Being German myself, I am always interested in what’s going on in my home country. Especially when it comes to cookies (and I’m not talking about the delicious Holiday cookies I had when I visited in November last year) and online metrics. I found this article last week that talks about the issues Google Analytics is running into in the German market. Looks like the end user might get in trouble when using it…

Germans have very high standards when it comes to privacy and they have a healthy suspicion about giving away information about themselves. But that’s not enough. Apparently data protection companies are helping with securing privacy in their own way. Under the new guidelines, not only will Google get in trouble, but the company who uses it might be in difficulty too. Click here for the article

I could imagine that a lot of companies were actually excited about using Google Analytics as it gives smaller companies the ability to quickly analyze what’s going on with their web site. I happen to love the tool. It’s not rocket science, it tells you what you are looking for fairly quickly and if set up correctly it is able to give you amazing insight about how the visitor behaves on your site. But looking at campaign data from BOTH ends – our ad serving reporting and the web analytics tool on the site that hosts the landing page – shows us the full picture. It’s a common mistake that clients believe they can see everything about a campaign through their web analytics tool only. This is only half the picture. We optimize campaigns based on several metrics, including Cost per Click, Cost per Landing, Click to Landing Ratio and view-through data. We still glance at the Click-through-rate but that’s just the first check point. From this set of metrics, only one can be compared to a number of the web analytics program: the landings should be close to the number of visitors to that page through the campaign. Everything else, especially the view-through data, can only be captured through our ad serving program. Here often lies the true success of a campaign. How often do we really click on a banner? I find myself searching for the banner content more often than clicking and that’s exactly what will be captured: users that were exposed to the banner, didn’t click, but came to the page later on. Most likely through a Search.

Dick Reed actually wrote an interesting and detailed whitepaper about tech metrics a while ago (Tech Marketing Analytics 101 Part 1- ROI). Check it out here:

Happy trafficking!
Frauke Cast