Web Intelligence Education moves forward at University of California
November 15, 2007
I’ve spoken about the study of Web Analytics and Web Intelligence in general in the past but now the University of California is offering a Certificate of Web Intelligence is online and ready to go! Web Intelligence is when you study how to apply business intelligence concepts to a website, its databases and scripts and figuring out how it is being used effectively and also ineffectively and applying that “intelligence” to developing new business procedures online that support and foster growth.
The courses that the University of California offers for Web Intelligence include…
- Business Intelligence/Data Warehouse
- Designing Dimensional Models
- Problem Solving and Decision Making
- Management, Leadership and Team Building in the Project and Program Environment
From these courses with the combination of courses from UBC applied with these offered by the University of California Irvine Campus you can create your web intelligence education. This is definitely interesting as the fields of Web Analytics and Web Intelligence grow. It’s an exciting time to be learning about web intelligence and analytics in general.
Luc
Personas - Part 1: Why Personas are personal to your business
November 11, 2007
The idea of picturing your customers is an idea that is as old as marketing but what if you could take that a few steps further? People, much like the people that visit your website and buy your products have a persona about them. In understanding your customers you need to understand that the products you sell and promotions you run attract certain types of people.
When it comes to optimizing your website to improve sales, having customer personas can help you distinguish a good customer from someone who really isn’t buying what you are selling and this is turn increases conversions among the web pages of your website.
So what is a “Persona” anyways?
The idea of a persona relates to the fact that you are creating a character to tell a story. In creating this character you understand things about the character. Some people refer to this as defining our “target market” or “core audience” but are defining a persona or personas you can design and market with a specific person or type of person in mind. Companies that want to understand their customers on a more personal level need to begin the process at this level and while developing personas is a very intensive way of building intelligence it pays off in the long run because those inferences made about your customers allow you to see if they are true or false by monitoring the analytics involved and continuing to develop and improve the intelligence about your customers. So how do you effectively create a persona? I’ll show you soon!
Luc
Everything you wanted to know about Google Analytics
November 1, 2007
If you tinker around on the web long enough then “Google” becomes a part of your everyday vocabulary. I’ve had readers express a strong interest in learning more and more about Google analytics over the past months. When it comes to analytics and learning how to use them in your business I know that most people don’t want to spend tons of money implementing a feature like this and in fact most people want to do it themselves.
In learning about your customers’ behavior and building intelligence you need an application (Google Analytics) that allows people to gain knowledge for little to no cost at all. With that I suggest that you go to Google’s Analytics landing page and sign up for an account. It’s simple and free! Sure there are many different Web Analytics platforms out on the market but in beginning to learn about Analytics I figure it’s best to start out with a common base like Google Analytics. I will be writing more articles about Google Analytics, how to use it, customize it and things like that in the coming months but if you have any questions about Analytics in General or Google Analytics then I suggest that you post them in the comments section of this blog post and I look forward to answering them.
Luc
