New Case Study: Understanding Traffic and ROI with Yahoo! Web Analytics

GrandStay® Hospitality, one of America’s leading extended-stay hotel chains, recognized a growing issue in tracking ROI and partnered with Del Monte Agency, a Yahoo! Web Analytics Partner, to have its analytics questions answered. Together, they have recently developed a case study detailing how they have used Yahoo! Web Analytics to understand how much each of the 24 websites GrandStay Hospitality® owns contributed to the bottom line.

Here are some of the highlights from this case study that showcase their success with YWA:

• Before Yahoo! Web Analytics was implemented:

“We were literally paying thousands of dollars every year for upkeep on websites that we were unsure of the contributions they made to our revenue, and their potential to drive even more,” says Jon Kennedy, President of GrandStay® Hospitality. “We needed to see the whole picture so that we could better spend our precious advertising budget on behalf of our stakeholders.”

• After the first solid month of tracking with Yahoo! Web Analytics, GrandStay® Hospitality realized that:
  • most of its revenue was being generated by the GrandStay® hotel chain
  • two-thirds of all traffic came from the microsites – not the main three corporate sites
  • most bookings occurred from organic SEO traffic
  • pay-per-click search advertising produced a huge return-on-investment, which resulted in an increase spend on that advertising vehicle

“We are so happy that this analytical mess is behind us,” says Jon Kennedy, President of GrandStay® Hospitality. “In the very near future, we should be able to spend our marketing budget based on actual performance, which was exactly what we were looking for and we can’t wait for what the next year will bring.”

To view the full case study, please click here to download the PDF.

Yahoo! Web Analytics Supports Do Not Track (DNT)

Yahoo! has that announced global support is being rolled out for Do Not Track (DNT).  In line with this, Yahoo! Web Analytics is now honoring this setting.

The excerpt below is from a blog post by Shane Wiley (VP, Data and Privacy Governance at Yahoo!.  See the full post here.

Yahoo! Launches Global Support for Do Not Track

Quick update – changes in YWA version 10.3.22

As we’ve mentioned previously, we’re slowly updating the look and feel of the Yahoo! Web Analytics user interface.

Yahoo! Web Analytics 10.3.22: related links:

Product Update

Resolved Issues

In today’s 10.3.22 release, you’ll see changes to the following pages (click on images to see full size):

Settings / Manage Campaigns

Changes:

• We’ve updated the look and feel
• We’ve moved the “Add new campaign” button from the bottom of the page to the top.
• We’ve collapsed the campaigns into groups of campaign types

Settings / Manage Campaigns

Changes:

• We’ve updated the look and feel
• We’ve moved the “Add new internal campaign” button from the bottom of the page to the top.

Other pages in which we’ve updated the look and feel.

• Settings / Manage Campaigns / Add New Campaign
• Settings / Manage Internal Campaigns / Add New  Internal Campaign
• Settings / Manage Internal Campaign Categories
• Settings / Manage Campaign Categories
• Settings / Manage Dashboards

Searching for Settings

We’ve also added a search box to the Settings page to make it easier to find the links you need.  Simply type the relevant phrase into the search box and matching links will be highlighted.

New Case Study: Improving Campaign ROI with YWA

Cajam Marketing is a full-service consulting firm specializing in maximizing offline and online marketing initiatives through analytics.  They have recently developed a case study detailing how they have used Yahoo! Web Analytics to improve campaign ROI for some of their clients.

Here are some of the excerpts from this case study that highlight their success with YWA:

• “In one place, we see revenue, cost, unique clicks, repeat clicks and more for each campaign”
• “After analyzing and optimizing our campaigns for a couple of months, we were able to lower our cost-per- order by 38%”
• “We were also able to increase our number of orders by over 30% while spending less money”
• “Yahoo! Web Analytics gives us the complete picture on visit path, number of visits, demographics, search phrase and much more”

One vital advantage of online advertising is the ability to collect more precise and varied data on campaign performance than with other media. But collecting reams of campaign data doesn’t always translate into reams of knowledge about your campaign’s effectiveness.

This bothered Kathy Gould, founder and CEO of Cajam Marketing, a consulting firm that specializes in maximizing online and offline marketing campaigns through analytics.  After all, analytics uses computer technology, research and statistics to solve business problems.  For that, you need the right kinds of data – and Gould wasn’t getting what she wanted.

Enter Yahoo! Web Analytics (YWA), which Cajam Marketing began using to analyze campaign effectiveness for its clients, large and small.  YWA, a customizable, enterprise-level website analytics system, helped the firm increase sales and visitor satisfaction, reduce marketing costs, and gain new insights on its website customers

To view the full case study please click here to download the PDF.

Online Video Analytics– Reporting on Popular Video Sections

The following post is by Yahoo!’s Tim Hampshire, a Web Analytics Specialist and YWA Account Manager at Yahoo!.

Related posts:

• Online Video Analytics – An Introduction
• Online Video Analytics – Tracking Embedded YouTube Videos

In this blog post we will show how YWA can be used to see which sections of a video are the most popular. This can provide insights into your visitors’ engagement with your site’s video content. In our previous two articles (above) on online video analytics, we looked at how to capture active-user actions (such as pressing pause or sliding the slider from one position to another) and how to report on these user interactions using YWA.

In this article we will be showing how to measure the number of users that watched particular fixed-length segments of any video or group of videos. In the example that follows, you will see that we can  define  video sections as either 10 percentage segments of the entire video playtime, or 10-second segments of the video playtime. The choice here depends on what you wish to report on, either relative 10% sections of video, or 10 separate 10-second sections of the video. I would suggest that in general and especially for long videos, the 10% segmentation scheme is more useful.

Below is an example of such a video engagement graph for a particular video.

Video Engagement Characteristic Graph

In the above we have chosen 10% subsections of the video numbered 1..10 corresponding to the 1 for first 10% , 2 for the 2nd 10%,  And so on

As can be seen from this graph the audience retention by the end of the video is fair in this case with 20,000 people getting to the last 10% of the video  out of the 40,000 who watched the first 10% .
To produce the report above we created a custom report with the 10% sections as group dimensions and an action on playing a video section as the metric.  We also filtered for a particular video

Once your report is created, you can start segmenting  by demographics like age range, sex, location etc in order to see how different segments of your audience are engaging with the video content you are providing.

Custom Report Wizard Setup for Video Engagement Characteristic Graph

So how can we go about doing this?

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