But the point of this post is that it comes from the same place where all AA posts come from: we all want what we do to be easier, more meaningful, more recognized, and done with less drama; all so our intellect can fuel results. I wanted to write a few thoughts about tag management, from the perspective of this blog. So, here we go:

Something to make clear, right away

While I think everyone in the world who has anything to do with a web site should see our tool, Satellite, I think everyone in the world who has anything to do with a web site MUST explore the category and its key players. If you are not actively working to integrate a TMS into your web site, you are living in the past. Get with the program.

No, I am not joking. Really. Get with the program.

Here are two of the other players (among many, please feel free to comment if you represent another provider) that people should be talking to as part of this process.

TagMan – TagMan touts itself as the first TMS and the inventor of the category. Thank you! TagMan has excellent technology and is highly valuable to companies managing dozens or even hundreds of third-party tracking tags. I have not seen their interface, but I hear that people find the tool very valuable. And the employees I have met have been incredibly sharp and nice people.

Ensighten - Ensighten is without a doubt an incredibly powerful tool with a rich feature set, including simple methods to track Flash and native apps. Ensighten has an army of outrageously intelligent (and I might add very nice) people working there, and they are pushing constant innovation in the space.

Our offering, Satellite, is geared toward not just empowering the current teams who do this work (mostly developers), but looking forward to where this work should be done, and offering an intuitive tool set that gets rid of the technical aspects of tag management to empower marketers and analysts to take back what is rightfully theirs. In fact, Satellite is purpose built so you never see a “tag” ever again (unless you want to).

Finally, I have to recognize Adobe and Coremetrics, each offering their flavor of a TMS to offer these great benefits to their clients. I also haven’t seen these interfaces, but I’ve heard great things about them. While I personally (and professionally, in fairness) think that going with a vendor-supplied TMS is counter to some of the greatest benefits of a TMS, I can’t deny that for loyal clients, they provide a great benefit.

On a personal note, I want to make it clear that I have a tremendous amount of respect for the founders, employees, and technologies of the major players in this space, and I always will. While there has been some uncalled for drama in the space, none of it has actually happened between the highly professional and capable leaders or employees of the players, themselves. I am lucky to work and compete with such great people, so my fondness for this community (and this subsection of it) continues to shine.

Tag Management is a “when” technology, not an “if” technology

Tag management, like CMS’s, development frameworks, and myriad other technologies that came before, is absolutely, without a doubt, going to be a pervasive web technology, and I’ll take it even a step further: web sites will be built with these systems in mind in the very near future. Not only do they present a feature set that is a nice to have and presents a real and immediate ROI; I believe that the best TMSs will prevail, and they will meaningfully alter the way sites are developed in terms of process, workflow, roles and responsibilities, and internal expectations.

In other words, this is big. Especially for analysts.

If you haven’t yet begun the process of investigating a TMS, start now. Create an RFP, or just reach out to the providers you trust or have heard good things about. This is not a matter of whether or not you will benefit. It’s just a matter of when.

I know this sounds pushy. But I would say it if I wasn’t in the space, and I wouldn’t have bothered getting into the space if I didn’t believe it.

Why Tag Management is important to our industry

OK, here’s the real shark jump:

A TMS is important to us because a TMS addresses the least important part of what we do.

If we again start to erect a shrine to yet another technology, we will be no further than we are now; we will just be there faster. The greatest thing about a TMS is that you can think less about your tools, not more. Our value is our output, not the inputs. The less time we waste on the inputs, the more time we can spend creating output: ideas that fuel success in your business or help your customers love you more.

Like when car windows went from self-winding to just a button: today you want a window to go down and BAM, there it goes. Yes, there was a little honeymoon when the technology was new and you’d gather friends and family in the parking lot or driveway, but today, we’re past it. We’ve moved on. Because we’re in the car to drive. Not play with windows.

I think it is absolutely the best approach that the internal selling of this technology focuses on getting businesses back to work. Removing boundaries. There are direct financial benefits of a TMS (one-touch window operation: faster, easier), but they absolutely pale in comparison to the value of you analysts, and what you can do when yet another boundary is removed (keeping your attention on the road, rather than cranking a window and getting paper cuts on your knuckles from the maps you keep in your door pocket). Like we think of crank car windows as stone aged now, the way we do things on the web today will appear cro-magnan when we look back 5 years from now.

The better the technology gets in our space, the more it will enable analysts to be great. Technology enables greatness in people, not the other way around. As an analyst, a TMS is there so you can pay less attention to the challenges and technology associated with your job. Not more. You are what’s valuable. Not the TMS, not the analytics tool. You.

The trouble is that I think the majority of us look inside our toolboxes and we are blind to the best tools available for the job at hand. And, you guessed it, both our mechanical advantage AND our outcomes suffer, making us lose focus on the job at hand.

That job is cash flow.

Period.

So let’s take a look at the various schools of thought when it comes to web analytics tools, and peer into the toolbox through their eyes.

School 1 (Bachelor’s Degree): Tools are Data-Gathering Thingies

Yes, all web data-gathering thingies are web analytics tools. BUT not all web analytics tools are data-gathering thingies.

There is a lot of attention paid to tools that are relentlessly created and improved to get you more and more insight into what is happening out there. These tools render thousands of reports at this point, they can tell you what people cut and paste from your site, what users do in flash, what their income level is, and whether they have an innie or an outie. These tools are like flashlights. When you crawl into the attic, they allow you to find more and more things that were already there to begin with.

Mechanical advantage is how much the tool can show you (and how easily you can knit a data sweater), and the outcome is awareness/knowledge/data puke, etc.

If you relegate yourself to this school and think that these are the tools in your Batman utility belt, it’s no wonder nobody asks you for any thought. If you think the tools at your disposal are just dragnets that you sort through and clean up in Excel to satisfy requests for reports, that’s all your output will ever be, and that’s all your value will ever be.

School 2 (Master’s): Tools are Reports, Data, Analysis to bend ears and drive change!

On the second step to enlightenment, you start to see some other tools in your utility belt. These are tools that can stun your internal enemies and help turn naysayers into advocates. Recognizing reports, analysis and insight as tools (rather than work product) means that your actual work product will be INFLUENCE. At this level, the analyst starts to realize that they wield some power and can use these tools to turn heads. As the tools have more polish (more complete and focused analysis and conclusions), they provide more mechanical advantage.

So at this level, the outcome is influence, and with more polish and reputation, you gain mechanical advantage in the ratio of effort in per influence out.

If you’re at this level, you are making a contribution to the company by getting people in other departments thinking. Oftentimes, those people in other departments are thinking about how to make your death look like an accident, once the flaws in their thinking are exposed, but hey, at least they’re thinking! You are gaining value, but other people are still doing the work. When things don’t work, you get to tell the organization that a correction is needed. But you don’t make that correction, and you don’t get the credit when the correction works, because what the correction was wasn’t your idea. Identifying what does not work is not equal to identifying what does work.

School 3 (PhD): Tools are other disciplines (UX, SEM, SEO, IA), ACTION

At the super ninja badass level, the best tools in your arsenal finally come into focus. The best tool is always ACTION. This means you have shone your flashlight on an issue, you have brought the right people in and influenced them, and now you’re about to whip out your mighty hammer of DO THIS. At this level, you are the general practitioner. You have done the rotations in the other disciplines, and you can send the majority of your patients home healthy without redirecting them to a specialist. But you also know when to not cross the line and take on an open-heart surgery.

This is what makes successful web analytics (and business) people: the realization that your real tools are not the the tools used to identify the trend, and they are not the tools used to communicate that the trend is a bad one that needs to be fixed; they are the ones used to actually solve the problem and improve the situation.

At analytics nirvana, your tools produce cold, hard, beautiful Benjamins as an output, and your mechanical advantage is brought about by your ability to synthesize information and ideas: drawing on all of the competing priorities that go into a finished interface or architecture, and recommending (or testing) the ideas that balance all priorities for the betterment of the user and the bottom line. Very, very few people in your organization will be capable of balancing competing priorities (your company’s compensation plan virtually guarantees it), so solving one problem while also solving / minimizing downside to others is an incredibly valuable output that almost nobody in your company can do as well as you can. The only way that you can see the problem from everyone’s perspective, however, is to own their perspective by knowing how to do what they do.

Getting your PhD

I don’t think you can call yourself a web analytics ninja without a decent degree of competency in the following disciplines:

• Usability
• Information Architecture
• SEO
• Various web marketing/advertising tactics (PPC, display, email)
• Social Media (I do not classify this as web marketing or advertising, and I don’t believe you should, either)
• Design (it’s okay if you suck at it, but put some effort into it so you have credz when you start drawing out ideas)
• Copywriting
• Making sites (HTML, .NET, PHP, SQL, Javascript, etc.)

If you’re missing skills, don’t fret. While it can take considerable time for you to learn about all of this stuff, you’re going to love it because you’ll immediately see new action tools popping up all around you. Hopefully, your organization is one where people love to cross boundaries and teach different disciplines about their own specialties (picture a medical school). I don’t see this much, but if you’re around these types of people, consider yourself blessed.

If you don’t work at a company like this, either go to a company that does, or you’ll have to try your best to get the med school mentality: if the cardiologist faints in the middle of a procedure, the remaining people in the room have enough working knowledge to get the patient out of the situation alive. If you can’t say the same for your organization, that may be a BIG problem.

You might also like:

Are you a web analytics beagle or a performance wolf? (Lame title on purpose)

ONCE AND FOR ALL! LET’S DO THIS!

Google Analytics will report the ORIGINAL referrer to the ORIGINAL requested page if a server-side 301 (or 302) redirect is in place.

Let’s shake out an example.

You own mySite.com and have a page called unicorns.html. You decide that you want to make a better page for this, so you make “DOUBLE-unicorns.html”.

Then you realize that you want to remove the original unicorns.html because it is lame compared to your double unicorns page, but you want to make sure that people who linked to that old page see the new, awesome double unicorns page. Because you’re a good, SEO-conscious person, you do a 301 redirect from “/unicorns.html” to “http://www.mySite.com/DOUBLE-unicorns.html”.

OK, breathe…here we go.

Let’s say that the site unicornUniverse.com loved your original page, and had a link on it. Now that your 301 redirect is present, what happens when someone clicks on that link at unicornUniverse.com? What shows up as a referrer?

Yes: unicornUniverse.com is the referrer! And what is your landing page? DOUBLE-unicorns.html is your landing page.

This happens because the browser never actually sees the first file: the server redirects your browser and the field of the DOM that monitors your referrer isn’t updated. This field is referred to by the document.referrer variable, and a quick cheat to check what’s in it is to type the following in your location bar:

javascript:alert(document.referrer);

If you’re a browser ninja, you might have firebug installed, and you can look at the DOM map there to see the same thing.

Let’s take another example:

What if someone searches for “super awesome unicorn page” on Google, just MINUTES after you put your redirect up? Well, Google hasn’t had time to find your redirect and update the URL in their index! OH MY! What will happen?

All is well in the world (almost, see the last paragraph below for what’s not well in the world), because when someone clicks the link to http://www.mySite.com/unicorns.html in the Google search results, they will be 301 redirected to http://www.mySite.com/DOUBLE-unicorns.html. Referrer? google.com (the document.referrer will actually read: http://www.google.com/search?q=super+awesome+unicorn+page — that is how it knows your search engine keywords). And again, DOUBLE-unicorns.html will be the landing page.

So, direct is direct, search is search, referred is referred.

Exceptions:

There are times when a 301 redirect will NOT preserve referrer information, but they are rare. The most common example is when an https page links through a redirect on a non-https page. Again, drop the javascript above into your browser to audit this on your own site if this is a concern. If that script tells you the right referrer information, Google Analytics will be cool as a cucumber.

Also, if you’re trying to do a 301 that isn’t of the server-side variety (I’ve seen some people try to state 301 in HTML or through a JavaScript redirect — don’t ask), you will definitely have problems.

Google’s documentation on this refers to javascript and tracking redirects, and is MISLEADING. It is technically correct, but it is NOT talking about server-side 301/302 redirects. In the isolated case it refers to (which isn’t well explained), it is right.

Lastly, webkit-based browsers (Chrome and Safari among them) have a known problem with opening content in new tabs and windows. If a user right-clicks a link and selects Open in a New Window or Open in a New Tab, referrer data is LOST! MIND BLOWN! But if they simply hold CTRL or command (on a mac) while they click to launch in a new tab, referrer data is preserved. DOUBLE BLOWN!

KEEP IN MIND:

If you are using 301 redirects, make sure they preserve your tracking parameters (utm_source, etc., at the end of your destination URL). Commonly, parameters that may specify display, email, or paid search campaigns may be stripped. What happens here? The URL of the referring site becomes a referrer and your campaign information is lost.

For example:

1) Your email that someone reads on Gmail should be counted as source:”email” medium:”email” campaign:”super email campaign”

if you forget to keep your URL parameters, instead of this visit being attributed to the email campaign, it will count as a referral from google.com! WHAT?!? Yes!

2) You are running a paid search campaign and have the keyword “unicorn site.” You expect source:”google” medium:”cpc” campaign:”generic unicorn terms”

if you forget to keep your URL parameters, instead of the paid search campaign being recorded, this visit will be attributed to NON-PAID search!!! Holy shnikeys!

The last thing to keep in mind is that before 301 destination pages replace your original pages in search engines (or if you use 302 redirects, and the URLs are not replaced in that case), your actual link URL from the engines and your Entry Page will NOT be the same! In the example above, Google linked to http://www.mySite.com/unicorns.html, but the entry page was DOUBLE-unicorns.html. If you’re trying to compare traffic to entry pages with your ranking reports (tisk tisk for running ranking reports!), they will not mesh up if you marry them by URL!

Good luck!

People like tools like this because they are intended to solve arguments quickly.  We can use data from users or computer simulations to tell the bonehead CEO that his ideas of putting jumping pink kittens and 24 calls to actions are bad ones. And this is great, so long as the data is inherently valuable.

The trouble with AttentionWizard so far is that it evaluates web sites like you would evaluate photography or art, using design concepts like contrast, weight, etc., with an obvious dose of “top-leftedness,” meaning that the tool anticipates where headers and text would start and shows greater focus there. And it is also seemingly weighted heavily toward identifying outlier colors.

But that’s not exactly how people evaluate web sites. The classic example is banner ads and how conditioned people are to avoid them, regardless of how bright and obnoxious they are.  In AttentionWizard’s demo video, you can see this error in their demo of 1-800-flowers.com, where the house ad gets a lot more attention than it would in the real world.

But to be fair, this demo does reach good conclusions, and you can see how much more straightforward the end result is.  But the point is it reaches good conclusions with the wrong data.

Unfortunately, we live in a phase of web analytics where most of the tool data is taken at face value.  So, people see a heat map and believe that’s reality.  Or they get a report about keyword performance and assume that keyword A is better than keyword B, just because it has a higher ROI (but without seeing if the landing pages make sense, if the prices are competitive, and on and on).

Tim makes great points on his site about what this tool is and isn’t, but right now that’s like John Stewart making points about how his political opinions are just his own: it’s irresponsible because it ignores how powerful credible sources are, and to both Tim and John’s credit, they are credible sources because of their history (and charm, of course!).

Below, I’ve shown a few demos of where AttentionWizard deviates from human behavior so radically that it can actually drive the wrong decisions.  And I’m not trying to show pictures of half-naked women or anything that the tool shouldn’t or couldn’t technically be capable of, because I do think that’s an unfair test.

Test 1: Pattern recognition

Here’s one that humans will get right away.  Just try to take your eye off of the star.  AttentionWizard didn’t get it at all.

In the world of the web, this is important for low-contrast sites that might use shapes and graphical weight to point things out.  We probably won’t see an example this simple online, but it is possible. I’m envisioning package design – you see 11 identical-shaped shampoo bottles on Amazon.com and one crazy-shaped one.  Where does the eye go?

Test 2: Position-sensitivity

So here’s one where I’ve placed calls to action at 1150 pixels.  This one tests to see whether the tool will hold up to the boardroom when someone says, “See, people will see this button at the bottom of the page!” Unfortunately, it seems that the tool isn’t yet sensitive to where things are and what screen sizes are most popular, which is definitely something that needs work before AttentionWizard is ready for its close-up.

I think this is an easy win for the tool – something that shouldn’t be too tough to change.

So Tim is to be applauded on creating a great technology.  But I would strongly urge people to not circulate the data it renders quite yet, not because the tool is bad, but because data is notoriously misinterpreted in the average company – taken for face value.

People can caveat their tools all day long, just like Charles Barkley could say he was not a role model, but we have to be responsible to the real world and produce things that don’t send mixed messages with the expectation that people are smart enough to filter the data.  They aren’t.  Not yet.