A great post on testing ideas using Google Website Optimiser.
How many of these variables have you tested in your campaigns?
Top Tips: http://www.blastam.com/blog/index.php/2009/03/top-50-google-website-optimizer-tips-on-what-to-test/
Filed under: Web Analytics
This is a very cool app brought to you by the guys at Dabble DB. It takes your raw Google Analytics data and pulls trends from it.
Something we’ve been waiting for from Google for ages. Nice work guys.
Check it out: http://trendly.com/about/
Suppose you are told you must marry, and that you must choose your spouse out of 100 applicants.
You may interview each applicant once. After each interview you must decide whether to marry that person.
If you decline, you lose the opportunity forever. If you work your way through 99 applicants without choosing one, you must marry the 100th. You may think you have 1 in 100 chance of marrying your ideal partner, but the truth is that you can do a lot better than that.
More: http://trueslant.com/ryansager/2009/08/17/the-mathematics-of-marriage/
Virtual Gravity [virtualgravity.de] is an interactive data sculpture that makes a bridge between the digital and the analog world.
Individual keywords can be selected and transported from a computer screen to an analog scale.
The importance and popularity of these terms, determined by Google Insights for Search, are then represented as virtual weights, which can be physically compared on the scale.
More: http://infosthetics.com/archives/2009/08/virtual_gravity_the_physical_weight_of_data.html#extended
Go Aussies – coming in at #4! – Check it: http://snippets.com/how-much-does-beer-consumption-vary-by-country.htm
Filed under: Social Media, Statistics | Tags: Social Media Statistic, Trends
Watch Video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sIFYPQjYhv8
A great story in the Silicon Valley business journal on a company I admire greatly. They have an amazing ability to visualise and communicate all sorts of data and are based here in the Valley.
THE BUSINESS: Duarte Design Inc. specialises in developing presentations for the stage, Web or electronic devices.
CUSTOMERS: Its customers are diverse, including technology, biotech, entertainment and the public sector. Clients include Adobe Systems Inc., Apple Inc., Google Inc., Cisco Systems Inc., the Food Network and Nestle Corp.
It also does work for individuals including Al Gore, and Michael Pollan, the writer and journalist featured in the movie “Food, Inc.”
More: http://www.duarte.com/
Do small changes make a big difference? In the world of landing page testing, they certainly can. A few weeks ago, Youtube ran one of the largest multivariate experiments ever: a 1,024 recipe experiment on 100% of our US-English homepage.
Utilizing Google Website Optimizer, they made small changes to three sections on their homepage (see below), with the goal of increasing the number of people who signed up for an account. The results were impressive: the new page performed 15.7% better than the original, resulting in thousands more sign-ups and personalized views to the homepage every day.
More: http://youtube-global.blogspot.com/2009/08/look-inside-1024-recipe-multivariate.html
Filed under: Web Analytics | Tags: Developers Challenge, Omniture, SiteCatalyst
Back in March Omniture announced our $25K Partner Developer Challenge. The challenge offered first and second place prizes of $15K and $10K respectively, plus the opportunity to promote the winning applications to Omniture customers.
Finalists were selected recently and they have recently announced three winners, one for first prize, and tie for second prize.
Finalists were chosen based on three core criteria which they call the “three C’s”: Commercial value – are their customers or other developers likely to see value in the application?; Creativity – is this something interesting and new, or is it a rehashing of an old idea? Consumability – is it well-documented? Is it well-understood what the application is and what it does? After evaluating submissions based on these criteria, their platform product leadership team selected three winners.
More: http://blogs.omniture.com/2009/08/21/omniture-announces-winners-of-25k-partner-developer-challenge/
The project, called Personas
, comes from the MIT Media Lab built by Aaron Zinman. Basically, it takes your name and searches the web for some context around it. It then takes the words and sites it finds to build a profile of your presence on the web. Or in MIT-speak using words like “corpus”:
Enter your name, and Personas scours the web for information and attempts to characterise the person – to fit them to a predetermined set of categories that an algorithmic process created from a massive corpus of data. The computational process is visualised with each stage of the analysis, finally resulting in the presentation of a seemingly authoritative personal profile.
Simply put, Personas represents the way the web sees you (or more specifically, your name).
More: http://personas.media.mit.edu/personasWeb.html
