Tag Archives: web analytics
As the moderator of this week’s Wharton School of Business panel, “Analytics Across Industries” Elea Feit (Wharton Customer Analytics Initiative) asked CM’s VP Marketing Science a number of questions about current trends in online measurement. Here’s a glimpse inside their discussion about the transformation happening inside organizations, posing interesting challenges for management and opening up new career paths for students.
Why Now?
Elea: What do you think is driving this move toward analytics?
Shaina: Accountability has been looming for years. Some organizations are still getting away without it, but I’ve seen clients and us fired if Sr. leadership changes and the analytics aren’t up to snuff. The days of bloated business are over.
Elea: All of you have invested your careers in analytics – you have really branded yourself as someone who can use data to provide answers. What led you to do that and where do you hope it will take you?
Shaina: I experienced the .Com boom and the .Com bust. If only we had had analytics widely in 2000, we probably could have saved the industry and a lot of jobs. Every agency in Chicago closed its doors and the industry overall lost the entire middle tier of talent. We now have a talent shortage for all the work that is out there. I chose this profession because a it comes naturally to me, and b to save the industry from tanking again, and to provide the consumer and business a better product.
As another year begins we all find ourselves looking back and looking forward. Or, as we say in Marketing Science – analyzing and predicting.
We would also be the first to point out that predictive modeling relies on the analysis of historic data. Or, in regular-person speak – only by looking back can we look forward.
So, stick with us in our predictions for 2012 because as we focus on the future we will be taking some detours into the past.
Prediction #1
Social media measurement will focus less on ROI and more on brand affinity and purchase decisions.
Legend has it that once upon a time, in a land far, far away websites were once considered an expensive and optional marketing channel. (“This interweb thing is nothing more than a fad.”).
There was also a time when social media was viewed by many as a fad. 2008-2009 saw businesses start to take social media seriously. (“Maybe this Zuckerberg kid is onto something.”).
By 2010 executives wanted to know what their social media marketing spends were doing and social media measurement took off. The listening platform industry was born and several companies offered products that measured how much conversation was there about a brand, what were the key topics of conversation, and what was the sentiment of those conversations.
As social media marketing budgets grew, those same executives wanted to know how their spends were performing. And so 2011 became the year of social media ROI (return on investment). A prior post speaks more to this topic.
As we turn the corner into 2012 we predict that the focus on measuring ROI will lessen as companies stop wondering if social media has value and accept that it is now a fundamental part of the marketing mix. The measurement of social media will evolve into measuring its impact on brand affinity and purchase decisions. Social media will stop being viewed in a silo and seen as part of an end-to-end marketing mix.
The Challenge
Common sense asserts a wealth of marketing opportunity residing in the analysis of consumers’ publicly shared (and digitally documented) interests and interactions. However, there are significant challenges in separating valid information from noise, then structuring that valid data to draw actionable insights with the same level of confidence that businesses expect from their market research, web analytics, and other Business Intelligence functions.
The first generations of social media measurement and analysis have addressed these challenges as best they could. To advance beyond pseudo-science into the realm of truly actionable business analytics, the next generation of analysis will need to draw from the established standards and best practices of organizations’ existing analytics functions with established competency in building data-driven management practices from digital analytics.
Current State
Current approaches to social media measurement come in two forms:
1) Content-based monitoring or “listening” evaluates the content of conversations to assess current perceptions, and guide future engagement.
2) Context-based “social graph” analysis evaluates relationships and interactions within and across the social graph to assess networks and their capability to drive business objectives.
Businesses are currently trying to apply these two forms of measurement in various combinations for several objectives; to avoid or respond to brand crises, to build brand awareness and affinity, to enhance customer experience and loyalty, and even to influence sales.
A prior post on this blog discussed the digital experience delivery process with a focus on the practice of optimization. This post focuses on the steps that lead from awareness through to Action/Conversion, with an emphasis on the importance of properly understanding the drivers of digital conversions.
The Awareness Challenge
Most businesses understand that the notion “if you build it they will come” is not actually true when it comes to the web. The web is a big place with many options for consumers, so getting attention for the experience you’re offering is a critical component of the digital experience delivery process.
The job of generating awareness and thus (relevant) traffic to your website typically belongs to online advertising and SEO teams, who utilize search engines for organic and paid appearances and distribute display ads across the web. Increasingly, social media is also being utilized as a channel for driving traffic to websites.
In the ideal process, your awareness generation efforts bring people into a destination designed and optimized to meet their needs, and their visit ultimately results in a mutually beneficial transaction.
Privacy and fear. The two are intertwined. Yes, there are real fears related to online privacy–identity theft, credit card theft, stalking, even murder; but marketing? Come on. Marketing is not life or death, folks. It shouldn’t even drive anxiety. It’s simply a means to get you to buy a car, cleaning product, shoes, faucet, bank account, etc.
The US and much of Europe are capitalist societies that have been built and grown based on business success. Companies are going to keep trying as hard as they can to sell their product, but they would much rather try to sell it to a qualified over unqualified consumer. We all get frustrated being so bombarded by advertising in our capitalist markets, but there is no reason to fear being sold window cleaner or basketball shoes. Let’s face it, you are going to buy this stuff anyway. That’s what humans who have jobs and money do. We all try to live our lives more easily and more pleasurably, and companies that develop and sell products help us do that.
Yet “privacy” is being used as a blanket issue and marketing is the scapegoat because it’s far easier to attack than the big unsolvable issues like identity theft or stalking. Read More
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!
