Empirical Path Web Analytics & Market Research

Maybe there is such a thing as a free lunch...

We teamed with our Partner Google Analytics to jointly publish a case study, "A switch from Coremetrics to Google Analytics removes measurement blindspots, increases actionable insights and drives revenue."  Only three other Google Analytics Certified Partners in North America have received this honor, and we were also chosen as the first GACP to co-present a webinar with Google.

The two-pager recaps an engagement in which Empirical Path reduced our client's total digital measurement costs while enhancing its web analytics capabilities.  How?  By replacing a premium web analytics tool with a combination of the free Google Analytics and professional customization and reporting services. Read on...

Our entertainment client's goals were typical of media and commerce businesses:

How many digital measurement pros can fit in a phone booth?  We don't know, but 44 squeezed into a private room for Web Analytics Wednesday in New York December 1.

Thank you to everyone who heard about the event via Meetup.com, Web Analytics Demystified, Linkedin, and Facebook. Across all of these RSVP platforms, we had over 90 people interested, scary for us as the sponsor buying drinks but fantastic for us as we hire and seek new clients and agency partners.

Also, a huge thank you to host Melaine Fuentes for making it all happen.

Four questions came up again and again in conversations:

New York web analytics professionals are so talented, they alter the space-time continuum.

OK, that's not why we're sponsoring a Web Analytics Wednesday -- "the single most popular social network and networking event in the digital measurement sector" -- on a Thursday, December 1 at Bamboo 52 in Manhattan from 6 p.m.

In reality, Jim and Peter are in town to speak at Business Insider's "Ignition: Future of Media," a conference which should tie up Silicon Alley at a Wednesday night reception.  So Web Analytics Wednesday Host Melaine Fuentes invites the City's fans of SiteCatalyst, Webtrends, Google Analytics, ChartBeat, Woopra, et. al. for drinks the next night.  Details from the Web Analytics Demystified website:

"Please join your fellow New York web analytics professionals at an upcoming event by clicking the "Sign up now to attend this event!" link. You'll be asked to provide your email address and confirm your participation.

Join us Thursday December 1st the final WAW of 2011 Sponsored by Empirical Path. Come enjoy some Free drinks and networking with fellow members of the Web Analytics industry.

Host: Melaine Fuentes ( This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it )
Date: Thursday, December 01, 2011 at 6:00 PM
Venue: Bamboo 52 NYC
Address: 344 West 52nd Street, New York NY (Venue | Map | Group)
Sponsor: This event is generously sponsored by Empirical Path
Share: Invite friends to join you at this event
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ATTEND: Sign up now to attend this event!

As we recently revealed, we've served numerous New York clients, especially in the media sector. So we look forward to seeing some familiar faces -- our staffing partner IQWorkforce is a Web Analytics Wednesday Global Sponsor -- and trading tips with other practitioners.  Looking for web analytics jobs?  Web analytics providers?  Want to learn web analytics?  See you there.

Prefer to manage your life on LinkedIn? Please see the event page there.

Prefer to manage your life on Facebook? Please see the event page there.

UPDATE: see our picture and re-cap of Web Analytics Wednesday here.

We're partial to the idea of "path," but Google Analytics is on to something else with "flow."

Empirical Path's partner today unveiled the Site Visits Flow report.  It enables web marketing pros to instantly and intuitively see how visitors from key traffic sources (or other segments) "flow" through pages on the site.  It makes other web analytics tools' pathing reports look downright dowdy, so Google Analytics has once again raised the bar for audience measurement.

In the past, the lack of a navigation report showing multiple steps in website visits was a knock on Google Analytics.  Yes, you could access the Navigation Summary to see prior and next pages viewed, for one page at a time, but the feedback from our clients was that this was hard to grasp and too granular.

This interface is a great leap forward, with connections between segments, starting pages, and pages downstream represented by curved lines whose width corresponds to traffic volume (and dreaded red lines to represent exits).  There are also a number of handy ways to tweak the visualization:

In the words of the Google Analytics product team:

"Our design team chose not to build individual 'path analysis,' which can quickly become complicated. Instead, they took inspiration from a wide range of sources to reimagine approaches for visualizing visitor flow. Our goal is to help marketers and analysts better optimize their visitor experience by presenting the ways that visitors flow through their sites in an intuitive and useful way.

Starting this week, 'Visitors Flow' and 'Goal Flow' will be rolling out to all accounts. Other types of visualizers will be coming to Google Analytics in the coming few months, but in the meantime, here’s what you can expect from this initial release."

We'll discuss the new Goal Flow Reports soon!

Please contact us for a Google Analytics Audit to ensure you are getting the most from Google Analytics' features.

Empirical Path is proud to once again hear a client tell the world how we helped them measure and optimize online channels.

In this case, it was public-radio station KDHX's Steven Ley, who praised our Analysis Exchange project to establish Key Performance Indicators.  These metrics are guiding the station toward its ambitious audience and engagement growth goals as it is "beginning a new internal evaluation and growth project to increase participation and audience over time." As the Official Blog of the Analysis Exchange reports:

"On September 21, 2011, the National Center for Media Engagement and Integrated Media Association coordinated a webinar entitled “Insights From Metrics: Public Media and Analysis Exchange”.  Thank you to Steve Ley from KDHX in St. Louis...for sharing your Analysis Exchange success stories and how you are using web analytics at your stations.  And Thank you to the National Center for Media Engagement and Integrated Media Association for providing a forum for us to share our story. If you are interested in hearing this webinar, it is recorded and posted on the NCME website here."

The Analysis Exchange "is an effort designed to provide hands-on training opportunities for aspiring web analytics professionals while providing free web data analysis to the entire nonprofit community. The effort works by connecting organizations, mentors, and student participants."

Empirical Path's Peter Howley served as a mentor on this project, with student Joan Cole doing the heavy lifting.  The pair studied the website's goals and interviewed KDHX's web team to recommend a manageable set of Key Performance Indicators, pictured here.  As Steven said: "This is a really helpful approach that our team took in educating us about the relationships between the measurements. It further listed the tools that we already know how to use in order to make the changes based on the goals. It really helped to add value to our project."

Peter and Joan then calculated the current baseline for each metric.  We also highlighted the search terms, content, and traffic sources offering the most leverage on the new KPIs.  In the webinar, Steven concluded: "The Analysis Exchange is really a rare system that provides the kind of value that you might pay thousands of consulting dollars for, and it should definitely be treated that way."

Peter and Joan are teaming up again on an Exchange project for a Washington, DC-based not-for-profit, and Empirical Path's Jim Snyder enhanced web analytics for a DC professional association, earning his own praise.

Please read more about digital measurement for not-for-profits.

World-class athletes are fast, on the field and online.

So an exercise company came to us for help tracking its website visitors as they moved among site sections and through the checkout process, as we describe in a new case study:

"A fitness equipment maker sold its product line exclusively through its e-commerce website, but could not attribute revenue to its campaigns due to multiple sub-domains.  Reporting was impaired by double-counted visits and 'self-referrals' appearing to be from the company’s own domain."

This is a classic example of the cross-domain measurement issues we discussed in December's "Entire web empire must be mapped" blog post.  In this client's case, as in most cases where numerous marketing campaigns are cranking through multiple channels, the payoff was immediate:

"Now, managers of this e-commerce website can adjust spending among channels and on promotions within each channel based on reliable revenue figures."

Read the full case study here.  Identifying cross-domain and -subdomain issues is a key part of our Web Analytics Audit.