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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Engagement is one of these important terms.

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

Cheers,

Jim

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

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

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

Don’t boil the ocean.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Cheers,

Jim

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