Scorecards - Adopt a More Dynamic Approach

Is our scorecard serving business needs of the moment? Scorecards are widely debated within organizations and what I have found is that scorecards end up reflecting personalities rather than business imperatives. We argue and sell the concept of a consistent set of metrics and a standard format, so business can be monitored and decisions can be made. But, I have found that the theory of standard format and set metrics only says that “I don’t want to rake my brain on a frequent basis and make decisions dynamically.” There are a very few businesses that do not pose a new challenge every day – some days we are fixing what is broken, on the others, we may be finding ways to optimize the operations, yet another, we may be trying to find new ways to grow the business. So, why should the scorecard always look the same?

There are ways, a lot of managers pretend to get by that problem – add more metrics to the scorecard, make the font small to fit on one-page (often as a result of the former), etc. But, do they solve the tactical business challenges that are discussed in the review meetings every day/week/month? A better approach would be to identify what metrics are meant to be the health indicators of the business and what metrics need to be monitored for making tactical decisions by pointing out wins/challenges. To achieve this, we need scorecards that are not repetitive indicators of our performance, instead can dynamically capture the data points that help executives hone-in on the issue and make a call quickly during the review meetings.

I am not suggesting we dump the old formatted view of our metrics, but instead, we create one that speaks to our most current challenge (today, this week, etc.) – which retail department is moving ahead and which is hurting, which promotions worked for us, how do we help our dealers and vendors be more successful, what helps the consumer buying decision, how do we grow revenue to meet this months targets, etc. This slight change can help surface underlying issue, as for example; With stagnant sales – increasing the share of consumer’s wallet is tough in these times, but bringing more consumers in through the door is still a viable growth strategy. If we can dynamically demonstrate the value of our key projects through the right scorecard, it might be just that much easier to gain executive approval and show the results as they come in.

Building an analytics culture!

Organizations apply analytics in mostly ad-hoc manner, often to answer a query from management about business performance. But, companies with more advanced analytics capabilities apply the models to unearth value in their businesses and create competitive advantage.

Since I am working with organizations with less than robust analytics capabilities, I find answering questions as the more prevalent reason for looking into the data. However, the bigger challenge with such organizations is the lack of, what I call the “analytics culture” or, the mindset for data-driven decision making. There may be several reasons that organizations are handicapped on this front, and in my consulting experience, I have found the following three factors to be extremely helpful in alleviating the problem to a large extent.

• Management support – senior leadership needs to support investments in analytics function and insist on data-driven decision-making.
• Knowledge of relevant metrics – business unit heads should take a critical look at the metrics that drive their business and not just the ones that make them look good in weekly reviews.
• Ownership of data models – a data model owned and managed by a neutral team within the company is a priceless resource to managing business performance, finding opportunities and enabling the data-driven decision making.

 I have come to believe that analytics culture needs to be established, supported and nurtured to really benefit from the insights. Where does it sit, who runs it, who needs to be hired in, what processes need to be in place, what are the key metrics, how is the accountability defined, etc.

First answer the question – what is my organization’s goal? Do we sell widgets online? Do we engage users to drive offline sales? Do we push content based on user preferences? Etc. While revenue is the bottom-line for however you look at a business, knowing the above goals will help us qualify the right set of metrics and analysis.

If I look at the business as an outsider, I believe for any business to succeed, it needs to build the analytics function outside other functional groups, simply to ensure the neutrality and to prevent the analysts from being encumbered by business unit goals.

The larger the organization, the more imperative it is for its management to recognize the subtle impacts of not following this policy. Often, marketing and data reporting teams would be asked to provide business analysis. This may not be the best strategy – marketing has personal interest in showing that the conversions are working well, and reporting is often too technical to understand the nuances and make educated recommendations for business improvements. Either is not an ideal strategy to provide a neutral view and critique into the business performance!

Are there lessons learnt in your organizations that you would like to share? Feel free to post your views below.

Online analytics for B2B business

Success of web strategy in a B2B environment depends on generating “qualified” leads for the sales teams. Although, growing brand awareness, increasing user engagement, drawing qualified applicants, etc. are also equally important, yet ignored, aspects that require increased focus. However, the data trends may not be as apparent as is the case with B2C online analytics. Hence, online analytics for B2B organizations need to be organized around the 3 guiding principles of Measurement, ROI and Management Communication.

In one of my recent engagements, I was working with a client to build an effective web analytics strategy and framework - the key was to monitor and achieve positive results on the above goals. The project success was mainly achieved by addressing the above 3 guiding principles; in that, once the metrics were identified that tracked the progress towards the established goals, it was a question of building frameworks for models that could define ROI and management commitment to effectively communicate the need and benefits of an effective online strategy.  

Measurement – Google Analytics is one of the more popular analytics implementations among B2B businesses, which helps measure the key metrics that most organizations would need to understand their consumers and site usage. The key is to identify process of lead conversion between traffic to the site and a successful sale (read customer conversion). For this reason, it is important that the scorecard shows the traffic, engagement and sales metrics, from web and sales analytics packages, respectively. I have also recommended revenue metrics, such as, revenue per visit, revenue per lead, etc., based on average sales to quantify web traffic.

ROI – models and business analysis capabilities help establish the value of traffic to the site, prioritize investments and measure returns.

Management Communication – effective scorecards and metrics reporting helps senior management see the value web strategy drives for the business, however long the lead conversion process takes. Metrics showing engagement growth, positive reviews, more applicant inquiries, etc. are all good indicators of a successful web strategy, and should be included as part of regular business updates.

Also, important is for the business to build data management tools such that web traffic and sales success can be correlated for clear measurement, ROI and management communication. Last, but not the least, hiring the right skill set and assigning the team to the right organization will be critical factors in achieving success with B2B goals.

Succeeding with business analysts

Every organization employs business analysts through different titles, business units, reporting structure, etc. What I often found was a significant disconnect among the duties, organizational goals and qualifications of the employees involved. Here I am not referring to individual qualifications, instead how they fit in with the management’s vision of applied analytics to achieve organizational goals.

I have had financial analysts performing the tasks of a marketing analyst, a web analyst performing the task of a business analyst and so on.

I believe there are 3 key considerations in improving the effectiveness of a business analyst to an organization:

• Qualifications – a business analyst should be numbers savvy, have keen business acumen and be able to visualize and theorize (this is often the most ignored). However trivial this may sound, it is more common than one would imagine.
• Clear goal definition – business unit heads should clearly define the business analysts’ roles, More importantly, they should resist the temptation to “take on more” because the organization is budget constrained and analyst is the “closest fit” to the functional skills needed for say, a tech analyst, tagging/implementation/Q&A analysts, etc. This only helps to dilute the impact a pure thinker and data expert can provide to analyzing and improving the business operations.
• Direction from management – managers should provide continuous direction and help channelize the theories on business performance that analysts come up with based on their continuous interaction with data. The challenge is to stay focused on organization goals, identify high-impact analysis/recommendations and prioritize projects with clear ROI and benefits.

Being in a large organization, I have struggled with all of the above, which resulted in not being able to hire/retain good talent, and/or generate and apply good analytical insights to test our theories. 

The issues in achieving the maximum efficiencies are sometime genuine, but without a qualified analyst, clear goals and leadership, we are not giving ourselves a fair shot at tackling them. Have a story? Share your experiences of how these hurdles were overcome in your organizations.

Website optimization OR portfolio planning

Web experience depends on a wide range of variables that are more conflicting than complementing to each other. For instance; to drive content consumption we tend to place a greater number of links on a page, in turn getting more clicks and page view depth. However, this user behavior may not drive the highest contribution (revenue per user) value for the business, since page view inflation tends to diminish CPM rates from advertisers. For such hybrid models, which most websites tend to be, optimizing the website experience then becomes a science that can be tackled by applying portfolio planning mindset across the variables.

The chart below illustrates different variables that may influence portfolio analysis approach to website optimization - product, design and UI, marketing, partner metrics, etc. Each of the variables are critical for meeting consumer, industry and organization goals however, lack of both, a well-defined web strategy and a portfolio approach may result in poor investment decisions and diminished returns.

So how do we tackle the “portfolio of variables” for maximum return on our website investments (I am only going to speak to the internal metrics, not the ones controlled by external partners)? First of all, we need to define the goals and build the revenue model that is based on key variables and estimates the common measurable denominator - $$. Then we need to look at each variable as a part of the larger model and determine what site features are critical for their success, respectively. For instance, traffic into the site could depend on the promotion type, promotion source, etc. Once the user lands in the experience, it is the content, user interface, navigation, etc. that will drive user satisfaction. Finally, as the users leave the site, we need to ascertain that their needs were met – did they click out to make a purchase or a lead, did they find the content satisfactory, did the search results return what they were looking for, did the partner promotion lead them down the conversion funnel, etc.

We need to further define and understand what traffic sources (SEO, SEM, online promotions, etc.) work best for driving new users to the channel. Here a useful approach can be to determine the value of each traffic source which helps in optimizing the return on investment (here’s some more on this topic from an earlier post …. http://www.analyticsheaven.com/2010/04/higher-marketing-roi-with-traffic.html).

Alternatively, our business may need to focus on optimizing the value each user delivers to the business. In this case, we will need to focus on conversion metrics. How can we drive more ad revenue (if that’s or business model) by improving consumer engagement on the site and growing RELEVANT page views, which in turn, improves CPM revenue.

In other instance, our business model may need to be optimized for driving qualified traffic to our partners (read CPC and/or Lead Gen revenue). Here, the focus should be on measuring and refining search results, product details and description, research tools to facilitate purchase, design and user interface to encourage purchase, etc. The business model helps to quantify each of these metrics, either through single variable or multiple variable analyses.

Equipped with this level of detail, general managers can ask the right questions of the functional units (Design, Product, UI, Marketing, Sales) and drive focus on the critical areas for overall business success. The success achieved through such portfolio approach to business optimization is more manageable and highly sustainable, as operational efficiencies are achieved through clear focus and optimum resource allocation.

Your turn - would love to hear from the strategic planners and analysts on other lessons learnt!

Value of social media – grow offline “Influencers”

A visit to a doctor’s office almost always starts with a finger on the pulse. I liken "net promoters" as that starting point to learn about the health of a business, before diving into a wide array of tables and charts, and making recommendations to optimize website and/or business operations. 

Harvard Business Review talked about “net promoters” as one metric businesses should measure – the idea being that if the user is talking about your product/service to friends and family, he/she is most likely to return and bring new traffic to your store; which brings us to the concept of one metric that can be used as a “pulse” of the business. I promoted a concept of “repeat visitation” as that one metric to define your website’s performance. Another one that I have believed strongly in is the “bounce rate” that is a good indicator of our success at engaging our users the moment they set foot in our experience.

Interestingly enough, all these metrics tend to define user satisfaction with your product or service, implying that the users are willing to talk about it – think “social media.” I found that a recent eMarketer report talked about influencers in the same vein. Here’s the quote “Marketers trying to boost their earned media online are on the hunt for influencers, those customers who are ready and willing to spread the word to others about products and services … they looked for new experiences, liked to know about new products first and told their friends when they had problems with a brand …” 

The study noted that word-of-mouth happened offline, however, it all starts online and we can employ some of the following tactics to build differentiated social media plans in our online marketing strategy.

1. Identify the target audience in your social media mix that can be categorized as “influencers.” These are typically the ones who are most engaged with your products/services/brands.
2. Build a company blog, if you already don’t have one, which speaks to this user segment.
3. Target the influencers through both social media and company blog with product information and updates, relevant offers, etc.
4. Sustain their interests through polls, surveys, offers that offer them a forum to speak and also talk about your product/service - this will drive new users to your site through the word-of-mouth.
5. Offer special sales and promotions designed for this group to thank them for their loyalty and support.

Improving lifetime value, high engagement, and brand loyalty never sounded this easy … all the more relevant in B2B environment.

Would love to hear your thoughts on the topic, things that worked in your business, new ideas!

Social media strategy and ROI ... again!

A recent eMarketer study highlighted that an ROI driven social media strategy was needed before businesses can actually start to invest in and reap the rewards. It was pointed, based on the 2 facts below, that social media users are not seeing the profits as anticipated and that there was a lack of data to support investments:


*  Only 35% are reported to have profited from social media through increased leads – these are also the ones who would invest in a social strategy and have staff dedicated to analyzing social media efforts.
*  The biggest hurdle to social media strategy is the lack of data to measure the ROI and a subsequent executive buy-in for greater investments – nearly 60% cited these as primary reasons for implementing social media strategy.

These are telling facts!

I maintained in this blog that measuring social media can be challenging purely in terms of an ROI model (net of revenue and cost), simply because the scale is not there for a typical business (in my experience). Instead, we need to utilize social media as a means to other insights (users and product) that may contribute to improving ROI through more traditional media – ones where we can easily setup a model to quantify revenue and cost for a net return (my earlier post on this topic:  http://www.analyticsheaven.com/2010/03/measuring-social-media-user-vs-product.html). 


I believe the social media efforts need to be looked at as pure investment into the future. The immediate benefits can be had from sampling and testing approach I proposed in the above post. Let’s look at social media data to learn more about our products, consumers and competitors, so we can make better decisions about our current marketing efforts. Hint - the consumers may tweet about a certain product feature they don’t like; certain types/demographics of consumers may be more interested in the brand/product; there may be a buzz about the competitive offerings that may need more attention; and so on.

Building the intelligence model from social media may be a simpler way to look at the ROI than trying to build an ROI model which, as the report highlighted, may not be easily done due to lack of data and appropriate mathematical model. 


Other insights, ideas ... please share!

Higher marketing ROI with traffic source contribution

Users find multiple ways to come to our website and represent different interests. But if we are treating them equally, then we are doing ourselves a disservice by not capturing the optimum value of each of our traffic sources. I have talked about targeted landing page experience, in this blog, for traffic from search, navigation, etc., as a means to improving stickiness and engagement. However, to please our finance folks, we also need to assign a value – an ROI or contribution (revenue/visit) – to each of these traffic sources to fully understand the potential and impact of our site improvement efforts.

As an example, one of my projects was to understand the contribution value of traffic from each of our traffic sources. The biggest hurdle to achieving this objective was the fact that we did not have any tracking to follow the user from the time it entered the experience to the time it left the experience. Depending on the size and scope of your web traffic, it could be a daunting task to collect that kind of data. However, if we tag each campaign appropriately, we can come fairly close to isolating the path. Of course the analytics software we employ will be crucial to achieving the goal (we were using Omniture and an in-house tracking solution to marry traffic and revenue data and build the user path).

Once we are able to follow the user through our site, we measured the revenue points in the path and aggregated to arrive at composite revenue/visit from a particular traffic source. Consumer centric tracking is one approach that may be useful (http://www.analyticsheaven.com/2010/04/tracking-make-it-customer-centric.html).

For instance; revenue/visit from content promotion was more dependent on user navigation and hence advertising revenue. However, search driven revenue/visit was driven more by user clicks to purchase and hence CPC revenue and/or Lead Gen revenue. We found wide variation, more than 100% between the low and high contribution values, among all our promotion vehicles. But, now we were able to employ targeting and relevant cross-sell/up-sell to grow revenue and contribution from each traffic source. Imagine the possibilities for your marketing ROI, if you were equipped with traffic source level contributions as you make decisions about where to promote, how much to spend, etc., on your campaigns. Listening to our customers and utilizing continuous feedback to update our content and products should help drive a favorable trend in traffic source contribution: http://www.analyticsheaven.com/2010/01/customer-is-always-right.html). This can be a competitive differentiator and a valuable tool in marketing portfolio planning.

Tracking - make it customer centric!

Knowing what your customers want or need, I believe, is the type of intelligence that is best obtained from internal data, rather than market studies. While the latter are a good source of market intelligence and trends, a more focused “consumer centric tracking” will ensure that we are better prepared to serve our consumers’ needs. The possibilities could be endless, from right targeting of offers, to lower acquisition costs, to greater conversion and monetization. I spoke about the customer focus (http://www.analyticsheaven.com/2010/01/customer-is-always-right.html), and now we need to ensure that our tracking is helping us achieve some of the benefits identified in that approach.

Achieving this level of granularity may be tricky, given consumer privacy issues, but we can aggregate user data in the right buckets to define our unique segments, design a scorecard to monitor appropriate metrics and create a process to quickly supplement our offerings to changing user needs.

While I talked about measuring the value of web traffic by promotion source, here the theory is that we build an understanding of user segments. For instance, if we are a content site, we may want to learn about the browsing behavior of our sports readers, segmented into say, MLB/NBA/Olympics/Soccer fans, etc. Metrics such as, time spent on the site, navigation pattern to other site sections, number of pages per visit, frequency of visits per month, shopping tendencies, awareness towards brands, etc. Following these segments may yield better returns per marketing dollars spent than a wide targeting of content and offers through the generic sports page.

What this data does is that it helps define our user experience, site navigation and product offers that are truly unique to this user segment. And we need to respect the findings to an extent that if our sports readers tell us that they are not interested in shopping (hypothetically), then we make the experience richer by showing them more content and leaving out the “useless” product ads from their pages – talk of a no-frills attached user experience. How else does one define relevance and targeting?

Guide to making Web Analytics more accurate! - rewind

I felt the need to bring this up again as organizations are pushing for better returns from their online strategies and web analytics.

Understanding business imperatives, setting clear goals, defining success metrics, continuous testing and robust/agile implementation is what it all boils down to ... when it comes to effective utilization of web analytics for business improvement.

Below is an excerpt:

A recent eMarketer study identified top issues with the accuracy of analytics. Most prominently, users said they can't drill into the data (42%), and called out the issues with marketing attribution (32%), campaign tracking code (25%) and cross site analysis (20%). These factors become prominent as the business evolves over time and market driven changes are incorporated across the site. However, with some planning and framework, we can define and implement a robust analytics strategy that is flexible and adapts to the evolving business needs and site-wide changes.


Here's the link to the original post: http://www.analyticsheaven.com/2009/11/guide-to-making-web-analytics-more.html

The data is in abundance - looking at what matters and applying for business success is what matters ... happy hunting!

Key to driving leads - beyond social media

I recently spoke about how social media can be utilized to drive positive ROI for your business.

Here is one of the more direct ways to driving leads, while you define the over-arching social media strategy for your business – INVEST (if you haven't already) in creating a company blog.

According to eMarketer study, company blog drove the highest number of leads in both B2C and B2B firms, although Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn were close second, third & fourth, respectively. Why this makes so much more sense is because there is a limit to how much can be said about your products, updates, tips, values, news, etc., on Twitter, Facebook and similar social sites, not to mention the timeliness of posts. We need to provide a more robust & permanent landing page experience (read company blog), with appropriate detail, to expand upon the 140 characters long nugget of information that you just updated on social sites.

The company blog should let your customers know more about your products/services, while encouraging participation (call-to-action). This can be through sharing knowledge about key features, competitive differentiators, upcoming changes and upgrades, issues and related solutions, user feedback, etc. Also, don’t forget to include employee comments about products, services, culture, etc., that can be valuable in promoting the company itself as having an open and transparent organization.

Interested readers (brand followers) on Twitter, Facebook, etc., can redirect themselves to the blog to read more. This approach serves 3 purposes that are critical for differentiating yourself in an over-crowded social media space. One – provides a common, yet an open platform for your customers (new and existing) to come to and learn more about your products/services. Two – provides a sense of attachment to the brand (comes from knowing and engaging more). Three - provides a forum to connect customers and employees for greater participation and transparency. Finally, maintain and nurture the company blog and its readers, and encourage participation through polls, promotions, events, tips, values, news, etc.

Measuring social media - user vs., product data

Measuring social media engagement and return on investment is an evolving science, with a lot of ideas on what is more important to track and record. I proposed an approach on “user and product metrics” in this blog a few weeks back (here’s the link: http://www.analyticsheaven.com/2010/02/social-media-can-drive-roi-now.html). While some of it may seem like a part of a marketing plan, it is still useful data for continuous monitoring and improvement.

Let’s expand on these success metrics. What metrics help us understand the user behavior and engagement on our site? Some of the obvious ones include, number of visits from social sites, followers/fans, page views (content sites) and leads, referring sites, demographic data on users commenting on your product, user segment more “prone” to conversion, loyalty based user segmentation, etc. Based on this data, we can decide how to engage our social media users; add more product information, product updates or new product ideas, engage new user bases, pamper most engaged user segments and our “net promoters,” etc.

To learn more about our products we need to monitor the features that people are tweeting about, be it our’s or our competitors’. Offline products may be impacted by, seasonality of product usage, recalls, new feature and/or product launches, etc. In case of an online product, social promotions can yield instantaneous glimpses into how we did on page design, site, navigation, layout, etc. Think of monitoring Bounce Rates, time spent on the site, pages consumed post landing, brand/product mentions and shares on social sites, etc. These will be good indicators of how well is the site performing relative to your expectations and competition. However, prior to starting a formal monitoring process, we need to set the benchmarks, so we can assess and define the deviations in tweeting behavior.

While following the social usage and consumption, don’t forget the company blog. This is where users will feel most connected and empowered to share their views and ideas about your product. Make sure it is conveniently linked from the social sites in order for the interested consumers to take that extra step.

Internet & TV - the inevitable synergies

As we see more and more user adoption of online videos and increasing TV viewership, I wanted to share some thoughts on possible synergies and trends in online and TV convergence. First let’s consider some facts:

1. Time-shifted TV viewing and online video viewing continued to grow in 2009 (according to Nielsen)
2. TV will become more social
3. Internet enabled devices, including Internet Enable Television sets (IETVs), will double by 2013 (according to Morgan Stanley), implying a more anytime/anywhere content consumption
4. Paid video content will make up 75% of US online video market (rest 25% will be ad supported)
5. Social ad spending approaches 50% of total online ad spend

What does this all mean for TV programming and online content? While internet continues to evolve in technology, engagement, user preferences, etc., TV has almost been stagnant in terms of content delivery and viewership. This is where I predict that online changes will have the greatest impact on TV viewing – something that the cable companies should take note of.

TV programs, while being available online, still are best viewed on TV from user experience perspective. As a result, paid content will be more viable and will see a larger adoption. Users will also start to “demand” more from their Video on Demand (VOD) programming. Because users like to view movies and favorite TV shows on TV for the most part, and not on an internet enabled device. VOD will need to evolve its offerings, interface and user experience to mirror more of what users are now getting used to online. The measurement of success will then closely mirror the success metrics in an online experience. On the other hand, ad supported programming, although a significant market in terms of dollar value, will be steady, and highly dependent on such metrics as, user demographic, click-through rates, completion rates, etc.

In either of the revenue models, common online success metrics such as, site navigation, content programming, time spent on a page, bounce rate, click-through rate on a title/promo, return frequency, etc., will/can be applied in some form to determine the success of a set-top experience.

The functionality offered by TIVO and its integration of streaming content from Amazon, Youtube and Netflix is already pointing to the online and TV synergies. As an example, UK market, with greater adoption of such preferences and willingness of users to pay for content, only helps to corroborate this trend. Cable companies can hence, gain a significant competitive advantage by preparing for the upcoming technological upgrades and investing in portability of online experience to set-top.

One metric to define website performance - Continued!

Some interesting questions were raised based on my last post on one metric to define website performance (http://www.analyticsheaven.com/2010/03/one-metric-to-define-website.html), so I felt like I should expand on the thought a bit more.

This theory of one metric often confuses the readers. It is not meant to replace the other more prominently monitored metrics, such as, bottom-line (which will be revenue). Return frequency is simply an indicative of consumer satisfaction with our product. Don't we all visit the same store, if we like what we see and get what we like? This philosophy extended to a web experience is what I am referring to as a metric that defines your web performance.

A higher return frequency means that our visitors are coming back to consume our content, buy our wares, conduct research, or whatever else we are programming. Looking at it from a mathematical model perspective, the metric is going to drive more revenue through our own unique revenue models (display, CPC, leads, etc.). I view revenue performance as a variable that is dependent on some of the more "upstream" variables (like, visits, return frequency, conversions, etc.) that can more directly be tied to consumer satisfaction which typically leads to higher bottomline.

An example of a parallel will be in call center industry, where Member Satisfaction Index (MSI) is often used as a metric to measure service quality. Similarly, Harvard Business review had published a study on "net promoter" being that "one" metric that everyone should monitor.

Monitoring one metric as an overall indicator of the health of your business does not mean that we ignore; defining corporate/business unit goals, identifying the KPIs and metrics that define success and acting on recommendations to improve upon each collectively - as may have been misunderstood from this post.

One metric to define website performance!

In the recently conducted poll on this blog "what one metric best defines your website's performance" a clear favorite emerged in the RETURN FREQUENCY (42% of votes). In second place was the Bounce Rate (28%), while Page Views and Conversion were not considered primary indicators of performance, although conversion did have some takers.

I would agree with the pattern, although, I also consider Bounce Rate to be a good indicator and more importantly, easily measurable metric to monitor.

Return frequency is interesting, since it indicates that users liked what they saw and are coming back. The greatest challenge I faced when measuring this metric was the accuracy and granularity of tagging to understand what was bringing the users back. The data usually is at site level and does little to offer insights into what did or did not work! (read my earlier post on this .. http://www.analyticsheaven.com/2009/11/are-you-looking-at-your-return_09.html)

Take for example, a content site where users may be coming back to read about a developing story and may stop once there are no new updates (or, the story fades from public memory). For an ecommerce site, certain deals and promotions may prompt repeat visitation, but don't necessarily mean loyalty.

I believe repeat visitation or loyalty is achieved through a combination of factors - navigation, user interface, relevance & timeliness of offering and source of the visit. Hence we need to build a framework, on site usage data and insights, that can be applied across the following 4 criteria.

A - (Product) where are users falling off or bailing from the site - improve our navigation to help users find what they came in looking for quickly (higher number of Page Views may not be a sustainable strategy, given the short attention span of users)
B - (User Interface) are there redundant widgets on the page that are distracting from the main story/promotion (one size fits all not a good strategy)
C - (Relevance/Timeliness) use the keywords trends and industry seasonality to ensure content is in tune with the user needs and interests
D - (Source of the Visit) differentiate the experience for browsing versus targeting. Browsers, ex., SEO visits, tend to consumer more pages, while more targeted referral traffic tends to be focused on the topic and leaves after the first page.

To summarize, if you decide that Return Frequency will a key indicator of the health of your business, ensure that your audience segments are clearly defined and measured; AND product navigation, UI, content and traffic source are designed to fulfill the needs of these segments.

Did I miss a metric(s) that you found to be a better indicator of success - I would love to learn about it, so please drop me a note!

Social media can drive ROI ... NOW!

Even as companies try to understand how to generate revenue out of their social media campaigns, there are other ways to define the ROI. Let us first simplify the dynamics of the social media – a whole lot of people sharing, commenting and blogging about their likes and dislikes. The positive – we are learning a lot about our users. The negative – our users are highly fragmented in every which way possible. So, how do we go about making sense of the feedback through social media and communities? After all, 10,000 visits from Twitter into our site that gets an average 5MM visits a month is not going to move the needle in revenue or traffic terms - for the most part that is the scale of variance we are talking about!

So where and how can we apply the findings for a greater return?

Presence in social media was often promoted as a way to build your brand recognition and image. However, marketers and product managers can utilize the data more robustly to develop new products and targeted campaigns. Consider social media as focus groups that are providing valuable insights into your products and services, albeit on wider and less cohesive manner than traditional focus groups. But herein also lies the advantage – if we can categorize the data into viable and logical buckets that best define our user base, we will have a much more specific knowledge that can be used to develop targeted offerings.

For starters social media findings (demographics, geography, product like/dislikes, interests, etc.) should be categorized into user data and product data. Product managers should work with analysts to define the current and future needs of the consumers, while marketers should think more targeting and localization of their campaigns. Take for example a shopping site – users look for latest offers, research about and seek approval for their next purchase, share the joy and frustrations from their new product, etc. – all the while also seeking for a relevant and targeted experience that caters to their whims and fantasies. If we can take the data from the social media voices of our consumer, we can make appropriate product tweaks, provide targeted offerings, edit our website navigation, make product related recommendations for up-sell/cross-sell, create more localized and focused experience, and so on.

The ROI of social media efforts would then be in-built with the ROI of product and marketing efforts, which will be a much more positive story, than the few hundred clicks it may be generating to our website. And, if positive word-of-mouth was to be factored in, our social media presence will find more internal support and add more to our P&L’s bottom-line.

Making sense of Twitter data

Marketers are trying very hard to make sense of the twitter data, but the range of "emotions" conveyed by the tweets and the lack of quantitative framework, make it extremely difficult to measure and apply the insights into real-life business improvements.

But, there are cool new ways evolving and recently, Harvard Business review had an interesting blog on "four ways of looking at twitter." Here's the link to the full article (http://blogs.hbr.org/research/2010/02/visualizing-twitter.html). The author talks about a couple of new visual aids (ex., Twitter Venn diagrams) being developed that may provide some quantitative feel to the tweets!

I decided to test my theory on "lack of analytics in strategic, operational and ecommerce decision-making" by running the Twitter Venn for the terms strategy, analytics and ecommerce. Below is the Twitter Venn that comes up:



This is a bit surprising even to me - the frequency of analytics and ecommerce tweets is relatively small, but more telling is the lack of overlap in analytics/strategy/ecommerce. I have worked with businesses where double-digit gains are easily achieved by merging the above three concepts. The tweeters, with a stake in strategy, analytics and ecommerce, just need to be thinking more congruence and overlap to realize those benefits.


Incidentally, I have been helping businesses build sustainable growth models by applying analytics to ecommerce strategy and planning (http://www.wsapartners.com for more info).

Planning to succeed with Analytics

Analytics and insights play into the business planning cycle in more ways than most organizations apply. It is a standard practice to use historical data and known events to prepare outlooks for the upcoming year. However, success metrics can be utilized to make business planning more robust and measurable. Businesses should identify a set of metrics that are bound to change during the course of the year, primarily from, shifting consumer, market and corporate needs. It is also imperative to earmark the metrics that cannot be influenced during the year and define appropriate measures to control the impact of these “fixed” variables on overall quarterly/yearly goals.

Pitfalls may come from unknown market forces – shifts in economy and consumer sentiment impacted overall usage patterns for online businesses in 2008 and 2009, thus significantly reducing the bottom line. In such times, it became imperative to focus our efforts on targeting and relevance to drive higher conversion and better average revenue per user (ARPU) to ensure viability. Ignoring the obvious may also lead to a lot of pain – for instance, drops in online shopping impacted not just the number of items sold, but also lower cost per clicks (CPCs) for online retailers and aggregators. The other hurdle, in my experience was, when external partners started to rewrite deals to cut costs, leaving us with no choice but to find innovative ways of managing/achieving our revenue and OIBDA goals.

As part of the annual planning, it is important to keep an eye on the key variables that “we control,” in order to be able to react to unforeseen market conditions and/or revenue dips. We started to listen more to our consumers and reacted appropriately to provide more engaging experience thus driving incremental revenue to offset the losses. The frequent A/B testing and agile project management to incorporate resulting recommendations assumed a whole new meaning. It also highlighted the need for a nimble annual planning process and metrics tracking/monitoring, so we are not caught with our pants down when; market softens, consumers leave, partners bail and corporate goals are “reorg’d.”

Campaign versus Search - User Experience & Metrics

Making your users feel special can happen through several means – providing what the consumers are looking for at the onset should be the most obvious starting point. Users come to our websites primarily through 2 channels, either promotions (pull), or user-driven search (push). Each brings in targeted users interested in your product or service and presents an opportunity to consummate and nurture the relationship.

However, often we fail to achieve the goals of our promotions strategies and/or returns on our marketing dollars because our “store front” did not appeal to the user need/want. Simply stated we probably did not do good job of engaging the user at the onset and then lost a further opportunity to up-sell our products and services. Differentiated experience is a must for the above pull vs. push strategies. However, what’s more important is to identify and measure the right metrics, such that our engagement and conversion goals are adequately represented and achieved.

When planning a PULL campaign, focus on the landing page experience that is clear and direct. For instance; if the users clicked on a story, make sure they see that story front and center on the page; if the users clicked on a 25% off offer, make sure it is prominently displayed on the page. Give the users what they want first, and if we have good knowledge of their behavior and usage pattern, we may show other BUT relevant up-sell opportunities – the idea is to let the user feel in control of the experience and not vice-versa. Omniture click-map can show the engagement with modules on your page – typically only 20% of these drive traffic to other sections of your site and hence are useful, the rest are clutter and annoying – get rid of the non-performers. The page view depth should not be high, since it indicates user was lost, or the offer was buried deep in the experience – not a good thing!

In a PUSH campaign, the dynamic is slightly different, in that, we know the user is searching, but is not 100% sure of what they will find, so they are more open to suggestions and up-sell opportunities. In this case, search page is ok to show plenty of relevant results, yet the focus should be user need. Recommendation engines are great for these pages and up-sell opportunities abound, provided they are relevant. Click-map on these pages usually shows more spread than that on campaign pages, BUT relevance becomes the key in driving conversion. Clicks on Sponsored Links and lead generation from the search pages provide good insight into the user response behavior and need to be monitored closely for optimization. Higher page view depth may actually be a good thing; depending on how specific is the user search term(s).

Customer is always right!

This cliché has been the mantra of customer centric organizations for a long time, however, we often find ourselves at the cross-roads of believing in the principle, vs., living by it. How many times as a customer have we wished that the corporations were more responsive to our needs? If our customers are asking that question, then we need to look inward again and redefine our corporate strategy, products, processes, etc.

During the discussions with my clients, following themes around operational excellence emerged at the core of customer disinterest.

1. Not sure of the key success metrics as they relate to the consumers
2. Not sure of the primary metrics to focus on
3. Lack of adequate data tracking and analytics to support change

And if the above have been addressed, we run into the all powerful organizational processes and legacies that create greater hurdles to change!

I think the root cause is that we often try to do too much in one go through a “one size fits all” website experience.

The point I am going to make is to instead “we need to keep things simple.”

Take for instance, the page layout. A quick look at the click map will reveal the areas/links that 80% of our consumers click on. However, we keep the page cluttered and unappealing to please the other 20%. Once we decide to cater to the top 80%, we need to ensure that the pages are light and current, and in-line with the evolving consumer needs. In other words:

1. Identify the needs of the top 80% of your audience
2. Keep it current – consumer needs are dynamic
3. Leave some white space on the pages

Site navigation across the site is another sore point that clients have often mentioned as not the best across their site. I liken this to a shopping experience – if I can’t find the stuff in a shop, I can’t buy it. Moreover, if it takes me forever to go through the maze of aisles every time I come looking for it, I will probably find an easier store to shop at. Designing the best navigation experience is highly dependent on the consumer demographics, needs, relevance of the promotion, business unit strategy, etc. – a wider topic that should be well left for the next discussion.

If you are having these discussions, please share those and I would love to start a conversation about how do we nurture a customer-centric analytics culture.