Why Web Analytics Fail Marketers #OMSMIN

On Friday I attended Online Marketing Summit 2010 in Minneapolis. It was a very informative day and I highly recommend that you consider attending when it comes to your city. Adam Kahlow and team offers up great speakers (both local and national) and the opportunity to network with them.

Adam Proehl of NordicCllck Interactive talked about Why Web Analytics Fail Marketers (And How to Stop Failing)

I live blogged this, so please forgive the format. My comments are in parenthesis.

Marketing IS Sales  (yes, yes!)

web –based leads are like printing money

- what’s happening with the leads? are they getting followed up on & converted?

   – what are sales’ view of web leads? 

Need to close the loop

Priorities –

– Facts & truths aren’t always right – numbers don’t always tell the truth

fuzzy numbers

- multiple platforms trying to measure the same thing

- do we know the real number?

- can we explain the why?

- How sound is the measurement methodology?

Sometimes things just don’t work –

tagging nightmares, site architecture issues, etc

High Level Corporate Initiatives

Company Objectives – you are touching many areas

Revenue, Operations, Stakeholders

(customer service, sales, marketing, communications, etc)

do you know where you fit into this? If not, then you’re setting yourself up to fail

There are plenty of analytics tools:

The tools don’t mean anything. (I have always said that, it’s not about the technology, it’s about the people)

Need to understand two things:

Know what your business objectives are.

What are your customers/prospects’ objectives (what point are they at in the buying cycle?)

- Understand your corporate goals – here are some examples

15% increase in revenue

10% decrease in customer service

The Rules in setting biz objectives

Be Specific – Be Measurable – Be Realistic (achievable) – Be Relevant – Set Timeframe

They need to fit into the strategic corporate goals

We want more leads. – not a goal

This is a goal:   We want to see a 20% increase in new site registrations by the end of 2010

Don’t forget your customer’s objectives!

Why did they visit your site?

What are they doing on the site?

How did they get here?

What state of the buying cycle are they in?

What signals are they giving?

From a technical standpoint –

Always befriend people smarter than you (IT)

Outline business case

Examples and documentation

Persistent vigilance

have the technical requirements

Define Success early – before the project goes live

Metrics? how will we know if this is successful

Methodology? where will the data come from?

Benchmarks?

Get buy-in

Acknowledge the Fuzz – (things aren’t black/white anymore – yes!)

Open for interpretation?

Know why it’s fuzzy

Assumptions?

Site / Tracking “quirks”

“You’re never as good as bad numbers”

What web analytics is –

trending data

directional gauge

‘a’ measurement

What web analytics isn’t –

perfect

spot on accurate

—

Some goals –

Fail fast  (do it early & learn from it)

Close the loop

get the value of the conversion

“Stack rank” – prioritize initiatives

Methodology matters a lot

Reporting –

Your boss & exec’s – provide a one page report

Finance – provide a one page report

Sales exec – one page – sales leads – have a continual conversation

Some useful & free tools

‘ Share this (free & integrates with Google analytics)

Snip-n-Tag (Firefox Add On) – URL shortener that creates campaigns works w/ Google Analytics

Better Google Analytics (Firefox Add on)

Enhanced Google Analytics (Firefox Add on)

Twitalyzer – integrates with Google Analytics – can see who is influencing

Bit.ly site – nice stats

Outbound Link Tracking – Google Analytics

Excellent Analytics (Excel Plug-In) – if you’re running the same queries (log into Google Analytics from Excel)  — (that sounds kind of scary!

Rank Checker (Firefox plug in)

Key Takeaways

• Understand reasons for failure
• Involve the key stakeholders
• No one tool can measure everything – understand limitations
• Fundamentals matter the most (biz objectives, methodology)

———————–

It was an excellent session and underlines how Alterian’s Web Journey fills a gap in providing information to marketers beyond traditional web analytics about the interaction that consumers are having with their web pages.

What are your challenges with web analytics?

Customers in Control: Part 3 of the Social Media ROI Series

Building your brand and product awareness isn’t about marketing, it’s about the quality of customer service you provide. Your customer service team works with customers by mail, email & phone. But there is a new channel: the social web that consists of Facebook, Twitter, and the numerous other online places. Are you listening to your customers online? Excellent customer service can differentiate your brand from others. My white paper: Customers in Control: The ROI of Listening to Your Customers outlines how social media monitoring can greatly improve your customer service efforts. This is the third in a series. You can find the first two here. We are also having a webinar on May 4th on the topic. What you Write Matters: Social media customer service that supports your customer and champions your brand Register here

A Framework for Social Marketing Analytics

Jeremiah Owyang and John Lovett have provided the industry with a great resource.

In March Jeremiah and Ray Wang of Altimeter published their report on Social CRM: The New Rules of Relationship Management.

Altimeter has partnered with Web Analytics Demystified to provide frameworks for social media analytics. I appreciate their effort to survey the social media monitoring community and then share their work in a creative commons sense.

One thing to note is that the chart below (from the report) doesn’t give attribution to Alterian SM2’s capabilities.

Audience Engagement: Alterian SM2 tracks comments, linkbacks, retweets & quantitatively measures them

Active Advocates: There’s a report called ‘Key Authors’ in SM2 which lists the authors that are creating the most content. Their influence can also be identified

Advocate Influence: SM2 identifies influence for all of the conversations that it gathers

Idea Impact: SM2 measures positive & negative sentiment and also tone. It also offers the unique capability to customize the dictionary used for determining them

 

You can see the whole report here which includes the formulas for calculating the metrics. You can download your own copy from Slideshare.

Altimeter Report: Social Marketing Analytics

View more documents from Jeremiah Owyang.

Are you ready to engage?

The last 18 months has seen some of the most significant changes in the marketing space in decades. As social media has exploded in popularity, businesses have begun to realize that anyone with an internet connection has the ability to damage their brand. Subsequently poorly targeted email campaigns or generic websites are no longer good enough to engage with both prospects and customers. Social media has empowered the customer in a way never before thought possible and brand engagement has had to evolve to provide the level of service the public now demands.

Late last week we launched the results of our annual survey looking at the methods marketers are employing and the areas in which they’re investing. The results through out some captivating statistics to support the evolution we know is taking place

• 66 percent of respondents will be investing in social media marketing in the next 12 months
• Of those, 40 percent said they would be shifting more than a fifth of their traditional direct marketing budget towards funding these activities
• The majority of respondents (67 percent) feel social media is either ‘increasingly important’ or ‘critical to success’.

The encouraging thing is that businesses have begun to recognize the importance in engaging with their audience via social channels, and are investing the dollars they need to get results. 2009 was the year in which businesses began to experiment with social marketing programs; 2010 will the year in which they formalize them and are expected to get some tangible results from their outreach. And to do this they need some form of measurement.

Our research also found that more than a third of respondents are planning to invest in social media monitoring and analysis tools. This is a relatively high figure given the immaturity of social media but the need to listen and respond to conversations, and monitor the buzz that social media marketing is generating is critical.

Tools like SM2 can help businesses stay abreast of conversations and respond to customers and prospects – whether their conversations are positive or negative. Engaging with customers on a one-to-one basis is increasingly critical as marketers need to find a way for their brand or product to appeal to the individual. The question is, are you ready to engage?

2010: Predicting a new decade of marketing trends

With 2010 upon us, it is time to start thinking about what trends are in store for the next 12 months and beyond. Here at Alterian, we’ve worked with our customers and partners to put together a list of predictions that focus on more effective ways to engage with customers, as well as the importance of measurement and accountability.

If this past year has shown us anything, it’s that due to the recession we’ve seen online monitoring and analytics become a critical component to marketing programs.  Consumers now have the opportunity to become active participants in shaping brands online and smart businesses are listening, engaging while adding value to the active conversations happening around them. 

As we continue to see social media take hold and online monitoring become an important piece in the marketing puzzle, businesses will emerge from the recession looking to further strengthen engagement and interaction with their customers. 

While our list below predicts what we believe then next 10 marketing trends we believe will be important in 2010, what do you think?

Let us know in the comments section which trend you’d like to see us dive into a bit deeper  and I’ll write a follow up blog on the topic that gets the most interest.

1. Social media will move towards ubiquity:

IDC survey data shows more than 50% of worldwide workers are leveraging the free, public social media sites like LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook for business today. Rather than being hype it will simply become normal and part of the everyday mix that works alongside email as a principle form of communication online.

2. Companies will have a social media policy:

As social media continues to integrate into the marketing and business mix, formal rules of engagement will become more widespread. Many companies are likely to come up against conflict when they try to extend their social media efforts across the board. There will be a need for a significant culture shift in order to overcome these barriers. As social media continues to raise its profile amongst corporate divisions, more companies will invest in Social Media specialists to guide their efforts both internally and externally.

3. Doing more with less:

This has been the mantra for all businesses throughout 2009 but will continue through the adoption of analytics and marketing software. Marketing departments are under increasing pressure to improve effectiveness and efficiencies with marketing campaigns, and also to achieve more, all with decreased budgets. 2009 was about how to make your business machine run harder and faster in a bid to stay competitive in a downturn, where consumer spending is in decline or being replaced by reason to buy at all.  This will now convert into the need to not only prove the value of your products to consumers but also the value of your marketing strategies as a whole.

4. Data analysts will become hot property for marketing departments:

Introducing analytics, or better analytics means empowering marketing with intelligence about their customers and prospects, so they can more rapidly, and more accurately, identify the hidden value in their customer and prospect databases. Analyzing the operational efficiency of every marketing department and taking action as required also means a marketing dividend can be realised. This can either be used to increase marketing spend or to maintain marketing spend if budgets are reduced; in essence, do more with less.

5. Measurability of marketers/measuring ROI:

At a time of economic uncertainty, more companies look to uncover cost savings or serve customers more effectively through leveraging social technology. However, the increased pressure from the boardroom to justify marketing spend, or time investment, means that marketing departments have to show value by measuring ROI.

6. Getting access to customer data:

This has become more possible with the introduction of social media platforms, but gaining access to the right data, the right channels and the key sentiments about your brand requires effective online monitoring software.  Social Media offers the perfect opportunity to revolutionise CRM tools and build true customer engagement programmes that are bespoke for each individual consumer, thus helping to deliver ROI.

7. The necessary technology for effective marketing:

Companies without the right monitoring, reporting, analytics and execution software are companies without a future. With the increasing importance of the internet for businesses, online marketing and monitoring allow effective one on one engagement that shape successful and focused marketing campaigns.

8. Integration of platforms and processes will be critical:

There is a proliferation of things to monitor, measure and manage, making it very difficult and time consuming for marketers to pull together the overall picture for integrated campaigns. There will therefore be a move towards single integrated software platforms so that campaign planning and management are integrated with web and email.

9. Recalibrate marketing for engagement:

Brands focus on content but with publishers desperate to protect revenues by charging for content, brands will increasingly look to develop content strategies that bring value to their customers.  Social Media Monitoring will be the key weapon for brands building these strategies.

10. Consumer empowerment:

Brand value will be influenced more and more by the consumer, making it more important than ever for a brand to have measures of authenticity that will aid in brand differentiation and consumer engagement – you can no longer rely on your brand name as you once did. Organisations are being increasingly judged by their actions and willingness to involve customers, visibly.

Now that you’ve had a chance to read our predictions, what do you think?  Leave us a comment and give us your feedback. We look forward to hearing from you.

Webinars on Social Media Monitoring for Marketers

Did you catch the webinar this month? I was speaking at a conference so I watched it after the fact. It was very informative and featured Suresh Vittal, Principal Analyst, Forrester Research. Suresh. He covered the following aspects:

• The changing marketing landscape

• The case for listening

• What should you know to get started?

• How does Listening inform your marketing communications process?

• Recommendations

He listed 10 ways that marketers can use social media monitoring that I found quite interesting. He also included many statistics.

You can view a recording of the webinar or download the slide deck. You may enjoy browsing all of our resources for marketers.

In November I will be presenting a webinar on Best Practices to Maximize Your Social Media Monitoring Efforts. (Use the link to register.)

My presentation will cover frequently discussed topics.

• Common Applications of Social Media Monitoring
• Search Design
• Dealing with Noise and Spam
• Reports and Analysis
• Actions Based on Insights that Result in ROI

What questions would you like to have answered?

The Web Analytics Revolution

The Web Analytics Revolution

Eric T Peterson, a veteran of the web analytics business, Principal Consultant at Web Analytics Demystified and author some of must read books on Web Analytics has published a report on what he sees as the current revolution in Web Analytics.

This report focuses on the needs for businesses to not just create reports but to develop insights and recommendations from the data – something that when I am talking about web engagement I have referred to as ‘actionable insight’ and it’s about more than pretty graphs.

Peterson also discusses the data that organisations are capturing and reporting on, the wealth of data available to organisations, from web analytics, to credit card transactions to observations about location – GPS data. He also covers the privacy issues wrapped around that – that people will give up their data, but it has to be in exchange for something valuable to them.

I like Peterson’s analogy of it being like money – the difference between using the money you have and just storing it – in terms of the potential rewards. As the report says:

If today’s business leaders want to take advantage of this treasure trove of intelligence about customers and prospects, a new approach is required. First and second‐generation analytic vendors are good at what they do, but mining for correlation and causation within massive, disparate online and offline data sets is simply not what they do. To take the next step, business owners need to explicitly recognize the inherent limitations in these systems and augment them with appropriate systems that are built to extract, transform, load and analyze data regardless of the source.

With certain symmetry with our own Customer Engagement vision, he refers to a third generation of analysis tools that are bringing this together – that companies who treat offline and online as separate data silos will concede ground to their competition that look at this more holistically across their enterprise.

As the report concludes:

The only thing worse than not having data, is having data and not being able to use it.

You can download a copy of the report here.

Eric T Peterson - a veteran of the web analytics business, Principal Consultant at Web Analytics Demystified and author some of must read books on Web Analytics – has published a report on what he sees as the current revolution in Web Analytics.

This report focuses on the needs for businesses to not just create reports but to develop insights and recommendations from the data – something that when I am talking about web engagement I have referred to as ‘actionable insight’ and it’s about more than pretty graphs.

Peterson also discusses the data that organisations are capturing and reporting on, the wealth of data available to organizations, from web analytics, to credit card transactions to observations about location – GPS data. He also covers the privacy issues wrapped around that – that people will give up their data, but it has to be in exchange for something valuable to them.

I like Peterson’s analogy of it being like money – the difference between using the money you have and just storing it – in terms of the potential rewards. As the report says:

If today’s business leaders want to take advantage of this treasure trove of intelligence about customers and prospects, a new approach is required. First and second‐generation analytic vendors are good at what they do, but mining for correlation and causation within massive, disparate online and offline data sets is simply not what they do. To take the next step, business owners need to explicitly recognize the inherent limitations in these systems and augment them with appropriate systems that are built to extract, transform, load and analyze data regardless of the source.

With certain symmetry with our own Customer Engagement vision, he refers to a third generation of analysis tools that are bringing this together – that companies who treat offline and online as separate data silos will concede ground to their competition that look at this more holistically across their enterprise.

As the report concludes:

The only thing worse than not having data, is having data and not being able to use it.

You can read more about what Peterson has to say or download a copy of the report here.

Seven Business Objectives and their ROI for Monitoring Social Media

Michael Leander Nielson of Oslo  invited me to present a webinar on Business Objectives for Social Media Monitoring. It’s a popular topic and we had great attendance!

I covered the following:

• Which objectives to consider when defining your social media monitoring (SMM) strategy
• What types of tools are available
• How to make sense of the data that is gathered
• The ROI and benefits of social media monitoring

During the webinar it was interesting the exchange of Twitter usernames transition to  requesting to continue the conversation in a community. It underlined how people with a similar affinity will want to gather! Everyone is welcome to join our Community .

View more presentations from Connie Bensen.

One of the challenges that I have in presenting webinars is that I feel like I’m talking to an empty space. But that wasn’t the case in this one. There was a lot of conversation happening in the chat box. I had 5 poll questions and that generated more conversation on the side as well making much more interactive. Here are the results:

Many of those that chose ‘Other’ posted their background in the chat.

I found this to be very interesting that the majority were B2B’s!

This explains why we’re so busy. Social Media monitoring isn’t mainstream yet. People are still learning.

Attendees were primarily from Europe, and there were a lot of questions about language capabilities.

It’s really important to know what your objective is for listening.

I will post a link to the recording of the webinar when it is available.

Google – The New Citizen Engagement Portal

Recently I was fortunate enough to meet with David Pullinger from the UK governments Central Office of Information(COI), who are driving our government’s citizen engagement strategy  and mandating the policy around which government must adhere to.

It was an incredibly absorbing meeting as we took a fast ride around all elements of where a citizen touches the government, (each of which I would love to have explored for longer than we had) and an interesting mix of mandatory policy, education and technical enablement that his department are driving.

David courteously and patiently indulged my interruptions and there is plenty to write about but, in this post, I’m just going to focus on one very interesting topic – the reduction in the number of government websites.

At first glance it’s easy to assume that this initiative is the old clumsy cost cutting exercise, a not terribly enlightened confusion between the words ‘platform’ and ‘website’,  which we’ve seen before. Whilst there is an understandable element of cost consciousness in this initiative – of recognising that a single WCM platform can manage multiple sites and a new website shouldn’t demand a fresh procurement process – I thought there was a more interesting driver behind it.

That driver is a recognition that the people look for information using search, not by turning up to the correct government agency website (or some obscure sub-site) and dutifully following the navigation. They are using Google and choosing from a list of results which is in direct contrast to the early days of DirectGov – of grouping information around ‘life stage’ on a single portal and assuming people will slot into the right shaped information hole. Today there is recognition that our lives are much more complex and subtle than that, and the way we access information reflects this.

Recognising that would not seem to be rocket science, ooh Truscott that’s SEO you say. But I say this is subtly different. It’s different because if you are looking for the cheapest TV or the information about Persuasive Content, the dynamic of sites competing for those clicks is different from if you are a Government hoping to engage with your people.

If you are a Government agency that provides services, advice or benefits for your citizen you are not competing for clicks – you are the authority, the source; you have the likely #1 search result the searcher needs. For example, there is only one definitive version of the truth when it comes to entitlement to state benefits, how safe a certain food is, the cheapest public transport to Manchester, whether it’s safe to travel to Uzbekistan and how to get a Visa.

What I think COI are saying is that by pruning the number of websites it avoids agencies and other government bodies, sub-sites and campaign sites from competing for those positions on the Google rankings, enabling the citizen to cut through the clutter to the single source of the truth.  They are looking to effectively manage that search page as our portal into government.

This then shifts their focus from individual website silos, to figuring out how search can bring together the information that the citizen needs – a single web page then needs to stand alone in terms of content and context.

To deliver this the UK government is on the vanguard of adopting the semantic web, standards such as RDFa and attracting the advice of Internet luminaries such as Tim Berners-Lee (read about their call for developers).

There is plenty more to explore here, but first lesson of Citizen Engagement seems to me to be that the COI have recognised that Google is the new Government portal.

Alterian is significant supplier of WCM software to the UK government and you can read more about what we do around Citizen Engagement.

Five Myths about Automatic Sentiment Analysis

Sentiment analysis is a hot topic. If the social media monitoring tool doesn’t have it, there’s criticism. If it does have it then there’s skepticism. So let’s take some time to talk about these five myths:

1. The technology isn’t accurate
2. Sentiment doesn’t take into account cultural differences
3. Positives and negatives cancel each other
4. Can’t identify the influence of those expressing the sentiment
5. Sentiment doesn’t indicate action

1. The technology isn’t accurate

Sentiment analysis using natural language processing. Yes, it is done by a machine and no, it’s not 100 % accurate. The industry estimates that it’s at 70 – 80%. We are very open about that and recommend that it be used as an overview.

In using a tool like Techrigy SM2 for automatic sentiment, customers can see the overall view of thousands of search results. It would take hours to manually review the same amount and one still wouldn’t have an overall sense of the percentage positive vs negative.

SM2 has a customizable dictionary so users have the option of reviewing a sample of results and revising the dictionary. This functionality was added to accommodate the language differences of various verticals. For example “well” in the health industry is a positive thing, but in the energy industry, an oil well has no bearing on sentiment.

2. Sentiment doesn’t take into account cultural differences

One of the first dictionaries that we customized was for our friends down under. Australia has some vernacular that is unique to it’s region. No matter the location, those lexical idiosyncrasies can be added to SM2’s dictionary.

3. Positives and negatives cancel each other

Marta Strickland listed this in her recent blog post: Five Reasons Sentiment Analysis Won’t Ever Be Enough

Many people assume this. In SM2 a search result can be attributed with positive and negative sentiment. In addition, a search result may have 3 positive aspects and 1 negative. This would also be charted as such (3 in the positive column, and 1 in the negative).

This information is then considered along with the length of the post when calculating tone.

4. Can’t identify the influence of those expressing the sentiment

That is possible and it utilizes the power of SM2’s categories.

Let’s consider the negative sentiment around McDonald’s McCafe. We want to see the negative results in order of influence (SM2 refers to it as Popularity).

By creating a category called ‘Neg McCafe Sentiment’ and assigning those results to it, we can then view them in the Demographics report. This will allow you to see the distribution from highest to lowest influence. You can drill in at each level.

And they can also be displayed under ‘View Results’ and displayed in order of Highest Popularity first. This is a nice way to browse them.

5. Sentiment doesn’t indicate action

I agree that it doesn’t indicate it, but I would also argue that automatic sentiment makes it very easy to realize trends/patterns that would otherwise be very difficult to identify.

By reviewing the results under Negative Sentiment in the McCafe example, some trends become apparent. And they fit under the following business objectives:

• feedback on the products – product development
• complaints about customer service – customer service
• irritation with specific ad’s – marketing/advertising
• reference of being diet conscious – marketing research

What do you think about automated sentiment analysis?

Katie Paine has a poll on her blog.

And Andy Beal offers another viewpoint.