Marko Hurst

Last week I spoke in Washington DC to the US EPA on my book Search Analytics and one of my co-speakers was Tony Byrne of CMS WATCH. Two key things I had to say was that 1) User Experience & Web Analytics should come closer together and 2) that while you can obtain search data from a server log, it’s very messy and not the easiest to look at and that most of the major web analytics tools that utilize page tags for data gathering do NOT have the ability to capture your internal search data.

Tony took those a step further in his article “Aligning Web and Search Analytics” and discusses what he feels needs to happen with Web Analysts and Marketers first. Read what Tony had to say here.

Any questions you may have regarding the presentation or on this or any other topic just drop me a line.

Hot “off the press”! The book cover to my new book due out next year is designed and ready to go. To keep up with the book and ideas that my co-author, Lou Rosenfeld, and I are testing check out the book blog.

I was talking with Lou Rosenfeld the other day about the book we are currently working on, “Search Analytics: Conversations With Your Customers“, and I proposed the the following…

A conversation is in most cases a two-way dialog that happens in real-time, i.e. someone is speaking, while at least one other is listening and that exchange might go back and forth. But this rarely happens with most websites, it’s mostly a one-way dialog with your users doing all the talking and the site owner just ignoring them. I can hardly call this a “conversation”. To me it seems more of a confession. And that’s not a bad thing if you consider what a confession really is… acknowledgment; avowal; admission; disclosure. Your users/customer/clients/etc. are telling you what they need, what they can’t find, what is frustrating, etc. And the best and juiciest part of every single confession is that it is in their own language! Short of using that all that wonderful info to take action on (hint hint), life on the Web doesn’t get much better than that.

So, is that book about conversations or confessions? We’d love to hear your thoughts.