Ilan Perez

I have just started my second unit in a Diploma for Data Science from Monash University. The unit is an introduction into Data Science. One of the articles they have directed me too is an article from the Harvard Business Review Website.

The Article “What a Big-Data Business Model Looks Like” is interesting to a point. In summary it talks about how data will run business in the future. Keep in mind this article was written in 2012, so I am a little late to jump in on the article…but from what I can see how business run in 2016 we are far from the prediction of the article.

The article explains how we will eventually have data mashups. The question really is what will incentive enterprise companies to make their data public or even in a “private” state for one enterprise company to allow another to access their data.

The answer is nothing! If data is the future, then companies will hold onto their data even more tightly. So really we are only talking about the gigantic; Google, Apple, Samsung etc that own huge amounts of data in all aspects of a persons life. These are the only companies that can really leverage off the wide spectrum of data to provide true insight and to make business decisions. Everyone else will be looking nmaking business decisions inside silo of their own data.

Do you agree?

I had a problem, my like a lot of people on the net where i have 6 elements on the page each with a hover state and each with an “elaborate” animation.

My problem was that i didn’t want this hover effect to happen if the user rolled over the page element 100 times. I wanted the the animation to start on hover, if the users mouse’s off then the animation should finish and that is all.

Initially my thought was to check if we are animating and disable the animation function as per this link from css-trick.com. For me, this didn’t work. I am not sure if i didn’t implement it correctly or what but this didn’t achieved the desired effect.

After read an number of other articles i came to the conclusions that I wanted this:

Start the animation on hover. At the end of this any queued hover events for THIS element should be killed!

This is the solution that worked for me.

Here is some example code

Time and time again I have heard the following “our kids have too much homework” and then the answer “I know but I cant think of a better way”

Well…enter Kahn Academy.

They offer free short lectures covering what seems all topics in math. Starting from basic 1 + 1 maths to probability and statistics etc.

“So you asking so what…There are lots of online lectures…”

The huge difference is no the fact that they have over 2000 lectures. Its not the engaging lecturer and lectures.  They want to revolutionize educating kids and their approach is to flip the class room experience.

That is at the moment we teach kids the theory in class and the he/she need to do the exercises at home. If there is an issue they have to wait until the next lesson to ask the question, if they even ask at all.  Kahn Academy proposes to do the lectures at home…via their lectures and do the homework in class. This is ingenious. This give the student time to absorb the theory at their own pace at home and the teacher more time for one on one help in class.

Another amazing aspect is the tracking. At the moment each year is effectively in a silo. Each year a new silo begins for a given student. There is no contnuity of their progress with effective tracking.  If they change school, go up a class from class c to b etc. Now with this the tracking will follow the student and you can see exactly his progress, where he has a hole in his knowledge. I can go on and on.

Watch this TED talk to get more details.

I hope those that read this will take the idea to their school of their children and try and get a trial setup. I truly believe this is a better model for school. What do you think?

Click tracking obviously the first thing we all look at when it comes to web analytics. It tells you how many people are coming to your site. Even what pages they are looking at.

In all truth I don’t care much for this data I would rather know where users, and what links users are clicking on then how many clicks.

Introducing In-Page Analysis.

So In-Page Analysis has been around for ages and there are so many companies offering good tracking services. Obviously Google is one of them.

So why did it title this post “Analytical Clarity at Last” was this.

For the longest time I have always been perplexed by In-Page analysis offered by Google.  Here is why.

Above is a screen shot of a portion of a site from Pyramid Analytics – Business Intelligence website I am working on. You can see that the Google says that 57% of clicks occurred on these three separate links. Aside from that being impossible it always demonstrated to me that the In-Page tracking offered by Google was broken and no one noticed. So I ignored it.

I read long ago about adding enhanced link attribution to your GA embed code and then turning it on in the property settings of your GA account BUT I never read that unless you do the following it will almost never be accurate.

You see my assumption was that enhanced link attribution would automatically determine that if a link appear multiple times on a page link 1 and link 2 would be different. that is only half true. According to the Enhanced Attribution Setup Instruction Page if each link doesn’t have a UNIQUE id then and I quote:

“If an element does not have a unique ID, then Analytics looks up to three levels higher in the DOM structure for a unique ID (i.e., the element’s parent’s parent). If Analytics is still unable to find a unique ID, then you see a range.”

So now hopefully moving forward each link will have its own value and I can actually get so useful data out of this invaluable report.

Let me know if you had this problem too.

As of November 2014 Fiverr.com charges a 50 cent surcharge for $5 gigs and some other amount for gigs over $5.

What is Fiverr?

Fiverr® is the worlds largest marketplace for services starting at $5. A service offered on Fiverr is called a Gig®. Gigs on Fiverr are offered for a fixed, base price of $5 (also referred to as one Fiverr). Whenever you see ‘I will _for $5″, it means the seller is offering a Gig for the fixed price of $5.

Source: http://support.fiverr.com/hc/en-us/articles/201500776-What-is-Fiverr-

Don’t you think that  branding and concept have been compromised? A person can’t get a job done for $5 anymore? Personally I have used it a few times. The logo on on Jewellery Homeware Online Website was designed using Fiverr.

I think it s a little disappointing and irresponsible of the company to add a fee.

Anyway does anyone else have any thoughts about this?

You may not have noticed but when Google Analytics tracks URLs it tracks the case of the URL. What this means is that http://jewelleryhomewareonline.com.au/  and http://JewelleryHomewareOnline.com.au/ are not the same.

Or more specifically http://www.whisky-advice.com/how-to/how-is-whisky-made/ is not the same as http://www.whisky-advice.com/How-to/How-Is-Whisky-Made/.

This means that each version of the same URL will have its own bounce rate, its own pageviews, its own time on page statistic etc. This is very annoying when trying to get a clear picture as to what is happening on your site.

So you are thinking, I can add two pageviews to get the total pageview count…so I ask, can you calculate  bounce rates for the two pages taking into account filtering. Now I am sure there is an easy way but why would you. All you need to do is add the following rewrite rule.

Enforce URL Rewrite url to lowercase.

In my current project, I am working on we are using a windows server and the website is built in asp.net. In order to create this rule you need to:

Open IIS

and find the

URL Rewrite option

If you don’t have that option in your IIS you will need to install the extension first. Click Here for those instructions.

Double click the (circled) icon and find the add rule link in the top right

Finally scroll down and install a predefined rewrite rule to lowercase URL.

What else do you do to improve tracking on your website?

Thanks for stopping by and welcome to my new blog! This is just an introductory post so I’ll keep it short and sweet.

I am all about learning and evolving in the online industry.

There is no time to stop and smell the roses, you need to be constantly growing new roses so that others can smell them.

That is how you stay ahead.

My skill set when it comes to online is everything!  Concept development through to web analytics and the entire online spectrum in between.

That’s it for now! If you’d like to be kept updated with my posts “Like” this post or subscribe to my blog.