Tag Archives: Marketing Science
Image credit: www.jonessnowboards.com
It started with 2,600 people packed into a Salt Lake City hotel ballroom eagerly awaiting the show to begin. This was my first year attending, so I didn’t know what to expect. The room looked like it has been set up for rock concert rather than a business conference. As a voice came over the loud speaker letting us know that the show was about to begin, Daft Punk started playing, the lights dimmed and the opening keynote for Adobe’s Omniture Summit began.
The annual event is a three day marathon of training, keynotes, breakout sessions, networking and, of course, partying with some of the best web analysts, advertisers, developers and digital marketers in the world.
The theme for this year’s summit was that digital marketing was the new extreme sport. If you think about it, the concept makes a lot of sense. Digital marketing, similar to extreme sports, is a combination of art and science. Whether you are analyzing a snowpack or spinning 180s over 120 foot gaps in the back country, you can’t (and shouldn’t) do one without the other. Summit takes all that is awesome about digital measurement and crams it into a very short time period. This makes for some very late nights and a lot of early morning coffee. But it is all worth it to spend some time with some of the world’s best and brightest marketers.
So what did I learn from the experience? Lots more than I care to write, but below are my four biggest takeaways.
Web measurement and web analytics programs can be complex and face many technological, process and cultural challenges. We here at Critical Mass Marketing Science help our clients overcome these problems using a combination of best practice modeling, innovative thinking and the latest technology.
Problem #1 – Unreliable Data
Are the numbers you’re looking at accurate? Do they represent what you think they represent? Is everything being captured that should be? Data collection systems, especially web analytics, are complex and as a result they are also easy to mess up or break.
So what causes web analytics data to be unreliable? There are couple of common reasons, but they both relate to how the coding is done.
Most commonly we see analytics “tagging” that is incomplete or wasn’t customized correctly. This can happen for several reasons, but more importantly, how can we fix it?
Image compliments of www.seekyledraw.com.
Alex Clemmons | Critical Mass Chicago
It often takes months to develop a website or digital program. After tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars, persona development, creative reviews, usability testing and some long nights, launch date is a huge milestone. But often times after a site goes live the client is ready to move on to the next project. However, it is in the post launch period that we can actually have the most impact and ensure that all the time and money we spent is paying off. Website optimization, the process of making continual improvements to the site in order to increase performance, can help make our clients, and ourselves, look like rock stars.
Part of website optimization comes from reporting. Every marketing initiative should have goals, and it is the Marketing Science Department’s job to define and track progress against these goals. Through reporting, we can identify underperforming areas and make recommendations for improvement. When we combine reporting with testing we can start to understand not only what is working, but why it is working as well.
Almost every aspect of a digital program can come under debate; page layouts, calls to action, image size and page colors are just a few things that can be contested.
A testing program could help settle these debates and optimize the experience to meet our marketing objectives and more importantly our customer’s goals.
In a nut shell, testing is the process by which we test different versions of a web page on the live site environment and then, through scientific methods, declare a winner of the test (the page that has best shown the ability to best convert visitors to do the actions that we want them to do).
The simplest form of testing is an A/B test. We pick a site goal, like conversion from a landing page, and then measure how different versions of this page perform against our goal. With tools like Omniture’s Test & Target or Google’s Website Optimizer we can serve up pages that have different images, copy or other treatments in real time and measure the results against a control page.
Page A is our control; it has not had any changes made to it. On page B, we can start to swap things out; it could be a new image or a different call to action. We run our test and find that visitors who saw page B had a 300% higher conversion rate than those who saw page A!
Pulling directly from Shaina’s CMVP nomination last October,
“She’s done an amazing job of juggling multiple client demands, team demands and office demands over the past couple of months. Marketing Science thinking is a key component of our new business wins and a growing component of day-to-day client deliverables. She delivers great insights, is a strong team leader, and continually reinforces her delivery with an attitude that clients and team members really appreciate.”
So it’s no question she is the Critical Mass CMVP of the Year for 2009. But let’s spend some time getting to know her a little better. Here are 10 Qs with Shaina.
1. What is your role at CM? How do you spend your days?
I am the Group Marketing Science Director, running the line of business for all offices. CM was in need of a more advanced analytics practice, so I wrote a business plan from my experience and research and executed against it. The vision was to ensure our clients get the most for their money working with us, our consumer gets the best experience, the product is the best we can deliver and our analysts have a highly engaging/challenging career at CM. Those were the 4 key components to drive the whole line of business. To date, we have 65% of CM accounts covered, a team of 15 people (and 6 more open positions).
I spend my days talking to people on the team [management] and selling during the day, planning operations and bigger picture analysis/strategy at night. 75% of the time I am travelling. I even have my own apartment in Calgary because I spent 6.5 months there last year. (Plus1 month in Amsterdam. Only 4 month at home here in Chicago!)
In a nutshell, it’s like I get to run my own business inside of a massive business and it’s very motivating.
2. Why do you think you were you nominated as a CMVP?
I suppose it’s because I built a successful line of business. Or maybe that’s why I was picked as CMVP of the Year. I think I was originally nominated because I had a very challenging month last fall. Sometimes, survival is extraordinary. That was when I was taking over solitary ownership of the entire group. It was challenging, but it helps that I love what I do so much.
3. What is the greatest thing about CM culture?
The people, themselves. I couldn’t work this much if I didn’t really like everyone who works here. I’ve worked at many agencies and with hundreds of people over the years and no one is like this collective group. The executives are so supportive and friendly. The Canadian heritage is rare and wonderful. Great work. Amazing roster of clients. All in all, it’s just a unique and ideal environment.
4. What drives you? What are you inspired by?
Finding the answer to “why?” and proving that what we’re doing is actually bringing value. Showing that everything we do at this company is actually worth something and can always be improved. That’s very compelling. Another big one is getting people to think–stop them and get them to think before they take action.
Ever since the early days of the Internet, technologies have been developed to track online behavior. Over time many of these have developed into what is commonly referred to as web analytics and now Marketing Sciences.
Some people believe this is a serious invasion of your privacy. Because you sit in the privacy of your home to surf the Web, there’s a belief that your activities should be completely private. In reality though, while you may be surfing in your underwear (ok, maybe that’s just me), people like me can “see” what you’re up to.
Here’s how it works, at a basic level. Most web pages have bits of code that are invisible to the average person. Between this code and cookies that get created and stored on your browser, back end systems are able to track a wide variety of actions that you may take on one or across multiple websites.
In order to explore this further, I’d like to separate out a couple of levels of privacy.
- I.D. level privacy – Credit card information, phone numbers, your address etc. fall into this category. This is the kind of thing that I could commit identity theft with.
- Preferences privacy – Data about stuff you like and perhaps have purchased in the past, but nothing I could stalk you with. You like cookies and organic gardening, but I have no idea “who” you are unless you sign in and tell me specifically.
- Browsing privacy – Data about how you moved around in a website and what you looked at. You downloaded three recipe cards on supertastycookies.com. “You” are totally anonymous.
Legitimate web analytics and advertising tracking operate mostly in level three (browsing) and sometimes in level two (preferences), but never in level one (I.D. level). (To be clear, level one is and should always be off limits to the realms of web analytics and Marketing Science.)
Why? For many reasons, but primarily to make your experience of the web better, easier, faster and more effective. The data can be used to optimize web sites as well as customize the content you might see so it better fits your personal preferences, and in so doing help companies achieve their business goals.
I will also point out that the data is also used to present you with advertising that you’re more likely to be interested in, and therefore more likely to click on hence making advertiser companies more money.
Privacy advocates would promote the idea of a complete cone of silence and that all three levels of privacy would be completely protected. In this scenario, no data would be tracked (and I would be unemployed). Think of this like walking around a very large city with a cloak of invisibility on. You can interact with the world, but no one can see you.
The reality is that when you walk around a big city, people can see you. They may not know who you are or where you live, but you’re not invisible.
If you go into a large department store, you’re being recorded on security cameras. Much like most web tracking systems, the camera doesn’t know who you are, where you live, or what your credit card number is, just that you were there. If someone is paying attention they might also know that you looked at handbags and shoes before you left.
