D/w-BI-Analytics « TechNayak(mirror)

Analytics gets a facelift and new tracking code

December 19, 2007 at 3:29 pm | In D/w-BI-Analytics, Web News | Leave a Comment

Google updated their Analytics product by launching a new script termed ga.js that is used for tracking. The new script handles more complexity than the original urchin.js script and the analytics tool itself has some new features that can be utilized only by ga.js tracking. You can also compare multiple metrics on the same graph thanks to the new graphing features included in the recent update. The new updates seem really neat and there is a detailed PDF describing migration instructions and how to’s.

The older tracking code urchin.js will still continue to work for at least another year but there will be no feature updates or compatibility with the newer features. For me , this change means revisiting lots ( and I mean lots ) of pages where I have embedded the tracking code. Lets hope it goes smoothly.

Bounce rates and Usability of websites

July 3, 2007 at 3:48 pm | In D/w-BI-Analytics, Tips,Tricks and code, gyaan | Leave a Comment

Note : I blog on my personal space at riteshnayak.com/blog . This is a mirror of the content.

I am a wannabe webmaster, I ever so often get involved in discussions with webmasters and build engineers about hosting, reliability and optimization tricks and so on. I am also a big fan of analytics and web site metrics. My experience spans with my first tool webstat, webalizer , awstats and then graduated to Google Analytics. I am interested in the dynamics of a website, what gets your visitors there, what keeps them there, what are their turn offs and so on. My own blog has been an experiment with analytics, I keep track of my stats and compare them to my site’s design and usability and yes they all culminate to one wierd mass of analytics mess that needs a lot of time and patience to comprehend.

Of some of the metrics that I found interesting apart from interestingness , entry points, exits , pageviews , timespent etc I liked the bounce rate very much. Yes bounce rate is the most amazing metric when it comes to the web.

In a nutshell bounce rate measures the percentage of people who come to your website and leave “instantly”. – Avinash Kaushik

Sites with good content have very low bounce rates, that coz users stay on the site for longer than just their immediate need. This metric is extremely important to consider as it could lead to some startling discoveries. Bounce rates directly translate to your site’s usability and design. A complicated design often confuses a user and he or she tends to leave a site if the site seems too cluttered ( which is why I hate GoDaddy’s design ). A blank design with no navigational links is also bad. Once the user finishes reading what he/she came to read, you need to coax them to stay longer. Either by giving them sneak peaks of other related articles or any abstract writeup, tags, internal links and so on. For bloggers, please do read this article to make a list of things to lookout for when picking your blogs design.

Google Analytics relaunches with a new interface.

May 12, 2007 at 2:42 pm | In D/w-BI-Analytics, Web News | Leave a Comment

For my first surprise, I was greeted by a “we have changed” page on my Google Analytics account. The interface have been redone and the personalizations built into the account. You can now drag and drop items into your dashboard like the igoogle interface and make your custom dashboard. You can even schedule and get reports delivered as pdfs.

The new interface has also removed the rough edges the application had in terms of usability and have done a tremendous job on the personalization front. Its worth a look. If you liked the older interface better, then thats on the offering too, just a link away, but the new beta homepage is worth the effort.

Interestingness – a new metric for content

May 12, 2007 at 2:36 pm | In D/w-BI-Analytics, Unsolved Problems, Web 2.0, rant | Leave a Comment

At the Big Thinkers conference by Andrew Tomkins of Yahoo, the word interestingness caught my attention. Though the idea of judging the interestingness of an object like a photo, document, video seems far fetched, I nevertheless was fascinated by the possibilities of this new metric. I found this patent document filed by Yahoo for their interestingness concept in Flickr.

claim 1: An apparatus for determining an interestingness rank for at least one media object, comprising: logic for accepting at least one metadatum concerning the at least one media object from at least one user; and logic for ranking the at least one media object based at least in part on the quantity of user-entered metadata concerning the at least one media object.

The apparatus of claim 1, wherein the user-entered metadata comprises a member of the group consisting of: tags, comments and annotations.

Well there are new web metrics being rolled out almost everyday and its only time, at least some of them, become mainstream. One of the strong contenders I feel is the interestingness metric. Based on the number of bookmarks, clicks , click throughs, views, tags, annotations, visits, visit length and many many more factors interestingness can be defined, although this may not be Flickr’s definition. Any piece of information like a music piece , a podcast, a blogpost, a video clip, a picture etc can be associated with interestingness – It simply gives the most popular item amongst a list of inventory. These items can also possess geographical information, time line and other information that can be used to extract essential patterns from these items.

The usage, could be a phenomenon on its own. Define a properly ranked algorithm and you could have your top selling items on your e commerce site. You could target geographically distributed audience with content of their choice and also give interesting timeline applications that let you see trends over time. Say for example you run a shopping portal, you could give a time line graph highlighting your most sold items over a period of time. This could also prove a big step in the analytics area where ROI and conversion from visitors to buyers play a significant role in everyday business and concepts like these could really boost your sales. Its still unsolved from a very broad sense, meaning there isn’t a standard set of practices to encompass such a wide variety of data and there isnt such capable systems that could mine patterns out of these collations. But its definitely interesting

I shifted, remember? so should you

April 17, 2007 at 5:45 pm | In Architecture - Design, Blogroll, Cool Web 2.0 Sites, D/w-BI-Analytics, General, Suggested Reading, Tips,Tricks and code, Web 2.0, Web News, gyaan, rant, socionets | 1 Comment

I have moved my blog to my personal space but continue to mirror content here because there are many who still read this blog. I see a lot of feeds pointing to this blog rather than my new space. Please update your bookmarks and RSS subscriptions to my new space.

My blog: http://riteshnayak.com/blog

RSS Feed : http://riteshnayak.com/blog/feed

Who am I? : http://riteshnayak.com

If you are not the RSS type and also don’t find the time to read my blogs, get it delivered by mail. Sign up by clicking on the link below and all my updates will be sent you by mail

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Im moving ….. to my personal space

March 28, 2007 at 3:39 pm | In Architecture - Design, Blogroll, Cool Web 2.0 Sites, D/w-BI-Analytics, General, Tips,Tricks and code, Web 2.0, Web News, gyaan, rant, socionets | 2 Comments

It was long due, but, finally I got my own domain riteshnayak.com and will blog there. I have installed wordpress on my server but couldn’t automatically redirect from here.

Please visit my personal site here

RiteshNayak.com

for my blog visit

RiteshNayak.com/blog

People using feed readers, please change your subscription to this address.

http://riteshnayak.com/blog/feed

I shall try and maintain both the blogs with common posts, but I cant promise anything with the amount of time I have left to blog.

Fun with Statistics

March 19, 2007 at 8:26 am | In D/w-BI-Analytics | 1 Comment

I have been working on Business Intelligence for over a year now and have seen lots of high end tools and applications. I develop BI solutions for a Fortune 50 company using some really high end BI tools to do the analysis and reporting. Analytics and BI have become more and more streamlined and are really beginning to make a difference in organizations and have started impacting them in a big way. More and more people are taking notice of the power of intelligent reporting and have begun to invest in BI solutions. This trend is observed clearly by the sharp increase in outsourced BI work to Indian tech companies. Seems like SOA and BI are the only projects coming our way. And yes, this trend is here to stay.

All said and done, analysis of boring looking tabular reports have become passe’ , its the age of cool tools that make reports more fun. Some of my recent favorites have been Google Analytics, with its flash enabled reports and also some really neat functionality built in cleverly into deceptive looking graphics. I was also excited when i looked at Crystal’s Xcelsius and its slick new outlook. My most recent fun tool is definitely Gapminder, recently acquired by Google for its really awesome looking interface. Take a look at this report and see for yourself how reports can be fun

some screenshots :