w.illi.am/_at_Google_Lobby

The second day at the Google Analytics Authorized Consultants yearly summit is the first of two days fully dedicated to Google Analytics.  The day definitely started on a high note with a keynote from Avinash Kaushik who talked to us about everything but web analytics tools. Let me explain.

It was both interesting and reassuring to hear that a lot of actionable information does not come from your web analytics solution, no matter what solution you have (Omniture, Coremetrics, WebTrends, Google Analytics, etc.). Why is it interesting? Because we shared tools some of us use for measuring mobile activity and for measuring social media activity.  Why reassuring? Because it confirmed that I wasn’t crazy by using KPIs that are nowhere to be found on our client’s web analytics solution.

Most of the time, we focus way too much on data that is available on Google Analytics (or whatever other tool), on how to interpret it, on how to measure it, how to segment it and so on and so forth.  But there is one very significant detail that is not being taken into consideration: all of these tools work when the user is on your website.  Now think about this, where do users read your content? Where do they interact with your content? Is it only on your website? Most likely not! A significant part of how users interact with your content takes places out of your website, whether it’s Facebook, Twitter, RSS Feeds or whatever other medium.  Now how do you track this in your web analytics solution?  Omniture made an attempt to integrate Twitter in their reports (specifically, how many followers you have) but it still does not provide actionable information which actually means something.  It’s like saying, “I have x amount of visitors.”  Yes, you always want more visitors, but how does it tell you if you are doing well or not?

We as marketers must be creative and define the KPIs that apply to us and to our marketing efforts. These KPIs are most likely not in your web analytics solution.  Is your KPI engagement? Is it conversations generated from your news? There are ways to measure this and tools available to do so.  The fun part is, this is where we get to be creative.

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In the nineties, Netscape was flourishing with between 50% and 80% of the browsers’ market and was in a intense combat with Internet Explorer. A guy at Netscape, named Brendan Eich, was given a difficult task of creating a language to make Netscape interacting more dynamically with websites. And of course they wanted this language the day before they asked it . In the time Brendan had, he did the most he could, and created a versatile language that even script kids could pick up, Javascript, he also created the DOM (Document Object Model) on top of Javascript. Now the difference between Javascript and the DOM is simple. Javascript is the basic language you use to make sentence. But the DOM is what is understanding this sentence and makes it interact with the document the way you asked it.

Microsoft was not going to let that happen

Microsoft was certainly not going to let Netscape have « Javascript » and not them, they decided to reverse engineer and implement it in Internet Explorer. Now problems began. They, very unfortunately, did not do a very good job at this implementation. Which means that for doing one simple operation on Netscape and Internet explorer, you had to code 2 implementation for both of them, because the DOM was not understanding the same sentence for both. In fact javascript, the programming language is mostly fine, the biggest problem is the DOM API, some words means nothing to IE and some other means nothing to Firefox. This is what drives web developers crazy. You have to write code specifically to some browsers because they do not follow standards, you have no choice, Internet Explorer represent 67% of your user base, you have to do an implementation for them.

You need to understand that this happened in 1995. The web did not had the same needs than today. Now web applications are vastly more complex. Some people had to step up and create cross browser API’s to deal with the DOM, and they did. Which means now you write one line, and some API dispatch the good implementation to each browser. This has make the life of web developers much easier.

There is currently 3 major « all round » Javascript libraries, jQuery, Mootools and Prototype

At w.illi.am, we decided to use the jQuery framework, which is now endorsed by a lot of major players, like Microsoft. Not only this is the most use Javascript framework in the world, this is the one we found the most powerful. Writing Javascript with jQuery enabled us to create more powerful web site than ever before and this tool is one of many that make us confident that we are ready for the future of the web.