To my readers,

It is with regret that I must inform you that I have been laid off from Sun.  Thank you so much for dropping in from time to time.  I hope I have been insightful and have challenged you at times.  I'm not sure where the road will divert, but I'm sure it will be challenging, exciting and rewarding.  I have always loved math (hence my degree in math) and am expanding my search for a new job most anywhere in that field.  This means I may or may not continue in web analytics.  Regardless, I'm sure that what I've learned about data, analysis and optimization will follow me around.  It has been exciting seeing the development of the web analytics community over the past few years from a small Yahoo! group to a multitude of bloggers and an official organization.  A special thanks goes out to Paul Strupp, Eric Peterson and Avinash Kaushik.  To the Omniture experts at Sun, I will miss our lively discussions.  Maybe you'll see me at the next Web Analytics Wednesday in San Francisco.

To see where I land and my ensuing search, you may follow me at my personal blog.

This is a screen capture of a report generated in Omniture v13.5.  I'm not sure how I caught this.  The last item in the graph legend is orange, while it is brown in the summary.  On the actual graph, the item was orange.

BTW - When will Omniture provide greater graphing capability?  I really liked the introduction of bar graphs in v14.  And I have to say, unless I need a bar graph, I still use v13.5.

I ran across the following story -  “I’m Feeling Lucky” Button Costs Google $110M Annually

Google exec Marissa Meyer wants us to believe that the only reason they keep this costly button is because Google doesn't want to be considered "too dry, too corporate, too much about making money".  I beg to differ.  I'm sure that little sucker is making up the difference.  You better believe that some web analyst provided strong enough evidence that enough of those folks wanting to get lucky become addicted to Google search, thus becoming part of the ad revenue torrent.  That $110M is not a loss, it's an investment in user base growth.

So here's to the unsung hero or heroin!  Your one piece of analysis is probably paying your salary many times over.

OK, so it's a bit harsh and totally unvalidated.  However, I find it quite interesting that Omniture tracks their blogs (blogs.omniture.com) with FeedBurner.  For a long time now, we have pushed for this feature within Omniture and our own engineers finally had to develop a solution which is basically an Omniture band-aid.  I just don't understand why Omniture decided to ignore tracking this technology just because someone's already doing a good job.  Even if it's not as fully featured as FeedBurner, wouldn't it be great to have the data within Omniture instead?  Ah, the analyst's dream - All my data in one place!  I'm very curious to hear other Omniture user's opinions!

I owe the web analytics community an apology.  I was doing some analysis yesterday that made me realize that my Omniture formulas for the hard bounce rate and the soft bounce rate didn't match my definitions.  So here are my corrected formulas:

• Soft Bounce Rate:  ( [exits] - [single access] ) / ( [visits] - [single access] )
  
• Hard Bounce Rate:  [single access] / [entries]

Originally, I had the soft bounce rate as ( [exites] - [single accesss] ) / [visits], then I realized that the definition requires the denominator to be only the multi-page visits.  In light of this, the formula can now be stated as the number of exits that were not part of single page visits divided by the number of visits that were not single page visits.  Here we are trying to answer the question, "Of visitors who have visited at least one other page before this one, what percentage end their visit on this page?"

I also incorrectly had visits in the denominator for the hard bounce rate, when it should be entries.  So the formula in plain english is calculating the number of single page visits divided by the number of entries through that page.  Here we are trying to answer the question, "Of visitors who start on this page, what percentage don't visit any other pages?".

One caveat I have thought of is when a visitor visits a page, refreshes the page, then leaves.  It is advised that you consider the refresh rate when contemplating the soft bounce rate as it will add to the soft bounce rate when you would probably consider that a hard bounce.  Although, not every refresh is a two page visit.