Best of the web – June 2012

1. Google Analytics adds Content Experiments to help you test the best layout for your site

The Next Web writes: “Google has announced the release of Content Experiments for Analytics, which will replace the company’s Website Optimiser product. Now, Analytics itself will let users test different layouts, content and designs, showing different versions to different visitors.”

2. Proving social media success is all about analytics

Econsultancy writes: “The elusive social ROI. Executives demand it, marketers search for it. But it’s actually not so elusive, especially for those marketers who’ve embraced the latest social technologies. In fact, there is a treasure trove of data available. Perhaps, however, marketers should not be thinking old-school marketing metrics for today’s social web. For social, it’s more about the ROE (return on engagement) than the ROI.”

3. Conduct browser-size analysis within Google Analytics

From the Google Analytics blog: “Today’s visitors to websites are using an ever-growing number of devices. Many users are on mobile platforms, and although desktop monitors are getting bigger, browsers aren’t necessarily following suit. For many people, the visible portion of the web page is much smaller than the screen resolution, because of excessive toolbars and other clutter.”

4. Gamification in market research – Is respondent engagement more important than bias?

From the Greenbook Blog: “Gamification looks like a relatively important methodology innovation that needs proper  validation – so the R&D work needs to be done before broad adoption can be advocated. More particularly, I think we need to understand  what biases we’re introducing, so we can understand what impact what types of gamification mechanics have on response patterns, and build that into analysis.”

5. Big data – what it means for the digital analyst

From the Online Behaviour blog: “I just Googled ‘Big Data’ and I got 19,600,000 results. Where there was virtually nothing about two years ago there is now unprecedented hype. While the most serious sources are IBM, McKinsey, and O’Reilly, most articles are marketing rants, uninformed opinions or plain wrong. I had to ask myself… what does it mean for the digital analyst?”

Also, check out:

6. Interviews on innovation – Edwin Lau, Microsoft

7. Customers are not data

8. Pakistani public opinion ever more critical of US

9. Facebook will disappear by 2020, says analyst

10. Let big data predictive analytics rock your world

_{Best of the Web is a roundup of the most-shared links on Twitter, based on analysis of all tweets generated by the MR community (as defined in our last project to map the MR Twitter network – see here for more details). Analysis by Dollywagon. Data was collected in the four weeks to 29 June.}