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.