We’ve officially moved into our new flat and slowly managed to furnish it. We had been living in a rather nice townhouse for the last two years but due to some very strange neighbours at the landlady’s current place she decided she wanted to move her family back in, which meant a nice eviction for us with 4 weeks’ notice. Initially, it seemed like a reasonable amount of time, but August and September is the probably the worse time to move, students trying to arrange last minute accommodation and we’re definitely in a competitive renters market. Couple this with the fact that we both work full-time which meant viewings would need to be during evening and weekends meant we needed to get our skates on.

So like any normal person (I guess), we hurriedly wrote down a list of requirements for our new property search.  These include:

• 2 bed apartment / 3 bed house (extra room for guests)
• Walkable to the city (Even though I rarely go)
• Sea views (not the current lean out of the bedroom window I previously had)
• Furnished (but we can’t be too fussy), white goods are a must though
• We work Monday-Friday, so evening and weekend viewings only

Then we hit the property portals; RightMove, Findaproperty, Zoopla etc and there’s plenty of choice. We can use search facets to drill down by price, area, no. of beds, furnished/unfurnished etc. The large choice suggests we’d find somewhere easily but how wrong I was? Firstly, the majority of properties on these sites have one line descriptions with one or two photos (and some with no interior photos at all). I can only think of three reasons why an agent would do this:

1. The agent didn’t have access to the property to take photos
2. The agent can’t be bothered to take photos
3. The agent wants to give you such limited information so you book a viewing

The first two are pretty lame excuses and therefore not really a justified reason. The third is fine but then maybe said agents should have some availability to actually view them. On more than 15 occasions when I called to arrange a viewing with separate agents the responses were one of:

• We’re fully booked for viewings for at least a week and a half
• We don’t do viewings after 5pm
• It’s already been let

Like I said this is a busy time for moving in the area and renting is pretty competitive down here. But surely by offering up the information on the website I can make an informed decision to whether I want to even view a property rather than have to book a viewing to get the information. 90% of the properties we viewed with limited prior information we had no interest in. By making this information available it saves both my time and the agents.

This got me that that the property portal business model has some fundamental flaws, scrolling through hundreds of properties with no content suggest estate agents pay a fixed fee for property uploads rather than paying on a per property basis. From the agents perspective: If I have a property coming up on my books I am way more likely to get it uploaded as fast as possible even without any information because I can do it with no added cost and it will give my estate agency a greater chance of being noticed.

But in actual fact the following happens. For the customer: scrolling through hundreds of properties with no content makes my search experience frustrating and frustration isn’t really what make good user experiences. For the agent they waste valuable time showing properties which the customer has not shortlisted properly due to inadequate information.

Surely the quality and user experience of these portals would improve if agents were required to upload a minimum amount of information above that of a photo and one line description?

On a more positive note, we did eventually find somewhere to live and it ticked all the requirement boxes.

The flat and sea views

Content = Better User Experiences is a post from: Online Marketing Blog | Digital Marketing Blog

I recently had a web analytics query from one of our clients specifically around the analysis they were doing for their library pages using the In-Page Analytics/Site overlay report. Being a council and receiving monthly visits in the tens of thousands it was pretty hard to believe that people were interested in some of the library pages but not necessarily going through to the library catalogue pages.

Links on the right have no clicks

So what’s going on?

The issue lies with the actual content. The three links we see to the right of the image (Search the Library Catalogue, Renew Library Items, and Archives Catalogue) all receive no clicks. These links however go to the sub domain of the site. But why is that an issue? Well, the In-Page Analytics report is quite misleading, it works by tracking the normal JavaScript snippet on your site that transmits the data to Google each time a page is loaded and therefore Google Analytics can conclude that a click was made, but it actually isn’t tracking the “clicks” itself. Because of this, if a click was made to an outbound link it will not track unless you also had the same tracking code on this external site. In this council example, tracking the clicks to the library pages would be entirely possible through the use of cross domain tracking from the main site to the library sub domain (explained below)

However, if like a lot of council websites or any website for that matter which has outbound links to other sources or even banner ads, the In-Page Analytics will not compute the clicks and therefore, although the report can give you a useful visual representation, the insights available from it are minimal, for me at least, making it a function of GA that I do not use.

Furthermore, the In-Page Analytics report is not able to work with the following types of content:

• JavaScript links
• Virtual pageviews created with urchinTracker
• URL redirects
• URL rewrite filters
• Links to subdomain pages
• Frames

And probably the most annoying  and what this report would be useful for is to identify interaction and usability without the need for A/B testing e.g. if one link on a page was more successful than another. However, because we’re not tracking ‘real’ clicks if there is more than one of the same links on a page (even if the anchor text is different) both of these links would give the same click percentage. Again, this is possible if you added an ID to each of the links, but this would be a hassle and not very good from an SEO perspective.

The solution

If visual representation of your data is what you are after tools like ClickTale or Crazy Egg are much more effective at click tracking. However, as I like to keep all my data in one package and don’t worry so much about visual representation I’d rather get the information in Google Analytics through other reports.

So to get the insight into what is happening on the sub domain through Google Analytics, there are a number of things we could do. Firstly, the library sub domain should have GA tracking added (you should be tracking all your sites after all); this would at the very highest level tell you how much the main council site is referring (traffic sources -> referring sites) but not for a specific page. For this you would need sub domain tracking, which basically says to GA the data from this site (sub domain) is part of the main site (make sure you set up filters though to distinguish between the two though).

Alternatively, if you want to track outbound links that are external to your site (e.g. you don’t own the other site). You can call the track outbound link action to allow the distinction of exits from any page. This action is very useful when looking at page exits (something you should be doing). We know there are good and bad exits depending on the stage of the conversion journey, however, without distinguishing whether or not these are due to outbound clicks (usually good), we might think that our site has an overly high exit rate. There are a number of ways to track outbound links; however I think in order not to artificially increase pageviews its best to use the event action.

In-Page Analytics: Why the Google Analytics Site Overlay report does not track all clicks is a post from: Online Marketing Blog | Digital Marketing Blog

I recently read an interesting post on Public Sector Customer Forums about a mother’s dreadful experience when trying to apply for the school admissions service on her local council’s website. The post highlighted several flaws in the system named as ‘A faster more efficient way to apply’. Firstly, I whole heartedly agree that making the service available online is likely to be a faster and more efficient process: A faster way for the user and cheaper for the council because an operative will not have to key in the application form when it arrives at a council.

I have summarised the steps the mother experienced during the application process:

1. Applies online and specifies a username and password
2. Submits an application and receives email to say ‘application submitted’
3. A few weeks pass and she decides to check application
4. Logs back in using the username and password (which was written down) – not recognised
5. Uses the forgotten password link – nothing happens
6. Calls the council stating that the forgotten password link does nothing – explained it was put there simply because users would expect it and the username and password would not let you log back in anyway
7. Tries to explain she has an application number – apparently randomly generated and has no use for tracking or any other benefit.

Cost saving

It’s pretty hard to argue that this limited functionality and integration isn’t going to be considerably cheaper to implement. A service that asks for a username and password but which then doesn’t do anything when submitted, is merely a form with no tracking. Similarly, taking such an approach might suggest that its back-end database integration is also limited, meaning contact details are processed inefficiently and therefore probably a lot cheaper than doing it properly. And I’m sure when you estimate how many of those potential citizens actually try to log back in and then call the council because they can’t, has a negligible cost.

On some element it makes sense. The public sector has been subjected to cuts of up to 40% and so cost savings have to be made somewhere. However, I’m very much a believer in offering services online to enable cost savings. It is well documented how much councils can save using the web compared to the face-to-face or telephone. But, by doing so, you should be offering your citizens the same level of service as these other channels, including the extra benefits the web brings, such as a service that is faster and available at a time that suits the end user (see this post about 24x7x365 that the web offers).

So what is the cost in the long-term? If the web channel is merely used as a cost cutting exercise instead of one to reduce costs and improve service, I can’t see how it will be sustainable in the long-term. Admissions are now closed, so this council got away with it this time. But what about next year? Do we continue to slash costs and at the same time likely reduce the quality of service? If so, I think it’s going to be ever harder for councils or the public sector to justify their budgets and in the long-term we will see the privatisation of these services similar to what is currently happening to the NHS.

The gap between cutting costs and improving public services is a post from: Online Marketing Blog | Digital Marketing Blog

I attended the Call Centre and Service Management Expo at the NEC a couple of months ago and have been meaning to write this post ever since. It was a very interesting event from our perspective, we’re not a call centre, and can’t offer call centre software (which most of the vendors did). Nevertheless, we stood proudly with our channel shift message “Death of the Call Centre” the summation of how to drive your customers to the most cost effective channel by improving customer engagement and maximising efficiency. Although, it didn’t go down to well with the other vendors, it drummed up quite a bit of conversation with the delegates.

I’m not pretending to be an expert in call centres, I’m very much not. But, by packaging up calls in a certain way it makes it much easier to ascertain where savings can be made. Take the graph below instance:

The graph shows the degree of involvement needed by the customer on the y axis against the involvement needed by human interaction on the x axis. By human interaction I mean the complexity needed by a person to deal with a customer’s query. The degree of customer interaction is defined by how well they feel the business would best deal with their query. E.g. a customer who has received bad service, tried to sort this out on numerous occasions, is going to have to be dealt with over the phone and by a human who is able to both deal with the issue and communicate this effectively. That type of call is destined for the high/high interaction.

I have highlighted the area in the bottom left (blue) where customer and human interaction are low. This is where a query could just as easily be answered on the web by simply offering up that information on web pages, by FAQs (Frequently Asked Questions) or even webchat. On first inspection this only covers a small percentage of the chart but arguably these types of calls are generally the majority. Nevertheless, we’re not talking about totally closing down call centres; there will always be times where customers need to be able to talk to a human being and for effective customer service there should always be the option of multiple touch points.

It’s about making the most cost effective touch point the channel of choice for your customers and for the majority of the time that will be online. I’ll discuss this further in a future post.

Moving to the most effective channel

It is here, where the opportunity for channel migration reveals itself. If we can get those low involvement/low human customers to shift to the web, you’re looking at considerable savings. The below diagram describes the costs associated with customers using different channels:

For the public sector the cost shift from face-2-face (£8.21), to telephone (£3.21) and then to web (£0.39)can create savings of up to 95%.

We’re not talking about reduced service provision or taking the human aspect out of the equation. If anything we’re it’s about the benefit of self-serve; customers being able to solve their query online, whenever they want 24/7 and without the need for the phone.

So what sort of services would these be? In the public sector and more specifically local authorities, it’s going to be about making the services that can be or are online as effective as possible. This will ensure that citizens can transact without the need for contact by other means. By effective I don’t mean just putting the process online, the process needs to be an end-to-end solution which is then wholly online.

So there you have it; try looking at how you can migrate your customers to a more cost efficient and possibly more effective channel, than simply making your call centre leaner. What are your thoughts?

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How to reduce costs by channel shifting customers to the most effective medium: Web is a post from: Online Marketing Blog | Digital Marketing Blog

This post focusses on why, what and how to set up goals and KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) in Google Analytics.

When delving into the world of web analytics it can become overwhelming, very quickly. You have a lot of questions, you’re expecting answers to those questions, and you’re expecting it to solve all your problems. But instead you find a plethora of metrics and reports and it’s difficult to know where to start.

But where you start is really quite simple. It always starts with one thing, your goals. What are you trying to achieve? This is the first rule of analytics. Think about what your business is trying to achieve and then align this to your analytics package:

Goal/KPI	Metric in analytics
To get visitors to engage with the site more	• Percentage of visitors who download a whitepaper/PDF • Percentage of visitors that leave a blog comment • Percentage of visitors that complete a contact us form • Average time on site per visit • Average number of pages per visit
Improve the customer experience	• Percentage of visitors that bounce • Percentage of internal site searches that produce zero results
To cross-sell more products to customers	• Average order value • Average number of items per transaction
To gain more traffic from search engines	• Percentage of visitors from search engines • Percentage of conversions from search engine visitors
To sell more products	• Percentage of visitors that add items to the shopping cart • Percentage of visitors that complete the shopping cart • Percentage of visitors where the shopping cart is abandoned

So you’ve decided what your goals/KPIs are and decided how these can best be aligned to your analytics package. Then you hit the first hurdle; meauring these KPIs do exactly that, measure and report on what is happening, but do nothing to tell us if what we see is good, bad or whether we should do something about it.

The next post in the series is about taking that next step; setting up goals and funnels to derive insight.

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How to identify Goals and KPIs for your website in Google Analytics is a post from: Online Marketing Blog | Digital Marketing Blog

A hostname is the name of the device where you receive your traffic from. Every time a visitor arrives at a page where Google Analytics is implemented, the information is sent to GA and the domain/hostname is displayed in the hostnames report (from the dashboard in GA click Visitors > Network Properties > Hostnames). For example my employers domain, GOSS, is http://www.gossinteractive.com so you would expect that if a visitor came to this page or any of the pages on this domain it would be displayed as:

However, the hostnames report looks like this:

www.gossinteractive.com

As discussed, this is what you would expect considering it’s the domain name which hosts all the content. Therefore, it’s not surprising it has the most visitors.

translate.googleusercontent.com

This is Google’s translate service. Views from this hostname suggest there are visitors  who cannot read the English version.

www.web.com

This is a website hosting service.  This one is trickier, someone could have posted a copy of the webpage’s here.

gossinteractive.com

The same as no.1 but without the www.

webcache.googleusercontent.com

When Google crawls a website, it also saves the pages in its own cache.  Therefore, theses pages have been viewed from clicking the cached version in a Google search rather than viewing on GOSS.

209.85.229.132

This is Google’s IP address the same as www.google.com.

www.GOSSinteractive.com

The same as no. 1 but with the brand name capitalised, maybe from a referral link or someone following our brand guidelines J

login.innovantage.co.uk

Interesting one. It appears to be a website which supplies software and market research for recruitment agencies. Maybe they have some of our content regarding job vacancies or have scraped our site for market analysis.

74.125.153.132

Another one of Google’s IP address the same as www.google.com.

cc.bingj.com

The same as Google’s cache but for Bing.

mixi.jp

Another interesting one, appears to be a Japanese social networking site. Not sure why we have views from here?

209.85.129.132

Yet another IP for Google

honyaku.yahoofs.jp

Appears to be owned by Yahoo JAPAN Corporation, likely to be the Japanese translation of the site for Yahoo or possibly Yahoo’s caching for Japan.

So that’s it, a quick browse every month can derive a bit of insight and expose some unexpected or even spammy domains that maybe scraping your site.

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Deriving insights from the Hostnames Report in Google Analytics is a post from: Online Marketing Blog | Digital Marketing Blog

A stormy start to yesterdays B2B’s Annual Conference: ‘A Brave New World: Digital Marketing in the 21st Century’, situated in an area of London I am not familiar with, just across from Tower Bridge and Tower Gate Tube station. The map provided by B2B was surprisingly detailed, although I still managed to walk the complete opposite direction to that of the venue which is probably down to my keen attempt to shield myself from the gales than fault of B2B.

I arrived at 9.10, thinking the day started at 9.00 but in fact it started at 9.30 so gave me plenty of time to check-in my coat, grab a croissant, coffee and take a seat at the front at what appeared to be a well designed venue for the event. Not knowing what to expect, (I wasn’t hugely familiar with the work of B2B, although I get there emails regularly), this was my first real experience. The day kicked off with a great intro from B2B magazines’ editor, Joel Harrison and an interesting keynote from Pete Jakob, IBM the conference got underway.

Next up was John Wooton, CMO from ShipServ, after a somewhat in-depth description of what the firm undertakes; SaaS offerings to the commercial shipping business apparently. John continued his presentation on ‘Campaigns are dead – long live content’, from here on, I found his presentation insightful and although I don’t agree, (and still don’t), that campaigns are dead, what he was alluding to is that you should spend less time planning campaigns and more time consistently and effectively getting your content out there to ensure your brand is current. But, what I found most valuable and what made this one of the better presentations of the day was the way he concisely and succinctly communicated ShipServ’s communications strategy. What tools they used, why they use them, and how they performed for the company. All but one of these tools were free, I know everyone bangs on about how effective free tools are, but  being presented with the results of their strategy through and integrated approach of these tools was refreshing.

After another coffee and even more croissants and biscuits, Richard Evans from Silverpop took to the stage with why he thinks numbers have replaced creativity as the core marketing discipline. As someone who spends a lot of time in the analytics world I was really looking forward to this presentation. However, although engaging, it was very much around the effectiveness of email campaigns, maybe it was just I knew a lot of this content already but being presented with how effective email was and what seemed a brain dump of the Marketing Sherpa website I didn’t get the feeling that the content was either brave nor new.

Andrew Buckley from American Express was up next, describing his findings of digital marketing for his business. Through a series of technical slide difficulties he provided insight of how the firm does not specifically hire employees with digital skills, although I found it rather amusing that those with PhDs cleanse their contact lists. All I could really sum up was that for American Express their strategy is still pretty much traditional, they predominantly buy lists and will be ditching email for the whole of next year (to be replaced with Direct Mail). Not so much of a brand new world then, but I think everyone appreciated his brutal honesty in what works and what doesn’t for the firm.

An interesting mix!

After a very nice and well organised lunch there were a series of breakout sessions to choose from. I attended ‘Demand generation’ by Stuart from Eloqua, ‘SEO’ from the very engaging, corduroy wearing, Steve Kemmo from Cyance, and ‘Analytics’, by Bryony Thomas from Clear Thought Consulting. Bryony delivered what I think everyone who attended her session to be the most useful of the day. With a straight-talking delivery, she discussed how marketing should prove its worth to the board, whilst being able to show the effect of all marketing activity in a clear, concise and visual way allowing you (the marketer) to prove you’re an asset to the company rather than an expense.

The day was wrapped up by a keynote from Professor Merlin Stone on the importance of brand reputation and how online makes it impossible to hide the mistakes, you, your brand or your ex employees make. He closed with an interesting look at the future where marketing needs to be ‘open-book’, in that your customers expect to know everything about you and therefore that information should be available.

Overall, the day was an excellent experience, well organised and a good mix of speakers from large and smaller organisations. There were no sales pitch type presentations, something I always hate when paying money to attend and event. I left with some really good ideas to take back to my own organisation and from a personal development point of you; a great event which represented good value.

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An Overview of ‘A Brave New World: Digital Marketing in the 21st Century’ B2B Marketing’s Annual Conference is a post from: Online Marketing Blog | Digital Marketing Blog

In my last post I discussed how Google benefits from the long tail of search with its Adwords platform. Concluding that all seems well in Google land, more and more searches = more and more ads = more profit.

But, what if users switch search engines, unlikely I agree, but it is conceivable. We all make the choice to use Google over the multitude of alternatives and my point is that it’s pretty easy to switch if we wanted to (change your browser setting or bookmark) and this revenue stream would decrease very quickly. So, ignore the reasons why we do stay with Google (good results etc. etc.). And focus on what Google are doing to prevent this happening. It doesn’t take long to realise that the myriad of free products Google brings to market (mentioned above) on a regular basis has something to do with it. Keep us in the Google domain, and if we don’t need to leave, we won’t.

Microsoft’s high switching costs

In contrast, Microsoft makes most of its profit from its operating system and office suite. It’s hard to switch because they go out of their way to make sure interoperability is difficult and therefore you tolerate it because your switching costs are so high. Microsoft knows this, so they don’t worry about usability or bugs. Note their retaliation when Apple started to get their foot in the door. Windows Vista, copying some of Apple OS features; Dashboard etc. but it was still hugely buggy.

So what can Google learn from Microsoft and vice versa? Probably not a lot, both models work – Microsoft are able to command high prices by making switching difficult. Google ensure the constant provision of value added services that do at the end of the day make switching costs high; yes you could leave and go to Bing of Yahoo! but why would you?

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Should Google worry about its low switching cost business model? is a post from: Online Marketing Blog | Digital Marketing Blog

It is well documented that 97% of Google’s profit comes from ads. Although they do have a lot of product offerings; Chrome, Gmail, Wave, Google Docs etc. these do not directly generate income. Therefore, if Google is an advertising company rather than a search company, it makes sense for them to ensure that you use Google as your default search engine. The more searches that go through Google, the higher the chance that an ad will be clicked. On the other hand, the more people who use Google, the more likely advertisers will use Google Adwords to drive paid for search advertising.

An increase in advertisers offering the same products for the same search queries will mean more competition, benefiting Google with;

1) a higher return (from increased CPC costs) and;

2) better targeted ads (Google wants to ensure it brings the right content to the right people).

Some search queries have clearly already reached saturation, meaning competition has increased CPC to a level where ROI is questionable e.g. LCD TVs. (only those retailers that can command economies of scale will get ROI).

For others, they will inevitably continue to advertise further down the long tail, continuing the cycle and complementing points 1 and 2 above. And if Digital marketing spend continues to increase, which it inevitably will (Digital will always have a more measurable model than traditional) means it’s all good news for Google.

In my next post I will discuss whether or not Google should worry about its low switching business model.

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How Google benefits from the long tail of search advertising (PPC) is a post from: Online Marketing Blog | Digital Marketing Blog

Yesterday, I passed the Google Analytics Individual Qualification (GAIQ) test with a score of 91%. It’s a 70 question online exam which you have an hour and a half to complete and you have to get 80% to pass (Google recently increased the pass rate from 75% and the reduced the time allowed by 30 minutes). I didn’t find this to be too much of an issue as I still had 15 minutes spare.

The test comprises of multiple choice questions, usually with 4 answers to choose from. Some however, are the ‘check all that apply’ type, which I found the trickiest.

Preparing for the GAIQ test

Before you take the GAIQ exam, the best resource for preparation is Google’s Conversion University lessons, which are broken down in to easily digestible segments. It goes through the fundamental basics, which are easy and mostly common sense to more advanced analytic code placing and report generation. I would recommend still reviewing all the lessons, especially for those ‘check all that reply’ questions. The lessons are set out in a sensible order, but content is explained quickly so be prepared to hit the pause button frequently, especially if you are planning to take notes. The lessons which I think were the most useful in terms of passing the test and, the ones you should refresh/familiarise yourself with are:

• Profiles in Google Analytics
• E-Commerce Tracking
• Filters in Google Analytics
• Domains and Sub-Domains
• Cookies and Google Analytics

My test included a lot of Adwords related questions, which although is covered in the lessons I think I would have struggled a bit if I was not familiar with running campaigns. Therefore, I’d recommend signing up to an Adwords account to get a feel of how it works.

Although I think the Conversion University lessons cover most things I have in the past found both Avinash Kaushik’s books; Web Analytics 2.0 and Web Analytics: An Hour a Day really easy to read and digest. I did read somewhere that most of the exam questions were generated from Brian Clifton’s Advanced Web Metrics with Google Analytics book and I could see why. Definitely a helpful book and it includes a handy 50% off voucher for the GAIQ exam, saving $25 and effectively making the book  free!

During the GAIQ test

With 70 questions and an hour and a half to complete, this only gives you very limited time to go research the questions (a minute or so per question). However, some of questions you will easily breeze through, leaving enough time to do a bit of research for those trickier ones. The resources that I recommend having open in your browser during the test are:

• Google Search – The answer to most things, although you won’t pass without preparation.
• Google Analytics – Make sure you’re logged in
• IP Address Range Regex Tool – I had a IP range question, which I just plugged into this tool
• Cookie Reference – There were lots of cookie questions

The best tool was the Conversion University itself. I set up the below page to be able to quickly find the information I was looking for across all the lessons:

• Conversion University Notes – Really useful if you use ‘ctrl F’

Conclusion

I hope you found this post useful in preparing for the exam. The test isn’t too difficult as long as you’ve had experience with Google Analytics and use the above tips to brush up and refresh on the things you’re unfamiliar with.

You will be awarded with the following certificate as a PDF file that you can print and put on your wall if you’re that way inclined :p

Good luck and let me know how you get on.

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Tips and tricks on passing the Google Analytics Individual Qualification (GAIQ) test is a post from: Online Marketing Blog | Digital Marketing Blog