By June Dershewitz (@jdersh)

Suppose you’re planning to run a simple A/B test on a Web page and you’d like to use bounce rate as your measure of success. Can you do it with Google Website Optimizer (GWO)?

I’ve had this issue crop up a number of times recently, so I decided to research it. Here’s what I found out.

Can I set bounce rate as a conversion goal within GWO?

No. GWO itself does not report bounce rate, nor does it allow bounce rate to be set as a conversion goal. It’s possible to approximate bounce rate as a goal by coding every single link click on every single experiment page as a conversion event, but that gives you exit rate, not bounce rate – plus the setup can take a lot of effort.

Can I get bounce rate for GWO A/B test variations from Google Analytics or Omniture?

Yes. Although bounce rate isn’t reported within GWO, you can get it from Web analytics tools such as Google Analytics and Omniture. Integrating the data turns out to be very easy, and in fact requires zero coding as long as all experiment pages contain your standard Web analytics page tags.

Here’s why it’s easy: As GWO serves variations in an A/B test, visitors are redirected to unique URLs (indexA.html vs. indexB.html vs. indexC.html, for example). This behavior was contrary to my initial assumption that all visitors got the same URL, as is the case for GWO multivariate tests. Since URLs are unique in an A/B test, you can simply view the pages report within your Web analytics tool and filter on (for example) index*.html to see one row per variation.

Read more at June’s Blog

By Gary Angel (@garyangel)

It’s probably feckless to talk about dashboards without showing any – so my last post was really just a preamble to this one. But that doesn’t mean that the concepts I talked about in my last post don’t matter. The 3C’s (Culling, Classification, and Context) are the underpinnings of effective social dashboarding.

Culling is the essential first step, the generation of a clean data set to be used for measurement. Ignore this step at your peril. Profiles setup by people whose job it is to monitor posts for PR problems and opportunities are NOT going to cut it when it comes to measurement and dashboarding. Classification provides the groupings that transform the raw metrics into categories appropriate for reporting. Context is the “spin” you put on the data – the way your dashboard relates the metrics to each other and to the broader business.

The dashboard examples I used in the webinar were drawn from multiple clients (and I fudged and obfuscated the data or used the initial mocks) – so they don’t necessarily represent a cohesive report set; I chose them because I thought they captured different aspects of the Classification and Context methods Scott and I discussed.

Read on at Gary’s Blog

By Gary Angel

If I found IBM’s acquisition of Coremetrics unsurprising, the same cannot be said of their acquisition today of Unica. Just how many web analytics tools does a company need?

But of course, the acquisition is a reminder that Web analytics is not Unica’s primary business line – marketing automation and campaign management is. And with the acquisition, IBM adds another piece to a formidable online marketing suite.

For several years prior to its acquisition by Adobe, Omniture was selling a vision of a complete online marketing suite – and working in that direction with the acquisition or development of tools for PPC management, internal search optimization, behavioral targeting, and multivariate testing. That vision has been expanded and changed by the Adobe acquisition. But while Adobe offers some of the same pieces (and some additional ones), the integration of design components with measurement and marketing automation has always been more of a stretch.

IBM is doing the same thing, but at a whole nother level of operations. IBM now provides one of the leading ecommerce and site serving platforms, one of the leading full statistical analysis packages, one of the leading BI and data mining tools, two of the top web analytics tools, and one of the leading online campaign management and marketing automation tools. That’s a heck of an Online Marketing Suite.

Of course none of this stuff is integrated. And, as I’ve written before (with somewhat bewildering regularity as the pace of acquisitions accelerates), acquisitions are a risky business particularly when you are absorbed into a behemoth like IBM.

Read on at Gary’s Blog