Matt Bailey and John Marshall debate the role of web analytics at SES San Jose 2009

SEMPO president Sara Holoubek http://www.saraholoubek.com/ interviews Matt Bailey, president of Site Logic, http://www.sitelogicmarketing.com and John Marshall, CTO of Market Motive, http://www.marketmotive.com on the finer points of web analytics. To support his theory of quitting early Marshall relates an incident with Van Halen. Van Halen used to insist that M&M's were part of their snacks but insisted there be no brown M&M's. They thus made everybody believe that they were prima donnas desirous only of making life difficult for people. However, they merely wanted to make sure their contract had been read properly and their gear was set up: if Van Halen found brown M&M's in their mix, that indicated that their contract may not have been read closely, and they could anticipate further trouble -- so they sometimes just refused to come to the gig. That idea is very important to web analytics, because we often end up with very complex programs, and it's important to realize that when we know if we are in a situation that is never going to work, it's better to skip that problem and move on to other solvable ones. To sum it up, if you are going to lose at something, lose early. Matt Bailey debates that notion, opting for the why? You have always got to be asking yourself: Why are we doing this? What are the goals? Why are we adding something to the site that doesn't conform to the goals? The analyst is the most subversive person in an organization, because they are constantly questioning campaign performances, and trying to dig dipper to improve it.

Category:

Science & Technology

Tags:

• matt-bailey
• site-logic
• john-marshall
• market-motive
• sara-holoubek
• sempo
• ses
• search-engine
• ses-san-jose-2009
• san
• jose
• 2009
• search-engine-marketing
• sem
• seo

[AusmedEducation]

What web analytics tool do you recommend that is similar to Google and Yahoo analytics and is free? Are there any?

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