Hut! Hut! … HIKE!

photo credit: bigeoino, creative commons license

Hey, I’ll be at XChange next week, leading a huddle on developing reports. The focus will be Excel because

• it’s what I’m most familiar with
• all things considered, it’s pretty easy to use - even for a n00b
• it’s widely deployed in most organizations so it doesn’t require an IT project to deploy and most business users are familiar with it

The huddle will hopefully be a discussion of best practices for developing sustainable web analytics reports - I really don’t want to talk at people for 2 hours, I want opinions, experiences, tips and tricks and discussions that will make us all better at report development. As the huddle leader I will come armed with questions and opinions that will serve to facilitate the discussion. It will be my job to get the huddle going, keep it on task and make sure we have a positive environment for discussion. It will be your job to bring your brains and experience. If we do our job well we should be able to come up with some substantive wisdom that everyone can use - not just us.

Interested? Today is your last day to get your huddle preferences into the folks at SEMPhonic.

Other huddles that I am interested in? (I know I won’t be able to attend them all - alas)

• Understanding Consumer Attitudes on the Web by Joseph Carrabis
• Deploying measurement systems across the globally distributed enterprise by Judah Phillips
• Advanced Visitor Segmentation by Matt Belkin
• Customer and Web Behavioral Integration by Matt Jacobs
• Measuring Return on Engagement by Terry Cohen
• Optimizing Main and Secondary Navigation by my colleague Olivier Sylvestre
• Persuasion Architecture & Functionalism by John Q (FutureNow!) and Gary Angel (SEMPhonic)
• And, of course, I am looking forward to Eric’s Keynote.

The full agenda is here.

Like so many other in our clique, I’m heading to San Fran for Emetrics.
I’ll be at the WAA General Meeting and Reception Sunday evening and at the event Monday - Wednesday.

This will be my second year at Emetrics, but unfortunately I am not speaking this time (or perhaps fortunately for those who remember my session from last year).

Thanks to Andrea Wiggins, Data Analyst at Enlighten and University of Michigan School of Information Student, for taking (and posting) pictures of Emetrics. Here’s a link to her MSI page, but it doesn’t seem to like me very much.

Thanks Again Andrea!

Well, it’s over and I am tired.
It was a great event. My head is still spinning.
One of my favorite parts was talking to Avinash Kaushik of Intuit and Web Analytics is Dead fame. This is a very sharp guy.

In any case, I had just finished presenting on report design (big shock) and he wanted my opinion on using UCLs and LCLs (Upper Control Limits and Lower Control Limits) in charts and I had a DUH! moment.

Using UCLs and LCLs (in this case, based on standard deviation) is a great way to show your report users what to ignore or not worry about. Normal variation (or as Avinash called it - biorythm) can appear quite extreme to the uninitiated so they might leap into action when action is not needed.

As a bonus, using constants like limits allows you to eliminate Axis grid lines (chart junk).

I always enjoy listening to the guys from Future Now about the Persuasion Architecture. The part that I like best is the strategic approach and thought process but it’s all good. We had John Quarto-vonTivadar, CTO, talking today and he took us through the persuasion architecture but also presented an XML tool that Future Now has developed for piping the correct configuration into your web analytics package (just HBX to start) for measurement of your persuasion architecture.

The one thought of his that I want to leave you with is this: Plan first. And that is not just planning your measurement, it means planning the persuasion path from A to Z before you even think about how you will measure it. Put it another way, its useless to measure a process if you haven’t planned the process before hand (otherwise how can you be sure what the data is telling you).

Other cool thoughts:
The data is inaccurate and it is still true (paraphrasing Jim Sterne)
The data is inaccurate - get over it (paraphrasing Avinash)
Note: the point of both these statements is that even with the inaccuracy inherent in web data, as long as we measure consistently we can still use it effectively

I’ll be at the Emetrics summit the next few days. Eric Peterson has promised to blog so hopefully I won’t have to correct him ;~)

This will be my first time at Emetrics as well as my first WAA annual meeting and I am looking forward to both.