Important Adobe SiteCatalyst update: How recent daylight savings changes affect reports and alerts

Over the long weekend, we received several alert notifications from Omniture for various clients - we monitor metrics such as hourly unique visitors and set email notifications if there are values outside the expected range.

We checked our clients' Omniture installations and noticed a pattern of 0 visits between 2am and 3am last Sunday, the 2nd of October. This corresponds with the hour skipped by the Daylight Savings Time changeover.

To confirm this, we checked the installations for clients we have based in New Zealand. As we suspected, we found the same pattern of 0 recorded visits for the previous week at the same time, which was when New Zealand started Daylight Savings Time.

Omniture alerts from Sunday morning about low values can be disregarded. Visits during those hours generally land in 3am-4am in the reports, so the daily totals should be intact.
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Australian Census data visualised with new Tableau 6.1 dark maps feature reveals a severe man draught

When we saw the new Tableau 6.1 dark map background feature and given today is Australian Census day, we though this is ideal to visualise the best nightlife hunting grounds for single men and women in Australia looking for a romance using some of the older Census data from 2006! But before we go into that, let's have a quick look at the sizeable Tableau 6.1 upgrade the company released last week. 

As far as the changes to Tableau go, here are some of the highlights:
+ Dashboards are now rendered specifically for iPads
+ Australian postcode data can now be plotted on maps automatically
+ Faster data processing and extraction, especially for test files
+ Ability to append additional data to extracts and data connections
+ View the input data as a whole via the left-hand side data window
You can check out a full demo of the new Tableau Desktop 6.1 features online but let's have at look at the last Census 2006 data on single men and women in Australia to demonstrate Tableau's new postcode functionality and sexy dark map background.

The topic of interest: Australia's supposed man drought

The basic theory is that there's a severe undersupply of single men for single women, particularly in their 30's. At first glance, this would seem a bit odd given that there's a roughly 50/50 split of men and women at birth. So let's see if this is true ...

At the national level, there are actually more single men than women for ages 20 to 34. And for the 35 to 39 age group there's only around 10,000 more single women than single men. Overall, the man drought doesn't really exist for 30-somethings.

However, the man drought may just be a regional phenomenon.

The below maps highlight the ratio of women to men in between the ages of 30 and 39. Depending on the map and your gender preference, a redder shade indicates a less favourable ratio and a greener shade a more favourable ratio. The size of the location represents the total number of people aged 30 to 39.

Northern NSW appears to have the largest scarcity of single men aged 30-39 (ratio of 1.07), while there's an abundance of men in Regional SA (ratio of 0.85). Although these ratio's aren't particularly high, there's some evidence of the man drought in particular regions of Australia.

Now, here's the best bit. If we look at ratios of single women to single men aged 30 to 39 in particular postcodes, then there are some places in Australia with an obvious scarcity of men. The top 3 places (of notable size) are:

1. 2559, Blairmount, NSW - 2.4 women for every man
2. 4509, Mango Hill/North Lakes, QLD - 1.9
3. 6770, Halls Creek, WA - 1.8 
It seems that there is a man drought, but it just depends on where you live. Similarly, there are places with a severe absence of single women in their 30s too. Here's the top 3:

1. 3008, Docklands, VIC - 0.4 women for every man
2. 5725, Roxby Downs/Olympic Dam, SA - 0.5
3. 4774, Moranbah, WA - 0.5
Single women are advised to avoid regions that suffer from a scarcity of single men if they are looking for a romance and single men might want to consider an excustion to these areas to imporve their chances of success. Have a look at our interactive maps and screen shots of wider Sydney and Melbourne to find out where you should be looking for your next man or woman.

Note: There's a fair bit of data behind the dashboards so please be patient when zooming in to your location.

(download)
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StatCounter Australian benchmark data on browsers and mobile OS market share: iOS 74%, Android 13%

Statcounter_logo

Not sure if you've heard about StatCounter but if you are an Australian online marketer looking for local benchmarking data on any of the below metrics, I think you will like this post. StatCounter publishes local Australia data on: 

+ Browsers
+ Browser versions
+ Mobile browsers
+ Operating systems
+ Mobile operating systems
+ Search engines
+ Mobile search engines
+ Mobile vs. desktop
+ Social media

According to Wikipedia "StatCounter statistics are directly derived from hits (not unique visitors) from 3 million sites using StatCounter totalling more than 15 billion hits per month". Now, the Australian sample is not the biggest, but it's not the smallest either so good enough I think. And best of all, you cannot just export the graphs but also download the raw data!

Below are a few of the more interesting graphs on browsers and mobile operating systems in Australia compared to the global average. Australia is largely following the global browser trend with one key exception, Safari seems to be much stronger here than the global average, almost as strong as Chrome.

In terms of mobile operating systems the iOS that powers the iPhone is the clear leader in Australia with over 74% market share followed by Android with 13% which is much more balanced globally. Android has a lot more catching-up to do here and it looks like the iOS has stolen much more market share from Blackberry in Australia over the last few months than overseas.

How does the below data compare to your own website stats?

(download)

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ADMA Data & Analytics Council presentation from RDA Research on geo-demographic segmentation

What are you doing with your customer address data? Nothing or not enough? Then join us next Wednesday evening, the 23rd of February, for a presentation from Robert Dommett, Technical Director of RDA Research and 20 year veteran of geo-segmentation for his perspective on the current usage of geo-demographics and vision for the future.

New perspectives on geo-demographics knowledge integration, multi-channel execution and global standardisation: For many years, geo-demographics has been a workhorse of the direct mail, retail and risk industries. Often out of favour and considered un-sexy by many in the industry, geo-demographics is enjoying a resurgence as a multi-channel integration framework.

Email councils@adma.com.au or visit the ADMA Data & Analytics Council Meetup page now to register for the event.

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ACMA Communications Report 2010 including data on Australian advertising expenditure by channel

ACMA just released another amazing report called the The Communications Report which is basically a collection of interesting telecommunication statistics from various sources. It includes some really interesting gems on Australian advertising expenditure by channel and the growing importance of online among less thrilling numbers on carrier licenses and emergency calls.

Download the full Communications Report form the ACMA website or check out some of the key advertising related charts below. As you can see online advertising expenditure has steadily increased over the past few years following a general usage trend and was actually the only channel with growth in 2009, however it still only reflects an average of 15% of overall advertising spend. Within online, search and directories are the key channels as one would expect but interestingly mobile reveals itself as somewhat hyped up given the the overall data download growth is still driven by fixed lines (mobile data download actually stagnated).

(download)

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