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.

A new approach in 2010

As we head into the New Year, there will be fresh focus on the business outlook than what happened in 2009. A lot of questions need to be addressed first-up, before we get buried in the daily operations - did we achieve the most out of our business analytics efforts in 2009, was the data adequately supportive of our business strategy in 2009, do we have a clear roadmap/plan for 2010, and what relevant metrics and analytics focus in 2010 will help us achieve corporate goals, etc?

Let’s take a moment to know our strategic focus, be it at the corporate level, business unit level, or simply for the team. If we are an analytics shared service team, we need to know the key metrics that will help our business achieve the desired results. If we are a functional team, we need to assess our metrics and sit down with our shared service folks to understand the metrics and outline a process to measure/report/analyze these in the coming months. And if you are a do-it-yourself organization - well, you are over-worked - yet, you need to ensure that your functional success is aligned with analytics goals.

So where should the focus be?

E-Commerce sites may need to look at conversions, CPC rates, click-through rates, etc. Content push sites may need to look at programming efficiencies, click-through rates, repeat visitation, etc. If your goals are a blend of the above, conversions and click-through rates may be more important. Do you have an online video strategy and are the metrics appropriately defined and tracked? What about your social media strategy – are the metrics defined and tracked? Oh, and don’t forget the consumer experience metrics – ease of navigation, bounce rates, engagement depth, etc. will be great success indicators, while A/B testing a great tool to continuously upgrade your site’s experience.

The key will be to understand the business strategy for the year and outline the metrics and analytics approach at the onset – meeting with your leader/executive and setting those benchmarks is very helpful in the beginning of the year and brings focus that helps react to business contingencies. As an example, in 2009, I helped an organization stay on course to beat their OIBDA targets, in spite of the downturn in revenue.

2010 is bound to present much greater opportunities!

Where does conversion suffer?

Only 40% of companies are applying some kind of testing AND targeting to grow consumer engagement and enhance conversion. The technology is often in-house and to top it all, most companies are not sure about what to test, how to test, what metrics to test, what is the timely reporting and format needed and how to apply analytics to the data.

These findings from a survey by Omniture, reveals a lot about the problems we face in the real world. To maximize the return on the online presence, we need to define the testing and targeting strategy, and apply analytics rigor to better understand our consumers’ needs and create opportunities for business growth.

Behaviorally targeted pages with dynamic content result in a 12% lift in conversions, according to the same study – that will be quite a handsome reward for our 2010 online efforts!

The 5 Cs of consumer engagement!

I have spoken a lot about consumer engagement through this forum, but I wanted to share the 5 Cs of consumer engagement - from a Forrester research study. So here they are:

1) Customer experience
2) Contextual
3) Consistency
4) Communities
5) Consumer behavior measurement

Customer experience across the site is a function of business focus, product/service, and objectives for the site and the page. If consumers come to the site to read an article, I would like to see the article be the main focus of the page, however, if the intent was to drive conversion, then that conversion message or the link needs to be clearly visible. That is a no-brainer, a lot of us would argue, but we often tend to ignore this simple rule of "simplicity" by provide a lot more in the hope that we will engage the consumer beyond the first landing. That is where we tend to hurt ourselves ... leaving some white space is OK, and so is to include relevant details from the original promotion, such as, rich media, related articles, products, searches, etc., whatever the case may be! Do make sure not to overwhelm the consumer with information overload and/or cause user-fatigue!

Contextual is simply building on the note above, in that, we need to ensure that besides the leader article on the page, there is other related information, such as, the related topics, relevant ads and any local information - again relevant to the topic. I have seen a lot of sites running mortgage rates ads on the same page as my local weather report. It is not just annoying but also "habit-creating" - that of a tendency to not look beyond my immediate interest, thereby robbing me of valuable engagement.

Consistent goes well beyond the site and the page. Here the goal should be ensure that the site is consistent in look-and-feel, value proposition, products/services with the overall corporate promotions, both online and offline. After all, familiarity and recognition of the brand does breed positive experience and hence better engagement.

Communities is a feature that companies are using more and more, but managing consumer experience and expectations could prove to be tricky. It is imperative to manage our social presence with careful planning in order to prevent any unwanted side effects. We need to define goals for our social media presence and participate and empower users to reach us through our social platform; And, we need to also make sure that we are responding to their voice and capturing the feedback, as needed, which would be a valuable addition to our data set on consumer analytics.

Consumer behavior on the site provides valuable insights about what works and what doesn't. We need to be constantly validating our experience through A/B or multi-variate testing to ensure we are current and responding to users' changing proclivities. I have seen businesses realize 25% to 50% improvements in user response rates by simply changing the color and test of the sales offer, after running an A/B test.

Overall, I feel like the 5Cs capture a good deal of how we can go about improving our user experience. When coupled with a sound online business strategy, operational focus and clear goal measurement, we can better engage our users, improve brand awareness and loyalty, and create real bottom-line value for the business.