Press Release

Local web strategic agency Clickthinking have won an internationally respected web competition, beating numerous global usability and site performance companies to take top spot.

The US-based Web Analytics Association (WAA) is seen as the global champion for the online marketing analytics profession. The association believes online marketing analytics is an integral part of the business decision process. Corporate members include Google, Yahoo!, Core Metrics, Web Trends, Walt Disney and Omniture.

The WAA announced the winners of the Web Analytics Championship on Monday July 14 2008. The competition was aimed at web analysts reviewing the site and traffic data for webanalyticsassociation.org. The judges wanted to see how companies extracted value from web data.

“It is tough to make web analytics cool and the team at Clickthinking managed that. Theirs was the most engaging and creative report in the championship,” the judges said in a statement. “They confronted tough problems head-on with data.”

The judges also said Clickthinking had a great framing of the problems (with the business objectives), clear original plan of analysis (including using multiple data sources), and adapted to adversity (missing data sources). Clickthinking also made clear connections between recommendations made and data reviewed. They also got bonus points for conveying complex recommendations in lay terms so any marketer would be able to understand them and not getting mired in technical recommendations and reviews.

Clickthinking was praised for the way in which they focused on solving the critical few important problems of the site.

Clickthinking Managing Director Peter Stewart said the award was a result of hard work by a team of individuals who are fast becoming the leaders in their respective fields. “We are very proud of this achievement, having competed with some of the very best globally”.

Other winners were Predicta (Sao Paulo) in second place, Alt64 (Barcelona) in third, User Intelligence (Amsterdam) in fourth and Targetbase (Dallas) in fifth place. The judges were Avinash Kaushik, Neil Mason and June Dershewitz.

Founded in 1997, MiX Telematics is a global provider of fleet management products and services companies of all sizes in over 75 countries on six continents. The company vision is to become the leading global provider of information and related services for all mobile assets. They place a high value on their website strategy and have selected Clickthinking to construct the solution architecture and strategically advise them on their digital positioning and implementation.

We discovered the following interesting bit of research today in a BBC news article quoting Dr Jakob Nielson:

In 2004, about 40% of people visited a homepage and then drilled down to where they wanted to go and 60% use a deep link that took them directly to a page or destination inside a site. In 2008, said Dr Nielsen, only 25% of people travel via a homepage. The rest search and get straight there.

“Basically search engines rule the web,” he said.But, he added, this did not mean that the search engines were doing a perfect job.
“When you watch people search we often find that people fail and do not get the results they were looking for,” he said.
“In the long run anyone who wants to beat Google just has to make a better search,” said Dr Nielsen.

Nielsen/Net Ratings released the Top 10 performers for November, 2007 recently. Often dominated by Florists, it was interesting to see some change with a women apparel website leading the list.