Six Sigma
Web Analytics is Like Eating an Artichoke…
Most people have to put in so much energy to get so little out.
You shouldn’t feel bad if this is your situation. It’s unfortunately quite common, as many of the people who attended Search Engine Strategies San Jose and the Web Analytics Association Base Camp confirmed for me in the last couple of weeks. As anyone who attended last year’s Emetrics Summit knows, there’s a real shortage of analysts out there — talented or otherwise. You can see it in job search queries for “web analytics jobs” like this one.
Finding this “free agent person” is like finding a wooden nickel. Not likely.
On the other hand, I’ve met many organizations where all they do is hire someone just to go through the reports, create pretty Excel or Flash presentations, then distribute the reports to a group of people. They should consider changing the name of this position to “reporter” because all they do is spread the news. Don’t worry. Many of the analytics companies are or should be developing web analytics widgets to replace the human reporter. I’m sure you can find something more valuable to do with these people, anyway.
So what can you do?
1. Learn to squeeze more of your current web analytics. Do something quick and actionable like use Google Website Optimizer to run some simple tests on your website and improve your conversion rate like our friends at Jigsaw Health did. This advice can earn you a raise or a promotion, so this week I’ll make time for two more free samples. If you contact me directly, I’d be happy to point out a simple test you could run on your site. Just ask Scott McClintock from Fujitsu how I helped him make thousands of dollars from one of these simple tests.
2. Stop your addiction for useless data. If the information is not actionable or tied to your bottom line ignore it for now. Focus on one key metric or report and focus on taking action based on the report. Practice getting really good at that alone, then move on. I could tell you story after story of companies that focused on a report company-wide and the success they have because of it.
3. Move away from the idea that you need tools, talent, then process, to process, people (talented or not) then tools. The process must be focused on business optimization or in other ways how you you make more revenue by helping customers get what they want so you can get what you want, more revenue. Let us know if you would be interested in attending a workshop that teaches web analytics without the analyst early next year.
How would you finish the line? Web analytics is like…
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Written by:Bryan Eisenberg
2 Ways to Get Started With Personas (Part 1)
I was having a conversation with the experience team at a major “entertainment” company after my presentation at the Internet Retailer conference a few weeks back. We were discussing ways they could get started on Personas, and how to overcome the challenges they’d faced thus far. Given that this dialog took place just off-stage, we had no expectation of privacy. Then again, I had no expectation that well over 100 retailers would be so interested in this conversation as well. It became “the presentation after the presentation”–so much so that the conference producer had to politely ask me to take the impromptu mob outside into the main hall… sorry again, Kurt 
–and I promised all those who wanted to listen in that I’d write up my thoughts and take them to a more appropriate vehicle. So, without further ado…
There are 2 ways to begin a Persona project:
1) Hire a firm to conduct research.
Level of difficulty: easy
Likelihood of success: minimal
Expect to cough up tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars on this research–and the wise marketer would do everything in her power not to entertain discussions of ROI (at least positive) from this exercise. Expect the resulting research to create beautiful-sounding Personas and make excellent posters to put up on the wall. In some organizations, you may even expect a raise for a job well done, but you’ll profit more from selling all your company stock short. (Bryan chronicled this approach in his ClickZ column, but it’s worth diving into even further, because the underlying question marketer’s are asking when they hire a research firm is an understandable, but flawed one.)
The question being asked of the research is, “How do we know which types of people make up our audience?” Cough up the dough, create a survey, and you’ll find out something absurd, like your audience is made up of “Info-Driven types,” “Conquerors,” and “Browse-2-Buy” types. How did they determine that? They asked about past purchases, of course, and–naturally–those are good predictors of future behavior, right?
Let me know how that works out for you.
Our clients undoubtedly tire of hearing us over-communicate, “Believe what they do, not what they say they’ll do“. Why? It’s simple. People lie. Not intentionally per se, but between people telling you what they think you want to hear (in America, there’s a bias against being “wrong”), people telling you what they want to be perceived as (what they wish were the case), and finally, people telling you something they simply don’t know (the right brain makes the decisions, and the left brain articulates & rationalizes them, yet both sides of the brain “speak” in different languages. Ever played the telephone game?), it’s virtually impossible to separate the signal from the noise.
“Who makes up my audience?” isn’t the question to be concerned with; rather, “How will each different type of person approach and buy my product?” The smart marketer uses this last insight to align the sales process with their customers’ buying process.
Let’s look at a concrete example of why “who” makes up your audience is irrelevant, while understanding the “buying mode” they’re in is essential.
My mom is a Methodical personality type, meaning her preference dictates a logical process, and one that is rather deliberate in its pace. She works professionally as a bookkeeper and routinely catches oversights by the auditors of her books. She remarks with bewilderment that someone whose singular concern is maintaining hyper-accuracy of the data can so easily miss the details. Notice, she wouldn’t qualify the details as minute, though to many they would be. To a strong Methodical, no detail is too fine. When she buys, chances are she’ll ask 10 - 20 extra questions than most other buyers, and with each successful answer, she’ll gain a touch more confidence.
My preference shares her bias towards a logical process, but has a much faster pace; what we call a Competitive personality type. Whereas Methodicals need a sense of order (or structure) to their process to gain confidence over time, Competitives are perfectly comfortable living amongst the chaos, and letting intuition guide their decision making process. The Competitive type can quickly dismiss logical-sounding fluff (you know, the statistical correlations marketers present when they have no actual causation to report). Think like “The Donald,” and you’re probably closely resembling the Competitive’s approach. When he buys, he’s in a hurry, and just wants the bottom line.
The key word in the examples above, is preference. My mother doesn’t methodically choose where to get her nails done, or where to go for a special dinner. In both of those cases, she buys more experientially, favoring more of an emotional process, and eschewing her normal deliberate pace for a much quicker one. She’s quite comfortable giving it a whirl. After all, “How bad could it be”? (Spoken like a true Spontaneous type, she’s operating outside of her typical buying mode.)
I went to buy my first car right out of college and, despite my bias toward a logical process, did zero research on the ‘net–and never checked out a consumer report. I also didn’t use my typical fast pace; I was much more deliberate. I talked to other people who’d owned the car previously and asked for their opinions and experiences. I considered the car to be an extension of my personal brand. My process was almost purely emotional and, with the deliberate pace, was the complete opposite of my typical buying preference.
Had the manufacturer done market research and decided Competitive types were their #1 audience segment, what would they have done? Built a micro-site catering only to fast-paced, logical thinkers. If they did, the conversion rate would’ve likely been the same anemic 2.4% we see today (because, after all, that’s what most sites today do: cater to one type of person, usually resembling the CEO/founder or IT professional who put the site together in the first place).
The point is, knowing your audience’s type doesn’t tell you which mode they’ll be in once they buy your product. That’s what you want to know and, unfortunately, research can’t tell you the answer to that question. If it can, it’s totally different research than anyone has ever done before. It involves using live test subjects, and not in some contrived listening lab. It involves designing the experiment so that the subjects don’t know they’re participating, they’re actually operating according to their own motivations. It involves making the experience become the experiment.
Planning the customer experience in advance, so you can hypothesize motivations, will drive their buying process (read: what mode they’ll be in). Once you’ve properly accounted for motivations, you can test their actual behavior–in a real environment–thus proving your assumptions about their motivations and optimizing the experience accordingly. The level of difficulty is far higher than simply hiring a firm to conduct research, but the likelihood of success is infinitely higher. And there’s a process to it, so you don’t have to bite off the entire approach in one sitting. This process leads me back to where I started, the second way to get going on Personas.
To be continued . . .
[Read Part 2 to learn how you can build Personas from the ground up without costly research, and build in the feedback loop necessary to know where you’re right and where you need to focus additional energy.]
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Written by:Howard Kaplan
Web Marketing and Analytics: Process, Talent & Tools
Eric Peterson recently revised Avinash’s 10/90 rule of web analytics to the 10/20/70 Rule for Achievable Web Analytics Success. I agree with both that the key to value and success in web analytics is actually taking action on the data. You don’t get ROI for web analytics by just distributing reports; you actually have to do something with the data
Most people will agree that you need three things to extract value from web analytics:
1. You must have clean, not accurate (that will always be a challenge), data.
2. You must have a talented person who can convert that data and into insight.
3. You must have a talented person who can absorb that insight and act on it..
And you’ll need to follow this process over and over again to get continuous improvement. This is what everybody agrees to be the formula. The truth is that this ONLY works when you have all 3 ingredients.
It’s not easy to find all three, right? There are only a few handfuls of companies that have managed to find all the talent. I wonder how long they can manage to retain it. As Anil points out, there are plenty of people looking to hire these people away from you.
Anyone who’s been in business long enough knows it’s virtually impossible to scale talent significantly. The secret in every industry category is process, people, then tools. Why do so many companies do this in reverse? They buy the tools or tactic du jour (a shiny object problem), then they try to hire someone (that person will “know”) and they never get far enough to actually develop process or get value (the tool didn’t work out).
Think of web analytics as accounting for the Web. Most companies would go out of business (or be unhappily popular with the IRS) if they looked for talent and disregarded standard accounting processes. When everyone is trained in the right process, you can always try and find people who are more talented in accounting. If you can’t find your own accounting genius, then at least you can substitute with someone familiar with the process to get the job done–even if it’s not very creative. Ideally, all your processes should be designed to be utilized by those with less talent, so they can scale.
The reason we at Future Now developed Persuasion Architecture™ (pdf)–a Six Sigma-like process that provides blueprints to plan, measure, and improve your online sales and marketing–is because after years of working with clients optimizing their sites with web analytics and A/B & multivariate testing tools, we realized clients would hit a plateau where they could not break through the optimization brick wall. It didn’t matter if they were retail, B2B, B2C, media or service organizations. They all suffered the same fate.
The main reason for this fate is not because they didn’t have the tools or the talent, but because they didn’t have processes in place to make sure that every bit of marketing they wanted to measure was planned and implemented with measurement in mind. They needed to sort out “fine” signal from noise. When the signal was loud and clear, the low hanging fruit of optimization, it was easier to detect. But without a process to define what signal actually means up-front, it becomes increasingly difficult to listen for it.
Eric Peterson was the first to write about Persuasion Architecture in a book called Web Analytics Demystified. And I’m continuously grateful to Jim Sterne for asking us to keep trying to explain it to his audiences at the Emetrics Summits. Although we haven’t always done the best job explaining it, Persuasion Architecture solves this critical “process, people, tools” dilemma.
I’ve written volumes on Persuasion Architecture; but because it’s made up of so many disciplines, people have a hard time grasping it without actually seeing it. I’m going to summarize the process again:
- People do things for their own reasons. So, first clarify what makes different kinds of people click. This is segmentation based on psychographics and linguistic preferences, since that is how people actually navigate and make decisions on the web. (Uncover your Personas)
- Model a blueprint of those clicks to plan the experience that helps your Personas buy the way they want to. This is a click-based experience model, unlike the wireframes people use, but more similar to the way developers plan interaction states in software.
- Build your website from that model which defines the responsibilities of every word, pixel and click. This is where it’s valuable to have talented marketing and creative staff or resources. Could you go to your site’s homepage now, click on any link and then tell me why any phrase, link or image exists? Which market segment should it appeal to? What action do you hope people in that segment will take after reading those words, seeing that image or clicking that hyperlink?
- Once every business decision and click is documented in the model, development times can decrease by over 30%. You’ll recover more than the time spent by reducing the number of iterations copywriters, designers and developers go through in more traditional website design.
- Learn from every click you’ve modeled to see if your Personas click as you expected (the virtually neglected but real value of web analytics).
- If the clicks aren’t what you expected, continuously improve what to click and what the clicks say. You do this by first testing your execution (try variations of the same headlines, copy or images to accomplish the same objectives you specified in the model in different styles or formats); if you try several variations and you don’t move the needle, you should re-examine the assumptions that went into defining that particular piece of the overall objective.
Like accounting, it’s deliberate, and less exciting creatively, but anyone can do it. And anyone can then use web analytics to continuously improve their web marketing. Isn’t that what companies are looking for?
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Written by:Bryan Eisenberg
You’ll Never Be Done Fixing Your Site
Even though your site might not seem broken because you’re making sales or getting leads, trust me: it’s broken.
I don’t mean to discourage you but, rather, to help you understand that as long as you aren’t converting 100% of your visitors, there’s room for ongoing improvement and room to make more money or generate more leads.
No one has a perfect sales process online that is mapped out to every individual, idiosyncratic buying process of every potential customer. You can’t just fix your site in one shot and say it’s perfect; it’s literally impossible to do so.
To put this in perspective, most websites are converting less than 3% of their visitors and are therefore pushing away 97% or more of their visitors. If they can just convert a slightly larger percentage of their visitors, think about the dollars this opportunity translates into.
There will always be new questions you realize your customers are asking, that you may not be answering on your site in the appropriate places. You need to be able to translate those findings into your web site in the appropriate places, where the visitors needs to find that information.
Where to Get Started
You can start improving your website’s conversion rate by thinking about how you’re going to find out where the conversion and persuasion challenges lie within your site.
Before you do anything else, take a look at your analytics program to check the site’s performance and to try to understand what’s happening throughout the site. Although you’re likely tracking unplanned scent trails, your analytics can still give you an idea of where things are broken. Even basic analytics information at various key points in the site can help you better understand how to give the site’s visitors what they want. It’s the first baby steps toward analyzing your website.
Instead of looking at your overall conversion rate, look at it on a micro level and track each individual click to see how you can improve micro-conversions.
- Where is your traffic coming from?
- Where is this traffic landing on your site?
- Once the traffic lands on your main landing pages, what are the most common links they are clicking on next?
- Once the visitors click through from the landing pages, to the most commonly clicked pages, what is the drop off rate on these pages?
- Are you persuading them to take action with a clear call to action on these pages and giving them other text links to move forward or are they leaving your site because they don’t have any scent to follow?
Persuasion Tip: If you can’t figure out what the most common questions people are asking when they come to your site are, ask your customer service reps what questions people are calling in with. Go onto message boards to see what people are saying in your industry. And go to your competitors sites and see how they’re funneling visitors around.
Take a look at your shopping cart and/or forms, and ask yourself:
- What is the drop-off rate for those individuals who are entering your shopping cart but not purchasing?
This will give you an indication of whether you’re making it easy for visitor to complete purchases or become leads.
Be the investigator. If your visitors are not taking the actions you want them to, look at the micro landscape and find out why that might be.
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Written by:Melissa Burdon
