The presentations centered around the measurement, analysis and optimisation of all types of digital marketing from websites to mobile applications and from bid management for search marketing to social media.

I presented the findings of the 2010 Australian Web Analytics Survey. This year’s survey establishes a strong correlation between the web analytics capabilities in an organisation with the criticality of the online channel and types of online services provided. You can download the full survey report free of charge and watch a short video on the key findings at www.bienalto.com/research.

Mark Vozzo of Microsoft Australia (@markvozzo) efficiently summarised each session for Yahoo Web Analytics Group. With his permission, I have reproduced it here.

— Start of Mark Vozzo’s summary —

Sydney eMetrics Day 1

#1 Jim Sterne
Keynote on Time to rethink your metrics. This was a great opening to the conference.

#2 Hurol Inan (Bienalto)
Reviewed data from the latest Australia Web Analytics Survey. This was very insightful and created a lot of discussion. Key take out – there is a need to link business goals to metrics and get reports under the noses of senior management.

#3 Stuart McKeown (Hitwise)
A excellent presentation on Conversion Optimisation. Great slide on how DailyConversions Team optimised a Homeless Man’s sign board to generate a 200% increase in conversions.

#4 Marcus Falley (Wineselectors.com.au)
Real Life example of Web Analytics in practice based on a new site they launched late last year.

#5 Rod Jacka (Panalysis.com)
Titled “Beyond the Bounce, Modeling & Measuring Qualified Visitors”. Great content of why bounce rate is not what it made out to be.

#6 Will Scully-Power (Datarati.com.au)
“Using Behavioural Data to Qualify and Nurture Sales Lead.” I never really knew much about Marketo and marketing automation solutions until Will presented really interesting information.

Sydney eMetrics Day 2

#1 Martin Walsh (IBM) @martinwalsh
I use to work for Martin, hence have been always inspired by his charismatic and informative presentations. He delivered an excellent presentation on “How to create a structured Digital Marketing, reporting, Optimization & Testing Framework.”

#2 Andrew Rodrigues (HotelClub)
I’ve been doing SEO for many years but Andrew’s presentation on “New Search Results require New Metrics” really got me thinking and as a result I’ve been able to add a few more metrics that I hadn’t considered before such as trend number of high quality broken backlinks over time.

#3 Dennis Yu (BlitzLocal) + Gillian Muessig (SEOmoz)
This energetic duo provided great insights into the potential of Facebook. It was an inspiring presentation as I don’t think many in the room really understood its potential until the presentation.

#4 Frederick Vallaeys (Google)
He gave a great presentation on the importance of testing variations and gave some insight into the tools Google have made available for testing landing pages and campaign creatives.

— End of Mark Vozzo’s summary —

No doubt, many of us will be eagerly awaiting for the eMetrics Marketing Optimization Summit to return to Sydney 2011.

But this is an important time to write about. We are launching the fourth annual Australian Web Analytics survey. As per previous years, our goal is to understand the state of the play in web analytics nationally and understand what prohibit or inhibit organisations’ adoption of web analytics.

This year we have decided to delay the launch to eliminate the confusion caused by the research being done late in the year and report being published early in the year. So this year’s data and report will be published early.

Coincidently this has worked out perfectly to time the release of the report at the eMetrics Marketing Optimization Summit to be held in Sydney for the very first time on 22-23 April 2010.

I am pretty excited about the eMetrics Summit coming to Sydney this year. I spoke at the inaugural summit in Santa Barbara in 2002. Since then the summit has grown to a well sought-after think-tank travelling to major cities around the globe such as Munchen, Toronto, San Jose, London, Madrid, Sao Paula, Stockholm and Washingto DC.

There is no doubt the summit will be full of insights for the Australian marketing professionals to help them succeed online.

I also personally can’t wait to hear Jim Sterne on stage again. His ideas, insights coupled with his amazing presentation skills will be well-remembered.

To support the Summit (and help the organiser’s with their decision to add the summit to their global calendar each year), Bienalto has become a major sponsor of the submit.

We also want to give away a pass valued at AU$995 to one of the participants of Australian Web Analytics Survey 2010.

Take the survey now
Learn more about eMetrics summit

These business leaders are asking the right questions. In most cases, there is room for improvement – and a strong business case, too, given that online is a low-cost, proven channel that generates measurable results.

That is, attracting more customers, generating leads, creating buzz and awareness, or simply improving business efficiencies.

Quantitative analysis is the fastest and most effective way to find out how you can better leverage the online channel.

Quantitative analysis the key

The best way to understand how well your website is currently working is through quantitative analysis. This strategic tool paints a clear picture of the best and worst aspects of your site; and, as long as you are prepared to act on the findings, your site’s performance will improve.

I have talked in the past about the importance of quantitative analysis, and the message is as relevant as it ever was.

When we help our clients analyse their websites, we start with the absolute basics:

• Are customers coming to your website?
• What are they doing on your site?

From this baseline, we can identify the gaps or pitfalls, develop a roadmap to plug these gaps and ultimately improve the performance of the online channel.

It sounds simplistic, but of course we cannot reach any conclusions without a comprehensive understanding of our client’s business and their strategic marketing approach.

Reassess your KPIs

During the assessment phase, it’s important to cross-check the stated objective of the site against its KPIs. Setting up good KPIs is critical for the ongoing monitoring of a site’s performance, and it ties in beautifully with a quantitative analysis.

With a vast array of measurables to choose from - page views, cost per acquisition, new visitors, the list goes on - there’s absolutely no point in trying to do it all. Rather, you should realign KPIs to match current business priorities and focus on getting accurate, timely data to support these KPIs.

The right KPIs enable you to track issues, identify opportunities and provide relevant recommendations to senior management about the online channel.

Augment with benchmarking

Once you have identified gaps in your website, it pays to check out what the best of the rest are doing. Seek out best practice in your industry and benchmark against comparable sites. This enables you to gather fresh ideas and set a clear direction for your own site.

In conclusion

Rationalising your website. Realigning it. Resetting it. Call it what you will – but any form of strategic re-evaluation of your online channel now will pay off in the long term.

I know it works. Having provided website analysis services for many clients in the past few years, and seen these clients reap measurable rewards from the changes enacted, it’s a proven investment.

Knowing that your website is doing OK is more than just about peace of mind. If it’s not up to scratch, you need to know how you can fix it. If you just ignore the problem, then you run the risk of losing customers – and at a time like this, every single visitor counts.

The free web analytics solution is now more attractive than ever, giving users the ability to conduct extremely detailed analysis to extract a better return on their online investment.

Advanced segmentation

Segmentation of data is one of the fastest and most effective ways to gain real insights into the efficacy of your marketing programs. As I’ve said before, segmentation takes the noise out of web analytics data, breaking it down into meaningful chunks that you can analyse more effectively.

In the past, however, the best segmentation tools on offer were through high end solutions.

The good news is that the power of segmentation has just been brought to the masses, with advanced segmentation tools now available to Google Analytics users.

There are nine default segments that will come in handy to most people who use the analytics tool. These segments can be applied to any report you want, and include:

1. All visits
2. New visitors
3. Returning visitors
4. Paid traffic
5. Non-paid traffic
6. Search traffic
7. Direct traffic
8. Referral traffic
9. Visits with conversions

But the real power lies in the ability to create custom segments. This means that you can isolate a certain behaviour, examine it carefully and see whether your marketing campaign worked for that group.

For example, you might want to isolate:

• All visitors who came from a specific email campaign AND purchased at least one product
• All visitors from Sydney who completed a goal
• All visitors who started a transaction, but dropped out (and where).

Once you have defined your custom segments, you can then compare the performance of that segment with the rest of the site using the reporting tools.

Or you might want to compare the performance of one segment to that of another. For example, you could view the bounce rate for a page, and then split it into the bounce rate for visitors who came from search and direct traffic.

Custom reporting

Until now, users of Google Analytics have had to content themselves with using the standard reports on offer (e.g. visitors, traffic sources and so on).

With the new “Custom Reports” tool, you can define your own criteria and create your own report. For example, you may want to create a report showing e-commerce information by geographies. Here’s how it’s done:

1. Create a custom report with the following metrics:
   • Visits
   • Unique purchases
   • Revenue
   • Per visit value
   • Average value
2. In the dimensions, add “city” at the top level. If you have customers from around the world, you may like to define “country” as the top level, and add city as the second dimension. If you do this, the report will initially show visits by country, and you can then select a country to see data segmented by city.
3. Then you can compare cities according to the metrics you defined – so you can see, for example, the average value of a visitor from Sydney to that of one from Melbourne.

More information at your fingertips

Once you have your segments and custom reports created, you can then access deeper insights by combining the two. Want to see which city is of greater value, as well as where your visitors are coming from in that city? Not a problem. In terms of segmentation, you’re only limited by the data sets you have to work with.

Setting these reports and segments up doesn’t take long at all. Once they’re up and running, you can begin to make more finely tuned marketing decisions, and better target your offering to particular groups of customers.

Bienalto can provide Google Analytics setup and configuration services. Read more about how we can assist you in implementation and optimisation.

Further reading

You can learn more about the value of segmentation in some previous posts:

Web Data Segmentation – a pre-requisite for gaining actionable insights

Understanding your website’s users

Informing information architecture with quantitative insights

The annual Web Analytics Buyers Guide 2008 from E-consultancy is now available for purchase. With its in-depth vendor profiles and market analysis, it helps you to put things in perspective when making buying decisions.

So what’s in the Guide? And how does it compare to what’s going on locally? With responses flooding in to our Australian Web Analytics Survey, we can provide a few answers.

One of the biggest predictions in E-consultancy’s guide is that the UK market for web analytics would grow by 12% in 2008. We agree (give or take a few percentage points).

Already, we can see a trend in comparing results from this year’s Australian Web Analytics Survey to last, with organisations spending significantly more on the investment in external professional services and in-house web analytics staff.

Not surprisingly, the investment in tools doesn’t show the same growth – a great proportion of organisations in Australia now use Google Analytics as a preferred tool.

According to the UK report, only 21% of companies use Google Analytics exclusively, but typically use it as a complementary tool to support another investment.

But with Google raising the bar with its new segmentation and reporting tools, it will pay to see how these figures change next year.

Purchase the Web Analytics Buyers Guide

Download the latest Australian Web Analytics Survey

It’s why marketers love customer demographics, and information on product holding, past purchases and campaign responses.

But what if you could go beyond this, and use online behavioural insights for your campaigns as well?

Taking it one step further, what if you could build or tailor an analytics solution to capture these behavioural insights – not just from the web, but from offline data as well?

It would place some pretty powerful information at your fingertips.

Instead of putting the behavioural data on your website into the “too hard” basket, organisations need to start asking how this data can help them achieve better ROI on their marketing campaigns.

The first step is to think about the scenarios, or insights, you need.

For example, you might want to capture insights about repeat purchasing behaviour; or the instances when a loyal customer starts browsing in new product areas.

In these scenarios, if you track the customer’s movements and collect the right data, you can then target them with campaigns across all channels – online through dynamic offer targeting, email marketing, direct marketing, and telemarketing.

The second step is to work out what’s required from your analytics or tracking solution. And this step represents a fundamental paradigm shift.

In the past, organisations would simply state, “I need a web analytics solution.”

Now, instead of selection of an out-of-the-box solution and thinking how it would help your business, organisations would benefit more from a solution that is built around those specific scenarios or insights identified as delivering value to the business.

Here’s where it gets contentious. Many of today’s web analytics solutions are not on an open architecture, which makes it incredibly difficult for you to integrate behavioural and offline data.

Seek web analytics solutions with open architectures. Get them to show how they can meet your specific scenarios. Be prepared to build custom tracking mechanisms, which are specifically designed to generate leads for your business.

Once you’ve done this, you can start capitalising on your behavioural insights. Not only are they easily actionable and translate into truly targeted marketing, but they also make the measurement of ROI much easier.

As Akin Arikan says in his excellent book, Multichannel Marketing, there is “no excuse for not using the rich lather of behavioural data from the website as a component for targeting marketing communications.”

So start thinking about it. Your customers will love your intuition.

Much to my dismay, I’ve discovered that once a client gets it into their head that they want to re-design their website, it’s ‘out with the old, in with the new’. Their customers have told them that the existing site doesn’t work, so they think there’s no point in analysing it. Instead, they want to toss the old site in the cyber-dustbin, and start coding again from scratch.

Sure, a clean start is nice. But what if you could use valuable insights about the strengths and weaknesses of your old site to improve the user experience design on the new site?

By identifying what works – and what doesn’t – before you embark on the re-design project, you reduce the likelihood of building a new site that may look better, but carries the same problems as before.

Through quantitative analysis, you can capture insights about your current users – customers and prospects – and understand how the site is currently being used. For example:

• You may find that a really important piece of content or functionality isn’t being used because it’s buried too far into the site. With the new customer experience architecture, you can devise pathways to guide traffic to these areas.
• By analysing the terms customers use on both internal and external search engines, you will learn the language your customers speak when referring to your products or services. This will help you devise the right labels, and contribute to your content strategy.
• You’ll see which areas of the site have been successful at converting customers, and which haven’t. For example, if you discover that most prospects use your calculator before lodging an online application for personal loans, then you may consider closely integrating the calculator in the customer experience architecture.
• You’ll discover the relative popularity of related items such as content categories and lists (often expressed as navigational menus). This should aid classification decisions. You may want to combine items that are receiving little attention or split items that are dominating. To take advantage of sequence bias in reading lists, you can enlist items in the order of popularity.
• You’ll identify where the exit points are and delve into factors that might influence the exits. If a page – especially a gateway or category page designed to steer traffic to detailed pages –experiences a high exit rate, it means either the page is getting untargeted traffic or there is something wrong with its design. Your experience architects should use these findings to contain the exit rate.

If you don’t perform quantitative analysis at this phase, then the user experience design phase becomes a subjective process – requiring large amounts of guesswork by your information architect. It’s guesswork that doesn’t need to happen, because the answers are right there on your current site.

Four years ago, I wrote about Understanding your website’s users. Never is this more applicable than in a re-design project.

We did in-depth quantitative analysis before commencing the site re-design for AMP, and the results speak for themselves.

And as for some other clients, I’m going to give them the benefit of the doubt: they simply do not understand the full benefits of web analytics, and it’s my job to educate them about how valuable analysis can be at any stage of a website’s evolution.

What I want to know is, how many web analysts are putting their skills to use in a re-design project? When was the last time you used quantitative analysis to inform a website refresh? And if you did, what were the major discoveries you made that impacted the redesign?

Multichannel Marketing: Metrics and Methods for On and Offline Success, the new book by Akin Arikan, is a thorough and practical exploration of the topic, with enough how-to’s and advice for all on and offline marketers to reap the benefits of multichannel marketing.

Akin sums up his mission perfectly:

Close your eyes. Visualize a multichannel analytics dashboard with charts, gauges, and funnels. We see the complete status of marketing initiatives. We see what customers desire of us next and where there is opportunity for greater efficiency. Meanwhile, leads and service alerts are distributed through the system to the right people at the right time for prompt action.

This is great.

My first main take-out from the book is Akin’s compelling argument about why direct, brand and online marketers can no longer work in isolated silos.

In many large organisations we deal with, these people aren’t even talking to each other, let alone sharing customer data. If they work as a team, as Akin proposes, they get to know where to concentrate effort for each customer.

Secondly, Akin reveals what each group is tasked to do, techniques they use and how they measure their success. Reading this, you see that each group has valuable experience to share, and it reminds me of how we recently took a well-established direct marketing technique, propensity scores, and applied it to email marketing.

The good news for marketers is that Akin delves deep into measurement techniques and insights that can be used to assess the impact of one channel on another, and on the organisation.

I recommend that every marketer – brand, direct or online – get a copy of Akin’s book.

Read it from cover to cover. Seek out your colleagues in the other channels, make friends with them and get them a copy of the book too. Then keep your copy handy for quick reference every time you plan a new marketing campaign.

Akin’s book is on a topic close to our hearts. We’ve written about cross channel and multichannel marketing in these blogs:

• Cross channel marketing best practices
• Using site search analysis in integrated marketing
• 360 degree campaign measurement

NI has both built-in and user-defined key performance indicators (KPIs), with integrated trigger-based reporting for both types of metrics. So, for example, say your abandoned carts reached a certain limit in the past week, a report/email can be sent out.

What we particularly like about NI is the ‘drill down feature’, which allows you to slice and dice the data in any way you wish, for example:

• Content groups – group different URLs together and then report on these groups (page tags aren’t necessary).
• Visitor profile – group different visitors together and then report on these groups (for example, compare weekend visitors to weekday visitors). Again, page tags aren’t necessary.

Other great features include:

• Data Conduit – this can be used to enhance data (from cookie) that is reported on. For example, if a visitor with ID 123456 visits your website, instead of reporting on this ID (which doesn’t mean much) you can look-up the ID in the database to get the visitor’s name, address, title and so on; and report on that instead.
• Campaigns are set up in the hierarchical format in the following order:
  • Campaign
  • Channel
  • Segment
  • Entry pages

This means that campaigns can be aligned with multiple channels that, in turn, can be aligned to multiple segments and entry pages. Thus, analysis can be carried out at any level you want.

Dynamic Content – is where visits receive different content. Reporting can be enhanced using a search and replace function to get rid of any unwanted parameters. For more information you can use a data conduit here as well.

Using this model, the time between identifying a problem and resolving it to unlock value can be as long as three years. Clearly, this is not ideal.

Fortunately, along came Web 2.0. One of the main principles of Web 2.0 product development, which has underwritten the rapid rise and success of its products, is the concept of ‘always beta’.

‘Always beta’ simply means designing and launching online web assets rapidly and frequently. At every redesign, as long as user-centred design principles are applied, the business notches up an incremental improvement on the experience.

Embracing the ‘always beta’ principle requires a major shift in mind-set for the heads of e-business, the online channel, and website managers.

It’s a huge departure from doing one major overhaul every three years – which involves an element of crystal ball gazing as you try to build a site that will work for your business over that period. With ‘always beta’, you manage ongoing development all of the time.

To overcome the organisational challenge of mobilising this approach for managing the online channel, you need a plan.

First, gain the full support of the internal and external technical development teams, so you are all working together on this ongoing optimisation path.

Secondly, arm yourself with the right tools. A key tool in capability development is a platform to conduct real-time user testing, also known as multivariate testing (MVT).

The notion of MVT is to get users to help you discover the optimum online experience. The qualitative research and expert knowledge is the basis of your product design. Once built, put it to the test in a democratic environment, where real users vote with their clicks.

MVT isn’t limited to website redesign. Marketers can use this technique to optimise email or paid search campaigns, or to optimise conversions on a website landing page.