Author Archive
October 10, 2008 by Jim Cain
It has been just shy of a year since I started blogging for Sitebrand. For those of you who have been reading my blog since I started writing over a year ago (my mom and fiancee), and those who have been reading, commenting and emailing, thanks for your support!
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.
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No Comments | Posted in Jim Cain, Sitebrand, Web Analytics, first time visitor
October 2, 2008 by Jim Cain
I have been a little lax on my blogging recently, so rather than my usual punditry I thought I would give some updates on the things I have been working on. As Sitebrand continues to solidify its position as a thought leader on web personalization, we are becoming more involved in interesting industry initiatives (ed: nice alliteration!) and I will touch on two things in particular I am quite excited about.
1) WAA Standards Document first release!
Last week, the web analytics association published an updated version of the Web Analytics Definitions document, which outlines all the key terms that are used by practitioners in our industry in an attempt to codify and standardize. Believe it or not, but until the first iteration of this document last year, there were no defined terms in the analytics space, only a tribal agreement on certain terms in principle. I have been on this committee for several months, and it has been both interesting and very informative.
I highly recommend that anyone who uses web analytics as part of their job click here to download a copy of the document, and post any and all feedback to the WAA blog. A number of very talented people did a lot of work to make this document happen, and it won’t achieve its goals unless it is read, discussed and adopted by our industry at large. As a further plug, each term has an ‘ask your vendor’ section, so that you can see how different terms are applied in different analytics products.
2) Rise of the First Time Visitor!
Waaaaaay back in March of this year, I referenced in the blog that I was working on a whitepaper regarding the First Time Visitor segment of website traffic, and how it could be understood and optimized. The ensuing document is entitled “First Time Here?: A marketer oriented approach to optimizing online conversions”. The always amazing Bryan Eisenberg of FutureNow and Always Be Testing fame wrote a great forward for the piece, and we will be doing a webinar with him next month on this segment.
Jason Burby of ZAAZ also referenced the whitepaper recently in his column on ClickZ. He is also a prolific writer on our industry, having penned a great book on Actionable Web Analytics. It has been pretty exciting to have two of my favorite writers in the industry think well of this work, and I hope it inspires debate about how to understand, and talk to, the first time visitor segment. Click here if you would like to download a copy.
Those are the big updates for now, and I will be back online in the next week or so with a more formal post.
Cheers,
Jim
UPDATE - Since the original publishing of this blog, I have been asked to give a presentation on the First Time Visitor Segment at a Web Analytics Wednesday in Montreal, October 15th. If you are in the area we would love to meet you. Sign up Here if you are interested.
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1 Comment | Posted in Sitebrand
September 16, 2008 by Jim Cain
As an analyst for a vendor, I get a question asked all the time that I am sure all vendors and practitioners work with when dealing with their respective HiPPOs (Highest Paid Persons Opinion - An acronym I use fondly).
“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
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No Comments | Posted in Jim Cain, Web Analytics, online marketing
August 25, 2008 by Jim Cain
There has been a bit of concern recently in the analytics community about the new version of Internet Explorer and its potential ability to significantly increase the number of Internet users who delete or block 
cookies from their browser.
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
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2 Comments | Posted in Conversion, Customer Experience, Jim Cain, Optimization, Personalization, Sitebrand, Web Analytics, eCommerce
August 12, 2008 by Jim Cain
Like just about every term in digital marketing (marketing in general to be honest), branding can be a little confusing to explain and apply. Our good friends at Wikipedia describe Brand as “a symbolic embodiment of all the information connected to a company, product or service.”
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
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No Comments | Posted in Conversion, Customer Experience, Jim Cain, Optimization, Personalization, Search Marketing, eCommerce
July 29, 2008 by Jim Cain
A little over a year ago Clare (my better half) was getting ready to buy a new car. I went to a few of the dealerships with her, and at the first place we went to salespeople assumed that because we were a couple and I was the man, I was the one making the decision. Suffice it to say they did not get a deal, and this is an example of bad segmentation that I will tackle another time…
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
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No Comments | Posted in Conversion, Customer Experience, Jim Cain, Optimization, Personalization, Web Analytics, eCommerce
July 16, 2008 by Jim Cain
I had a good chat this morning with my colleague Larry (Manager, Corporate Training) about a term he has been bumping into in the last few weeks called ‘Social Conversion’. It all seems to stem from a nice blog-post that was written last month by Justin Talerico, CEO of ion Interactive, about the importance of monitoring, understanding and optimizing the micro-conversions associated to social media marketing.
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!
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3 Comments | Posted in Conversion, Customer Experience, Jim Cain, Optimization, Personalization, Social Media, Web Analytics, eCommerce
July 7, 2008 by Jim Cain
For our customers, working with Sitebrand is pretty exciting. Frankly, any site specific optimization initiative is exciting, because most marketers have historically been blocked out of the website by technical/political barriers, and optimization allows them much greater control over their conversion rates and sales. Because of this excitement (and the associated results) there has been rapid growth in visibility and adoption of optimization as an online marketing practice.
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
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No Comments | Posted in Conversion, Customer Experience, Jim Cain, Optimization, Personalization, Web Analytics, eCommerce
June 20, 2008 by Jim Cain
There is a lack of tested business practice when it comes to website optimization. This is because it is a brand new aspect of the (in itself young) discipline of eMarketing. That said, one of the most compelling aspects of optimization is that there is no right way or wrong way to do it. Given the cyclical nature of an optimization initiative, if you make a change to your website and get lousy results, you are that much more likely to do better on the next pass.
Given that Sitebrand is a personalization company, we spend all of our time assisting customers in getting their own conversion optimization efforts off the ground. Because of that, I have a few points that I think should be considered by any marketer about to get started in this space. If you follow the first point, and remain aware of the second, you should be off to the races in optimizing the desired outcomes of your web property.
POINT 1: You can’t score if you don’t know where the goal is.
Don’t bother tinkering with the zeros and ones that make up your website unless you are aware of and educated on your traffic and the goals you have for them. Let’s say you want to rebuild your home page to grow your conversion rate (for simplicity, let’s assume conversion equals making a shopping cart purchase:
• How many page views does the home page have?
• What is the bounce rate for this page?
• How many home page views were the entry pages for a session?
o What is the conversion rate of this visitor type?
o How does it compare to the overall site average?
o If it was 10% higher, how much money is that worth?
o How does it trend for the last year?
These questions will allow you to see a rough revenue opportunity for your optimization, and provide some baselines to show if your changes have created a noticeable lift in goal outcomes over time. The end-game of optimization is not a feeling, it’s a number. Make sure you have clarity about what the number is and where it comes from before you start trying to play with it.
(If you want to get really into it, start drilling down a little and looking at the conversion rates of homepage visitors by source, geographic location and new or returning visitor status. Give each one an opportunity cost, and alter your page to speak to the one worth the most money. When you are done drop me an email, I would love to hear about the results)
POINT 2: There is a difference between optimizing the medium and the message. (sorry Mr. McLuhan)
An important consideration when considering online optimization is that it is delivered in two key pieces, what you say and where you say it.
Sounds Obvious huh? However most of the current discipline around site optimization focuses on where things are said. Look at some of the case studies online, where you see that moving the ‘buy now’ button two inches on the screen has an impact on conversion, or making a green menu blue decreased bounce rates by 52%….
I’m not at all saying the numbers are wrong, but I am saying that changing the shopping isles and front door of your store is only part of the equation. Moreover, it the most easily automated. Someday soon a software tool will be announced and:
• it will have a really cool sounding algorithm
• it will take every element of your site and shuffle them in real time to optimize your store layout.
Proper site optimization takes what is being said in equal (or perhaps more) consideration with where it is being said. The better your dialog with a visitor, the better your goal outcomes. The better your dialog with a visitor, the better your goal outcomes. Look at the messaging, the incentives, the calls to action and the relevance to the visitors you are targeting. You need as much Eisenberg as you do Taguchi.
Map out your goals properly, remember that the message is important too, and have fun growing your business.
“Obstacles are those frightful things you see when you take your eyes off your goal” – Henry Ford
Cheers,
Jim
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1 Comment | Posted in Conversion, Customer Experience, Jim Cain, Optimization, Personalization, Web Analytics, eCommerce
June 13, 2008 by Jim Cain
The traditional website is becoming de-centralized, as most traditional websites are fragmenting into hundreds of micro-footprints through blogs, social networks, newsgroups and multiple wholly owned properties.
At the same time, the market at large is calling for online marketing management software to become centralized (see Forrester), so that more cohesive campaigns can be built, and disparate datasets can be merged together for better visibility.
To quote a great Ottawa personality: Isn’t it ironic.
I think the answer to this ironic situation is in another quote (and source of online flame wars) - “Web analytics is hard”.
While it is definitely a legitimate hot-button and market requirement, a centralized online marketing suite is not a silver bullet. There is no doubt that it is impossible to make decisions about current successes and future plans if you have fifteen sets of reports from fifteen disparate tools.
We deal with this on a day to day basis at Sitebrand. If a customer uses us to personalize messages to a visitor from a particular affiliate with the goal of growing conversions, they now have three reports from three vendors, none of which connect, and all of which have different numbers. Yikes.
Given the aggressive adoption (and evangelization) of 2.0 technologies and marketing methods however, no online marketing suite will ever be able to solve problems out of the box.
In five years from now, it might be effective to push a viral video out through RSS specifically to mobile browsers, with the hope that they click through the video to a Facebook widget created to have friends push coupons to your products to each other, which can be used online or in store.
And I can promise you, even in five years there won’t be enough Red Bulls and developers in the world to build transparent reporting around that initiative.
All that is going to happen is that the leading thinkers in the space are going to say “Online Marketing Suites are hard”. And they will be right.
Build a plan, work the plan, show the plan worked. We are still struggling with it as we come to the end of Commerce 1.0, and we will keep struggling with it until we standardize on ‘what should be done’.
Perhaps this is a job for the WAA standards committee. They are doing a great job in standardizing the common terms in analytics so that the industry stays on the same page.
An interesting next step for them might include a practical document standardizing what a team of web practitioners should be doing for procedures, tools usage, documentation etc. Better yet, including a scoring system so that readers could self-evaluate. Think Gartner maturity model, but for eCommerce.
The moral of the story is that there is no piece of software, in present or future, that will help execute on a plan when no plan has been built. I think if more web teams knew where they ranked based on holistic best practices, they could take some of the ‘hard’ out of web 1.0, and be prepared to reap more value than hype from the next generation of technologies and practices.
Cheers,
Jim
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1 Comment | Posted in Conversion, Customer Experience, Jim Cain, Optimization, Personalization, RSS Marketing, Social Media, Viral Marketing, Web Analytics, eCommerce
