I realize times are tough right now – budgets are cut shorter than Barack Obama’s hair, company headcount is shrinking faster than Nortel’s stock and general uncertainty is causing big-time havoc on anyone looking at long term planning. See, I’ve caught up with my news and current events (see my last blog to fully understand…).

In e-Commerce, we talk a lot about first time visitors – the big unknown. There’s a huge focus on this segment and while no one has completely cracked the code, there are dozens of best practices out there with proven and repeatable results. Jim Cain, Sitebrand’s resident super analyst wrote a great whitepaper on this very subject last year.

So, cool. First time visitors are the elusive catch, the big seg (sounded cooler than segment). And so it should be – generally it makes up about 70 per cent of total traffic or more. But today, I wanted to look a little closer at return visitors. That’s approximately the other 30 per cent of your traffic and while significantly smaller than first time visitors, it’s still an important segment and could act as a more profitable one long term. All repeat visitors were once first time visitors, right? I know what you’re thinking: “How profound of you, Kevin”. Thanks for the feedback.

But think about it. You’ve already invested in driving these visitors to your site once. Maybe they bought something. Maybe they saved their cart. Maybe they looked around on your site for twice the regular average. Who knows, but for some reason, they are back. Which brings the question: what are you doing for these visitors and how do your marketing strategies look for returning visitors?

From a search marketing standpoint, you’ve done your job. They are back and on your site – again! Are you messaging targeted content to return visitors? Are you segmenting your return visitors based on if they purchased anything during their last visit? Are you A/Bing content to this segment? Do you want to create a unique customer experience? Are you able to create real-time campaigns based on click-path navigations and behaviors during that specific session?

You could be.

Enter plug: This Wednesday afternoon, I’ll be hosting a webinar geared towards this exact topic with 5 best practices to boot. Here’s the skinny: 29 minute webinar with me (rad Sitebrand Sales Engineer), on return visitors and how you could be improving conversions. And it’s free. Register now.

I can plug my own webinar on our official blog, right? Like, that’s not a faux pas, is it? I hope not. But more so, I hope to see you there – 2pm EST sharp.

Stay Classy, internet.

Despite having started writing while still part of the sales department, I decided from the outset to have a strong focus on the fundamental principles behind conversion optimization through dialog personalization, and less of a focus on promoting Sitebrand.  The assumption being that if you agree with the concepts behind creating marketing driven dialog with a traffic segment, there is really only one game in town….But I digress.

I am talking about the focus of my blog because it is rare that I get the chance to leave the cube here in Gatineau and go out and talk to practitioners of digital marketing to hear what they currently do and what they want to do when it comes to optimizing visitor outcomes.

Last month Stephane Hamel of Immeria and WASP fame invited our CTO, Falk Gottlob, and myself to attend a Web Analytics Wednesday event in Montreal.  Not a lot of hesitating on my response, and going to Montreal was just icing on the cake.

Falk and I got the chance to have a few cold beers and a few heated debates about the state of analytics and optimization, and met some fantastic people.

So I was both surprised and excited to be invited to come back and be the presenter at the next event, which will take place next week.

Much like my blogging, the emphasis of the presentation will be less on Sitebrand and more on how a marketer can understand a specific traffic segment, and then optimize their experience to increase their goal conversion.

Per my last post, I will be sticking to my current favorite segment, the First Time Visitor, and I am jazzed to see what the questions and responses will be to the talk.

A few important points for those attending: I love questions and Sitebrand is buying the beer.

Looking forward to seeing you in la belle province.

Cheers,

Jim

Click Here to register for this Web Analytics Wednesday event, Oct 15, 2008 @ Le Local

Click Here to learn more about WASP, a must have tool for any practitioner of analytics.

Because the impact of how you market this huge segment is so significant, Sitebrand invites you to register for our Oct. 30th webinar called: “Your Website and First Time Visitors: Friend or Foe?”. 

And who better to co-present than Bryan Eisenberg, best-selling author, publisher of award-winning blog, ClickZ columnist and co-founder of FutureNow. In just 29-minutes, this webinar will offer advice and tips around:

1. Using data to build an understanding and framework for first-time visitors, aka personas.
2. Building targeted messaging to grow the engagement and sales of first-time visitor segments / personas.
3. Mapping the real estate on your site toward your messaging.
4. Launching your cycle, watching results, and planning for re-optimization.

We’ll conclude with questions and answers!

Got a scheduling conflict? Register anyhow so you are notified when the webinar is archived for on-demand viewing at your convenience…

GET SMART EVEN FASTER! To study up on some of what we’ll be talking about, you should go ahead and download our new whitepaper by Jim Cain, a senior analyst (and fellow blogger) here at Sitebrand. The whitepaper is called  “First Time Visitor: A Marketer-Oriented Approach to Optimizing Online Conversions” and it also features a foreward by Bryan Eisenberg.

“How can I prove your campaigns worked?  Show me a nice clean ROI report in my analytics.”

A good question, and a valid one too.  I wish that analytics technology had been built in such a way that it answered it easily and properly…

As a product that personalizes a web visit, Sitebrand has a profound impact on the conversion rate of a targeted traffic segment.  But what if a given client sends out a huge email blast that touches the segment we are optimizing?  What if they redo the SEO on a number of key pages?  What if they do multivariate testing on a shopping cart page?  Who gets the credit for increased conversions?  

The reporting system in our Segment & Serve product is very strong, and has a series of control groups built in to ensure the highest level of data accuracy.  However, our reports don’t take into account any other work that is being done by the customer outside our product.  And this isn’t a Sitebrand issue: with few exceptions, every other vendor in online marketing software is in the same boat.

In their most recent Web Analytics Buyers Guide, Jupiter Research states that “A resounding 86 percent of analytics clients said attribution measurement capability would be the most beneficial feature for their respective businesses.”

Most of the larger paid analytics vendors have some way of dealing with the attribution issue (Google Analytics does not), but these are still evolving, more abacus – less calculator.  So if I click on two different paid keywords for company XYZ.com over my first three visits, and then click on an internal marketing message en route to a purchase, the marketer might get some visibility into those three things in regards to my conversion.  But which was the most important?  Tough stuff.

I wanted to bring up the attribution issue for two reasons.  The first reason is that it drives me nuts, and I felt like sharing.  The second is because the concept of attribution speaks directly to one of the core themes of my blogs.  Technology will not save a marketer with a weak plan.  If you know your web numbers and have confidence in them, you can build a plan to effect significant and transparent change.

Cheers,

Jim

PS. For some nice insight into how attribution works,  check out these great videos by Avinash Kaushik and John Marshall from earlier in the year.

http://www.kaushik.net/avinash/2008/03/standard-metrics-revisited-5-conversion-roi-attribution.html

I read this and had a moment of panic.

For those of you who don’t know, it is just about impossible for any web analytics or optimization product to collect historical data without the use of a cookie. Without the cookie, you lose recency, frequency, and historical behavior and conversion information. For any web tool that generates reports, this is a significant loss of data and customer value. For more info on what cookies are, click here.

Why would Microsoft help people to delete information that a multi-billion dollar industry (eCommerce) needs to survive? The answer is a bit too long for this blog, but has to do visitor (and legislator) concern over abuse of personal information, as well as unfounded fears about viruses and spyware.

About a year and a half ago we had a similar fear about IE7, which would set off security alerts for every website which runs third party cookies (advertising cookies). We had to completely change the way we deploy our product to make sure that our cookie would be served as a first party one by each customer. Suffice it to say, it was not a fun transition.

So I started emailing the CTO at Sitebrand, talking to colleagues and reading the WA forum to see what other people think about the potential impact of massive increases in cookie blocking and deletion. Most of the feedback was resoundingly grim…..

Enter Jim Sterne, one of the founders of the WAA. I am going to print his thoughts on the WA forum in their entirely below. I can’t say it any better than he can, and it made me have a ‘eureka moment’: There is nothing creepy about cookies, as long as you earn the right to use them. If your visitors are deleting or blocking your cookies, you have bigger things to worry about than data accuracy.

So worst case scenario, the new version of Internet Explorer increases cookie block and deletion rates from 3% to 30% for your average website. Your cookie deletion rate becomes less of a data accuracy issue and more of a KPI on site value to visitors. It can be monitored, marketed and managed like your bounce rates.

Thinking of cookies this way, as a indicator of visitor engagement rather than a pure technical component of web analytics, is a major departure from current thinking.  It is also the right way to view cookies as we migrate towards analytics/web 2.0

Thanks to Jim for the concise (and funny) reminder that website visitors SHOULD have control, and that we as online marketers create a forum for the best application of that control, i.e. to engage MY website and business instead of my competitors.

Cheers,

Jim

(Jim Sterne Post to WA Forum, Thursday August 21st)

Giving control to customers (visitors) is always the right move. It then places the responsibility on the marketer to offer sufficiently significant value that the customer is willing to exchange personal data.

Level 0 - Cloaking device engaged

View all of our marketing materials

Level 1 - Cloaking turned off - cookies enabled - javascript tags accepted

Configure products

Stock-on-hand viewable

Use of shopping cart

Access to blog

Latest white papers available

Level 2 - Email address

Download screen savers

White paper archive

Ability to comment on blogs

Newsletter

Notification of special deals

Webinars

RSS feeds

Level 3 - Postal address & preferences

Product discounts

Special event invitations

Access to local call center

Member-only webinars

Level 4 - Answer surveys, participate in Advisory Council

Negotiated pricing

Client conferences in Aruba

Level 5 - Reveal most intimate personal details and predilections

Marriage proposal

Level 6 - Vulcan mind-meld

Resistance is futile

This is helpful information if you have a ridiculous marketing budget or a Fortune 1000 business, but it tends to be dismissed by many SMB companies, especially those who are pure play online firms.

I’m not even going to try to talk about how to build your brand online.  That’s not a blog, it’s a book……a big book.

What I do want to do is run through a few basic things you can examine right now about brands and your business which you can immediately turn into money.

The only thing you need to know about branding to put this post to use is the following:  Visitors who are looking for a brand are worth more than visitors who are looking for a ‘thing’.

Pretty straightforward stuff.  “I am looking into buying a car”.  Not bad.  “I am looking into buying a Porsche.”  Awesome (unless you don’t sell Porsches). A ‘branded’ visitor is already on the sales path as they have bought into and chosen to trust either your brand, or one you carry.  Their conversion rate should be substantially higher than a commoditized search visitor, or someone who is looking for a generic category or product/service type.

Let’s prove it.  Open up your analytics and get the answers to the following questions:

My Corporate Brand

• What percentage/how many of my visitors so far this year were direct type ins or book marks?  What was their conversion rate?
• How many visitors found my site in natural search by looking for my company’s name, or a variation thereof?  What was their conversion rate?

Brands I represent

• Are there any brands I carry that generate significant natural search traffic?  (i.e. 5.4% of our visitors are looking for Coach purses)  What is their conversion rate?

You now have some hard data to show how brands are currently making you money, and like any good dive into analytics, probably have 100 new questions to go along with your answers.  Do brand oriented visitors convert better from the home page or a landing page?  Do visitors looking for a brand I carry also buy other products?  Does this change based on Geography or Multi-channel marketing? Etcetera etcetera…

Taking this branded vs unbranded approach to visitor source also adds significant value to any optimization  or personalization initiative.  Visitors who typed your name into Google do not need to be educated on your unique value proposition, whereas visitors who found you in Google will need to create trust through proper communication and messaging.

In offline marketing branding tends to be a highbrow, high budget affair. Leveraging brands online however, can be worth significant revenue to any firm, large or small.

Cheers,

Jim

This is the theme of our August 21 webinar and it’s a nice spin on our usual format. That’s right, you’re not just signing up for the perspectives of two presenters this month. Oh no. This time you’ll be treated to the perspectives of four presenters! And even though each presenter wears a Sitebrand hat, there will be guaranteed controversy thanks to old school versus new school perspectives. This on top of four distinct personality types…if you know what I mean.

I know we’re in the thick of summer holidays, but don’t let that stop you. Sign up anyhow and watch for a post webinar email that will include a link to view it online at your leisure. 

Joining me for this roundtable panel will be 3 more of Sitebrand’s own. We’ve got Darryl Praill, VP Marketing - he always makes discussions interesting thanks to his highly, shall I say, opinionated thoughts on all things marketing. We would be the “over 40″ side of the equation so our world hasn’t always been about the web.

And then to round things out, we’ve got the ”under 40″ pair of this panel who I daresay have almost always lived in world with the web. These would be Mr. Jim Cain, a Senior Analyst here who is very plugged in to all things analytics…especially as it relates to actioning those analytics which is a big part of why web personalization should matter to you. And then there’s Alok Ahuja, one of our senior account managers and possibly one of the most adored this side of the moon. His clients love him and I think it’s because Alok is always testing the boundaries…not just geo-boundaries, but boundaries in general!!!

So the essence of our webinar will revolve around the mixed messaging on the meaning of web personalization. We’ll talk about what it’s NOT - ie.
- A/B testing
- Recommendation engines
- User registration and personalized greetings
- Analytics
- ‘One-to-one’ emails mentioning first names

And we’ll talk about why it matters - ie. how it really does present an opportunity to dramatically increase revenue and conversion with segment and serve functionality that creates highly relevant online experiences.

So what’s holding you back? We typically hear comments like:
- I’m already using Google analytics, isn’t that enough?
- I’ve already optimized my content.
- My marketing dollars are limited and already committed.

In just 29 minutes, Sitebrand promises to break myths, educate, inform and convince you that personalization should be your #1 priority…and that it doesn’t have to cost a thing if you do it right.

So go ahead and register today…unless of course you’re happy doing the same old, same old.

The second place we went to, we got a good salesperson. He lead by asking who was making the decision, asked about budget, and sat down to work his deal. Clare met all the criteria of someone he can sell to. She was in the market for a new car, she had the money to make a purchase, and she was sitting in front of him talking about the Honda Fit (a wicked car btw).

Now I don’t think it’s a stretch to say that the sales director at Ottawa Honda doesn’t sit down once a month and calculate his closed sales metrics based on:
• The population of Ottawa
• Visitors to every Honda dealership in North America
• People who have gone past the dealership on bikes

He looks at his sales metrics based on:
• People who came into the store
• People for whom a car purchase was financially feasible
• People who engaged a Salesperson.

Seems pretty obvious right? Sales 101.

So why do the vast majority of websites calculate their conversion rates against all visitors to their site? Why isn’t conversion a function of the close ratio of people who could be closed at all?

Example: Many eCommerce websites in the United States don’t ship outside the continental United States, and the ones who do tend to make it so complicated it amounts to the same thing. Why do they not calculate their conversion rate against the traffic that originates in either the 50 US States, or the lower 48 that they build their business around?

I spend a lot of time in other people’s data, and I put this thought to the test through a number of analytics accounts in the last week. The changes in conversion rates are profound when you look at the percentage of prospective customers who convert instead of the percentage of all visitors who convert.

Separating the wheat from the chaff will not only provide clarity into your actual close rate, but will allow you to see opportunity. After you have segmented out the US, you might see that the UK generates 20,000 visits a month but has very low conversion. Perhaps it is time to build a cost-effective and easy UK shipping plan.

It’s not your fault as a marketer if you don’t close any visitors from Ulaanbataar, Mongolia. You don’t ship there. Clean up your conversion reports, and you won’t only make your numbers better (and more transparent), you might find your next major market opportunity.

If enough Ulanbataarians show up, maybe “Spend over $200 and get Free Shipping to Mongolia!” isn’t such a bad idea.

Cheers,

Jim

Loved the blog, agreed with the concepts, but not sure we need to coin any new terms. Social Conversion is just another way of saying conversion. According to the WAA Standards Committee, Conversion is “The number of times a desired outcome was accomplished.” So let’s try and really nail down the basic definitions before we throw them out the window and come up with new ones. (Still, it’s a great piece, specifically the landing page and whitepaper examples)

Wondering what my intro has to do with the title yet? Here we go.

Just as the term ‘social conversion’ has been doing the rounds in the last few weeks regarding its relevance and veracity (or truthiness), the concept of engagement in digital marketing has done the rounds for almost two years, and has been the subject of heated debate and scrutiny.

The ongoing dialog (or should I say blogalog? Yet another new term) has revolved around two primary questions:

• Is engagement an important concept?
• If it is important, how can it be quantified.

To learn more about the topic, here are a number of great posts on the subject. I specifically recommend checking out the recent flamewar between Omniture and Eric Peterson, both industry heavyweights with very differing opinions.

I myself blogged on the issue back in February, and my take is that being able to understand and manage visitor engagement to/from/within a given web property is the first major step towards ‘analytics 2.0’. Standardizing what metrics are used however is much more difficult.

If you work with a company like ion Interactive, engagement will have a strong landing page/social media focus. If you are a multi-channel marketer, engagement might have strong online/offline ties.

Having helped some of Sitebrand’s customers directly identify engagement related KPI’s in their business for the purposes of Optimization, I know it works. As for the ‘philosopher’s stone’ of engagement equations that work for every site, the jury is out.

In a fairly new industry like internet marketing, new terms will be coined at the speed of….internet. But some terms stick and have a profound impact on our discipline.

Engagement is one of these important terms.

Do some homework and form an opinion. If you think it’s bunk so be it. But if you think engagement monitoring and management could be a core aspect of your job in the coming years, start applying some of the concepts now so you don’t miss the boat.

Cheers,

Jim

PS. Larry heard I was referencing him in the blog today and wanted to make sure all our customers knew that he is available for all training requests/questions at training AT Sitebrand.com. Go team go!

In my last post I referenced a few points on Online Optimization, specifically goal setting and the difference between optimizing the look of the store and the dialog with the visitor.

Because of discussions I have had about this particular post, I thought I would add another ‘best practice’ point that is critical to the longterm success of any optimization initiative.

Don’t boil the ocean.

While this is a straightforward and somewhat obvious statement, it can get lost in the initial excitement of optimization. (Note: if you work in eMarketing and don’t think site optimization is exciting, you will soon)

Per point one in my last post, you need a defined goal to start an optimization initiative.  Alongside that goal, you need to start with a tightly defined plan to achieve that goal.  So for example if you want to minimize the bounce rate of California visitors on your homepage, you can run a targeted piece of content to 50% of your Cali. Visitors for a one month period, and compare the two bounce rates.

Will an entire California page work better?  Maybe, even probably, but how can you really prove which message on the page had the most impact?  This will be important when you are showing your results to the top of the org chart and asking for additional optimization budget.

Shane Atchison of ZAAZ speaks directly to this concept in his great “Web Analytics intervention” series on ClickZ.  Look at Point 5 in part 2 of the series. (Click here for column)

Lily Chiu at Omniture speaks to this issue as well in a recent post.  As a real estate optimization vendor, Omniture knows the importance of transparent results and encourages starting with small changes that show clear impact, like changing a green button to a red one.

As a vendor that optimizes dialog with a targeted visitor segment, Sitebrand makes similar recommendations.  If you say fifty different targeted messages to fifty different segments, some of which overlap mid-session, how will you know which ones work well?  Moreoever, how will you know which ones work well together?

The purpose of starting small in the initial short term is not to minimize your results, it is to provide the required clarity in a murky web metrics world to ensure that you can grow your optimization plans in the long term.  The upside is that your initial requirements are smaller, and your long term payoff is larger.

Cheers,

Jim