About Mike

Who?

It’s always best to get the boring (but important) stuff out of the way first so here goes.

My name is Mike Sukmanowsky and I’m currently the Product Manager, Analytics working for The Globe and Mail here in Toronto, Ontario, Canada.

Boring stuff done? Great!

Why Web Analytics?

I often remark that most people who find themselves in the field of web analytics usually end up there by accident (albeit an accident I couldn’t be happier about!). That being said, my educational background had me more geared towards a career in software development and that’s honestly where I originally saw myself going. While working for Loblaw however I stumbled upon a piece of software, that was causing the e-Commerce department to be bugging us poor IT guys an awful lot, named WebTrends. Like a lot of other companies web analytics wrongfully was assigned as an IT duty instead of resting more on the shoulders of marketing.

That being said, all the questions coming from curious e-Commerce users resulted in me becoming quite curious myself and asking the same questions they were:

• Why are we seeing a spike in traffic when we weren’t running any campaigns?
• How would you track the success of online marketing efforts?
• How does a program like WebTrends know how many page views, visits and visitors a site got? How does it calculate that?
• What exactly is the relationship between page views, visits and visitors and what are the exact definitions of those things?
• What is a “conversion rate”?
• And many many more…

So I took it upon myself to take charge of WebTrends and I began diving into documentation, advanced configuration guides and literally hours of time on support calls. After while however, I found that I had become quite savvy technically with the tool (I even went as far to create a WebTrends Google Group to help others out) and could answer any of the questions that my business users needed answered, but I still felt as though there was so much more potential to what it could do for us. So like many people out there I started seeing what was online when I searched “web analytics” and eventually landed on some amazing materials, a few for example:

Sites

• The Web Analytics Association
• Web Analytics Demystified
• Occam’s Razor

Books

• Web Site Measurement Hacks – Eric T. Peterson (Main Site | Amazon)
• Actionable Web Analytics – Jason Burby and Shane Atchison (Main Site | Amazon)
• Web Metrics – Jim Sterne (Main Site | Amazon)
• Web Analytics an Hour a Day – Avinash Kaushik (Main Site | Amazon)
• Call to Action: Secret Formulas to Improve Online Results – Bryan and Jeffery Eisenberg (Main Site | Amazon)

These books and sites opened up my eyes to an entire part of the internet I wasn’t even seeing. Unlike other marketing channels (print, radio, etc.), the web offers to anyone who enjoys being data driven and making good decisions what’s analogous to a kid in a candy shop. Imagine even the power of owning an e-Commerce site and being able to know with certainty that your spend on an offline campaign was responsible for contributing 20% of sales for that quarter. These are the kinds of ideas that keep me up at night .