The Clickthinking Blog | Scent Optimisation

A few weeks ago we featured exclusive insights from the eMetrics Optimization Summit in San Jose California, courtesy of our COO Niel Bornman who attended the event.

What we didn’t mention was that Niel was flown to the conference to accept a prestigious award from the Web Analytics Association.

As chairman of the WAA’s Examination Committee, Clickthinking’s COO was instrumental in the development of the Web Analyst Certification Program, the first official global certification for web analysts.

He was presented with a Presidential Award in recognition of his significant contribution to the WAA and the global web analytics field. Needless to say we are very proud to have Niel on our team!

Read the full story on BizCommunity.

Readers of BizCommunity, South Africa’s marketing and media hub, may have noticed our Feliny for Lucky Pet campaign amongst the top news headlines on Wednesday.

The Feliny Heist is an interactive digital promotion which invites users to participate in solving an intriguing online mystery over a two month period, for the chance to win an Apple iPad.

The project is a fresh approach to petfood marketing, which traditionally emphasises the health benefits of products, for the purpose of introducing Lucky Pet’s new Supreme Dry Kibbles.

Despite the elements of excitement and intrigue, a social responsibility factor is incorporated into the promotion, whereby a donation of petfood goes to the SPCA for every new member who joins the Feliny Heist. So far a substantial donation of 450 bags of petfood has been collected.

Campaign statistics

Feliny.co.za has been live for a few weeks, and the latest figures from our data analysts confirm that the campaign has really begun to take off.

Statistics measured from when the site received its first visits on 19 April to this week:

• 454 sign-ups from 1446 visits by 1005 unique visitors; this is a high conversion rate of 31.3%
• Of these visits, 281 (20%) originated from the banner campaign
• 122 visitors (10%) opted to send the campaign email to a friend
• Of the 1005 visitors, 365 chose to view the campaign video
• The video has been viewed a total of 500 times

Clickthinking worked closely with Jupiter Drawing Room on the Feliny Heist. We can’t wait to see how the campaign fares as it moves into the exciting second phase.

Join the challenge by visiting the site, and keep track of the investigation as it unfolds on Twitter and Facebook.

Statistics released by comScore late last week suggest that social networking site Facebook is at the forefront of the US display ad market.  Facebook ad views accounted for 16.2 % of the market’s total, surpassing all online publishers including giants such as Yahoo and Microsoft.

The report from comScore, a leading digital marketing intelligence agency, shows that a total of 1.1 trillion display ads were shown to American users during the first quarter of 2010, 15% more than the same period last year. Of those, Facebook racked up a massive 176.3 billion display ad impressions.

Yahoo still makes substantially more profit from display ads however, due to their extensive network which serves ads on sites other than their own, combined with the poor click-through rate for Facebook ads. Nevertheless the social networking site is reportedly poised to reach billion dollar revenues for the first time this year. Read the rest of this entry »

This is the second installment in Niel’s two-part account of his experience at the eMetrics Optmization Summit in San Jose, California. If you haven’t read the first part see previous post or click here.

Take action, even in the face of data discrepancies!

It is clear to me that there are two distinct tracks in web analytics.

Technology – this track is concerned with instrumentation, data integrity, data integration, BI warehouses, cubes, data model development, etc. The web analytics space is filled with technologists, people who migrated out of the back office into the limelight when their data warehouses seemed to contain valuable information. Read the rest of this entry »

Our COO Niel Bornman attended the international eMetrics Marketing Optimization Summit last week in San Jose, California. This is the first of two posts in which Niel shares his experience of the conference, as well as insight into the web analytics industry.

Are we still behind the rock?

“How far behind are South African web analysts?” is a question I pondered the entire week at eMetric

I spent the most part of the last 9 days travelling to and from the eMetrics Summit in San Jose, in the heart of Silicon Valley, and the rest of it interacting with the best and brightest minds in the world of web analytics…as well as some of the not so bright.

The eMetrics Summit is aimed at the web analytics industry comprehensively and attracted people from all three walks of web analytics life – vendors, clients and consultants. Speakers included Avinash Kaushik, Jim Sterne, Jim Novo, Eric Petersen and Bryan Eisenberg.

I walked away with a couple of key insights:

1. Technology vendors don’t understand the world of web analytics, they understand databases.
2. Web analysts at large organisations have very tough jobs.
3. If data discrepancies are stopping you from gaining actionable insight, you probably don’t know how.
4. Web analytics is a third world economy with too many of us thinking we are ninjas. Read the rest of this entry »