Within the realm of my consulting business, my 3rd year was a banner year for me. I’ve gone from the realm of just squeaking by to actually earning a comfortable enough income that I can consider retirement savings again (whew – that one had me a bit worried. I am very behind on my retirement savings so I need to catch up!).

In 2011 I averaged 23.5 billable hours per week. I had my share of of peaks (70+ hours) and valleys (1 hour) during the year. In 2012 my goal is to increase that average to 30 billable hours/week, and also to try and smooth out those peaks and valleys as well.  Ideally I won’t peak above 50 hours/week too often. Also, with the exception of any vacations I decide to take, I’d like my valleys to not dip below 10 hours/week.

In 2011 I also managed to negotiate myself a 13% “raise” with my clients. This was the first time in 3 years I raised my rates so I was pleased that my clients were open to the increase. I now don’t plan to raise my rates again until 2014. Instead I will focus on trying to get more consistent billable hours per week instead.

Another goal I have for 2012 is to become more proficient with eCommerce. This still is an area I am lacking expertise in. I’ve done some work with eCommerce clients in 2011, but I am hoping to increase that in 2012. I feel quite comfortable working with lead generation and brand awareness focused clients, however I need to continue to push myself out of my comfort zone. I also want to do more digital measurement – tracking mobile apps and social media. As I said earlier, I can’t just focus on the Web anymore.

Just on a personal note, in 2011 I also became engaged to my very wonderful sweetheart. We plan to marry sometime in 2012.  My other personal goals for 2012 include trying to get all the little remodeling projects in our house done so we can sell and upgrade (with 2 humans, 2 dogs, 2 cats and an aquarium of fish, this house is starting to feel a little bit cramped!).

What are your goals for 2012? Please share!

The main presenters each had 20 minutes to provide 10 tips on whichever topic they were presenting on. All the presenters finished on-time and provided a ton of great tips across a wide variety of topics including:

• Social Analytics
• Monetizing Facebook
• Building an Integrated Listening Environment
• Mobile Strategy
• Tag Management Systems
• Creating a Data Driven Organization
• Turning Around your Web Analytics Program
• Improving your Vendor Relationship
• Building a Great Digital Measurement Team

After the main speakers concluded, it was time for the Super Accelerator session. Each Super Accelerator had 5 minutes to focus on one point/topic. The final one of the day was the best (and the speaker won a prize) by doing his entire presentation in rhyme. Some of the topics covered by the Super Accelerators included:

• Stop Being a Report Monkey
• The Rarity of a True Web Analyst
• Sharing the Story Behind the Data
• Competitive Facebook Analytics
• Web Analytics Career Development
• Learning to Say No
• Having Unconditional Love for Customers, Co-Workers and Vendors
• Media Fragmentation
• Benefits of “Freemium” Analytics Tools
• Mobile Analytics
• Tracking User Behavior while Respecting their Privacy

Here are my top five learnings from the fire-hose of data I was doused with at this conference:

1. It’s not just about web analytics anymore, it’s about digital measurement (web, mobile, social media, who knows what’s next?)
2. When marketing on Facebook, use ads, not the wall on your company page. The wall is for engaging with your followers.
3. Data is dirty. Get over it!
4. When working with vendors, do not assume they can read your mind!
5. As consumption of digital content via mobile devices increases, mobile analytics is becoming increasingly critical.

Success did not come immediately – it took me 5 months to find my first real client. That was the break-through moment for me, when I landed that 8-month project. It was then that I had an inkling that maybe I might be able to make it independently. Then it took another 5 months to find the next client, which led to my doubting that remaining independent would work out.

However, when I landed that client in April, 2010 – that is when I went full-steam ahead with no looking back. That client was an agency who put me on an open-ended contract and as of today is still my primary client. I am very grateful to them as they have helped me sustain my business.

In 2011 my goal was to add a 2nd long-term client, and I am happy to report that I have done just that. Throughout 2011 I’ve had other clients come and go with small projects, but finally in August I signed a long-term contract with another agency who will be able to provide me an endless array of projects.

My goal, looking at 2012, will be to increase my average weekly billable hours. Not that I’m unhappy with the current amount of billable hours I currently average, however I have some personal goals I need to reach and increasing my billable hours with my clients will help me achieve them.

Happy 11-11-11 everyone! I feel almost like the entire world is today celebrating my success!

Let me walk  you through a typical implementation from a high-level and you will clearly see why having a detailed process in place before the project begins, will ensure everything is completed on-time.

Requirements Gathering

With any web project, the first step must be gathering requirements from the client. Before I can determine the best KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) to track, I need to first understand what the clients’ goals are for the site. Many of the sites I have worked on have been micro-sites with a very clear, specific goal (contact an agent, download a PDF, sign-up for a newsletter). However on larger, more complex sites, there may be multiple goals, and therefore more complex KPIs. I do try and keep the KPIs to 5 or less, no matter how large or complex the site is. If this isn’t possible, I try and consider breaking the site up into sections, and identifying 1-2 KPIs per section.

Since I work with agencies, they often do this part of the process without me and just send me the documented requirements.

Tracking Manifest

Once the requirements have been gathered and the KPIs have been determined, the next phase I always do is put together a detailed tracking manifest. This is a spreadsheet with a list of every page/screen of a site, and every track-able action. I often go through and list every single action and then trim out the detail that isn’t needed. I feel it’s better to list too many actions, than to accidentally miss a few critical ones. Within the manifest I detail out things like the page names, type of action (onLoad, onClick, onSubmit) to be tracked, and any and all custom variables it makes sense to set for each.

Code Implementation

Depending on the client, either I go ahead and do the implementation myself, or I work closely with a developer who will be doing the actual code implementation. In either case the detailed tracking manifest becomes very critical at this stage. Many sites are complex and it can be easy to miss adding the code for a specific custom variable if there isn’t a detailed check-list to help guide you page-per-page. This ensures all the necessary code and code snippets are not missed.

Quality-Assurance (QA) Testing

The final part of the process is doing a thorough round of QA testing. I use my tracking manifest as a test plan as well, and go through every page and action to make sure each step is being tracked originally intended. This requires the site to live in a staging server that is tied into the analytics tool. I like to use a combination of tools to test the implementation. I have a variety of FireFox plugins, a couple of stand-alone code debuggers (Charles and Fiddler 2) and the analytics tool itself that I look at during a QA test.

So as you can tell any analytics implementation can be quite complex, and without a detailed process in place, things can quickly go wrong and delay or even derail the project. Make sure you have your ducks in a row ahead of time and you will increase your chance of a smooth and successful implementation.

As a tablet computer owner I am finding some sites difficult to use. Not because they use Flash (I have an Android tablet), but because they insist on forcing me to view the “mobile” version of their site. Some sites do offer the option to swithc to their “full” or “desktop” version, but often I have to re-select this on every page. Other sites never even give me this option, and I find the mobile versions of their sites both unattractive, and limited, when using my tablet.

Mobile optimized web sites are awesome when I am browsing with my phone, but once you use a 10.1″ tablet, they really are less than ideal. Tablet optimized may also be an option depending on how whiz-bang your site is, but often my tablet can handle the full version of most sites.

When looking at the mobile stats for my clients over the past two quarters I noticed a significant increase in tablet traffic to their sites. To that end I have begun reporting on those stats so they are aware and can make the appropriate business decisions for those users. I am recommending to all of them to either serve the full versions of their sites to anyone running Android 3.0 or higher, developing a tablet optimized version, or at the very least including the option to switch to the full site if they wish. In addition I am recommending if they choose the 3rd option, to place a cookie to remember that option, so as the user navigates the site, they are not brought back to the mobile version with every click to a new page.

I highly recommend anyone reading this post to check the mobile stats for your site, if you are not already doing so, and start thinking about options for the tablet computer users who visit your site.

That being said, I don’t care how fantastic of tool you have, if the UI is lacking in usability, it really frustrates the heck out of me. I won’t pick on any one vendor in particular but when it comes to both having a robust analytics tool, and a usable interface, my pick over all the rest that I’ve work with so far has got to be SiteCatalyst, followed by Google Analytics.

Here’s an example of a UI that’s really lacking in usability – one tool I’ve been working with recently requires you to click a button in order to “apply” any sort of date change. If you want to change between profiles (report suites) the data always resets to the current month. It even resets to the current month when navigating within a profile at times as well. This makes running reports very time consuming, especially if I want to run a report and I need a specific date range (like if I’m running quarterly reports across multiple profiles, for example). Omniture  really got this one right – they only reset the date back to the current month if you are logging in or have been away from the tool for an extended period of time. My selected date range remains across reports, and across report suites without having to reset everything each time.

This is but one small example of a UI that’s really lacking in usability, which in the end wastes my time and my clients’ money.

At this year’s Omniture Summit they made two exciting product announcements – SiteCatalyst 15 and Social Analytics. I’m personally excited about both of these products and I’d like to share why I’m eagerly anticipating getting to use both of them.

SiteCatalyst 15

SiteCatalyst 15 is more than just an upgrade to the SiteCatalyst tool. It introduces an entirely new platform, UI changes and some very long awaited feature additions like:

• Segmentation

  This was one of the biggest features that Google Analytics exceeded SiteCatalyst in. When Google Analytics introduced Advanced Segments it had an edge over Omniture/Adobe since trying to get segmented data in SiteCatalyst was a rather tedious and/or expensive proposition (expensive if you opted to pay for additional tools like Discover or Insight).

• Bounce Rate

  This is a much maligned metric and I discuss in more detail why I don’t feel it’s an entirely useless metric in my previous blog post. I personally am happy to see this as a default metric going forward (thank you!).

• Full-Subrelations on all eVars

  Until now, in order to get full-subrelations enabled on an eVar, you had to request it from ClientCare, and even then you were usually limited to only 3-5 eVars that could have full-subrelations enabled. Now they will be enabled for all eVars, all the time. This is awesome! With full-subrelations enabled on all eVars, this opens up the possibility of gaining more depth and insight across your eVar data and will greatly improve conversion analysis.

• Improved video reporting

  Instead of separate video reports, video reports are now going to be included across all metrics by default. If you have a tagged video, you should be able to get video data across all reports. This will make getting at this data a lot easier and require less development.

• Trending multiple metrics

  Showing trends of multiple metrics will save me a lot of time when I’m preparing my reports. I always have to download the data and put it into Excel in order to produce a trended chart of multiple metrics. If this can be automated within Omniture, it will increase my productivity a lot. (Hmm although, since I charge by the hour, if I can do my work faster, I end up charging my clients less … hey wait! … hehe just kiddin’!)

• Processing Rules

  Based on a video made by @VaBeachKevin, SiteCatalyst also introduced new processing rules in the Admin tool. This looks really exciting to me because instead of working with developers to write fancy JavaScript to process the values and/or conditions for such things as events, evars and props, SiteCatalyst now lets you do it straight in the tool. This will also really help my productivity as I won’t have to write detailed instructions for developers and wait for them to get around to implementing my requested changes. This won’t eliminate the need for developers entirely, but for a non-developer like myself, being able to do more within the tool myself will reduce one bottleneck in my process.

So those are a few of the things I’m really excited about with SiteCatalyst 15.

Social Analytics

Social Analytics won’t launch for a few more months, but this is yet another tool I’m very eager to work with. The details on this tool are not as fleshed out as with SiteCatalyst 15 (which is now live), but just knowing there will be a dedicated Social Analytics tool is exciting in-and-of itself. It will compete directly with Radian 6 and monitor social media activity in tools such as Facebook, Twitter and YouTube. It will compliment SiteCatalyst, but will not require SiteCatalyst (which would be important for companies that focus specifically on providing social media services to their clients). It will have metrics customized for social analytics, such as sentiment.

I’ll admit I’m eager to see more details about this tool and I have signed up for the beta test program in hopes of getting a sneak peek.

I think 2011 will be an exciting year for me and I hope my clients will be as eager as I am to try out these tools. I’m already trying to persuade them to upgrade to SiteCatalyst 15 and I have at least one client who may be a great candidate for Social Analytics. I can’t wait!

Now while I will agree that it is over-requested, and not always the best metric to gauge a site’s performance on, I also do not find it entirely useless either. Admittedly the page-level bounce rate is the most useful way to look at bounce-rate. It gives you more data than just which pages are being used as entry pages, but how successful each page is at engaging a visitor to visit other parts of your site (or click on a particular call-to-action on that page).

However I am not entirely convinced that the site-level bounce rate (the over-all bounce rate for an entire site) is a useless metric. I think the usefulness (or uselessness) of this metric is really determined by a number of factors including:

• Web site type
• Web site goal
• Overall marketing efforts

As I’ve advised my clients, if their site is a blog, they can expect a high bounce rate and that this is entirely normal. Most people read blogs to get at specific information and then leave. I often enter a blog on a particular article I am interested in and then go on my way. The blog may be a great blog with tons of great articles in it and I may be back to read others at a later date when Google brings me back, but I rarely seek out additional articles after completing the one I came to read. From folks I’ve talked to, this appears to be fairly typical behavior. Blogs often get higher traffic to their articles than they do their home page.

If your site is not a blog, naturally you would expect a bounce rate much lower – and typically I find a bounce rate of 25% or less is fairly typical. In regular web sites I keep an eye on the site-wide bounce rate primarily to see if it ever spikes up above 25% and really take note if it spikes above 50%. At that point clearly something is wrong and requires some checking into. The problem could be anything from the tagging to  a botched online marketing campaign (one of my clients did a massive PPC/Banner ad campaign which doubled their traffic, and their bounce rate soared up past 60% – their campaign targeted the wrong audience).

Now it is a gamble to provide this metric to executives (aka HiPPOs – Highest Paid Person’s Opinion), as many will freak out if the site bounce rate is over 10%. However,  I am always prepared if an executive asks for the site-bounce rate and then wants to drill me as to why it’s over 10%.

So, while a site-wide bounce rate may not be the most useful metric to determine overall site performance, I find it’s not completely useless either.

On the heels of the FCC considering a “Do Not Track” list, similar to the “Do Not Call” list, allowing people on the internet to opt-out of being tracked by web sites and online marketers, (not to mention the European Union’s Do Not Track legislation), now both Firefox and Chrome have announced that they will add “Do Not Track” features.

It seems everywhere we turn, government agencies and companies want to block or inhibit the work that we do as web analysts. People even decry us as spys and invaders of privacy.

To that end, the community of web analysts have rallied behind Eric Peterson and the Web Analytics Association by pledging to follow the Web Analytics Code of Ethics. This is, in part, an attempt by our community to calm the fears of the general public that are being led to fear what we do by a few, but very vocal, naysayers, without truly understanding both sides of the issue.

Take my uncle for example – he very much fears having people “spy” on him, afraid that the internet is filled with hackers and other ne’er-do-wells around every corner. While it is true there are such folks out there, the fact of the matter is not a single one of them is operating based on web analytics data. They have other much more nefarious means of getting what they want out of your computer.

The vast majority of web analytics tools do not even allow users to track individuals at all (despite some HiPPOs dearly wishing they could). Even the ones that do, don’t track individual people, but individual devices (via their IP address). If a family of 5 all use the same computer, or a single person accesses a site from 5 different web-enabled devices, we wouldn’t know. We’d only know that in the first case a single IP address was visiting, while in the 2nd case 5 different IP addresses were visiting. That still won’t tell us about Suzie Smith’s career, background or family history (unless of course she chooses to share that information on a social media site – but that’s a completely different topic).

How do you feel about the FCC proposal, or the new “Do Not Track” browser features? How do you feel the government legislations (proposed or in effect) for either opting-out of being tracked, or requiring users to opt-in before they can be tracked? How will this affect the web analytics industry? Will we be forced to work with the age-old “sample size” of polls and surveys of populations, rather than looking at the entire population/traffic of a web site? Please chime in!

Still being independent despite the economy is amazing to me. I am very grateful for the opportunities that my clients have given me. I have been able to expand my experience in a number of areas in analytics, and worked with a wider variety of analytics tools as well. All-in-all, it’s been a good year.

2010 was also a roller-coaster year for the Web Analytics industry with new laws in Europe restricting tracking, people in the US decrying the industry’s practices as an invasion of privacy and the latest from the FTC proposing a “do not track” list. On a more positive note, we also saw the launch of the Web Analytics Association Certification program and Eric Peterson’s proposal of a Code of Ethnics for Web Analysts. We’ve made strides and had a few set-backs in our industry this year, but I feel we will emerge from this all as a better, stronger and more cohesive industry going forward.

This time of year is also the time of year to look forward to the next year and even make resolutions.

I am definitely looking forward to the 2011 Omniture Summit where I hope to meet and network with many of the folks I interact with on Twitter. I also look forward to the keynotes, sessions and of course the entertainment which is always amazing. Let’s hope the first year of the Summit with out former CEO Josh James still proves to be as good as previous years.

As far as resolutions go, for 2011:

• I will update my blog at least every 2 weeks.
• I will sign one more long-term client.

I will also strive to encourage my clients to embrace testing as a part of analytics. I have worked on numerous projects that could have benefited from some A/B or multivariate testing.

On that note I wish everyone a Happy New Year and hope you have a successful and prosperous 2011.