers that provide Google’s income, not the end users executing searches.

Now, I’m aware that I would be on extremely thin ice, both morally and legally, if I were to speculate on whether Google’s market position constitutes a monopoly. And, just to be clear, I’m not. I’m also not speculating on how it was that Microsoft ended up in trouble with the DOJ (I in fact have very little knowledge of the specifics of the case). All I would say is that Google and Microsoft have a lot more in common than people might like to believe. Neither is staffed by moustache-twirling evildoers (to borrow Whimsley’s excellent phrase); both are trying to develop their business and improve the services that they provide to customers. The challenge is to do so from a strong market position without ending up behaving in a monopolistic fashion.