slidedown

business intelligence

Getting my hands dirty

I have been at Connected for over 16 months. Throughout this time I have heard the term Big.TOE mentioned several times and never understood it. When I first got here I didn’t understand anything, and when I would request explanations on this interestingly named… thing, I would be told it means “Business Intelligence Group Theory [...]

Google Analytics is not for marketers

Back in 2005 Google acquired a great little analytics company, Urchin and shortly afterwards shook up the web analysis world by offering the previously chargeable product for free. It’s progress over the last 5 years has been one of Google’s great success stories and around half of the respectable commercial sites in the world use [...]

First time, last time, every-time

Measuring how visitors come to your site and convert is a critical part of understanding the factors that drive success. Traditional methods (such as Google Analytics) uses last touch or last visit to measure how a conversion took place but this is only part of the story. It is possible to hack most of the [...]

Good lessons in 250 A/B tests

We’ve just finished our financial year and, feck me, it’s been a busy old year. I’ll do a fuller post highlighting how the year went in more detail but the big thing we’ve seen this year is the explosive growth and (almost) 100% adoption of web site testing. From just 35% of our clients embracing [...]

The cost of delaying – getting a testing regime implemented

Most organisations, especially marketing-driven ones, are not familiar with one of the greatest web weapons available, namely continual testing. Traditional departments hum their day away thinking of great new “marketing” initiatives and wish they had invented the Meerkat or the two annoying blokes on the Safestyle Windows advert. Most of what they produce is low-grade, [...]

Tactile web?

The absence of many of the senses (touch, smell, taste and largely, hear) when interacting with t’interweb is a challenge that at some point needs addressing if we are to replicate the real world into the virtual world. Lots of studies have shown that these senses greatly influence our decisions and if virtual environments seek [...]

Farming in a virtual future

Image via Wikipedia China is seeing the rise of online “Gold Farming” This is the practice of hiring a group of mainly poor kids to ply their way through the myriad of online games (Everquake, World of Warcraft et al) collecting things of value to other gamers such as gold, potions, weapons etc. These items [...]

VITES 3.0 Features & benefits

Due for restricted launch at the end of Summer, VITES 3.0 brings a whole new set of features for market-leading organisations to rip into and turn into huge competitive advantage Here is a brief outline of what you can expect in the next release of the worlds first, commercially available, personalisation and customer journey platform [...]

A statistical quandary

This post takes me back to my favourite subject of statistics We’ve all heard the “lies, damn lies and statistics” quote and still, all too frequently, statistics have been made “to fit” a required outcome Most people know that this is wrong but still blindly accept the results, probably from a lack of their own [...]

Information is not knowledge, or power

The oft misused phrase that “information is power” generates some pretty big headaches for organisations. Just by gathering information on, for example, web-site activity suddenly turns ageing IT and obsolete marketing departments into “great houses of power”. Funny, eh? One of the great dilemmas facing organisations embracing the web today is not information poverty, as [...]