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Thursday, June 17, 2010

Blogging about web analytics - What has happened in three years

This is a three years' anniversary post and 78th overall. It's really mind opening and fun to look back and analyze little bit what you have done in a year or three. When I started I felt some sort of pressure for blogging from other people. Today, I think it's pretty common if you're a blogger but still, there are many characters and gurus that are not branding themselves online. Let's do little bit benchmarking:

Here you can see search volume by Google Keyword Tool for different different people (May 2010). Petteri Järvinen is over Alex Nieminen, my sister is on top of me (maybe because of the hockey :) and I've beaten Mikko Helme, CEO of advertising agency Taivas in Helsinki. : )


Here you can see search volume over time by Google Insights for Search for us. Now we got confirmation that Petteri Järvinen's brand is in rise. I would like to know what happened for Alex Nieminen in the beginning of 2007? A huge peak in search volume back then.


Let's also take a look how many Google search results we get from Helsinki today for us:

  1. Alex Nieminen: 1 080 000 search results
  2. Mikko Helme: 546 000 search results
  3. Jim Sterne: 165 000 search results
  4. Petteri Järvinen: 86 500 search results
  5. Petri Mertanen: 56 000 search results
  6. Terhi Mertanen: 35 700 search results

I'm pretty sure that you will get different kind of search results depending on WHERE you do the search. It may be confusing from search engine optimization point of view when Google is geo-targeting it's search. As you can see from some of these previous search examples, I have found very interesting how pictures, videos, maps and social circle are coming in to search results page. Do your own rehearsal with these tools at time to time to check your persona., company or product brand against competitors! ; )

So what has changed since I started blogging? One of my goals was sales & personal branding. I'm sure that blogging has helped a lot in business, yet I have to confess that it's very hard to measure the effectiveness of blogging. I haven't done that much writing than during the two previous years but I have been speaking and training a lot. In a year there has been:

  • 17 posts + couple of guest posts (30 previously)
  • 14 comments - 6 of my own
  • 14 speaking opportunities
  • 15 training events
  • more than 20 workshops / kick-offs
  • couple of articles
  • lots of comments online

Blogging and speaking has definitely helped me to close some deals, that's for sure. How much and how? Don't know to be honest. I do have the same passion to share information and experiences but I sure would like get much more comments so this whole blogging thing could be more like conversation than just shouting out.

This year I have been little bit lazy about writing recaps of events. I have attended many many events and especially I liked Marketing Communications week, Internet Expo (web analytics panel moderated by Seppo Roponen) and seminar of the Finnish Advertisers' Association. Last year my highlights were:


 Here are some more social media "metrics":


 
I lost my old Google Analytics data during my training sessions... ; ) 


Note! metrics above are not equally comparable because of two web analytics systems Google Analytics and Yahoo! web analytics. (by the way, if you want to use Yahoo! web analytics, send me an email)


You can easily see three big peaks during this year. Those peaks are related to these posts:


Three years ago I was a rookie, at least when it comes to blogging. : ) Now I hope to that I'm reaching the top of mind when people are thinking analytics. Still, this field is very young and fragmented to several small consulting businesses. Globally the vendors are consolidating; Adobe buying Omniture and IBM acquiring Coremetrics lately. In Finland I just hope that we could grow the awareness of analytics. Instead of re-tweeting and creating just noise to social media why don't you open up and share your ideas or challenges you may have?


Right now I'm working with an important thing relating to Naviatech so stay tuned and be prepared to another post soon. Next week I will talking about search engine optimization at eZ Conference in Berlin. In fall we will have Internet Marketing Conference in Helsinki  so if you want to see me on stage you should put dates September 15-16 to your calendar.


Have a nice summer time - see you soon online or offline! = )

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