"web-analytics" via S.Hamel in Google Reader

iPerceptions teams up with J.C. Williams Group

2009-07-10T15:34:08Z

(From the company news section of our corporate website)

iPerceptions has teamed with J.C. Williams Group to provide retailers with new insight into consumer behavior that are directly relevant to companies conducting e-commerce on the international stage. Through the partnership, iPerceptions is now providing J.C. Williams Group with quarterly global benchmark data on e-commerce site visitor satisfaction and task completion based on 4Q website survey data from over 100 countries. J.C. Williams Group will include these important benchmarks alongside data from the US Census Bureau and Conference Board in its US National Retail Bulletin (USNRB) that is distributed monthly to senior decision makers at America’s largest retailers.

“Thousands of companies are using the 4Q website survey to tap into the hearts and minds of customers in over 100 countries – and to get a handle on task completion, the single most important metric available to marketers today,” said Claude Guay, President and CEO of iPerceptions. “In addition to understanding customer satisfaction, a measurement of site and brand experience, retailers can now use the 4Q website survey to go much further by using task completion to tie site performance back to hard actions taken by visitors. We’re very pleased to partner with J.C.Williams Group to provide retailers with the basis for true site accountability based on a real understanding of how they measure up and where they can improve.”

“With their 4Q website survey, iPerceptions provides important and ongoing benchmarks for websites to continually refine their sites' usability, based on timely user feedback across a number of international markets,” said Jim Okamura, Senior Partner at J.C. Williams Group. “We are excited to be providing retailers actionable benchmark data to effectively manage their websites across various countries and languages, and to help prioritize their improvement efforts.”

J.C. Williams Group is already featuring 4Q website survey benchmark data in its May 2009 US NRB supplement on International E-Commerce Retail Customer Satisfaction. The supplement compares task completion and satisfaction for 4Q website survey respondents in 5 different markets: USA, France, Canada, China and UK.

Name Dropping – Not My Usual Vice

2009-07-11T15:14:32Z

I’m almost old enough.

I didn’t actually gasp or gush when I met Craig Newmark of the eponymous Craigslist but I was sufficiently startled by my awestruckness that I became tongue-tied.

Craig Newmark

Oh I was pleasant enough and acquit myself with adequate aplomb to have made no impression on him whatsoever. But such a missed opportunity.

I was so vigorously chagrined about not engaging Craig in conversation that I totally neglected to be flabbergasted when introduced to Howard Rheingold.

The location was personally meaningful; Shakespeare’s Old Globe in London.

Shakespeare's Old Globe Theatre

I met my wife in a Shakespeare class at UCSB 32 years ago and am on the Board of a Santa Barbara theatre group that’s performed Hamlet at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. I gawped. I was totally chuffed to be there. I took many pictures.

For the occasion and location, I extend sincere thanks to Ashley Friedlein.

Ashley Friedlein

He noted from my Sterne Measures newsletter that I would be in town for a RedEye seminar. “Are you free for tea in the afternoon?” he asked. Little did I know the occasion was the Econsultancy Traveling Geek’s Roundtables.

I had spent a perfectly engaging morning and lunch with RedEye’s clients and should-be clients delving into the tangled web of promotional attribution and was now amidst the Gods and Goddesses of social media.

Fortunately, Robert Scoble had previously attended an eMetrics Marketing Optimization Summit, so the kick in seeing him in the flesh didn’t knock me off my feet. It was great to see Ian Jindal again, sit next to Ros Lawler of Random House, see Guy Stephens from Carphone Warehouse carrying an eMetrics bag as his laptop case, chat with Kerry Bridge from Dell, and get interviewed by JD Lasica. But I thank heaven that Goddess Susan Bratton was there.

I got to know Susan when I was speaking at and she was chairing Ad:Tech and I’ve closely followed her mastery of the podcasting and ebook publishing world through her Personal Life Media network. If you ever have the chance to have Susan introduce you to somebody, do not hesitate. It’s a transformative experience. She is effusive and enthusiastic, charming and animated, insightful and informative. She has a way of linking the particulars about the people she’s introducing that makes them feel the new connection is a gift. Susan is a social philanthropist. She introduced me to Howard.

Howard Rheingold

Howard Rheingold is the progenitor of social media having been an early adopter of The Well, an online, open discussion community that preceded AOL. It was Usenet for non-techies. My question to him required no planning, research, cogitation or hesitation:

“Don’t you laugh,” I wondered aloud, “when you see all the fuss about social media when you’ve been at it for a quarter of a century?”

“But it’s still so exciting!” he chortled.

Howard’s zeal is easily contagious but is transmitted in deep, abiding ardor rather than flighty exhilaration. “Who knew, back then, when we were pecking at keyboards producing green ASCCI characters on CRT’s,

CRT

that people would be re-tweeting a video you posted seconds ago?” He then described the future of education, a subject I thought I had completely understood 40 years ago.

I was lucky enough to attend a lecture by Arthur C. Clarke, delivered at Foothill College in Los Altos Hills, California, in the late 1960s. That was before the moniker Silicon Valley had been assigned, before Steven Jobs had long hair, and before Star Wars was a movie or even a government program. Clarke was asked about his vision for the future of education. He related the following story:

A young boy at the beach scampers between tide pools. He reaches down into one and pulls out a small shell with tiny claw legs sticking out. Curious, he holds his find near his wristwatch and asks, “What is it?”
The wristwatch analyzes the specimen and replies, “It’s a hermit crab. It lives in tide pools all over the world. This is a young one. It will grow to be twice that size and find protection from predators by living with anemones.”
“What happens when it gets too big for its shell?”
“It leaves its shell and finds another.”
“Can I take it home?”
“No, it would die. But you can find an empty shell and take it home.”
The child carefully places the crab back in the water, continues his search and pockets an empty crab shell. The interaction has been coded as an educational experience and recorded in the school database via satellite.
At the end of the week, a question about turtles will appear on a test to see if the child understands the difference between animals that live in borrowed shells and those that grow their own.

With the exception the necessary artificial intelligence, we have all the necessary technology today.

Howard described his classes at Stanford and Berkeley. “The chairs are all stacked up in the back and students come in and place them in rows facing the front. These kids are so institutionalized. I have to break them of so many habits. Read the book – and the blogs – before you come to class. You want to sit and watch me lecture? Fine – YouTube. You can watch them all. You want to know what I find interesting at the moment? Follow me on Twitter. Befriend me on Facebook, that makes me happy too. But the time we spend together in that room should be dedicated to sharing what we’ve discovered and answering questions and brain storming.

“The technology should leverage our time together, not define it. We should spend more time fostering curiosity and critical thinking.”

So Mr. Clarke almost had it right. The question on the test about turtles will be replaced with a conversation about turtles with an engaged, encouraging teacher.

My conversation with Howard was diverted to the ingestion of Pimm’s Cups, cups of tea and a wonderful tour of the theatre trading photo-ops with Susan and soaking it all up. I was in Anglophile heaven.

I would happily have followed the throng onto their next stop – a Techcrunch Awards Dinner – but I had a dinner date with Chinwag founder Sam Michel, MasterChef producer Claire Nosworthy and writer for hire, Peter Hill. Excellent food and excellent company. The perfect end of a perfectly splendid day in London.

Posted in Uncategorized

WAA Championship - have you got what it takes?

2009-07-11T15:38:00Z

Again this year, the Web Analytics Association is putting up the Championship challenge for its members: put your web analyst skills at work and analyze the WAA website!

This is a unique opportunity! I often get contacted by students of the UBC Award of Achievement in Web Analytics and others who want to start in the web analytics field. One of the challenge is to get your hands on the tools and play with a site that has sufficient level of data to make it interesting. So now is your chance!

Three simple steps:

Have a peak at Google Analytics, WebTrends and Yahoo! Analytics as implemented on the WAA website
Do your analysis and provide insight & recommendations
Win prizes! But beyond all, you get to learn & experiment a real web analytics environment on a real website and get involved in the association. And be assured we will take your insight and recommendations with interest as we are looking at some revamps & enhancements for the WAA website.

FYI, I'm one of the judges, along with my friends "Wandering" Dave Rhee and Judah Phillips, under the supervision and great help from Daniel Waisberg. Which brings a nice international participation, unless I'm mistaken, Judah is in Boston, Dave is in Germany, Daniel is in Telaviv and I'm in Québec City!

Originally posted by Stéphane Hamel at immeria.net.

The Web Analytics Championship, in memory of Hosam Elkhadory

2009-07-11T12:47:37Z

The Web Analytics Championship is up and running! This year we decided to dedicate our prize to Hosam, our valuable member that is not with us anymore. We have worked with him in several projects and will certainly miss his...

Online to Offline cross-sales in retail banking

2009-07-11T06:36:23Z

(This post is part of a series on the state of multichannel metrics today, one year after the book came out.)

The previous post focused on a travel company that listens to their customers’ online behavior so to get their cross-sales - or last minute - offers to those who are most likely to care.

Now how about the retail banking industry?

Retail banks and credit card companies have been great innovators in the use of analytics for direct and relationship marketing. For example, the case of CapitalOne is well described in the book Competing on Analytics.

For good reasons:

Banking is a relationship business.
Banks know embarrassingly much about their customers based on all those transactions and other data
And what is the profit from a new bank customer at the moment when they first open their account? Negative, probably, until over the life time of the relationship the bank makes back their initial costs (and then some)
Banks have learned that they are most successful with cross-selling products to customers within the first 30 to 90 days of the relationship. After that, customers seem to go on auto pilot with their relationship.
Banks also have learned that new customers are most at risk in the beginning of their relationship and may spring back to their previous bank if something goes wrong.

So banks plan out all their customer communications very carefully by predicting which offer or message sent to which customer at what time is most likely to amount to maximized net present value.

(You might joke that we wouldn’t have the stupid mortgage crisis today if the direct marketing departments had been in charge of their banks)

So why is it then that many banks are such laggards when it comes to online offline integration?

Few industries have it easier.

You visit your bank’s web site frequently
You are almost always logged into your account when you go to your bank’s web site.
There is a big incentive for not deleting your cookie so that you won’t have to go through all those annoying security questions to “register” your computer.
Quite likely you even clicked the “remember my user ID” option so that even the bank’s home page greets you with “Hi Joe, welcome back”

All your bank’s products are outlined online so you have it easy to answer your own questions.

Looking for a car loan or savings account?

Likely you check rates online.

So … hellooo … is anyone listening?

Example 1: European bank cross-sells savings accounts

It seems a no-brainer.

The bank, with the help of a nifty online marketing consultant, mined their web analytics and customer data for clients who

have a checking account
but no savings account
YET who have recently been on the web site looking at savings rates.

All it took was a feed from web analytics looking at web pages relating to savings accounts and keyed by login-name of customers.

For extra credit, they could have extended the campaign to those who weren’t logged in but whose cookie was previously registered during an authenticated session.

According to the consultancy, the campaign was easy to do and very lucrative. So they are expanding the program.

Example 2: Cross-selling options-trading to clients at a stock brokerage

Another no-brainer.

Options-trades are a great way for an online stock brokerage to increase transaction volume and to lock in clients into a tighter relationship.

But options are risky and somewhat more complicated than trading stocks. So they aren’t everyone’s cup of tea.

Who is ready to receive the cross-sales offer?

Could it be those clients who are not yet authorized for options trading but who have recently been on the web page studying the process of how to sign up for options trading?

You betcha!

So what are the couch potatoes waiting for?

Legitimately, banks want to make sure that they stay within the accepted norms for privacy. The online-offline integration feels very new to them. So bankers are quick to throw up their arms and say that their hands are tied by the privacy rules of their organizations.

Are banks really that concerned about our privacy though?

Every night banks crunch through our daily account transactions to watch for unusually large deposits so that they can quickly bring us a cross-sales offer before we move the money elsewhere.

How is that for privacy!

Personally, I think that some of the arguments that we hear today are similar to what happened when the first train came out. Namely, it was said that traveling at the never-before-heard speed of 20 MPH was not healthy for human beings!

No doubt, we will see more banks review the opportunities very carefully. Innovators are already tapping into the integrated data. Others will follow.

In some future edition of Competing on Analytics we may well hear about some bank that rode the opportunity out to their advantage.

Re: UBC Award of Achievement in Web Analytics

2009-07-11T06:35:23Z

... For sure, you can quote me (the check is on the way) :) Stéphane

Re: UBC Award of Achievement in Web Analytics

2009-07-11T06:34:57Z

Hi Jim, I got the impression that Russell already knew most of what the UBC courses offer-- that he was considering the program as a "badge". In which case, I

Re: HTML Crawlers

2009-07-11T06:34:41Z

I'm not familiar with wget (although my love of the command line means I should) - I have used HTTRack, it's awesome, simple, and easy. -kb

integrating survey data - is it possile?

2009-07-11T06:34:34Z

Hi - I have been asked to include a pop survey (5 questions max) to our customers who buy a product so the popup would appear on the thank you page. With

Measuring and Monitoring Twitter for Small Business

2009-07-11T04:28:00Z

My article on Twitter for Small Business was just published - here’s a link to it at Entrepreneur.com

Let me know what you think by leaving a comment here. A few links were edited out and my profile picture hasn’t been updated yet.

I tried to come up with a unique angle, but, I have to admit, a lot has been written on Twitter metrics lately.

Tried to focus on small business and Entrepreneurs, which is the focus of The Magazine, and, I needed to write in a more purely focused way, than on my blogs.

Using Compete.com to find unusual sources of Traffic

2009-07-10T21:18:40Z

Been trying to find something to post about today - but for some reason that’s been tough. I hoped to write more about Compete.com’s new offerings - but most of them are not working for me, yet; however, I was contacted by Compete yesterday and they will be giving me access to their full Enterprise account capabilities some time next week.

Still, I looked at Compete.com Keyword Destination Tool for some keywords and found thinks that really surprised me. For example, when I searched on my own name, I found the only destination Compete.com showed was one I’d never, in a million years, have found, using my site referral logs:

Further investigation found this photo of me at the Roger Smith Hotel for a Charity Event I went to recently. You would have thought that Compete.com would have picked up the main traffic on my name as going to one of my blogs - but it gave me this, instead. Hmm.

I also found it interesting that, according to Compete.com, the singular and plural form of a word like “entrepreneur” has different results in terms of where traffic ends up at - probably a function of how Search Engines work - take a look

Entrepreneur

Entrepreneurs

Interesting musing for a Friday.

[JOB] Intuit - San Diego - Staff Web Analyst

2009-07-11T00:00:18Z

Hi, Are you technically focused? Do you love data analysis? How about the Internet? Want to continue building your experimentation skills? Do you have a strong

Re: GA _trackEvent call has extra pageviews

2009-07-10T23:50:51Z

You shouldn't have to call trackPageview first in order to call trackEvent. There was/is a known issue where calling trackEvent would fail if you didn't, but

Re: UBC Award of Achievement in Web Analytics

2009-07-10T23:50:06Z

Rita - while I passionately applaud your promotion of the eMetrics Marketing Optimization Summit (the check is on the mail) I'd have to say there's a lot more

Re: HTML Crawlers

2009-07-10T23:49:52Z

Hey guys, thanks for your suggestions; we just tried the Wget command and wow, what an absolutly amazing job it does!! Haven't looked at HTTrack yet, but not

Fruits of Our Labour - July 10, 2009 Week in Review

2009-07-10T20:23:18Z

From Our Sponsors & Advertisers

For all you west coasters, Search Engine Strategies San Jose is on for August 10 - 14, 2009. Some great speakers lined up!
eTail East 2009 is being held August 3-6, 2009 in Baltimore.

New Contributors This Week
We have a new contributor this week - Janice Diner - who debuts with her write up about her experience and insights from being a judge at Cannes this year. Welcome, Janice!

This week's WIR curator is Erin Raimondo. Erin is the intern at LintBucket Media in charge of scone acquisition and latte liberation.

Seen Around

In case you hadn't heard, Google is hopping into the OS game, furthering their plans of world domination, no doubt. Off the back end of Microsoft's entry into search, Google announced the development of an open source OS based on Chrome, initially to be aimed at netbooks.
Do you #moonfruit? Take a good idea from Squarespace and tweak it so that what's free, is actually free, and you've got this week's twitter meme - Moonfruit. The website builder has been giving away MacBook Pros left right and center, as well as handing out discretionary prizes of iPod touches for creative entries...and some of them are beauties.
Blogathon is coming - will you be ready?

Heard on Twitter

RT @martinwaxman Great post on 3 key things businesses need to embrace in order to go social, from @ambercadabra http://bit.ly/2vydA
RT @SarahCooley Today, slightly after noon, for one very special second, it will be 12:34:56 7/8/09

This Week's Video Meme

I'm unsure whether to be charmed or moderately terrified by the scarily advanced looking babies, but hey...it's certainly different!

Submissions for the 2009 Digital Marketing Awards are Open

2009-07-10T19:57:04Z

Innovation, excellence, leadership. It's what the Digital Marketing Awards are all about. Produced by Marketing Magazine, the DMA's represent the best of interactive marketing in Canada. The Awards are judged exclusively by the industry with the mandate to inspire many but reward few. Those few are chosen for their creativity and for leveraging the interactive environment to its full potential.

The categories have been divided into three groups:

Online Advertising: Distributed content.
Websites: Destination is the site, content is at the destination.
Other Digital Media: Ads or technology that does not fit into the traditional categories.

The entry form may be fully completed and submitted on the DMA website.

The entry deadline is Friday July 31, 2009 at 5:00 p.m. EST.

Five Times to Test: 1 - When you need to optimize beyond the click

2009-07-10T16:37:20Z

I have known a lot of companies that spend a tremendous amount of time on their analytics. They tweak their tags, they build custom dashboards, they set up automated reporting, and they have business analysts doing studies in the data on a regular basis to find interesting insights. This is all as it should be. The first rule of analytics is that it doesn’t do you any good unless you study it and share it.

However, it is always odd to me when I see a company that has found some very compelling insights in their analytics but they have yet to act on it. They may have even done a study to estimate how much money they could be making if they just improved a particular top entry page’s bounce rate, for example, and it could be worth millions in incremental revenue to them to decrease that bounce rate. But months later, they have yet to realize those gains because they didn’t know where to go from there. As a result it can sometimes seem that they are not yet earning the first dollar of ROI on all that effort and expense to do the analysis. That is, until they take action. And if you never take action on your analysis then it may have been interesting, but largely academic. That is what testing and targeting are for – to help you actually earn your ROI, not just forecast it and document it.

I do this all the time on my own website with the Omniture Suite, and I never cease to be amazed at how simple it can be to take action that drives real results fast. In my years at Omniture, and when I was an Omniture customer, I’ve led many initiatives involving analytics, testing, and targeting. So from this experience, I wanted to share the first in my multi-part series called “When to Test and When to Target.” We’ll start with the first item in The 5 Times When You Want to Test.

1. Landing Page Optimization – when you need to optimize beyond the click.

For many years companies have been spending a lot of money on advertising to drive visitors to their websites, but comparatively under-investing to convert that traffic once it arrives at the site.

I know a large business that as recently as last year was spending almost $100MM of their advertising budget in PPC search campaigns. It’s fair to say that they were only spending maybe 0.2% of that to optimize the keywords’ landing page experiences after the clickthrough. I don’t want to make it sound like it has to be a 50/50 split between ad spend and optimization efforts – that’s probably unrealistic. But $500/$2 ratio is quite lopsided toward the ‘spend side’ regardless of who you speak to.

One quote that has always stuck with me comes from a Wunderman executive who “gets it.” He said the following:

“We preach that clients today should be setting aside 15% of their spend for optimization. We believe that the opportunity to improve the performance of the other 85% is that significant, and well worth it.” – Mark Taylor, Wunderman, EVP and CIO

This means that if you have an advertising budget of $500k for a particular “new product release” campaign, you normally might engage your agency to build a flash microsite to capture leads, as well as a couple of different sizes of display banners to put out on publisher sites. Then point them all to the microsite. But if you are looking to maximize the number of leads you get out of this new campaign, you might do the following instead: Ask your agency to use their creative minds to come up with 3 vastly different approaches to the microsite, depending on differing theories they have of what might drive conversion. Then have them do multiple alternative creative approaches to the display ads. Spend the first 15% of your budget to run some tests to find out which combination of ad+microsite is the best performer. It’s the Darwinian concept of letting the first visitors succeed and fail to discover what works and what doesn’t. Because who’s to say that the first microsite idea the agency came up with is going to be the highest-converting idea? Once you know the best performer, push the rest of your ad spend to that experience. At least now you’ve found the least-leaky bucket before turning the water on full volume.

Returning to the business that spends $100MM on paid search…. The fact of the matter is, in today’s economic climate the VP of Advertising may have his acquisition budget hacked in half. He can’t spend nearly as much just to shove traffic at the site. But, of course, the VP of the .com is probably still held to her same revenue targets from last year. The only logical way for the CMO to make this work is to squeeze much more juice out of the traffic that DOES come to the site. And the way to do that is to constantly be running optimization campaigns on your landing pages. Some of you may be thinking, “That’s great stuff…I wish we could achieve it. But we’re just trying to survive this year.” That’s true – and landing page optimization is your marketing department’s life raft.

Tune in next time when we’ll discuss the second situation when you should test….

-Brig Graff

“Simplicity” and “Complexity”

2009-07-10T18:29:35Z

I think that sometimes, it’s human nature to try to add complexity to seek a competitive advantage.

Sometimes there’s competitive advantage in Ease. In easyness. In simplicity.

A good example is the difference between Windows and the original command line DOS. Another is between Mac OX and Windows.

Simplicity isn’t easy though.

It’s far easier to pound out a five page brief than it is to write two paragraphs communicating the same thing. It’s hard to get right. But most of the time, you only have two paragraphs.

So you see, simplicity can be incredibly complex.

I’m kind of intoxicated by this relationship between simplicity and complexity.

Navel Observatory: Snippets from Sun Valley

2009-07-10T17:57:25Z

The Sun Valley media and technology conference opened Wednesday. We like to make fun of the confab of media moguls and owners as “navel gazing” (hence the pun in the post title!)—I mean, a media conference that’s closed to the press?—but since the press seems to be swarming around outside the conference and lots of people seem willing to talk, I guess it’s time to fire up the ol’ rumor mill.

First up, Google’s CEO Eric Schmidt. In a press conference last night, Schmidt said he tried for six years to save us from Chrome and the pending Google OS, but eventually the wave of enthusiasm that is Larry Page and Sergey Brin overpowered his objections:

“I just gave up,” Mr. Schmidt said. “But there is no question I am hugely supportive of Chrome and Chrome OS. They are game-changers. They change the way you think about your computer.”

The new Chrome OS, they said, will be “virtually indistinguishable from a browser” (WSJ’s words). However, they were careful to avoid saying they’ll be a competitor to Microsoft in the netbook space, opining instead that they’ll “expand the market for netbooks” (WSJ again).

The Wall-Street Journal has more notes from their remarks, covering everything from Twitter (”We like Twitter a lot. . . . We were worried these guys might be competitors, but it looks like people who use Twitter and Facebook start using Google more.”) to the book settlement agreement to YouTube.

Next up: AOL’s Tim Armstrong. As a refresher, while the once-ISP-king is now struggling mightily, a little over a year ago AOL acquired Bebo, formerly the most popular UK social network at the time (and still a strong competitor to Facebook), for $850M. AOL also owns such sites as TMZ,

Now, AOL is reviewing its acquisition portfolio. While in this economy (and with social networks’ continued struggles for monetization) they couldn’t hope to recoup their purchase price, could AOL need the cash enough to sell off Bebo?

CEO Tim Armstrong says that’s improbable. The company is “reviewing assets it could sell or divest, but will likely keep its social networking site Bebo,” as Reuters reports.

What do you think? Is the Chrome OS going to open up the netbook market, or is it yet another way for Google to challenge Microsoft? What should AOL sell off to keep itself afloat?