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?

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).