With the holidays upon us, and the results being less than expected, there are a lot of scared people out there in digital commerce world.  Consumers aren’t sure if they should spend, retailers aren’t sure if they will spend, and vendors aren’t sure if their services will be required.  Place vicious cycle here.

Online retail is still growing, just not at the breakneck speed of the last few years.  Internet Retailer reported that in October, online sales grew by only 1 percent.  Newsflash:  it still grew.  Every other type of retail shrank.  This doesn’t mean that times will not get leaner, it just means that digital sales are better positioned to ride out (and potentially thrive) in a time of uncertainly.

So here is my recession proof marketing tip, and it only really applies to websites that have deployed an analytics tool on their website.  To be honest, if you haven’t deployed analytics on your website by now, you might have missed the window of opportunity to be successful online.

TIP: Put some effort into taking advantage of what your analytics are trying to tell you, and not only will you be able to do more with less, you will be able to grow your business while others fail.

Using and profiting from your web analytics data involves a little bit of elbow grease, not an MBA.  (Note:  I have a degree in Comparative Politics and am no math whiz)  Many of the people we talk to feel that analytics is a purely bookish discipline that they will not be able to get into because they think of themselves as designers/catalogers/developers etc.

Not an excuse.

The tools you have deployed to monitor your web visitors are easy enough to use, they are just hard to take advantage of without some work and a good plan.  Without wanting to get into the ‘web analytics is easy or hard’ debate, I am of the opinion that getting web analytics to work is pretty easy, and getting web analytics to work for you is hard.

I try to write these blogs in such a way that there are always a few tactical takeaways.  So without further ado, here are a few steps that anyone with analytics and a website can take to better weather this economic storm.  I have also embedded a ton of links to relevant info to make following

1) Make sure your analytics is set up properly:  Validate your data to make sure it is accurate.  Run WASP against your deployment to make sure your tagging is done properly.  Compare your revenue results in analytics against your shopping cart.  This exercise will not only increase your confidence in your analytics, it will make it much easier and intuitive to use the tool.

2) Make a ‘top 5 list’ of the questions that keep you up at night.  Every online marketer has these questions.  How is my paid search strategy really doing.  Do visitors from outside the United States ever buy anything?  Do our blogs and forums help visitors convert?  What is the return on investment for my website technology spends? ( I could go on at length).

3) Open up your analytics and try to answer the questions.  I would guess that with a little bit of work you will at least see roughly how to get your answers.  Reading a few blogs and books will put you well on the way to getting the definitive answers you want.

4) Action on what your have learned to either streamline or grow your business.  Did you find out that you generate a bunch of European traffic but no conversions?  Try building a European shipping page.  Do you have areas of your search marketing spend that don’t make you much money?  Stop paying for it.

5) Repeat.  Questioning, answering and optimizing is a continuous process.  Plan on spending even one day a month on this process and you will learn a ton about your business as you are strengthening it.

This whole process is going to be a lot easier than you think it is.  The analytics community is very open and helpful, there are a ton of great free resources, and YOU ALREADY HAVE ALL THE DATA.

Have fun, happy optimizing, and feel free to drop me a line if you have any questions.  With a little hard work and the right questions about your business, we’ll see you on the other side of the recession.

Cheers (and happy holidays),

Jim

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.

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.

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Resistance is futile

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

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