Not to be outdone by MapQuest’s new bigger, badder, API, today Google has released a refresh of it’s popular online mapping application, but with a three dimensional twist. Google Maps now features “Street View“, which offers street-level photography in select cities. So far San Francisco, Las Vegas, Denver, Miami, and New York are the only cities available.

Navigation within Street View is, as usual, intuitive and straightforward. Though some of the street view pics aren’t contiguous - some views feature clear, sunny days while others are overcast and dreary - the general feeling of the service is very cohesive and fluid. Resolution is outstanding for most pictures, allowing for remarkable detail when zooming in.

For most users, Street View will be a unique addition to an already solid online mapping service. As the service expands, expect to see additional metro areas added quickly. They may already have the photos acquired and are simply easing in to a full-scale major metro rollout (remember the Gmail beta?).

Google Maps

Web Analytics has evolved into a copy and paste exercise. Go to any of the popular, free analytics services and the implementation instructions might read:

“Paste the analytics tracking code into each of your website pages and tracking begins immediately.”

Fundamentally, this statement is correct: copy this code, and analytics will start. Yet, the copy and paste mentality does little in the way of offering deeper analysis that can so often be critical to business decisions, both tactical and strategic.

By no means is this a slight on the free analytics services. Most are easy to implement, provide accurate data, and integrate well with popular online advertising tools. Rather, it’s indicative of how they have positioned their tools to be so customer friendly even the most techno-unsavvy individual can implement a very powerful toolset.

However, setting the course to discover critical stories through analysis is difficult, time consuming, and challenging to manage. Cut and paste analytics is no longer applicable, and pure-play “specialist” type skills can be too siloed to drive real discovery. Instead, design teams, development teams, network teams, usability teams - all the specialists in their own disciplines - need to be sitting at the same table speaking the same language - striving towards the same goal, but guided by a common understanding of technologies.

Clearly most companies want to align their resources in such a way, but many do not. Utilizing resources in this way can ultimately create a seemingly immovable monolith of people, projects, and processes - the very things that have been flagged as a significant drain on corporate resources. In many cases this is enough of a deterrent to implementing truly meaningful marketing intelligence initiatives.

For example (using a model of efficiency):

A company decides it wants to implement a new navigation bar on their website. Its daily traffic has been increasing significantly to nearly 1 million pageviews per day and they want to provide a “better” experience for their users. The designers hand off the new design to the coders, and the new navigation bar is implemented quickly. All told, the new navigation structure adds approximately 10K in additional data for all the elements needed to make the navigation work. It’s a sleek, low-maintenance site update process and it gets the job done without the need for meetings, special budgets, or the involvement of a lot of people or teams.

In that example the end goal was accomplished - the implementation of a new navigation bar in a quick, simple, and efficient manner.

But moving beyond efficiencies into meaningful intelligence puts the analysis monolith directly in the path of where most companies need to go. Yet even for the simplest endeavors it must be tackled with a vengeance in order to reveal deeper insight. In the case of a new navigation bar, meaningful marketing intelligence can help raise issues that may otherwise go unnoticed:

• Are those pageviews from people or robots?
• Does syndicated data such as RSS feeds count against those pageviews?
• How many people actually make use of the navigation?
• How many pageviews were generated by standard web browsers? Mobile/WAP browser?
• Are pageviews impacted by proxy servers (such as AOL) that may be altering the actual amount of traffic to the site?
• Are static page elements caching themselves inside the visitor’s browsers, or reloading every time?
• Can advanced styling technologies be implemented to deliver more compact file sizes?

And so, with this type of intelligence that comes from both a broad understanding and specific knowledge of disciplines involved in marketing intelligence strategies, the simple exercise of updating a site’s navigation becomes much more meaningful:

An organization decides it wants to implement a new navigation bar on their website. The daily traffic has been increasing, and is now at the level of 1 million pageviews per day (this data from the analytics team). Only a small percentage of the traffic is from robots and automated scrapers, so there are actually people looking at the site. And, while use of syndicated content has risen, those individuals have a different navigation structure, both for RSS feeds and mobile site access. There’s very little traffic being proxied through services like AOL or MSN, so more people are actually touching the site on a regular basis instead of fetching the content from a proxy server.

The design teams come up with an elegant solution that scores great marks in usability testing, taking its cues from data gathered on how users are interacting with the various page elements. The development team sees that a great majority of site visitors are using next-gen browsers which enables the use of more advanced styling techniques, reducing load times and filesizes, and ultimately giving the designers what they want in terms of an interactive experience. In addition, cache-controls were set on navigation content, since the navigation items rarely changed from day to day, meaning that site visitors would only download the navigation when an element had changed, versus downloading it every time from the webserver.

Based on the intelligence gathered, the new navigation filesize is variable (6-8K vs. 10K), depending on what browser type or access method is being used. It seems like a minute amount of data in today’s broadband-enabled world, but the small increase has big implications. Even though the additional data is less than 1% of what could fit on a regular 3 1/2″ floppy disk, a 10K increase in data size means almost 3.5 extra terabytes of data that’s being sent to site visitors over the course of a year (that’s approximately 150,000 trees made in to paper and printed). That’s a significant increase for something so small as a navigation menu. The server team understands this and calculates the impact on network congestion and hardware failure rates, and ultimately recommends adding an additional server to handle the increased load and maintain scalability and redundancy.

The small change of reworking a navigation bar has evolved into something much more complex. More people are involved, implementation timeframes have been longer, and costs are potentially higher than the original scenario, both in terms of capital assets and people costs. Yet, a deeper approach to implementing a new navigation bar potentially means bigger savings in the long run and a more strategic alignment of resources that ultimately will prove beneficial. If this were an e-commerce site and the site was down for an hour due to hardware failure, or congested due to traffic issues, how much revenue would be lost then?

Meaningful marketing intelligence is technologically complex and cannot happen within a silo. Though specific knowledge and expertise in technology disciplines is critical, integration through a broad understanding of technologies, disciplines and crafts - and how they all work together in the digital experience - is vital to successful, meaningful analytics intelligence.

comScore has released its latest search engine rankings for April 2007. Not surprising, Google continues it’s march towards search dominance, moving up 1.4% from the previous month to 49.7% of all US internet searches.
Both Yahoo and Microsoft’s search sites declined slightly, as did Ask’s rankings. It will be interesting to see how Ask’s numbers move (up or down) as they move forward with their “algorithm” advertising campaign here in the US.

comScore Releases April U.S. Search Engine Rankings via [www.comscore.com]

As more marketers and advertisers are drawn to the allure of click->buy, is there a new paradigm being created that pits the show-me-the-results-today mentality against an organization’s traditional sales cycle?

Much has transpired over the last few years to fuel the “right now” attitude of the current digital era, and this movement has slowly but surely seeped into the commercial marketplace as well. Companies are expanding and shifting advertising budgets to the digital medium because the promise of an instant audience (that’s where people are migrating) with instant revenue (and those people are spending money) is too tempting to ignore.

But even though more people are spending more time online, does this automatically equate to more dollars spent or more purchases made?

Not necessarily. Remember the shopping mall? 10-20 years ago it was as much of a place of business as it was a place to hang out. People would socialize and gather - to talk with friends, see a movie, or do some window shopping. Today, destinations like MySpace, services like text messaging, media outlets like YouTube, and shopping experiences like eBay are taking the place of what historically have been offline activities.

And just like the tire-kickers of yesteryear, people regularly visit these sites without the intent to purchase something or engage in a transaction.

Online has become the new offline. Activities that were once terrestrial commonplace are now happening digitally at an increasingly growing rate. Everything has gone digital - music, watching TV or a movie, communicating (voice or text) - even grocery shopping.

Clearly those organizations with a significant portion of their revenue coming from online channels expect to see positive returns on digital initiatives. But, if online is the major or only path to market or customer engagement it makes sense for a direct correlation to exist between advertising dollars and revenue.

Too frequently, however, do companies succumb to the allure of digital marketing and advertising without a clear sense of expectations. The positive hype around online advertising is often loud enough to drown out the fact that even though more people are spending more time online, it doesn’t necessarily translate into instant revenue or positive return.

Though many sectors have figured out how to sell online profitably there are still those who, in terms of direct revenue generated from digital initiatives, have yet to see a clear picture of any type of return. This is not to say that search marketing, banner and rich media ads, or other types of digital advertising aren’t worth the investment. But it does mean that if those types of strategies are employed then there must be clear expectations of what to expect, and when to expect it.

For many companies real sales still take time. If a pay-per-click advertising campaign is put online one day, chances are it may not generate direct revenue the next. However, if the offline or historical sales cycle is 3 months long a benchmark for performance and expectations is  already in place, providing structure and context around the effectiveness of that campaign.

Speculation came to a halt today as the Internet rumor mill reports Google is officially buying FeedBurner.  Sources close to the deal say that Google will pay $100 million for the RSS feed management service.

This is the latest acquisition in a recent buying spree for the search engine giant.  With their recent acquisitions of YouTube and DoubleClick (and they already have Blogger in their treasure chest),  this is yet another signal that Google is positioning themselves to have an advertising presence in both established and emerging web channels, even if the emerging channels have yet to garner the attention of the general Internet population at large.

$100 Million Payday For FeedBurner via [TechCrunch]

Back in the 1990’s a company called Web Trends released a tool that scanned website traffic logs and provided information on the number of visits, pageviews, and other rudimentary date about where site traffic originated. Instead of having to pour through reams and reams of mind-numbing data, companies could now easily see basic data about what was happening on their website.

Like Henry Ford and the Model-T did for the auto industry, Web Trends set the stage for the rest of the analytics market space well into the dot-com era. It introduced the lexicon of analytics to the commercial world, and did so quite successfully. Soon the language of analytics began making its way in to daily boardroom and water cooler discussions across the new digital landscape.

Though this language surrounding analytics did offer marketers and advertisers new ways of thinking about how their customers used websites it did not evolve as quickly as the websites themselves. Technologies like Javascript, Flash, Acrobat, and streaming video became more commonplace and websites as a communications and advertising platform became more sophisticated. But despite the maturation of the online world as a whole, the language of analytics simply did not keep pace. The online and interactive mediums kept evolving, but how organizations were talking about measurement did not.

After the bubble analytics took a back seat to pretty much everything. Not being armed with the latest version of analytics software was secondary to many companies as their current version was pleasantly providing all the data the company needed. Because of this the language of analytics within companies remained the same - how many visits, how many pageviews, and where did visitors come from.

The dot-com bust was a stopping point in the evolution of web analytics. Though the industry continued to improve and expand basic software functionaltiy, the rudimentary language of web analysis had become so cemented and solidified in the business community many organizations weren’t encouraged or expected to expand their own perception of analytics and look beyond visits. In the collective business community web analysis began to degrade from an evolutionary business tool into a set of programs that merely provided reporting, rather than inspiring new ways of thinking and revealing stories about how customers interacted with a website or other digital media.

Web analytics is like a giant monolith - massive, daunting, and scary. If an organization manages to keep its analytics implementation out of the silo of death, there’s not only understanding what the language of analytics is but applying context to those stories the data is telling and using them to make informed decisions.

That’s why web analytics is often underestimated, understaffed, and undervalued by many organizations.

We’re taking a closer look at the monolith that is web analytics, and in the coming days we’ll offer commentary and insight about these issues. We’ll look at how analytics got to be a monolith: why it can be misunderstood, why it’s difficult to implement (at the technical and business levels), and how important data often stays hidden from those who need it most.

Stay tuned!

Apple isn’t messing around with this product launch. Expected sometime mid-June, the Cupertino technology company reported on Wednesday that iPhone will be available at approximately 2,000 stores (160 U.S. based Apple stores and 1,840 ATT boutiques).

No word yet on how many units will ship on launch date, however. Reports for 2007 annual shipments have been as high as 7 million unitsh which averages out to just over a million shipped per month ( or 500 phones per store). Chances are some of the higher-traffic Apple stores will have more inventory available, as the dinky, mall-type Cingular/ATT kiosks may not even have space available for that many units.

iPhone to be Available at 2,000 Store Fronts at Launch via [AppleInsider.com]

Yesterday Google announced its Universal Search initiative, which integrates search results from all of Google’s web properties and projects into the main search results page of Google.com. Instead of only seeing text-based search engine results or having to go to the separate portals for image, news, or video search, users will now be seeing the most relevant results for a search query regardless of its format. So, searching on Steve Jobs will not only bring up the most valid text-based search results, but you’ll also see images, news snippets, and video - all embedded within the standard search results listings.

Lots of feedback on the announcement throughout the Internet. We’ll be following up with further posts of the ramifications of Universal Search later.

With today’s approval of the iPhone by the FCC the final specs for the long awaited device have become public record. There’s been speculation for some time that the iPhone wouldn’t ship with more than EDGE wireless network connectivity, and though most of us wireless broadband junkies were holding out hope today’s announcement was the final nail in the coffin. No UMTS or HSDPA in the works - just plain old EDGE.

EDGE works well for retrieving email synchronized through Exchange or other POP3/IMAP services, but even with text-only web pages, it can be a bit slow. And large media files - you can forget about it.

If Apple’s play is to truly make the iPhone a mobile/wireless music and entertainment device (mobile iTunes, anyone?), why would they skimp on the slow data rates of EDGE?

One potential reason could be that they are waiting for Cingular to upgrade all their networks to UMTS/HSPDA. Though current Cingular/ATT 3G coverage is growing, there are still major population areas throughout the country that don’t have the higher bandwidth 3G provides.

There’s no doubt that future versions of iPhone will have the faster wireless options, and in the near term EDGE connectivity will be sufficient for the majority of iPhone users. But with the current adoption of wireless devices, the massive public interest in the iPhone, and push in the marketplace for mobile-enabled services, Apple better have plans on the drawing board already to make their high speed phone truly high speed.