Christian Moist

MailChimp - Now With More Context!

A bit ago, MailChimp came out with another revision to their site. Their revisions are always great and they're always taking steps forward. Past revisions offered better interfaces for creating emails; things like a fancy WYSIWYG editor, etc. Mostly pre-campaign features.

This revision seemed to focus more on the analytics end of things; the post-campaign features. They now feature a much enhanced analytics package with tons of my favorite thing; context!

Check out the screen shot above that calls out a few of the areas they present very well. Not only does MailChimp compare your current campaigns performance to your account average, it also compares it to your industry average based on other like accounts they manage. I think this is wonderful, as stand-alone numbers are fun, but without knowing how these numbers compare to some other relevant numbers, no measurement can be made, and no action can be taken. They even go as far as to put it in MailChip terms in the green box at the bottom of the screen shot.

Other features they provide which provide context are the ability to see a domain performance report compare opens by location with an interactive flash map.

Good job, MailChimp. Keep up the good work!

Labels: Analytics, Email

Posted by Christian on Mar 13, 2009 at 3:46 PM | Permalink 2 comments

Advanced Segments in Google Analytics

Recently, a new feature was implemented to all of my Google Analytics accounts. Advanced Segmenting is still in the beta stage, but it's there, none-the-less, thanks in part to Googles analytics evangelist, Avinash Kaushik. Out of the box, Advanced Segmenting supplies several 'standard' segments, including new and returning visitors, paid and non-paid visitors, search, referral and direct traffic, as well as traffic with conversions. These are great to get you started, but the option is also available to create your own segment, which is where the fun begins.

I've found it handy to do things like divide paid traffic into specific channels, such as paid keywords and CSE traffic, using referral path as a dimension. This seems to work well, as these sites normally wouldn't send traffic to my sites, unless I've hired them to do so. Another idea is correlating specific dimensions to site goals.

The drag and drop Advanced Segment Creator is very simple to use. You're able to select from many dimensions and many metrics and use 'and' and 'or' logic.

Google slates this addition as an "enterprise-class feature". I tend to agree and think that steps like this will bring Google closer and closer to solutions like Omniture. Go Google!

Labels: Analytics, Marketing

Posted by Christian on Nov 9, 2008 at 6:51 PM | Permalink 1 comments