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.

Web Analytics - Challenge or Opportunity?

A recent eMarketer study published a chart showing the areas of knowledge that web analytics users worldwide would like to improve. Here are the top few:

1) 60.8% - measuring web 2.0 technologies
2) 57.2% - Targeting & Segmenting
3) 49.8% - A/B and Multi-Variate Testing
4) 48.6% - SEO
5) 41.2% - SEM

Other areas included, campaign & content management, email & affiliate marketing, each recording <38% response.

I find this interesting because, while a lot of organizations struggle to keep up with the right and effective measurement, users like us, with an elevated passion for web analytics, can grab this as an opportunity to create competitive advantage for our respective business units.

For measuring web 2.0 technologies, DEFINE your goals for promoting your business on blogs and social media sites, SET key performance metrics and MONITOR these KPIs for best results. Data in this area is in its nascent stages, and metrics such as, reach, velocity, engagement, followers, loyalty, etc. are still gaining popularity. The challenge in not only in measurement, but also in applying the insights, if there are some to be gleaned from the data.

Targeting and segmenting ideally needs to be on 2 fronts - consumer-centric and content-centric. Ideally there is significant overlap, or else, we need to first build greater insights into our consumers and business objectives, before attempting to target our content.

A/B testing is fairly common, but in my experience, businesses often struggle with multi-variate testing, due to a variety of reasons like, lack of tools, resources, expertise, etc. Investing in this area can help solve for multiple metrics, resulting in significant improvements budget utilization and user experience.

Marketing campaigns (SEM & SEO) analysis is relevant for obvious reasons - optimize your search term buy for best return, and invest in SEO expertise to apply techniques for improved rankings.

The closing thought is that we should not try to be good at all of the above at the same time, since the business teams tend to lose focus with too many initiatives and may not be ready to measure/analyze/recommend most efficiently. Evaluating gaps in your business will help develop a strategic roadmap to prioritize and implement these initiatives for best results.

What is a good conversion monitoring frequency!

A few days back, I did a quick poll on how often we monitor our conversion frequency. Needless to say it ranges from daily, to once a week and once a month. There is no benchmark for this, but the intent was to increase awareness about the conversion itself. Being aware of the conversion from our site is critical, if we want to achieve the desired outcome.

If our goal is to drive the traffic deeper into our experience, we need to make sure that users are in fact clicking on the the links to other relevant content on the site. If our goal is to drive revenue, we need to ensure that users find the right product or listing on the landing page. Page design and site layout should account for these user needs.

Tools such as, Click Map from Omniture allow one to look at click frequency across all links on the page, and can help determine the success on such parameters as, position, design, color and other User Interface features. These should be inherent to any design process, that caters to evolving user needs and changing market conditions. Monitoring frequency will then be based on how rapidly we can collect and analyse the data, and make necessary changes to our site experience.

Take for example: Amazon is consistently driving the user down the conversion funnel, and consistency of experience is key for returning users, hence monitoring frequency once a week may suffice. However, CNN may need to monitor user tendencies on a daily basis (even hourly), to determine which stories are keeping users engaged, so as not to bury them in the site as new stories break. In either case conversion monitoring should be conducted as frequently as needed to maintain a healthy consumer engagement and an eye on your business goals.

Guide to making Web Analytics more accurate!

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.

The first step is to take a step back and outline the core strengths of the business, around which metrics will be defined. This means that if we are a content focused site, we need to ensure the page view depth, SEO traffic growth, etc., are top measurement priorities. Further, monetization strategy of this traffic should be defined, in close coordination with sales and business development. (The exercise needs to be repeated at the page and/or section level). For an ecommerce site, it will be highly desirable that conversion metrics are aligned with the strategy, traffic engagement and monetization.

Web sites have three key ingredients that define its performance.
1 - traffic into the site
2 - navigation behavior within the site
3 - conversion from the site (usually lead/revenue generating click)

The key to a robust site analytics data is to be able to connect the above 3 ingredients in a flow that helps explain the value of the user coming into the site. In my previous experience, we ran into several issues in trying to develop reporting that provided this level of visibility.

Basically, a campaign code assigned to a particular promotion needs to be tracked through the navigation cycle, up to the point where user leaves the site. This helps us understand which campaign drives most traffic, how do users from various campaigns interact with our experience, which campaign drives maximum value towards our internal goals (engagement, lead, revenue, etc.).

Ideally, it is best to work with ONE vendor in implementing the tracking and reporting system, so as to ensure consistency, data integrity and institutional knowledge - identifying a vendor that provides the best possible solution becomes much easier, once the step one above has been defined at the onset. Onsite staff that understands the business and the analytics implementation can then provide insights and recommendations that are sustainable.

Low hanging fruits in web analytics!

When I am looking for greater impact - macro trends in the data, I often come across interesting insights that can be easily implemented and rewards measured almost instantaneously. These observations, not only yield quick results, but also make a compelling case for continued focus on analytics (if it ever need to be emphasized!). I wanted to share an example to spur conversation and show how little nuggets can be utilized to create incremental value for the business!

While trying to understand the seasonality and return on our promotional campaigns, we started to see a pattern in the common terms within the titles that had resulted in a better click- through rate (CTR). Looking at the last 9 months's data and we founde the "theme" behind some of our most successful campaigns. One of the top 5 terms that emerged was "free" - not surprising in this economy, although I would argue that free will always be popular :) Free, while most obvious in retail, could mean a lot of things such as, free service, free trial period, free coupons, free gift, etc. We came up with campaigns that had free in the heading, and saw double-digit improvement in CTRs.