Recently I received a thought-provoking e-mail from Jeff Ginsberg at “The E-mail Company” asking why we didn’t talk more about analytics here at One Degree.

Long time reader, big time fan. How come there is not much at One Degree about analytics? Am I not looking in the right place or has it been overlooked? After getting my free “Google Analytics” trial and setting it up in a matter of minutes I have to tell you the reports rival the big boys. It would be nice to hear from readers who have used “Omniture”, “Coremetrics”, or “Web Side Story” to see what they think of Google Analytics.

I’d also like to hear from people using the top tier products on e-commerce sites. Have they gone to the effort to do advanced tagging for the complex sales calculations the above-mentioned products can give?

By the way, “Hotwire” and some of the other travel sites use their analytics to send triggered email message to customers based on what they searched for on their site. For example, if you sign up for Hotwire’s deals and search for Los Angeles you will start to get e-mail about deals to LA like this:

Dear Jeff, Looking for great deals in Los Angeles, California? Hotwire finds great deals on unsold hotel rooms. You save big. Travelers like you found these great deals on Hotwire: …

Very cool.

Regards, Jeff Ginsberg, Chief Email Officer

Cool indeed.

I’m a big fan of measuring what you do and I just love the data that these big apps throw off. We haven’t done much on this at One Degree because no one has stepped up to cover “the analytics beat” and I don’t feel I know enough to add that much to the conversation. I’m therefore posting Jeff’s request a) to get a bit of discussion going around his specific questions and b) to hopefully flush out a few Canucks looking to write about their experiences with web analytics. Feel free to comment below and if you are interested in contributing posts about analytics, “drop me a line.”

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Originally published at www.onedegree.ca on June 20, 2006.