AndyEdmonds

Highly recommended - a Standford class delivered at Google with the lectures available on Google Video / Youtube.

The course uses both the open source stats tool R as well as Excel for the heavy and lightweight ways to get things done.

The slides are at stats202.com.

Navigating the YouTube UI to work through these vids is painful, so I created a playlist with the videos. Click through for the larger format video:

Here's a brief out-take running today on the Stomper999 promotion where Brad Fallon and I talk about the advantages of multivariate over split testing for getting more insights faster.

Tracking branded traffic is a useful activity for any business. Branded traffic refers to users who seek out your business by name, either through historical familiarity or perhaps the translation of offline marketing into online activity. Thus, it can measure the effectiveness of offline advertising and the growth of a loyal custom user base, with the help of return rate metrics.

Last year, I wrote about a split test we did that was featured in a Marketing Sherpa report on product videos and optin status. The test of click to play vs autoplay vs no video on an e-commerce site for it's top 10 best selling products revealed a huge benefit to click to play.

I've been a long time, occasional, user of an open source alternative to high-end statistic packages like SAS & SPSS called "R". I recently spent some time learning an associated data exploration tool called "GGobi" and the integration with R (rggobi).

The SEO Position Plus script has been updated to pull page offset from Bing.com -- thanks to Stomper Jim MacKay. Get it at the normal place and keep an eye on http://gist.github.com/138555.

While split or multivariate testing is an extremely powerful tool, it should not be deployed as the sole method driving improvements to your online business. If testing is applied as the only way to determine the right path forward the outcome is certain to be less successful over the long term.

At the usability professional's association a few weeks ago in Portland, I chatted with Beverly Tseng @ Ebay and she recorded the essence on the whiteboard:

Man, you gotta love the internet. Within a week of the general availability of the Google Analytics API there's an explosion of interesting new works and open source creations. While some folks may have had access before the announcement, the checkin streams on github show there's no time like the present.

We've been working hard on SEO Position over the last few months and the latest version has been in use by Stomper members for a while now.

With the announcement of updates to the Google referral string it's now important to update the script and there's some serious new features.

SEO Position Plus tracks more types of referrals than the original script. All the categories logged to Google Analytics events are prefixed with SEO.

Recent talks by Jeff Dean of google at Web Search Data Mining '09 (video) and an earlier talk at Univ of Washington present some interesting history on the evolution of the Google search technology.

The most tantalizing aspect of this is the notion of a "fast index", perhaps in-memory on many servers, dedicated to indexing (and computing authority or PageRank) for rapidly moving content like Digg and YouTube video honors.