Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by Matthias Bettag on January 29, 2010 at 3:13am

Hi Titus,

as long we don't know how the KPIs of the WAA website perform we should not judge on plain traffic ;-))

I personally never was a big fan of the WAA site's usablility - however I always found very nice information there. But there are so many fancy websites out there which owners or services are way less fancy in reality, that I prefer the opposite. However, there is room for improvements. I agree that the WAA homepage should be up-to-date.

Does the long domainname matters so much? E.g. Googling "WAA" is directly leading to the WAA site. Now, in times of smart adressbars/bookmarks offering the sites while typing in the adressbar, I don't care too much any more on complicated or long domainnames (I am german, dealing with monster-words is part of our DNA I guess...).

Actually, I also do not see "little traffic from US" (how little, BTW?) as a problem for a global organization. The WAA has rapidly spread across the world in the recent past and more and more people from all kind of countries get in touch with it.
Or do you say that WAA members in the US are decreasing? That would be bad news indeed.
I would only assume less or no increase due to the fact that WA in US is more developed than anywhere else and therefore somewhat settled. If this is true (which I don't know) then this could be balanced by new users from other countries. I already experienced less participants on different conferences in the US in 2009, mainly because of budget cuts due to the financial crisis. So maybe this is only a global trend across different industries?

And one more question: How much reliability do stats from compete.com have regarding trends about traffic to US sites coming from the abroad?

Permalink Reply by Stephane Hamel on January 29, 2010 at 5:55am

Hi Titus,
when doing analysis, there is one important concept that our friend Avinash brilliantly exposed: multiplicity. Never take decisions or make assumptions based on the data provided by a single tool. Compete (or whatever else competing analytics data source) only shows you a small piece of what's going on... and is also pretty inaccurate in the picture it depicts of the WAA website.

I agree the WAA site should be much better, more frequently updated and provide more information about the web analytics industry than about itself. However... are you a member of the WAA? Have you looked at what's available for members only? For example, the Outlook 2010 survey, available at http://webanalyticsassociation.org/en/cmt/?6, provides an amazing, independent picture of the industry.

One of the reason why the site haven't been updated is we're getting close to the launch of a site redesign (new technological platform specifically geared toward associations needs). Another reason (although certainly not an excuse) is the WAA is a volunteer-based, non-profit organization, the content provided on the site is largely the result of people who are interested in various topics and believe in the value of the WAA. If you are not a member, maybe you could join us and a) make the site better b) share your knowledge with others c) gain additional expertise and exposure d) be better informed before criticizing :)

Best regards,
Stéphane Hamel
- Director & Treasurer, Web Analytics Association
- eBusiness Strategist & Web Analytics advocate!
- Tutor, UBC Award of Achievement in Web Analytics
- Teacher, Université Laval
Twitter: immeria
Web: http://immeria.net
Blog: http://blog.immeria.net
LinkedIn: http://linkedin.com/in/shamel
WAA: http://WebAnalyticsAssociation.org
UBC: http://tech.ubc.ca/webanalytics/
ULaval: http://www.distance.ulaval.ca/fad/cours/MRK-67605.htm

Permalink Reply by ChrisG on January 30, 2010 at 12:35pm

Another example besides the January 13th event is the broken link to the Industry Outlook survey slide show. The WAA appears to not be paying attention to its site. Stephane, why is a site relaunch a reason for not updating the current site or checking its condition?

Titus, I think one reason is a dearth of information (other than the news-about-WAA stuff). For example, they have some big restrictions on what original articles they'll publish and the restrictions have prevented a lot of great content from being submitted.

I would bet that much of their traffic is people looking for jobs. I'd like to see a breakdown of the site's visits according to purpose, based on analytics.

I have found their members-only webinars, in the past, to be top-notch and this is why I go to their site. I'd really like to have more reasons to do so, but I am grateful for what's there ... the webinars and some stuff about the WAMM maturity model, which is one of the few things that's important for both execs and practitioners.

The "industry outlook" surveys are nice for what they are, but they're useful mainly for managers/execs/industry watchers. My guess is that most of the members are practitioners and want different content.

Permalink Reply by Vincent Granville on January 30, 2010 at 1:03pm

According to Alexa.com, their page view numbers are stable, not down. I guess both Compete and Alexa are wrong. I tried Quantcast, but Quantcast does not display their traffic numbers, just the demographics. And anyway, Quantcast is (moderately) accurate only for websites that have installed Quantcast's tracking code (like AnalyticBridge), or for very large websites. Who knows what filters these companies use to measure traffic? If they've improved robot detection, then a traffic drop might be artificial, an artifact of the metric definition being changed (improved) on a weekly basis.

Better indicator of traffic increase for a web site like WAA are: number of posts per members, number of new members per week, sometimes number of advertisers: these statistics can be observed directly or gathered with a web crawler, or inferred (e.g. you can estimate the number of new users by counting posts from members who posted this week but not over the last 6 months, assuming you've been gathering stats for over 6 months). I'm wondering if there are companies offering this type of member tracking / competitive intelligence by crawling millions of websites. If not, that's a new idea for a startup!

Anyway, it would be nice the see a more interactive WAA website for non-members (e.g. with real time news, polls, etc.). Maybe in the next release.