Entries from October 2008 ↓

Today I’m proud to announce the official launch of a new phase of NuConomy Studio.
During the past few months we have received thousands of requests from all over the world for beta access. Unfortunately, we couldn’t accommodate everyone as we had to focus on developing and scaling our platform.
Today we announce the opening up of our platform, making it available to everyone who needs a better, easier (and free!) way to understand, optimize and monetize their site or digital advertising.
Additionally, we are also officially announcing some really exciting news about new features of the platform.
But before I get into all the details, I wanted to say thank you to the thousands of customers who already put their trust into our platform and use it today. It’s definitely been a bumpy ride sometimes as we learned how to scale the system and worked on performance issues. Your patience, support and feedback has been very valuable and we all really appreciate it. Our first and most important goal is to give you the best experience possible; we promise to continue to work our hardest to make it better. 

So what are we announcing today?

A new era in web analytics – meet Sage, our proactive analytics engine.
We work with thousands of customers - from personal bloggers and small startups to some of the largest sites on the web serving billions of pages every month.
It does not matter if they use us or other analytics platforms like Google Analytics or Omniture, we always hear the same complaints:
1. The smaller publishers keep saying that tracking lots of data and custom segmentations is very cool, but they just don’t have time to sit all day long, slicing and dicing information. They need to run a business.
2. At the same time, the bigger publishers complain about almost the same thing. Tracking everything possible is cool but sometimes there is just too much information to look at. If you have 10 million unique users coming from the US and just 100K from the UK and you suddenly jump to 400K in the UK, your chances to see that are very small. But in reality this is a very interesting and important piece of information for you to know.
Add the fact that now you can also segment your data by multiple criteria (e.g. age, gender, category, geo-location, referrers, keywords, etc.) and you see why getting the most valuable insights into your business became very hard.
Until now the general way vendors tried to attack this problem was by allowing you to create and add more custom reports. We have a very different vision for how web analytics should be done…
Sage is a patented data mining engine that does a lot of the “dirty work” for you. Sage runs every night and automatically slices, dices and analyzes all of your data. Sage compares all of the data of the last day to your historical data and determines what are the changes in your business that you should be aware of. It then pushes this information to you via “stories” so you will simply be able to log on to the system (or receive the info via RSS or email) and immediately understand what you need to focus on today. Even better, you can simply click on any of Sage stories and it will slice all the reports in the system in just the right way so you will be able to keep exploring the data yourself.

But that’s not all… Sage also analyzes your long term history and  finds hidden trends that sometimes are harder to see. It pushes them as well as new stories into the dashboard.  Via the two-way API, you can also take immediate corrective action based on the Sage results; let NuConomy optimize your business, thereby freeing your time to think about how to grow your business.
Examples of Sage results are:

• You had an increase or decrease in one of your site activities with a particular segment
• You had a large change in the keywords or referrers through which users found your site
• You had a change in the performance of one of your campaigns
• Some of your content just became very hot
• Much more…

Unfortunately web analytics is sometime like Microsoft Office. You put a lot of effort on buying or installing it just in order to take advantage of 3% of its power. We really believe that proactive analytics will change this industry and make web analytics more actionable again.
It gives small publishers the ability to find the real insights and focus their precious time on the important things they need to know to make their business better. At the same time, in-house analysts can finally focus on what they get paid for – analyzing insights and helping convert them to a desired on-site activity instead of sitting and slicing reports all day long.

I wanted to give special thanks to Omer van Kloeten, the real magic behind Sage, for all his hard work the past few months.

Are you a Blogger? Cool new plug-ins for major blogging and CMS platforms
As a blogger, this is one of the most exciting features. Today we announce the general availability of our plug-ins to some of the largest blogging and CMS platforms.
These are standard plug-ins which you can simply take and install on your blog in a matter of seconds. The plug-in does all the integration work completely automatically and tracks ~15 different activities across your blog, including RSS feeds and videos.
Even better, for some of the platforms we were able to embed all of the NuConomy Studio user interface inside the blog administration UI itself so you don’t even need to go to another interface to see the NuConomy insights and get smarter about your blog.
I want to highlight some features in the system that we think are particularly cool for bloggers:

• The ability to understand what topics you need to write on in order to encourage more participation and readership from the community.
• The ability to see the top users in your community.
• If you are running a multi-author blog, you are able to understand the different contribution each of your authors gives to the blog.
• Understand the engagement and contribution of videos you embed in your blog.

Later today we will post additional details about the above features and more…
If you have a Wordpress blog, you can simply take our plugin from the Wordpress plug-ins directory. If you are using another platform, such as Community Server, Dasblog or Movable Type, feel free to join our beta program and we will be happy to provide you with access to the plug-in.
Don’t forget to subscribe to this blog as we will have more exciting news around our plug-ins in the next few weeks.

I want to say special thank you to Eran Kampf who made the plugins possible.

Video Analytics
In recent months we saw video become an important and major feature for many of our customers and publishers.
As such we decided to develop a new solution for video.  Today we announce the official release of our new video analytics platform which comes in two flavors:

• Automatic tracking of flash videos (e.g. YouTube)
• A new revamped video API which you can quickly install into your own player

Our video analytics don’t just track how many people viewed your video. We actually allow you to understand how many people watched every second of the video. With this you can easily understand what are the most engaging parts of the video? Did people actually watch the ads in the video? How should you optimize ad placement in and around the video?
And the best thing is that this is all just part of the full NuConomy Studio, so you can use our powerful segmentation and correlation capabilities also on your videos.

OpenID Support
We are big fans of making the web a better, more open place for all of us. As such, we believe that OpenID is one of the more important initiatives out there.

We are really proud to announce that NuConomy Studio now fully supports OpenID. If you already have an OpenID, you can now use it to log into the Studio. If not, you can obtain one from one of the many providers here.

What’s more?
In the next few weeks we will keep pushing new features that will give you better ways to understand and monetize your business. You can stay up to date on all of them in our product blog.

As always we would love to hear your thoughts about our platform and vision. Feel free to contact us through the blog or just email us directly at any time.
And of course - Thanks again for the all NuConomy team who worked days and nights on delivering this platform to you.

Image via CrunchBase

There were quite a few posts  the last couple of days about the Google Yahoo deal. The powers against the deal (a.k.a Microsoft) organized many advertisers to talk loudly about their fear that such a deal will bring with it price fixing from Google side.

But as Danny Sullivan from Ad Age and Marshal Sponder wrote, Google is already fixing prices from day one.
Google has two very big black boxes under its belt.
The first one is the quality score algorithm that determines which ad will appear for each search and also how much the advertiser will pay for it.
Although they give some general guidelines about how this quality score is calculated, Google never really told the world how it is really done.
The second black box is the revenue share Google gives the publisher. As a publisher you have no idea how much of the advertising money is going to your pocket and how much into Google. There is a big chance that even if Google will change this number, you will never really know.
This fact combined with the huge number of publishers and advertisers using their services, gives Google great flexibility in its operations. When times are bad, they can always just add 0.01 cents to their part of the rev share and keep show wall street the growth they need.

With that in mind, you can start to understand why if the deal with Yahoo will take place, Google will have full control over the future of Yahoo. With small tweeks they can control exactly how much money Yahoo will make, how much ads they should give them, and how much money will advertisers will have to pay for these ads.

So is this deal really that bad for the advertisers, the publishers and the market? Maybe… And maybe not. It’s all in the hands of Google two black boxes.

In the last year we have done a lot of work with our customers, helping them targetting their users with product recommendations. You know the drill - the idea of giving a user the experience of “If you purchased this, you might want to purchase also…”.

Recommendations are a great way to enahnce the user expericne and drive your sales up. We saw some hugh imporvements in ROI from email campaigns as well as user satisfaction.
To be honest, we always had Amazon as our role model here. As a loyal customer of Amazon, I alwyas admired their work on deliverin this superior targeting experience.

This is why I was su surpise to get theis email from Amazon…
A month ago, I purchased there my first DSLR camera. A few days ago I got an email from Amazon, stating that they have some recommendations for me based on the fact that I showed interest in cameras.
What were their recommendations? Cameras.
This is a waste of a marketing message. As I already purchased a camera, what I should have been targeted with was other products like lenses and bags.
This is an error we see a lot of vendors do, but I was surprise to see it also from Amazon.

I’m really happy to announce our new partnership with Federated Media.
This is something we have been working on for some time. Federated share a mutual vision with us about what kind of metrics advertisers should get. The idea that tracking the mare traffic and clicks their campaigns generates is simply not enough.

When brand advertisers build digital campaigns in the shape of mini experiences and blogs they are trying to engage audince with their brand. Their goal is not to just pump p traffic, but really facilitate a conversation on their products and brand name.
In order to enable this, Federated just announced a new toolbox for their advertisers. The toolbox will give advertisers unprecedented holistic view on the campaign metrics. They chose us to power everything around engagement measurement.

This is just the first step, and we are working hard together on improving the toolbox and give advertisers the best solution posible.

You can find the official press release here.