There are only 18 days left to submit your thought-provoking session idea for Webtrends’ Engage 2010!

November 16, 2009 is the last day to send us your fresh ideas on getting the most out of enterprise customer intelligence. We’re especially excited to receive strategies, case studies, and notable trends related to the following areas:

• Social media
• Site optimization
• Mobile data
• Offline integration of data

Got a clever idea in mind? Want to share your ingenious new view on the old ways of doing? Great! We can’t wait to see it! But there’s one more thing to consider: Webtrends’ Engage 2010 offers three days packed with interactive sessions, so you’ll need to choose from the following types of presentation delivery formats:

• Sprints: Ignite-style presentations (5 minute PowerPoint presentations with a total of 20 slides that rotate automatically after 15 seconds)
• Breakout Sessions: Hour-long, timely, relevant, and intriguing presentations
• Workshops: Hands-on and interactive sessions with no PowerPoint and no agenda
• Flex Sessions: Small round-table discussions guided by industry leaders

You can read more about the session types on Webtrends’ Engage 2010 blog. The video at right is an example of the Ignite presentation style.

Webtrends’ Engage 2010 is three days of interesting forward-thinking and interactive discussions on enterprise customer intelligence. As an unconventional conference, it’s designed to encourage the sharing of ideas and solutions between attendees and presenters.

Held this year Februrary 1-4, 2010  in beautiful New Orleans, LA, Engage 2010 is a chance to both learn and teach the latest in best practices for digital marketing. In addition to having an opportunity to show off your ideas and knowledge, valuable networking opportunities with industry leaders and experts abound!

Keep in mind, if you are submitting a topic, sales pitches and product plugs will not be accepted. Session presenters chosen will be notified by November 30, 2009. The clock is ticking! Send us your presentation idea and type of format, and present at Engage 2010!

During the previous four parts of this series( intro, paper prototyping, design, and web standards), I focused on the redesign of Tag Builder that we completed in the spring. While authoring these posts, I didn’t have the liberty to disclose the application we launched just last week, Webtrends Analytics 9 Insight. However, these posts were not unrelated as the methodologies and principles that guided the redesign of Tag Builder were also core to the genesis of Analytics 9 Insight. In the final post in this series, I’ll introduce Analytics 9 Insight features that were inspired by working directly with our users as we progressed through designing, building and testing.

Stories

For the past year, we have been collecting stories from our customers. While listening to what is currently working for them, we paid special attention to what isn’t. We found that our pro users spent a majority of their time creating dashboards and reports for other users in the organization, from executives to marketers. These other users greatly outnumbered the pro users and found that the Webtrends interface was difficult to navigate and had too many options. We incorporated this feedback into stories that guided our design and development.

Some of the stories that guided Analytics 9 Insight

Prototyping and User Testing

Working from these stories, we prototyped the new application completely on paper, using a process called paper prototyping. A cross-departmental team made up of designers, developers, writers, testers, and others “built” the application with markers, paper, scissors, and tape. We then took the paper prototype on the road to our customer conference in Las Vegas. There, we had multiple sessions where our customers attempted to accomplish tasks derived from our stories. When they succeeded, we knew we got it right. When they didn’t, we broke out the markers and paper and designed new solutions. In the end, the paper prototype became a blueprint for our design and development efforts.

David working on some paper prototypes before testing with users

Beta

We developed the application in just nine weeks. We wanted to get it in the hands of users as soon as possible, initially releasing it into a private beta so we could gather feedback and address issues before releasing it publicly. It was a great thing to do because it gave us the opportunity to fine tune the performance and remove many issues before launching the application to the entire On Demand user base.

White board used to track key issues during the private beta

Launch

We were all a bit nervous as we launched the product. It was exciting to see the activity on Twitter and the early reviews pour in. Our goal was to make the most intuitive, useful analytics application in the industry, but because the stories that guided our design efforts came directly from our customers, we were also confident. To keep the dialog going, we included a Get Satisfaction link right in the product. We want to continue to hear from our users.

Get Satisfaction feedback built into the product

New Features

The main features of Analytics 9 Insight have been fairly well documented by now. Web Services URLs ready to embed in Excel, Story View, and RSS overlay among others. The following are features that you may not have heard about that come directly from listening to our users.

1. Shareable URLs

The original version of share included an email option. Then we thought about how people communicate in the office today and realized with corporate IM, intranets, message boards, etc, email was just one way in which users would like to share reports. We took a step back, removed the email option, and created a URL system that would allow anyone to copy and send the link to any other user. This makes sharing reports extremely easy.

URLs reflect choices in interface. Great for sharing.

2. Dimension and Measure Auto Suggest and Search

Creating custom reports in Webtrends allows for endless possibilities. Unfortunately, it can also create endless reports. When considering many different options in which a user could categorize reports, we discovered that most users could remember which reports they were looking for by identifying which dimensions and measures that the report is made of. In the profile dashboard, below the fold, is a list of all reports available to you for that profile. If you start typing a measure or dimension in the search box, the auto complete will kick in at three letters. Choosing one of the measures or dimensions will filter the list to only include reports with that measure or dimension.

Auto-suggest for dimensions and measures across reports

Filter by measure or dimension

3. Copy and Pasteable Content

Sometimes, when scanning through analytics data, you run across a bit of data here or there that you need to copy and paste into a spreadsheet or report. We prioritized this ability over almost everything else. Whether you are in the profile dashboard and click on table view or are in a report, you are able to select the data directly from the interface. Very handy.

Trend view

Switch to table view for easy copy and paste

4. Weekend Indicators

Insight uses 7-day, 28-day, and 91-day date range shortcuts. The first is typical but the second two are a bit peculiar. There is a reason why we chose them instead of the standard 30 and 90 day range options—weekends. You see, both 28 and 91 are divisible by 7. This allows us to display data ranges in compare mode where the weekdays align. Interesting patterns emerge when you show one date range compared to another and the days of the week align perfectly. This is extremely useful as most businesses see a difference between weekdays and weekends.

28 day compare view with weekend indicators

91 day compare view with weekend indicators

5. Date Range Options

The default date range options, as mentioned, are 7-day, 28-day, and 91-day ranges. However, if you click on Custom, you are able to select any range of days you want. After you make a selection, the compare default is to choose the same number of days just before the selection. To change your compare range, all you have to do is select the starting day and the application will automatically select the range equal to the same number of days as the main range. There are also other shortcuts available in the custom option. The year, quarter, and month are all selectable as shortcuts. You can also use one of the numbered week selectors, just to the left of each week.

Custom date range allows for day, week (shown), month, quarter, year, and custom ranges

6. True Visitor Metric

If you select one of the calendar shortcuts mentioned above (year, quarter, month, week, or day), the Visitors key metric will appear in the profile dashboard. Because Analytics is tuned to scan across these standard date ranges and produce a true visitor count, we added this when those ranges are selected.

True visitor count when date selection is set at standard report period

7. Pivot

When you drill into a report and have a specific date range selected, the last thing you want to do when switching reports or profiles is set up the date range all over again. We know that many users switch profiles when viewing similar reports. We added a dropdown to the right of the profile and report selection that makes this extremely easy to jump from profile to profile or report to report. This saves quite a bit of time.

Click on pivot dropdowns to change account, profile, or report

8. Adaptive Account Dashboard

Every customer is different. Some have many profiles. Some have just a few. And some just have one. We wanted to make sure that each customer/user had an interface optimized for them. If a user only has one profile, then they never see the account dashboard and jump right into the profile dashboard. This eliminates unnecessary steps after login. If the user has less than 25 profiles, they see the standard view which features a single table of profiles that can be sorted by any of the available measures and embeds a sparkline of page views. If the user has more than 25 profiles available, they are presented with the compact view which features four columns and reduces the visible metric down to one. In this view, the user can choose a different metric to display by clicking on the metric dropdown at the top of the screen. They can also hover over any profile to get a multi metric and sparkline view. Interesting tip. A user can force the standard or compact view by adding a query parameter to the URL. ?mode=standard or ?mode=compact will change the views.

Account dashboard in standard mode

Account dashboard in compact mode

Inspiration

There are many more customer-inspired features in Webtrends Analytics 9 Insight. If you are a current user, we hope you enjoy Analytics 9 Insight. After all, you helped create it. If you are a customer and haven’t been an active user, we encourage you to login and give it a try. When you do, don’t be shy about sending us feedback through the Get Satisfaction widget in the product (hover over Help and click Feedback). We will also be conducting some user testing next week, August 17 – 21. If you are in the Portland area and would like to test some prototypes of what we are designing next, let me know in the comments.

Today we announced and launched Webtrends Analytics 9, the most significant set of advances in user experience and data integration in our 15+ year history.  Webtrends Analytics 9 is comprised of three primary feature areas:

Insight Interface: No Instructions Necessary

To compliment our powerful analytics engine, we’ve added a new interface called Insight. The new Analytics 9 Insight interface combines numerous breakthroughs in data exploration and visualization, including:

• RSS Overlays. Quickly determine how your web site is being influenced by other marketing investments by visually overlaying data from any RSS feed on top of trending web metrics.  Overlays from Webtrends Social Measurement, for example, provide direct insight into the relationships between web site traffic and activity on enthusiast blogs, video channels and other interactive media.
• Story View. Automatically converts data and metrics into non-technical narratives that provide written context that graphs and charts can’t. Narratives can be downloaded and shared as PowerPoint, Word, and other formats.

Data-in, no Restrictions. Data-out, no fees

Webtrends industry leading enhanced application programming interface (API) provides self-service access and integration of your online and offline data without any added charges:

• Live spreadsheets. Review web site metrics throughout the day in live spreadsheets that anyone can access. Create excel dashboards with live data in three easy steps.
• Data collection. Uncover cross-channel trends and business opportunities by programmatically sending data from mobile applications, devices and any other standards-based source to Webtrends hosted collection service for processing and analysis alongside your web site traffic and other data.
• Data Extraction. Populate widgets, dashboards and other applications with Webtrends data using the iron-clad, and no fee, Webtrends Web Services built with Representational State Transfer (REST) URLs and other web standards – or combine data from Webtrends and other business intelligence tools to create best-of-breeds solutions catered to your business.

Powerful to the Core

Analytics 9 provides all of the core analytics features customers have come to depend on with Webtrends On Demand, including:

• Unlimited scale, capacity. Distinct and fully redundant data collection, analysis and rendering help absorb even the largest spikes in traffic without system outages or lost data. Webtrends has never lost a byte of customer data.
• Unmatched data flexibility. Unlimited dimensions and measures based on any attribute or parameter let you explore your data without restrictions or incurring extra charges.

Analytics 9 is available for purchase beginning today. Current Webtrends On Demand customers have access to Analytics 9 at http://insight.Webtrends.com

And now the traditional product manager ramble (Wilson started it):

Truth be told, I’ve been doing this line of work for a long time.  But in all this time, I have never seen both the tireless dedication from everybody who worked on this project and the immense creativity and talent that was required to get the job done.  This effort was not only in product development, and not only in marketing, but throughout the entire organization.  People stepped up every day and offered their help. I am immensely proud to represent this product and even more so to work at a company where everybody is so passionate about customers success.

I am very pleased to announce the launch of a market-leading data collection capability for Webtrends. The addition of this API to our capabilities is another example of why Webtrends is the most powerful, open and elegant solution in the industry.

Keeping with our commitment to gather your feedback and deliver the most relevant of tools, we are making this new capability available in Beta for all of our customers and partners to use now.  Please help us help you by getting involved today. Push the limits! Get creative! Then let us know where we can improve on the capabilities. We will continue to evolve the API. Anything that connects to the internet is fair game.

As you, our customers, continue to expand your online presence beyond your web sites, it is our responsibility to grow our own measurement capabilities ahead of your evolving needs. Our data collection API is a critical addition to your arsenal of tools for collecting new data. The primary purpose for the API is to track behavior across various media that access the internet where traditional site tagging isn’t possible or an optimal fit.

Interested in more details? A full overview is available on our Developer Network. Please feel free to reach out to me with any questions, comments, or to explore opportunities to leverage this exciting new capability.

There are so many reasons to celebrate Webtrends Marketing Warehouse availability On Premise.  We’ve had a lot of success with our On Demand version over the last couple of years and wanted to better serve some unmet market needs with an On Premise version.  Here are just a few of the market needs that this product addresses.

• You choose: data mart or data warehouse – Our Marketing Warehouse product can be used in several ways to meet your organization’s needs.  You can use Marketing Warehouse as a data mart of online data to feed your enterprise data warehouse to benefit your organization as a whole.  You can also use it as your data warehouse for all you online data for your marketers.  Best of all, you can use it both ways!
• Deep integration – On Premise offers organizations ultimate flexibility in how they use their online data.  Having direct access to enriched online data means that the sky is the limit in how you want to integrate that data with other data and other marketing applications.  The goal is to drive insight to fuel actions with your customers and prospects.
• Ultimate control of the data – Whether its for privacy purposes, regulatory compliance, or  simply direct access to the data, having this level of control of this data behind your firewall is a huge benefit to many businesses.

Along with Marketing Warehouse, Webtrends Score is now available in On Premise as well.

Caution…proud Product Manager ramblings below.

I wanted to recognize the achievements of the Webtrends team who worked tirelessly to bring this product to market.  From developers writing code, to QA folks testing it, to Services folks ready to implement and support it, to Marketing promoting it, to Sales folks selling it.  A personal thanks to all of you who worked so hard to bring this product to market because you’re passionate about helping businesses strive for excellence.

In the previous two articles*, I introduced the newly redesigned Webtrends custom tracking-code creation tool called Tag Builder and then provided some background into the user centered design methodology, Paper Prototyping, used to construct the flow of the application. In this post, I will highlight the most significant design improvements that defined the new look of Tag Builder and influence products to come.

1. Palette

The most noticeable change with the new Tag Builder is the monochromatic color palette. It is sparse, simple, and gets right to the point. As we push the design of Webtrends applications forward, we are intent on establishing a professional, concise, and highly engineered look and feel. Think German automobile. Think professional photography equipment. Webtrends products are professional products. The palette of charcoal, magnesium, and white dominate the design while hints of litho blue and stop sign red reveal themselves on hover states and error messaging. Color is still there, just reserved for when it is effective.

Color palettes (before and after)

In an addition to Tag Builder, you may have also noticed that the brand identity for Webtrends received a facelift. The webtrends.com website reflects this and is being rolled out across all of our marketing materials. The new wordmark is modern. The new palette, is complimentary to Tag Builder. Both are heavily monochromatic but the modern blue and warm grays have a much stronger presence with the outbound marketing while the product reserves its use of color for important indicators and highlights. This sophistication in coordination is like the outfits of a well dressed Hollywood couple attending the Oscars. Tag Builder was released before the branding update was revealed and so you will see future refinements to product design to reflect alignment.

2. Grid

The grid has received a lot of attention in the web design community in the past couple of years (thanks to pioneers like Khoi Vinh at the New York Times). The grid has been used for decades to organize typographical information in print so that blocks of type define the geometry and patterns of the design. This allows for the elimination of ornamental design clutter and reduces design to its essential elements. The new Tag Builder uses a 960 based grid and this allowed us to simplify the design dramatically. It may seem a bit open at first with excess whitespace, but as soon as you interact with Tag Builder, you’ll notice that the whitespace gives way to hover help text that no longer requires a click just to get the basic concept of each fieldset.

Tag Builder and the grid

3. Language

Because the previous Tag Builder required this additional click to access any help, the field labels ended up being sentence like in places and overly descriptive. This created a wordy design that left the user with a lack of confidence and uncertainty as it required more comprehension even for basic fields. The new labels are short and conversational in tone. This is easier to comprehend and it leads to a more confident user. For instance, a certain label read, “Single first-party cookie (use one first-party cookie across the primary and each subdomain: Cookie domain attribute.” In the new interface it now reads, “The site domain you want to track,” followed by the entry field. When the user hovers over the field, hover help appears and provides the user with an opportunity to confirm their assumptions as well as providing a link if the user wishes to explore the topic in depth. In addition to improving the readability of the labels and hover help, we also improved the error messaging for improperly filled out fields. The language short, concise, and straight to the point.

4. Indicator Dots

One of the most troublesome design challenges we faced with the new Tag Builder was how to clearly communicate completed fields when only one tab was visible at a time. We solved this challenge with a unique solution that we named, “indicator dots.” We noticed in the prototyping tests that users would click through the tabs a few times just as a driver in a car trying to make a left hand turn onto a busy street swings their head back and forth. With the indicator dots, now they at least knew which tabs that had completed some information in. This challenge grew as we realized that there was no clear way to message the user if they had improperly filled out a field on one tab when clicking the “Build Tag” button. So, we also leveraged the indicator dots to turn red when there is a field error on a tab. In the end, the indicator dots communicate to the user three things; how many choices are there on a tab, how many were filled out, and which fields contain errors when submitting the form.

Indicator dots

5. Confirmation

A related challenge to the indicator dots was the lack of any confirmation before the user clicked the “Build Tag” submit button. The previous version of Tag Builder directly triggered the “download” function of the browser when this was clicked. This worked ok in Internet Explorer but in Firefox and Safari, the download function didn’t allow the user to name the file. We realized we needed a confirmation page that condensed the information related to that particular tag setup on one screen paired with the option to name the zip package.

Confirmation page

Summary

We made many additional improvements with Tag Builder and I hope if you are a user, you have noticed an improved workflow. In the next article, I’ll walk through the changes we made regarding the web standards architecture.

I’d love to hear your feedback (thoughts, comments, questions, or critiques) on this new design direction.

*When I set out to write this five part series, I didn’t intend for it to be as drawn out. A new baby and product design improvements beyond Tag Builder are keeping me quite busy.

Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 (MOSS) is a great platform for an organization that needs to roll out an intranet with very little effort because MOSS offers an easy way to organize content based on a company’s organization model.

However, what many companies found was while it was easy to implement the website, trying to get accurate analytics on a MOSS portal was difficult, if not impossible.  Log file analytics yielded inaccurate results and advanced JavaScript tracking was nearly impossible for most organizations due to the complexity of the SharePoint code.  If your organization did not have a C# programmer with SharePoint Portal experience, you were out of luck.

After hearing this concern again and again, we decided there had to be a better way and we were going to find it. The current analytics experience was difficult and frustrating – this was unacceptable.  With this goal in mind, my colleague Michael Love and I researched the issue and came up with a simple solution: directly interact with the SharePoint Portal template structure.  The data is already there on the page; let’s use it.  Just as the Webtrends SmartSource Data Collector code pulls data like refers automatically, this altered code allows us to pull details about the portal experience automatically from the SharePoint templates.

So exactly how much development is required?  This is the best part; the effort involved in implementing the code is minimal.  No C# coding required.  No major template modifications are required.  Your developers should be able to apply the code and get you up and running in minutes.  Webtrends will provide you with the code you need to apply to MOSS 2007 to make this work.  Webtrends will do the rest.  We’ll set up the reporting and help you test the data output.

How rich is the data?  Using this methodology we can collect data on Content Areas, overall site traffic based on a Breadcrumb drilldown report, document tracking, Webpart views, onsite search results (including found vs. not found) and all of the standard reports you expect out of Webtrends Analytics.

The document reporting is probably my favorite functionality.  We can build a report that will track document interaction within a document library including check-outs, downloads, emails directly from SharePoint and a number of other options.  The best part is you get you pick the standard document interactions you want to track.  User level reporting is also available.  If you have an external list of departments that users belong to, we can create a report that will allow you to see activity based on departments.

How do I get it? If you are interested in this offering – touch base with your account manager for implementation details and pricing.

This is just the first step.  Webtrends is serious about getting you the data you need and giving you direct access to you.  Many of you saw our press release about integrating with WebSphere Portal.  The integration will be equally easy, giving step by step guidance on how to track your WebSphere Portal with minimal effort.

It’s time to make things easy!

Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 (MOSS) is a great platform for an organization that needs to roll out an intranet with very little effort because MOSS offers an easy way to organize content based on a company’s organization model.

However, what many companies found was while it was easy to implement the website, trying to get accurate analytics on a MOSS portal was difficult, if not impossible.  Log file analytics yielded inaccurate results and advanced JavaScript tracking was nearly impossible for most organizations due to the complexity of the SharePoint code.  If your organization did not have a C# programmer with SharePoint Portal experience, you were out of luck.

After hearing this concern again and again, we decided there had to be a better way and we were going to find it. The current analytics experience was difficult and frustrating – this was unacceptable.  With this goal in mind, my colleague Michael Love and I researched the issue and came up with a simple solution: directly interact with the SharePoint Portal template structure.  The data is already there on the page; let’s use it.  Just as the Webtrends SmartSource Data Collector code pulls data like refers automatically, this altered code allows us to pull details about the portal experience automatically from the SharePoint templates.

So exactly how much development is required?  This is the best part; the effort involved in implementing the code is minimal.  No C# coding required.  No major template modifications are required.  Your developers should be able to apply the code and get you up and running in minutes.  Webtrends will provide you with the code you need to apply to MOSS 2007 to make this work.  Webtrends will do the rest.  We’ll set up the reporting and help you test the data output.

How rich is the data?  Using this methodology we can collect data on Content Areas, overall site traffic based on a Breadcrumb drilldown report, document tracking, Webpart views, onsite search results (including found vs. not found) and all of the standard reports you expect out of Webtrends Analytics.

The document reporting is probably my favorite functionality.  We can build a report that will track document interaction within a document library including check-outs, downloads, emails directly from SharePoint and a number of other options.  The best part is you get you pick the standard document interactions you want to track.  User level reporting is also available.  If you have an external list of departments that users belong to, we can create a report that will allow you to see activity based on departments.

How do I get it? If you are interested in this offering – touch base with your account manager for implementation details and pricing.

This is just the first step.  Webtrends is serious about getting you the data you need and giving you direct access to you.  Many of you saw our press release about integrating with WebSphere Portal.  The integration will be equally easy, giving step by step guidance on how to track your WebSphere Portal with minimal effort.

It’s time to make things easy!

Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 (MOSS) is a great platform for an organization that needs to roll out an intranet with very little effort because MOSS offers an easy way to organize content based on a company’s organization model.

However, what many companies found was while it was easy to implement the website, trying to get accurate analytics on a MOSS portal was difficult, if not impossible.  Log file analytics yielded inaccurate results and advanced JavaScript tracking was nearly impossible for most organizations due to the complexity of the SharePoint code.  If your organization did not have a C# programmer with SharePoint Portal experience, you were out of luck.

After hearing this concern again and again, we decided there had to be a better way and we were going to find it. The current analytics experience was difficult and frustrating – this was unacceptable.  With this goal in mind, my colleague Michael Love and I researched the issue and came up with a simple solution: directly interact with the SharePoint Portal template structure.  The data is already there on the page; let’s use it.  Just as the Webtrends SmartSource Data Collector code pulls data like refers automatically, this altered code allows us to pull details about the portal experience automatically from the SharePoint templates.

So exactly how much development is required?  This is the best part; the effort involved in implementing the code is minimal.  No C# coding required.  No major template modifications are required.  Your developers should be able to apply the code and get you up and running in minutes.  Webtrends will provide you with the code you need to apply to MOSS 2007 to make this work.  Webtrends will do the rest.  We’ll set up the reporting and help you test the data output.

How rich is the data?  Using this methodology we can collect data on Content Areas, overall site traffic based on a Breadcrumb drilldown report, document tracking, Webpart views, onsite search results (including found vs. not found) and all of the standard reports you expect out of Webtrends Analytics.

The document reporting is probably my favorite functionality.  We can build a report that will track document interaction within a document library including check-outs, downloads, emails directly from SharePoint and a number of other options.  The best part is you get you pick the standard document interactions you want to track.  User level reporting is also available.  If you have an external list of departments that users belong to, we can create a report that will allow you to see activity based on departments.

How do I get it? If you are interested in this offering – touch base with your account manager for implementation details and pricing.

This is just the first step.  Webtrends is serious about getting you the data you need and giving you direct access to you.  Many of you saw our press release about integrating with WebSphere Portal.  The integration will be equally easy, giving step by step guidance on how to track your WebSphere Portal with minimal effort.

It’s time to make things easy!

I’ve been in the software industry for over 20 years and in that time I have seen plenty of term confusion and misuse.  But it’s hard for me to remember a time when I saw so much of it from a single space.  Let’s clear the air on a couple of definitions (for now), beginning with the liberal use of the term multivariate.

Regardless of the terms, there are really two fundamental forms of testing and optimization in our space: split tests, as I refer to them, and multivariate.  Split tests, a.k.a. A/B tests or A/B/n tests, apply when you have a small number of variables and values.  For instance a single variable, such as an image, may have two values, Image A and Image B.  This most basic example is where the term A/B test comes from.  Add in Image C, Image D and Image E, and you can see why the A/B/n shorthand is used.  In these instances the number of values is low enough to permit a large number of trials to be performed on each, providing us with a clear statistical winner with a reasonably sized population of trials.

Now let’s throw in another variable, such as a text block.  You might have two versions of the text to go along with two versions of the image, making four combinations.  This is where the confusion enters in.  Some vendors have gotten into an annoying habit of calling this multivariate.  It’s not.  You can use the exact same split test approach as before – it just so happens there are two variables involved.  I like to call this multi-variable split tests, but frankly I don’t care what we call it, so long as it’s not confused with multivariate.

So what is multivariate optimization?  It’s a form of statistical variance analysis.  The Taguchi methods (named after its inventor Genichi Taguchi) is one form of multivariate statistics reportedly used in several behavioral targeting, testing and ad optimization solutions today.  Where multivariate statistics come into play is when the number of variable/value combinations is so large that it prohibits more than a small number of trials being run against a single combination of values (i.e. it would be too time consuming or too costly).  Multivariate statistics permit us to infer, statistically, the singular values and/or combinations that lead to the desired outcome (e.g. conversions) based on a relatively small population of trials.

Now that we have that cleared up, let’s move onto the term “portfolio” as it applies to PPC campaigns. Back in the ‘70’s and 80’s, Harry Markowitz published his works on Modern Portfolio Theory (MPT).  His work earned him the Nobel Memorial Prize for Economic Sciences in 1990. Essentially MPT provides the body of mathematics used to create diversified investment strategies, and in so doing providing the greatest possible return within a given risk tolerance (notwithstanding global economic calamities, that is).  Or conversely, the lowest amount of risk for a desired return.  It’s all on Wikipedia, so you can read all about it there.

More recently some really smart people from Efficient Frontier, Inceptor (RIP) and WebTrends applied some of the principles of MPT towards the problem of optimizing large-scale PPC campaigns.  In fact Efficient Frontier derives its name from one of the main concepts of MPT.  It is also how the term “portfolio” came to be used in the context of search marketing.  Today I’m only aware of three vendors that use MPT-style mathematics in their PPC optimization solutions: Efficient Frontier, eSearchVision (I think) and WebTrends.  If there are others, please comment below and let me know.

So now enter the confusion.  Several vendors advertise “portfolio-based bid management” capabilities.  What is meant by this is that you can apply a bid rule against a group of keywords.  The term portfolio, in this instance, is used as an English synonym to group or collection.  Grammatically accurate?  Yes.  Intentionally designed to mislead?  Absolutely.

Of course vendors get away with this because the detailed understanding of these technologies is locked in the heads of a relatively small number of people.  But hopefully they are influential people who have a belief in transparency and truth in advertising.  So if you’re one of those people, please help educate the market, starting with me.  If you see errors in fact or have differences in opinion from my comments or in WebTrends’ messages, let’s hear it.