Occam's Razor
SEPTEMBER 15, 2011
There is one difference between winners and losers when it comes to web analytics. Winners, well before they think data or tool, have a well structured Digital Marketing & Measurement Model. Losers don't. This article guides you in understanding the value of the Digital Marketing & Measurement Model (notice the repeated emphasis on Marketing, not just Measurement), and how to create one for yourself.
Edwin Chen
APRIL 26, 2011
How do you know what machine learning algorithm to choose for your classification problem? Of course, if you really care about accuracy, your best bet is to test out a couple different ones (making sure to try different parameters within each algorithm as well), and select the best one by cross-validation. But if you’re simply looking for a “good enough” algorithm for your problem, or a place to start, here are some general guidelines I’ve found to work well over the year
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Paul DeBeasi
JANUARY 27, 2011
Question: What do Cloud Computing, pervasive mobility, and TV white space have to do with each other? Answer: Read this blog post and find out! Virtually every customer conversation that I have these days is centered on the topic of mobility. Enterprise users want to communicate and collaborate anytime, anywhere, using any device. Most of my conversations focus on mobile device management, information security, and application architecture.
Nutanix
NOVEMBER 11, 2011
Converged architectures coming out of force-fit consortiums are just that — expensive toxic blobs.
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Occam's Razor
OCTOBER 10, 2011
I am going to break one of my unspoken cardinal rules: Only write about real problems and measurement that is actually possible in the real world. I am going to break the second part of the rule. I am going to define a way for you to think about measuring social media, and you can't actually easily measure what I am going to recommend. [Update: Please see update #2 below, you can now easily measure what's recommended in this post.].
Occam's Razor
DECEMBER 12, 2011
We have access to more data than God wants anyone to have. Thus it is not surprising that we feel overwhelmed, and rather than being data driven we just get paralyzed. Life does not have to be that scary. In fact a data driven life is sexiest digital life you can imagine. In this blog post we are going to bring the sexyback. I am going to attempt to significantly simply your life by recommending the critical few metrics you should use to analyze performance of your digital marketing campaigns an
Data Leaders Brief brings together the best content for data, strategy, and BI professionals from the widest variety of industry thought leaders.
Occam's Razor
NOVEMBER 21, 2011
It is astonishingly common that we are asked to analyze the impossible. In perhaps a career-limiting move I'm going to try to do that today (and for a controversial topic to boot!). In this post about an important Google change, I want you to focus less on the data and focus more on the methodology. And – so important – I want you to help me with your ideas of how we can do this impossible analysis better, in the complete absence of data :).
Occam's Razor
OCTOBER 31, 2011
Data analysis is not easy. It takes years to get good at it, and once you get good at it you realize how much more there is to learn. That is part of the joy. You are always learning. You are always growing. This blogpost is a collection of tips I share with my friends who are just starting out. Each tip is a "simple" mistake that is easily avoided.
Occam's Razor
AUGUST 29, 2011
Recently the Google Analytics team changed the way sessionization algorithm. In lay terms… how the start, duration and end of a Visit is computed. A minor version of the butterfly effect occurred, one small change in a part of the system caused a few other smaller changes in other parts of the system. Some people freaked out. Others wondered what the fuss was all about.
Occam's Razor
APRIL 4, 2011
Someone asked me this very simple question today. What's the difference between web reporting and web analysis? My instinct was to use the wry observation uttered by US Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart in trying to define po rn: " I know it when I see it. " That applies to what is analysis. I know it when I see it. : ). That, of course, would have been an unhelpful answer.
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Occam's Razor
APRIL 25, 2011
Every presentation I do is customized for the audience in the room. That means I get to spend loads and loads of time across many industry verticals, see many many campaigns, translate many many foreign websites (thanks Google Chrome for auto-translate!) and meet many many many executives and hear about their digital marketing strategies, challenges and outcomes.
Occam's Razor
JUNE 28, 2011
Web Analysts are blessed with an immense amount of data, and an amazing amount of valuable, even sexy, metrics to understand business performance. Yet our heroic efforts to report the aforementioned sexy metrics lead to little business action. Why? Sure your organization could be to blame ( org structure, bad boss , ineffectual team ). Perhaps your client did not provide you with the all important Web Analytics Measurement Model.
Occam's Razor
JUNE 6, 2011
I got an email the other day with this simple question: "How do break into the world of web analytics?" Actually I get that question almost every single day. :). The interest is not surprising. There is a ton of excitement about web analytics. Companies are starting to think innovatively about the web (no more unintelligent banner ads or digital "crimes against humanity" ), and they are starting to understand the power of data to delight customers and drive accountability.
Occam's Razor
AUGUST 22, 2011
Here you'll find all my blog posts categorized into a structure that will hopefully make it easy for you to discover new content, find answers to your questions, or simply wallow in some excellent analytics narratives. To assist with that process everything's organized into these sections: ~ Digital Marketing: "What is amazing out there?
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Occam's Razor
AUGUST 8, 2011
99.9996253% of Web Analytics reports produced are utterly useless. Partly because of a lack of any tie to business strategy (ensure you have a Digital Marketing & Measurement Model !), partly because they are out of the box standard reports that web analytics vendors create for “average” people (and we both know that you are not average!), and partly because all they do is present data in the aggregate (a punishable criminal offence if there ever was one!).
Occam's Razor
JANUARY 24, 2011
Regular readers of this blog will recognize that I suffer from OOD. Outcomes Obsession Disorder. I am seeing a therapist for it. The way OOD manifests itself is that in every website and web business I work with I am obnoxiously persistent in helping identify the desired outcomes of the site / business before I ever log into their web analytics data.
Occam's Razor
JANUARY 10, 2011
Let's start off the new year with lessons learned from a tough life on the front lines of trying to make the world a smidgen more data-driven. This post is a collection of six things I wish I knew before I started my career in decision support systems (of which web analytics is just the latest incarnation). These lessons might have made some goals easier to accomplish, some frustrations easier to avoid and some salary jumps easier to come by.
Occam's Razor
SEPTEMBER 19, 2011
With a plethora of digital media channels at our disposal and new ones on the way every day(!), how do you prioritize your efforts? How do you figure out which channels to invest in more and which to kill? How do you figure out if you are spending more money reaching the exact same current or prospective customers multiple times? How do you get over the frustration of having done attribution modeling and realizing that it is not even remotely the solution to your challenge of using multiple medi
Speaker: Mike Rizzo, Founder & CEO, MarketingOps.com and Darrell Alfonso, Director of Marketing Strategy and Operations, Indeed.com
Though rarely in the spotlight, marketing operations are the backbone of the efficiency, scalability, and alignment that define top-performing marketing teams. In this exclusive webinar led by industry visionaries Mike Rizzo and Darrell Alfonso, we’re giving marketing operations the recognition they deserve! We will dive into the 7 P Model —a powerful framework designed to assess and optimize your marketing operations function.
Occam's Razor
FEBRUARY 22, 2011
Just when you thought you were finally getting more comfortable with website analytics and the metrics you report, here comes the massive explosion of mobile data! At one level it is the normal impressions and clicks data, but on another level we are getting new data and metrics we normally don't use. We are going to have fun doing cool stuff, learning new things.
Occam's Razor
MAY 16, 2011
My beloved little labor of love, this analytics blog, is 5 years old today. Five! I am so proud of having reached this incredible milestone, because when I started I was not sure I would make it to the first anniversary. Let me tell you how utterly improbable it seemed. My first blog post, on May 15th, 2006, was titled Traditional Web Analytics is Dead (let me emphasize the first word, traditional ).
Occam's Razor
FEBRUARY 7, 2011
After 416,350 words in posts and 845,128 words in comments on this blog, thus far, there is always more to explore, illuminate and share. Hence every once in a while I flip the tables and ask you for challenges you are facing. It is a great way to stay connected to what's most important to you (and keep the blog and its content relevant!). This past Monday I asked for your questions and you were kind enough to share some awesome questions.
Occam's Razor
MARCH 22, 2011
Day in and day out we stare at standard tables and rows and convert them into smaller or scarier tables and rows and through analysis we try and move the really heavy beast called the "organization" into action. It is hard. This blog post has three ideas I've learned from other smart people, ideas that help surprise the "organization" with something non-normal and get it to take action.
Speaker: Jay Allardyce, Deepak Vittal, Terrence Sheflin, and Mahyar Ghasemali
As we look ahead to 2025, business intelligence and data analytics are set to play pivotal roles in shaping success. Organizations are already starting to face a host of transformative trends as the year comes to a close, including the integration of AI in data analytics, an increased emphasis on real-time data insights, and the growing importance of user experience in BI solutions.
Edwin Chen
MARCH 13, 2011
Lots of people know that the Riemann Hypothesis has something to do with prime numbers, but most introductions fail to say what or why. I’ll try to give one angle of explanation. Layman’s Terms. Suppose you have a bunch of friends, each with an instrument that plays at a frequency equal to the imaginary part of a zero of the Riemann zeta function.
Occam's Razor
MARCH 7, 2011
Many of you are aware that I am the co-Founder of Market Motive, a delightful little labor of love whose mission in life is to provide bleeding edge education via quarterly, what we call, Master Certification courses. There are seven courses in all: SEO, PPC, Social Media, Web Analytics, Conversion Optimization, Marketing Fundamentals and Online PR.
Edwin Chen
APRIL 24, 2011
Kickstarter is an online crowdfunding platform for launching creative projects. When starting a new project, project owners specify a deadline and the minimum amount of money they need to raise. They receive the money (less a transaction fee) only if they reach or exceed that minimum; otherwise, no money changes hands. What’s particularly fun about Kickstarter is that in contrast to that other microfinance site , Kickstarter projects don’t ask for loans; instead, patrons receive pre-
Edwin Chen
MARCH 13, 2011
I was playing around with the Hacker News database Ronnie Roller made (thanks!), so I thought I’d post some of the things I looked at. Activity on the Site. My first question was how activity on the site has increased over time. I looked at number of posts, points on posts, comments on posts, and number of users. Posts. This looks like a strong linear fit, with an increase of 292 posts every month.
Speaker: Donna Laquidara-Carr, PhD, LEED AP, Industry Insights Research Director at Dodge Construction Network
In today’s construction market, owners, construction managers, and contractors must navigate increasing challenges, from cost management to project delays. Fortunately, digital tools now offer valuable insights to help mitigate these risks. However, the sheer volume of tools and the complexity of leveraging their data effectively can be daunting. That’s where data-driven construction comes in.
Edwin Chen
MARCH 13, 2011
Measure theory studies ways of generalizing the notions of length/area/volume. Even in 2 dimensions, it might not be clear how to measure the area of the following fairly tame shape: much less the “area” of even weirder shapes in higher dimensions or different spaces entirely. For example, suppose you want to measure the length of a book (so that you can get a good sense of how long it takes to read).
Edwin Chen
SEPTEMBER 6, 2011
tl;dr See this movie visualization for a case study on how a post propagates through Quora. How does information spread through a network? Much of Quora’s appeal, after all, lies in its social graph – and when you’ve got a network of users, all broadcasting their activities to their neighbors, information can cascade in multiple ways.
Edwin Chen
APRIL 30, 2011
(See a demo here.). While working on a Twitter sentiment analysis project, I ran into the problem of needing to filter out all non-English tweets. (Asking the Twitter API for English-only tweets doesn’t seem to work, as it nonetheless returns tweets in Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Russian, and a couple other languages.). Since I didn’t have any labeled data, I thought it would be fun to build an unsupervised language classifier.
Edwin Chen
MARCH 13, 2011
(Way back when, I went through all the Netflix prize papers. I’m now (very slowly) trying to clean up my notes and put them online. Eventually, I hope to have a more integrated tutorial, but here’s a rough draft for now.). This is a summary of Koren’s 2008 Factorization Meets the Neighborhood: a Multifaceted Collaborative Filtering Model.
Speaker: Christophe Louvion, Chief Product & Technology Officer of NRC Health and Tony Karrer, CTO at Aggregage
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