With the recent Facebook fiasco, privacy is yet again coming to the forefront of users’ minds.  As Scott McNealy said, “You already have zero privacy - get over it”.  And yet, we hope that that is not true.

On my personal laptop I restrict third party cookies and am selective about the sites from which I accept first party cookies. I accept first party cookies when I perceive that there is a benefit to doing so.  Because I don’t see the benefit in third party cookies, I never accept them.

I am willing to trade privacy when I am receiving a valuable service in return. Thus, I accept cookies from Amazon because of the perceived value to me — the ease in ordering, the suggestions for additional purchases, and the ability to add to my wish list. However, I decline first party cookies from a running website that requires cookies. The website serves up running routes in my area but I don’t value this service. Yet, the website will not function unless cookies are enabled. It frustrates me whenever I forget this fact and try to measure the distance I ran. As a result, I typically go to this site once or twice a year by mistake. By restricting access, the website is trading off brand awareness in the hopes of better measurement and personalization of content. I personally don’t think the trade-off is worth it.

I believe that users should have the ability to turn off and on cookies as they wish. Further, there needs to be more education about cookies and about a user’s digital footprint in general, particularly with the advent of behavioral targeting. I have provided a link to a Wikipedia page but perhaps an example would be best. Companies can use data from your cookies to serve up targeted ads. Providing you with ads that are targeted to your needs and preferences sounds great. But what if those ads are wrong because you share a computer with someone else for example? For some this could be annoying but for others it may be offensive. There is also the question of who has access to that data and how long it will exist. Further, what if your digital footprint is combined with your off-line behavior?

Personally, I think that advertising companies, in particular, should be required to ask for permission to use your data for behavioral targeting purposes similar to opt-in requirements for e-mail marketing. Best practices calls for consumers to be considered opt-outs for e-mail communication unless they expressly opt-in. Requiring the same for behavioral targeting will encourage advertisers to educate users in the hopes of increasing opt-in rates. In the US, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) is advocating self-regulation but I think they should push for express consent by users. Most users don’t read privacy notices and those that do find that they are usually full of legal jargon making them difficult to understand. There’s a report from the FTC called Protecting Consumers in the Next Tech-ade: A Report by the Staff of the Federal Trade Commission from March 2008 in case you want to read more about it

I have been playing around with Google Analytics, trying to answer the question “What should my Mother make?”  For her birthday, I created an Etsy website so that she could sell her handcrafted jewelry online.  She had been selling bracelets, earrings, necklaces and lanyards at fairs and events. 

Well, she has been making bracelets like crazy.  She has 40 or so on her website and at least that many which have not yet made it online.  She has only a handful of necklaces currently available on the web and probably less than two dozen which could be posted to her website.  Should my Mother be making so many bracelets?  

I analyzed this from two different angles.  First, I analyzed what pages visitors were viewing on her site.  With Google Analytics you can set an entrance path and see what pages were viewed next.  I choose her home page to be the entrance path and found that:  

• 36% went to the second page of her shop
• 15% looked a her featured jewelry
• 13% clicked on the necklace section of her shop
• 8% visited the bracelet section of her shop

Google Analytics also tells you where visitors went next so I know if they continued browsing her inventory, looked at her profile page, or reviewed the feedback purchasers provided about her.  In addition to understanding how visitors are navigating the site, it also indicates what items are most popular.  For example, one jewelry item had many page views.

Visitors clicked on the necklace section more often than the bracelet section, which indicates that necklaces are more popular.  However, necklaces are the first section listed and it may be that the order is causing more page views.  Thus, I will switch the order and check back to see if the pattern continues. 

Next I analyzed her online sales.  Necklace sales outpace her bracelet sales.  In addition, the average cost of a necklace was more than twice the average cost of a bracelet.  I had thought that visitors would gravitate towards bracelets because they are less expensive; however, her online sales suggest that visitors are more likely to purchase necklaces even though they cost more.

From a business perspective, it makes sense for my Mother to make more necklaces; however, my analysis doesn’t take into account her offline sales or her artistic goals.  My Mother is an artist and not a factory.  However, I will suggest that we update her necklace inventory on the website.

For my Mother’s birthday, I created her very own website on www.etsy.com.  My Mom was speechless when she saw a site dedicated to selling her handcrafted jewelry online. 

This was a labor of love.  I spent many afternoons taking pictures of her necklaces, earrings, bracelets and lanyards and then researching the materials she used.  Using the etsy template, I created her “shop” by loading the pictures of her inventory, creating descriptions for each piece, setting up tags, outlining her shop’s terms and conditions (including shipping costs) and setting up a Google Analytics account so that I could track the performance of the website.   

It is so rewarding to receive feedback from customers that they love my Mother’s jewelry and think it is well made.  I also enjoy analyzing the web site’s performance and playing with Google Analytics.   In case you haven’t had a chance to use Google Analytics, here’s a screen shot from one of the standard Google Analytics’ reports.

The top graph shows the number of visits by day for the most recent month.  You can look at the metrics by day, week or month and set the time period to be analyzed.

Next on the report is site usage metrics including visits, pageviews, pages/visit, bounce rate, average time on the site, and percent new visits.  Most of these metrics are straight forward but you do need to be mindful of anomalies.  There are some weeks when I will see a huge spike in visits; however, those correspond to times when I was loading jewelry to the site and thus frequently visiting the site to see how it looked.

Her bounce rate is 39%.  Google Analytics defines it as follows, “bounce rate is the percentage of single-page visits or visits in which the person left your site from the entrance (landing) page.”  Not everyone who comes to her page will be interested in her jewelry.  Three visitors who typed in the keywords “buddha inspired chinese” were directed to her website.  I doubt they found what they were looking for!  Bounce rate is a powerful metric and I will be discussing it in another blog post.

Next is the visitor overview.  This is the number of new and existing visitors that came to the site.  It looks very similar to the Dashboard chart but the difference is that it measures visitors and not visits.  The Map Overlay World shows me at a quick glance where visitors to the site are coming from in the world. 

The pie chart below shows the traffic sources — direct traffic, search engines and referring sites.  Finally, the report shows an over view of the pages that had the most pageviews.  The first is the home page of her site and the subsequent ones are the pages for particular jewelry.

 I have no idea what I will do for my Mother’s next birthday but I will probably still be playing with Google Analytics until then.