Reality Within Web Analytics

“Many advanced analytics solutions allow you to track conversions, goals, revenue, expenses, etc. These solutions aren't for the faint of heart; they're designed to provide detailed metrics to make decisions on the best way to make improvements.”

Eversince the start of my existence, I never really attempted to look for web analytics definition – not even its simplest meaning. Never did I come up w/ questions such as; “what was it?”, “how it works?” and “what benefit we could get from it?”. It just started when our professor in Data Mining class, Sir Ramon Duremdes, opened up our mind into reality within WEB analytics.

Going deeper into details..

What does WEB ANALYTICS do?

Basically, it is the measurement, collection, analysis and reporting of internet data for purposes of understanding and optimizing web usage. Well, those italicized words are really the main purpose of web analytics which actually made its definition more broad and précised. Let’s go through it one-by-one to make it more understandable.

MEASUREMENT could be defined in terms of extent and quantity. By this, you should know some of the more commonly used terms and what they mean. Understanding these terms in Web analytics will insure that you know what you're measuring and what information you don't have. Just like HITS. “Hits” is probably one of the most used terms in Web analytics. See. But unfortunately, it's also one of the most incorrectly used terms in Web analytics. According to wikipedia, a hit in Web analytics is: "any request for a file from a Web server". This means that every request that is made to a Web server can be considered a hit. To understand further, requesting auxiliary files like CSS or Ja

vaScript are all counted as hits. COLLECTION, well web analytics involves data which is a collection of raw facts.

DATA + another DATA =

collection of ideas

All data must be collected and put together in just one shoe box then after gathering or collecting, might as well get into ANALYSIS. Those collected data must be analyzed thouroughly in order to come up with a best decision. REPORTING is the last and most important among all root definitions. This is where you choose and decide which part should be implemented and be given actions.

One basic example is BLOGGING.

You will simply be asked to create your own account similar with any other networking sites.

Blogging is the best way to generate ideas/ thoughts. You don't need to waste an ink and paper just writing down everything that's going on in your mind. All you have to do is type and there -- everyone can hava access.

However, you have to know what is working, what isn’t, and what trends will make your site the next “must read” stop for visitors each day. The only way to effectively do this is to have a good statistics package working in the background. However, figuring out which package is best for your site can be tricky.

Until your site starts earning some revenue, you’re best starting off with something free. Then, as your site grows, you may want to pay for a few more features. If you’re really lucky, you’ll start off with a free package that can grow with you, and it may be the only package you’ll ever need.

So.. how do web analytics get in?

Pertaining to the tools, well, here is one of the preffered tool yet most known and useful:

GOOGLE ANALYTICS

Google Analytics is arguably the most popular analytics package available for individual site owners. Google Analytics (or plain old “GA”) allows you to dig down deep into your stats to see breakdowns of individual regions, states/provinces, cities and numerous other items to better identify your site visitors. The wealth of data available is admirably balanced by a well-executed user interface, but it can still be overwhelming.

Going back to the report that was assigned in our group which is "Quality Analysis" can somehow be essential by means of monitoring and tracking customer's behavior.

Lab Usability Testing.

By this, you will could measure your customer's ability in performing certain task. In order for them to complete whatever tasks were given to them, they are allowed to use different websites and softwares and it's up to them to decide which one is better.

Site Visits.

This tool is actually home-based or office-based. A researcher and other stakeholders will go directly to their customer's house and observe, while doing so, they could conduct interview. This would help them monitor the performance of their clients in real-world environment.

Heuristic Evaluations.

This is where you mimic. You do whatever your customers do. You get to experience their experiences. This is where you could analyze every possible mistakes of your customers because you don't just sit down and OBSERVE, however, you base your judgements on your experience.

Surveying.

Surveying is the most, let's say, common. We do this a lot of times in order to get feedbacks and decide which of the following ideas are the best.

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Philippine Health Insurance actually has their own so-called "website" wherein customers could check the possible latest informations offered by the company itself. Web analytics can have a better role in the company like appaying some of its basic tools like GOOGLE alerts. As recommended by our group (health insurance), they must atleast create their own blogsite in order for them to have a good flow of business. How possible would that be? Well, company and customers interaction is very important. The thing is, it should not be just one-sided. The company don't just do their thing alone, they don't just want to achieve their objectives by setting out goals. However, they must consider the other side (which is "the customers"). Everything should epend on customer's wants and needs. Once they create a blog, they will have a better interaction. With that, google analytics will take its place. It's not just the REPUTATION itself. Thus, going back to the definition of WEB ANALYTICS, it refers to measurement, collection, analysis and reporting. Once you generate the code, you can paste it directly on the html of the blogsite and there --- analysis, collection, measurement and reporting will finally take place. They can now monitor their customer's performances. The more customers who visit, the greater amount of those individuals who are interested in the company.

Online Reputation as Part of Human Ego

"A good REPUTATION is more valuable than money..."

You've spent a lot of time building up your reputation and image both online and off, so it's important to make sure that someone isn't out there dragging it through the mud.

As you all become aware of, “Online reputation” is crucial in diverse purposes specifically in line of business as well as students. It can also be summed up through a wide range of ideas. For those who can’t relate, online reputation is an aspect in any online community where trust is merely important. It affects a pseudonym rather than a person. Agree? Well, Concern over reputation is sometimes considered a human fault, exaggerated in importance due to the fragile nature of the human ego. Let’s go deeper...

We all agree that everyone has their own social networking site which they are mainly active on. Like, eversince they start schooling it has been part of their daily routine. Let's conclude that reputation is part of it either GOOD or BAD.

As discussed by our group (health insurance), reputation is not only an important thing one must have in order to survive in any case. Simply, it's more of knowing yourself from within by answering questions such as WHAT, WHERE and HOW. To tell you "It is a maxim to me that no man was ever written out of reputation but by himself". In the case of any government health insurance online reputation can be essential by getting feedbacks from their cutomers so-to-say. By this, they can easily find out which path to go in order to have some changes upon serving people in a better way.

Still confused? Let’s take a look at these EXAMPLES which I actually searched through one of the websites. This examples would show how online reputation can benefit most of us. Besides, every examples show some definitions on how it works:

One of the simplest and easiest ways to track something on the way, your reputation orotherwise, is to use Google Alerts. We know that this is one of the most familiar websites. With this free service, you can search either all of Google's properties, or you can specify that only News, Blogs, Web, Video, or Groups is searched. You can then configure the Alerts results to be emailed to you either as it happens, once a day, or once a week. There is also a page where you can edit the alerts once they are created or delete them when they are no longer in use.

To begin with, we'll look at Trackur. Online reputation monitoring doesn't have to be a complex, time-consuming task. With Trackur's sophisticated online reputation monitoring technology, you can easily deploy your own reputation tracking within minutes. You tell us the names, products, and brands that are vital to you and we'll scour millions of blogs, news sites, images, and videos for you. If your reputation is being discussed in the social media, Trackur will alert you. Use Trackur to warn you of an attack on your reputation, look for positive press coverage, or even monitor your competition!

Monitorthis is one of those browsers that will allow you to subscribe to any other sites. It'll link you to 22 different engines as easy as possible. By this, you could really spot the importance of online reputation.

Although Naymz is quite a bit less popular than LinkedIn it offers a great feature that LI does not. Naymz places an add in the paid section of the search results (see image below) which will add additional placement on the front page for your name and lead the reader back to another site that offers up quality relevant information about you. Your Naymz profile is also a great place to funnel people back to your other sites for more information as it lets you place links to other sites.and a lot more...

A couple of times every month I browse on over to Google and search for my own name to see what the results will bring. After I’ve done that, I type in the name of my website and run the search engine again.

SEARCH: Razilee Dizon

Checking your online reputation like this is something that every freelancer should do on a regular basis. I wouldn’t recommend stopping with Google, either. You should also check on Twitter and on other social media sites.

While it might seem vain to search for yourself online, it’s actually an important step in protecting your online reputation. If you do business online, then you not only be checking on but also working to protect and manage your online reputation. It may sound really simple but online reputation must be a big deal for everyone since almost half of our lives are spend on cyber space.

Fortunately for me, I haven’t experienced any severe complaints or untruthful information, although I often run across sites that have “borrowed” my work without asking. I share my personal name with several other individuals and a popular television character –- but fortunately that has not affected my freelancing career.

However, not all freelancers are so lucky. If you find that you do have a problem with your online reputation, then you have several options:

Ignore It. If you have a dissatisfied customer or find that someone has stolen your work or is spreading misinformation, you can look the other way. Perhaps the offending person will stop their activities or the plagiarist will take the stolen material down. If the complaint is minor or if the poster doesn’t look credible, ignoring the problem might be the best solution.

Confront It. Another option if you find that someone is posting negative information online is to confront the negative poster directly. Contact them and ask them why they posted what they did and ask what you can do to make it right. This approach can be particularly effective with former clients who have legitimate complaints with the service they received.

Get Help. If your problem is too large or you are facing a particularly aggressive onslaught of false information, then you should get professional help. There are companies that specialize in online reputation management services that range from monitoring your reputation to correcting misinformation to taking legal steps (if needed).

"Data mining" through discovery

Before I start off, I’ve read this article regarding “An introduction about data mining” for me to have at least idea, background or in some way get myself familiarized with a certain topic. As to go further, I have been thinking how data mining works and how important or valuable it is for everyone in different fields. Imagine how simple words could just turn out into a broad range of facts.

Of course, the topic itself should include an extensive range of information with the purpose of coming up with an idea that would definitely provide readers a comprehensive knowledge about a certain matter. For it to take place or for it to be implemented, I, myself, should arrive with a process. Not just the common ones, a long process rather, that will formulate my ideas and make it visible to others. This simple thought or example can be compared to data mining which incorporates the extraction of hidden predictive information from large databases – well defined. In a nut shell, data mining has something in it that enables industry to foresee future trends and behaviours, allowing businesses to make proactive, knowledge-driven decisions. Still complicated? We’ll go through it...

Basically, Data and information are correlated. Looking through the definition of data is that it focuses on raw facts and describes a certain phenomenon while information is processed data wherein there is a particular meaning with in a specific context. After getting the significance and advantages of Information Technology in a competitive manner, it is also essential to know the value of a certain data that are not likely visible or is hidden. Apparently, these were all taught in class weeks ago.

These days and the days onward, digital information is relatively easy to capture and quite inexpensive to store. Agree? Well, the digital revolution has seen collections of data grow in size, and the complexity of the data therein increase. Advances in technology have resulted in our ability to meaningfully analyse and understand the data we gather lagging far behind our ability to capture and store these data. A question commonly arising as a result of this state of affairs is having gathered such quantities of data, what do we actually do with it?

Such information may often be usefully analysed using a set of techniques referred to as knowledge discovery or data mining. These techniques essentially seek to build a better understanding of data, and in building characterisations of data that can be used as a basis for further analysis extract value from volume. This is indeed interesting yet hard to absorb.

As I go along, it is commonly accepted that the basis for capturing and storing large amounts of data is due to the belief that there is valuable information implicitly coded within it. An important issue is therefore how is this hidden information (if it exists at all) be revealed? Traditional methods of knowledge generation rely largely upon manual analysis and interpretation. However, as data collections continue to grow in size and complexity, there is a corresponding growing need for more sophisticated techniques of analysis.

For this case, software is needed. There are actually techniques which I have read in one of the given articles.

• Artificial neural networks: Non-linear predictive models that learn through training and resemble biological neural networks in structure.

• Decision trees: Tree-shaped structures that represent sets of decisions. These decisions generate rules for the classification of a dataset. Specific decision tree methods include Classification and Regression Trees (CART) and Chi Square Automatic Interaction Detection (CHAID) .

• Genetic algorithms: Optimization techniques that use process such as genetic combination, mutation, and natural selection in a design based on the concepts of evolution.

• Nearest neighbour method: A technique that classifies each record in a dataset based on a combination of the classes of the k record(s) most similar to it in a historical dataset (where k ³ 1). Sometimes called the k-nearest neighbour technique.

• Rule induction: The extraction of useful if-then rules from data based on statistical significance.

These techniques are really helpful in small volumes of data which I think includes software. However, there is more to that I guess. MODELING is a word which is more likely familiar to some of you. This is a technique used in order to perform such feats in data mining. Like, it is simply the act of building a model in one situation where you know the answer and then applying it to another situation that you don't.

Consider, for example, customers of a bank who only use the institution for a checking account. An analysis reveals that after depositing large annual income bonuses, some customers wait for their funds to clear before moving the money quickly into their stock-brokerage or mutual fund accounts outside the bank. This represents a loss of business for the bank, of course.

To persuade these customers to keep their money in the bank, marketing managers can use data mining software to immediately identify large deposits and trigger a response. The system might automatically schedule a direct mail or telemarketing promotion as soon as a customer’s balance exceeds a predetermined amount. Based on the size of the deposit, the triggered promotion can then provide an appropriate incentive that encourages customers to invest their money in the bank’s other products.

Finally, by tracking responses and following rules for attributing customer behavior, certain software can help measure the profitability and ROI of all ongoing campaigns.

Information Technology as part of our daily existence

• http://www.ngenera.com/insight/thought_leaders/

• http://f1.grp.yahoofs.com/v1/MFw4So6VLE5cbmnBF_b1wIBvyOHwqFrA5fiB5t6pZsegg3GHMFjlPWaxF0sIhI4ahiXqq8Dzcl1qP8IBvJ8ob0oIjUxtWZaBv9s/Business%20Intelligence%20for%20Decision%20Makers_Don%20Tapscott_8pp.pdf

As to start off, Information technology for me, ever since, created a big impact in the business world like it has been used many times widely for diverse purposes. These said purposes appear to be really essential by way of everyone’s existence specifically in the world of industry. Well, this matter might somehow give me hint/dea on the advantages we may possibly acquire through considering IT as an element of our daily life. Besides, it would really provide us a wide range of knowledge that we may have to apply as business management students. Of course, it’s not just about those people who are in the field of computers but also to those who were running businesses along with wanting themselves to stand-out over the others. Given the link above are the people who are known for being an expert in providing strategic management advisory services and continuous insights.

Well, I am already concluding as if I know a lot about the topic when in fact it is really a big thing for me. It seems like I need to broaden up my intelligence in order to further expand my ideas prior to the subject matter.

Information Technology covers a wide range of ideas which can be really helpful in any business fields like outsourcing and others. These days information technology involves more than just computer literacy; it also takes into account how computers work and how these computers can further be used not just for information processing but also for communications and problem solving tasks as well.

Unfortunately, I’ve read the article “Business Intelligence: Actionable Insights for Business Decision Makers” and “The Interview of CIO Magazine with Clayton Christensen on the idea of disruptive innovation” -- it was stated that, Companies that are able to effectively harness the copious amounts of information IT systems generate will have the inside track on the competition: gaining better understanding of customer needs, identifying trends earlier, and using resulting lead time to capitalize on opportunities. More to these are the competitive advantages that a business should have: Value proposition which aims to have a decision based on FACTS, not just opinions or conjecture in order to really pursue specific goals. Simplicity and relevance which I think, data or decisions don’t have to be complicated hence what important was that there is enough knowledge and there is a tight teamwork between the business unit and IT department. Agility in which business must have its own original IT design that has to be flexible, responsive to change and somehow allows the IT organization to focus on providing more value-added services. Integration is very important because this is where data is gathered and structured. Also, here is where data is processed, stored in the production system and then eventually extracted -- at most, daily --- into a data warehouse into a linear sequence. Payoff is when business organizations should choose simple and relevant business intelligence solutions that are more likely to uphold competitive advantage in a constantly changing world. In the end, business should look ahead and make the most out of their decisions in order to truly stand-out and have the GUTS to be more competitive.

Moving on, for me, IT delivers many advantages to the organization that manages it effectively. From cost savings and improved productivity to greater business intelligence and decision-making capabilities, every organization can benefit from IT. However, these days, business is putting great pressure on Information Technology to cut costs and deliver even more business value. To add up on that idea, we all know that Information Technology can be costly because it deals with software’s which you can only acquire at a very high cost. Yet, if a business knows how to manage IT well, then there’s a greater chance that a business could stand-out and finally be more competitive.

As you may notice, our world today has changed an immense deal with the aid of information technology. Things that were once done manually or by hand have now become computerized operating systems, which simply require a single click of a mouse to get a task completed. It can be helpful in our chosen industry which is “Government Corporation” wherein governmental entities are choosing to outsource their information technology needs. Instead of doing their jobs manually, they could keep records of the people like in Phil. Health Insurance Corporation, SSS and other government related corporations. Not only that, Information Technology could be a lot of help in communicating and giving up the latest information directly to customers via internet. I know some of you can relate like in school. Back then, library is very useful but nowadays, you would notice that only few uses library for home works & research ever since Information technology became part of our daily living. In addition, with the help of IT we are not only able to stream line our business processes but we are also able to get constant information in 'real time' that is up to the minute and up-to-date.