…

Earlier this week, I sat down with Jim Bennette, CEO at VisiStat Analytics. During our discussion Jim and I discussed a number of different topics including analytics trends, business requirements and technology – I also got some great insight into VisiStat analytics. Check out our conversation below:[Manoj]: What are the key business issues your customers face today (related to web analytics)?[Jim Bennette]: Well, obviously we are in a difficult economy, and that has had a huge impact on small to medium businesses…

…

We missed this great infographic earlier (care of SiteJabber), which describes the pros and cons of some of the most popular daily coupon sites and provides a comparison of visitors/growth/prices amongst the top coupon sites. Here are some key points from the Infographic:

• Groupon averages 8.2 million unique visitors (per month) vs. LivingSocial at 6.9 million
• In terms of traffic share – Groupon, LivingSocial and EverSave receive 43%, 27% and 16% respectively
• An average deal on Groupon costs $41 vs…

The video below outlines some of Google’s local ranking factors including insight into how new features like Tags, Boost and Hotpot may or may not impact the ranking of organic listings. 3 of the main factors that the video highlights are: Prominence, Distance and Relevance. Prominence: how well known the business is around the internet. Distance: How far away is the location (if location specified), otherwise your general location is used…

Interesting post over at the Hitwise blog which talks about the latest hype surrounding Groupon/Living Social and the interest from large corporations such as Amazon/Google. Here are the highlights:

• Groupon.com received 79% of US visits last week and Living Social received 8% among a custom category of 81 Group Buying sites last week
• There are reports that Amazon is poised to make a $150 million dollar investment in Groupon competitor LivingSocial…

According to the annual ForeSee Results analysis, customer satisfaction stayed flat during Cyber Monday. However, during Thanksgiving week, on Black Friday, and on Thanksgiving weekend, customer satisfaction was slightly up. This suggests that retailers have good reason to be cautiously optimistic about their holiday revenues, because satisfaction is a proven predictor of financial success.The research was conducted by ForeSee Results using the American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI) methodology…

WebProNews interviews Derrick Wheeler, Senior SEO Architect at Microsoft, discusses how to optimize large/complex websites for search engines. Derrick touches on strategies such as duplicate content, CMS, crawling efficiency, content freshness and linking (see video below).In my personal experience thing is really understanding site hierarchy/structure because the execution of dynamic 301s or crawling optimization can affect hundreds and thousands of pages at once…

Cool infographic designed by the Cloud Hypermarket team which shows some interesting stats about cloud computing, such as adoption, IT budgeting, benefits of using the cloud, and the top users of cloud computing. Check out the full graphic below, here are some highlights:

• By 2013, 60% of the the server workloads will be virtualized
• There are 50 million physical servers in the world today
• 56% of Internet users use web mail: Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail, etc…

…

According the latest eMarketer report, social media is at the top of US advertisers’ list in regards to both SEO and PPC strategies in 2011. Link Building programs and CMS processes round out the top 3 for SEO, while local search advertising and managing the impact of Google instance make the top 3 for PPC.

…

Cool infographic from the Skloog blog depicting the history of social media starting from the postal service in 550 BC to Google Buzz in 2010. Click on the graphic below for a larger version, but here are some highlights:

• Friendster: 2002, still active with 90 million registered users and 60 million unique visitors a month
• MySpace: 2003, has to innovate or will die a slow death
• Flickr: 2004, 3…

Very cool video designed by the Sybase featuring statistics around the growth of mobile. Here is just a few of the cool pieces of info you’ll find in this video:

• First handheld phone was in 1973 (over a foot long and weighed almost 2 pounds – priced at $3,995)
• The world’s smallest phone is designed by Modu: 37mm wide and 72 mm long
• In 2009 (Globally), there were 51 million car, 210 million TVs and 1…

Very interesting post over at the Hitwise blog last week, which states that Facebook generates 1 out of every 4 pages views in the US. Here are some of the other highlights:

• In March, we reported an important milestone when the market share of visits to Facebook.com surpassed Google.com (US traffic only and excludes mobile).
• Since then, we have continued to watch the growth of Facebook…

…

…

Awesome slide deck from Morgan Stanley’s, Mary Meeker at the Web 2.0 Summit on internet, mobile and global usage trends (source TechCrunch). Mary’s research predicts that smartphones will begin to outsell PCs in 2012 and she also mentions that mobile devices account for 84% of social networking activity in Japan.

…

comScore stats for October show that 175 million U.S. Internet users watched online video content in October for an average of 15.1 hours per viewer.Google Sites, YouTube, ranked as the top video site with over 146 million unique viewers. Yahoo! Sites followed Google with at #2 with more thatn 53 million viewers.Top U.S. Online Video Properties by Video Content Views – Ranked by Unique Video ViewersOctober 2010Source: comScore Video Metrix Property Total Unique Viewers (000) Viewing Sessions (000) Minutes per Viewer Total Internet : Total Audience 175,186 5,473,282 908…

According to ReadWriteWeb, the Wikimedia Foundation, parent company of Wikipedia, is looking for $16 million in funding this upcoming year so that they can remain free around the world (without advertising). In the blog post there was also some very interesting statistics mentioned about Wikipedia (care of comScore), check out some of these numbers:

• Wikipedia is the 5th most popular website worldwide (#12 in the US)
• They served 398 million unique visitors in September 2010 (80 million in the US)
• Wikipedia is available in 270 languages
• There are 80,000 active volunteers worldwide
• 17 million articles available across all languages
• The most articles in a language other than English is German with 1…

This week Twitter founders Evan Williams and Biz Stone were guests on Late Night With Jimmy Fallon (who is a power user of Twitter himself). One of the topics discussed during their appearance was how they came up with the name Twitter, see the conversation on the video below.

…

…

I was very intrigued when I first heard about Concept Feedback and how their usability/design services could add more value to wire-frames, landing pages, and apps. So I decided to call upon, CEO Andrew Follett for some first hand insight. Have a read below:Give us the ‘elevator pitch’ on your technologyConceptFeedback.com offers quick, actionable website feedback from a hand-selected panel of experts in design, usability, and strategy…

With over 1000 downloads, the first release of our Web Intelligence Tips & Tricks eBook was quite a success. Because of these great results, we were able to publish this version just a couple months after. The amazing part is the level of interest we’ve received, in regards to both downloads/participation, from professionals all around the world. [Download the eBook]Version 2 of our Web Intelligence eBook includes topics ranging from:

• The Web Analytics ecosystem
• Social Media Text mining
• Traffic Attribution
• Keyword Research
• Web Analytics Debugging
• Link Analysis
• Click-Through Rate Optimization
• Social Media Measurement
• Landing Page Optimization

Future eBooks are something we will continue to do, so if you’re interested in participating or have any feedback, please send me an email to manoj…

According to the latest report from eMarketer, email still tops the list in terms of percentage of people performing this activity on a daily basis, but if you take a closer look, Social Media actually leads in regards to total hours spent. In September 2010, surfers spent 4.6 hours a week on social sites, compared with 4.4 hours on email

…

According to the latest report by comScore mobile usage is up on all accounts in the United States. The data below compares mobile content usage for June 2010 vs. September 2010 across activities such as: Browser Usage, App Downloads, Texting, Playing Games, Social Networking and Listening to Music. App Downloads and Browser Usage saw the greatest gain, both rising by 2% versus in June.Mobile Content UsageTotal U…

Very cool Infographic designed by The Roxor, which shows the amazing size of the Internet including stats on data, social media, usage. Here are some highlights:

• 1.9 Billion people use the Internet
• Over 5 million terabytes of data on the Internet
• Google’s index only includes 200TB (or 0.004%)
• 193 Million domain registrations
• 46% of domain registrations are …

Performable offers a full-circle approach to analytics, in addition to tracking clickstream/website usage, Performable takes it a step farther by providing recommendations on how to improve that experience. Recently I sat down with their VP Products, Joshua Porter to get some further insight into Performable.[Elevator Pitch]: Performable makes actionable analytics easy. There are three major hurdles with analytics packages today:

1. Not Customer Centric – Most analytics packages are “web-only” analytics packages…

…

Nick and Avinash from the Google Analytics released episode 13 last week, this time covering the following topics:- Combining (A AND B) OR (C AND D) in advanced segments- Is there a way to tell how many people have opted out of being tracked by GA- How does tracking Google Analytics and Urchin work together- How is tabbed browsing tracked in Google Analytics?- Do Website Optimizer A/B tests only track direct traffic?- Are there any survey/voice of customer tools that integrate with GA?- Does the async code execute faster than the traditional snippet?- You can’t track users who have opted out of GA- Why table report filters get removed when you navigate away from a page- Why are there differences between Unique visitor reports? Which to use…

Mobile Apps are the hottest thing since sliced bread, but the latest eMarketer report shows that mobile users actually prefer to use browsers over apps for many entertainment/shopping related activities. Here are some examples:

• Researching product/price information, mobile users prefer browsers to apps 81% vs. 19%
• Reading customer reviews, mobile users prefer browsers to apps 68% vs…