FutureNow's GrokDotCom / Marketing Optimization Blog » Web Analytics

A Clicks-to-Bricks Site Optimization Checklist

Melissa Burdon — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 13:30:06 +0000

Because I live in the optimization world, I sometimes assume that certain web site strategies are common sense and obvious. I sometimes forget that the only reason why they are common sense and obvious to me: Because I analyze and optimize web sites all day, every day. That’s a bit of an unfair advantage!

At FutureNow, we work with clients in a variety of industries and business models: e-commerce, lead generation and catalog. Lately, I’ve had the pleasure of working with some clients who are driving traffic from their web sites to physical store locations. These clients share some basic challenges, so I’ve decided to cover things you should be focusing on if you’re an online business trying to drive traffic to a physical location.

First, decide what action you want your visitors to take. We know that you want your visitors to come off your web site and visit your physical location, but what actions do you want them to take ON your web site that demonstrate their interest in coming to your physical location? These are what we call micro conversion points. “Micro” because they are stepping stones on the way to some sort of purchase, which we call a macro conversion.

Here are some examples of actions a site might want the visitor to take to show their interest in moving forward. The following points should be tracked as micro conversion points, and you should optimize to increase these individual conversion rates.

A “locations” page where you feature your address and map with directions. If visitors get to this page, they are interested in where you are located, which shows strong motivation and intent.
Some sites feature a “Find the nearest location” tool.
Booking an appointment for a service or holding/reserving a product.
Contact us page, phone calls and emails are demonstrating that visitors are looking for answers to questions.

Tracking these micro conversion points is important, but it’s also important to follow through and track whether visitors who take these micro conversion actions are resulting in physical store purchases. Many companies track one or the other, but they seem to have a hard time tracking micro conversion rates on their web sites or they have a hard time connecting actions on a web site to actual sales in the physical store.

Here’s a list of questions you can ask yourself in order to get the right tracking in place to start seeing how your online efforts are resulting in ‘brick and mortar’ sales.

Tracking whether a store purchaser was originally a web site visitor:

Are you tracking all in-store purchases, asking each purchaser whether they went to your web site before they came to your physical store? This will help you find out general stats on how many visited your web site prior to purchasing.

Are you collecting email addresses and sending out surveys to in-store purchasers to find out how they came to your store?

For those who identify that they came to your web site before coming to your physical store, are you asking them if they already knew about your store and were just coming to your site to find the address/location or to call the store?
Are you asking them whether they were actually searching for something online, and found your web site as a solution to a problem (and didn’t yet know about your store) and they only found out that you had a physical store from your web site?

Tracking phone calls from listed phone numbers on your web site:

Is the phone number listed on your web site unique from other marketing efforts so that you can track it separately?

Is the phone number you list on various pages unique from the other pages on your site? In other words, if you feature a phone number on the about us page, is it a different number than the one on your contact us page? This would help you identify what pages visitors are making a decision to call from, and will also help you identify what types of things they are asking after visiting specific pages on your site.

Are you collecting enough information from the caller on the phone, so that you can match this up if the visitor turns into a sale in the physical store location?

Purely “clicks and mortar” E-commerce sites see the importance of optimization before the Holiday Season because it directly impacts their sales online. “Bricks and mortar” companies that use their web site to drive traffic to their physical store don’t see the direct impact as strongly, but this could be because they aren’t tracking the impact effectively. If you’re in this situation, use some of the tips above to begin tracking and optimizing. You still have time to optimize for the holiday season and beyond!

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Starting as low as $1000 per month: FutureNow's OnTarget provides on-going expert analysis and prioritized recommendations to improve website conversion rates 40-80% or more. Lead generation and ecommerce versions available.

What Is Your True Conversion Rate?

Bryan Eisenberg — Fri, 11 Sep 2009 12:11:31 +0000

Increasingly more people are joining the optimization crowd. Savvy marketers need to do more with less budget. Others just want to beat their competitors. No matter the motivation, optimizing your conversion rate is a no-brainer.

What seems more difficult is deciding where and what to optimize. All of us have our plates full already. Adding optimization to the heap seems uncomfortable, even painful.

It doesn’t have to be.

It may not be easy, but very little that is worthwhile ever is.

When no clear starting line exists, most marketers will optimize in an ad hoc manner with no clear plan. Often companies will:

Start with their newest campaign

Start with their pet campaign

Optimize their least favorite campaigns

Optimize the easiest campaigns

Optimize everything they can just a little, but never develop a method to get maximum results

Start with the boss’ favorite campaign, least favorite campaign, and so forth

None of these are bad places to start. A little bit of optimization even in a less optimal place is better than no optimization. Still, if you’re looking for a more effective means to get rolling toward results sooner rather than later, here are a few tips.

Preface: Understand Your True Conversion Rate

While your average conversion rate is the total number of unique visitors divided by the number of unique visitors that take a conversion action, your true conversion rate is the number of people who take the action you want them to take divided by the total number of potential people who could have taken that action. Your true conversion rate takes into account how qualified the visitor is and gives you a better indication of how well your site is performing.

Look at Your Marketing Efforts

How are you bringing these people who take action to your Web site? Do they all come by directly typing your URL in their browser’s address bar? Do some search for your brand? Do some search for your category? Or your products? Do others come from organic search? Paid search? E-mails? Affiliates? Do these people come from different Web sites: Google? Bing? Yahoo? Wikipedia? Twitter? Facebook?

Define Your Prospects

You are likely targeting different audiences based on personas or demographics. You might have different efforts for each segment, maybe several efforts per segment. Each segment that was brought in by an individual marketing effort has different, sometimes intersecting, occasionally opposing scenarios (persuasion paths) based on needs, motivation, knowledge, purchase preferences, or some combination thereof.

For example, you sell Web conferencing and buy the keyword “online web conferencing.” You’ve identified three prospect segments: small office/home office, education, and marketing/sales. They all share a keyword and a landing page that gives them the content each segment needs. You might also buy more targeted keywords that send them to more segment-specific content, but they all share the same sign-up process.

Each one of these is an effort that may need to be optimized. A don’t forget your banner ads and offline media efforts, either.

Create Goals and Micro-Funnels

You cannot succeed online unless you plan for it. Specifically, you need to plan conversion goals for each effort. What actions do they want to take based on where they are in the purchase cycle? How are you going to measure them?

Again, if you sold Web conferencing, your early-buying stage goals may be to have visitors sign up for a trial or download a case study. Late-stage buyers would have paid sign up as a goal. Often, optimization means starting by adding efforts for early or middle stage. There are clearly too many businesses that expect to convert you all the way on the first visit. This may be unreasonable, depending on the audience segment and the complexity of the sale.

Each segment brought in by an individual marketing effort that navigates through their scenarios (persuasion paths) is a micro-funnel that needs to be optimized. Prioritize them!

The 80/20 Rule

The Pareto Principle is a good place to start thinking about prioritizing your optimization. It is highly likely that if you have 1,000 different efforts, about 20 percent are pulling their weight. Those 200 efforts need persistent and vigilant optimization.

Here are a few more places to start:

Optimize your top-performing efforts, figuring out how to make them better.

Optimize your most expensive but low-converting keywords (each one or several related terms in a group in individual marketing efforts).

Sort out your top 200 campaigns and optimize those that are within a few percentage points of performing like a top-200 effort, then move on to your next 200.

If you have very few efforts that perform respectably (over 10 percent true conversion rate), you may need to look at the potential market and create persuasion paths by paying attention to your market segments’ needs or your prospects’ needs at different buying stages.

Optimize your top 20 exit pages.

Optimize the bottom of your registration or checkout funnel and work your way up the funnel.

Your conversion rate is nothing more than the sum of the thousands of efforts and paths that prospects take through your site. Beware of averages. There is no such thing as an average person. That is why your average conversion rate is a rough indicator but virtually worthless as a way to focus your conversion optimization.

You have lots of segments that come to your Web site. They differ by demographics, psychographics, behavior, or marketing effort.

Are you optimizing by effort or by average? Tell me which and I’ll tell you what kind of success you’re having.

[Editor's note: the author of this post is now blogging at bryaneisenberg.com]
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Starting as low as $1000 per month: FutureNow's OnTarget provides on-going expert analysis and prioritized recommendations to improve website conversion rates 40-80% or more. Lead generation and ecommerce versions available.

Nikon’s Email Marketing is Out of Focus

Bryan Eisenberg — Fri, 21 Aug 2009 14:30:04 +0000

I love Nikon. My dad had a Nikon. I bought my first Nikon SLR (an F3) when I was in college and a couple of years ago my wife brought me into the digital DSLR world by buying me a Nikon D60 for Father’s day. So it pains me to see a company I love make such critical mistakes.

Last night, I got an email from them on my Blackberry. Like most people, I typically just delete promotional emails, but I decided to hold on to this one, considering the headline said “My Picturetown – 20GB for just a few cents a day!”

You can see the full email by clicking the picture below.

Broken Scent Renders Landing Page All But Useless

I clicked on their call to action “Store my photos and videos” and after the jump was offered “Sign Up For Free,” by the headline, followed by a form and a graphic proclaiming: “2GB FREE!” Notice how all “scent” or messaging connection to the email is lost on this landing page (pictured below)?

As you can see, there’s no mention of the 20GB at all (I wonder if it was a typo), let alone information about the e-mail’s offer of 20GB storage for just a few cents a day. I was wondering how few cents it actually is: 2 cents, 10 cents or 99 cents?

Also I couldn’t help wondering what was up with the big empty box before the sign-up form’s confirm button. What is that for? I tried it in multiple browsers on my Mac and even tried it on a PC, but it remained empty. Keep in mind that I only put in that extra effort because I planned on critiquing the form. Most potential customers won’t bother checking to see if the form renders correctly in alternate browsers/platforms – that’s why it’s the marketing team’s job!

What Nikon Should Have Done

1. I hope Nikon are testing their email marketing offers before send them to their whole list. Otherwise that’s like being there for that perfect picture moment, the once in a life-time shot, snapping the photo, and realizing you left your lens cover on. Send out your email to a small portion of your list 5-10% and watch the metrics and website analytics to see how people behave. Then tweak accordingly.

2. Nikon’s e-mail could have directed visitors to sign-up for the free service AND THEN upgrade to the paid 20GB account (they event offer a 200GB plan). It would also have been a good idea to repeat this information both on the landing page and in a follow-up e-mail after customers signed up for their free account.

Or Nikon could have offered their e-mail subscribers the choice of services directly from within their e-mail, with two separate calls to action, maybe with the second CTA looking like: “…or upgrade to a Gold 20GB account for only $2.99 a month.” By the way, if you’re wondering where I got that price from, I had to Google “MyPicturetown,” and then really dig into Nikon’s website to – finally! – find the pricing info in their tour pages.

3. They should make sure their form works on all platforms and browsers. I can only imagine that that box has to be the terms and conditions. Sorry but my Mac with Firefox and Safari didn’t see a thing. Everything should be tested to make sure it works.

4. Their landing page design should have better visual impact. Currently, it has all of the design sensibilities of a 3 year old taking their first picture: no focus, no impact, no clear subject and leaves you wanting. Nikon has a great brand, known for their great visuals, but what happened to this product team?

Nikon needs to work much harder than this if they want to acquire customers. I already have a Flickr Pro account and a Picasa account. Others like me (very much in their target market) need plenty of reasons to change what we are currently doing. Maybe next time they’ll capture me at the right moment.
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Starting as low as $1000 per month: FutureNow's OnTarget provides on-going expert analysis and prioritized recommendations to improve website conversion rates 40-80% or more. Lead generation and ecommerce versions available.

When Landing Page Optimization Isn’t Enough

Bryan Eisenberg — Fri, 14 Aug 2009 13:00:15 +0000

As I was preparing for my SES Extreme Makeover session, analyzing the lucky businesses that were chosen for a free makeover, I became fascinated with a particular e-commerce site.

There was no question that the pages on this site performed exceptionally well. Bounces were under 20 percent and the exit rates were very low. I also knew this company had been testing using Google Website Optimizer.

Clearly, this company was dedicated to continual improvement and working hard to improve its conversion rate. The analytics shouted proof that someone was minding the store.

So why was its overall conversion rate painfully low?

I dug deeper into the analytics, going back and forth between the numbers and the site. Then I knew exactly what was wrong. I was curious if my staff would be able to see exactly what I saw.

As much as I’d like to brag about my staff for being brilliant (they indeed are), I shouldn’t have been surprised. After all, they’re trained to look where others don’t. Without hesitation, they saw exactly what I saw.

All Is Well…on the Surface

The marketing was good and relevant, the site was well designed, the landing pages and product pages were sticky, and traffic seemed to move through the site with ease. Even the checkout process was good. Instead, the site suffered from a severe persuasion scenario problem.

The site attracted interested prospects and gave them enough big call-to-action buttons and shiny products to browse, but made it difficult, even impossible, for prospects to gain any resolve to buy the right product for them. This is a site with a slow drip. Prospects are falling off one by one in hundreds of different places. It’s proof that landing page optimization isn’t enough.

Moving Beyond Best Practices, Usability, and Testing

Joel Spolsky best summed up this site’s dilemma in “User Interface Design for Programmers“:

Usability is not everything. If usability engineers designed a night club it would be clean, quiet, brightly lit, with plenty of places to sit down, plenty of bartenders, menus written in 18-point sans-serif, and easy-to-find bathrooms. But nobody would be there. They would all be down the street at Coyote Ugly pouring beer on each other.

The site is nice, well lit, well run, but not selling. So how do you begin fixing the problem? First, you have to understand it a bit.

We created a simple, one-dimensional persona who was early in her buying process. She knew she needed a certain product but didn’t know where to start. The site sells sporting recreational goods with the average price point in the hundreds of dollars. This isn’t an impulse-buy type of site.

We clicked through the site as this persona and, no matter where we started, we ended up hitting a virtual brick wall, confused and frustrated. The site seems to have good prices but little guidance on what products are best for the beginner. The site even offers packages to make it easier for the customer.

Yet it didn’t help the persona answer the question: which is the right package for me? Even when we were a persona further along in the buying process, we still had a heck of time sorting and finding the right products for our need.

Simple persuasion issues not addressed on product pages and category landing pages are the Lilliputians sucking the lifeblood out of the site’s conversion rate. Proof again that too many sites spend way too much time and money on best practices and page performance to the detriment of site performance.

The Good News

This site will get a makeover that will undoubtedly stop many of the drips. Some solutions are as simple as adding a little copy to category pages, creating several pages specifically addressing the needs of different buyers, and leveraging some great content already on the site.

The site can serve as a lesson to those of you who have come up short on your optimization expectations. It can remind you to optimize not just for better page performance but also for the actual visitor using those pages.

Here are a few steps you can take if you’re suffering from a slow-drip persuasion scenario problem:

Start with a simple persona, putting her in a typical buying process for your product or service.

Click through the site as that persona, doing your best to pretend that you don’t know where the content she needs is. Is it easy for her to find? Did she get distracted by something else? Does the content do what you intended it to do: does it move users forward through the site and give them greater resolve that they have found or will find the right product for them?

Run a usability test. Sometimes it’s hard to see your site with fresh eyes; you may need to bring in some help.

Remember that site engagement metrics, like bounce and exit rates, click-throughs, and time spent on site, are important key performance indicators. If your site’s engagement metrics look healthy and your conversion rate remains low or unchanged, you must now focus on selling and persuading the customer, not designing the right button or searching for a better hero image on a landing page or even finding better qualified traffic. You will likely need to create some content that will help visitors find the product they need and want. That’s a persuasion issue, not a usability or best practices issue.

Are you spinning your wheels, looking at your site analytics and running out of things to optimize or test? If you’re willing to share your situation with my ClickZ readers, tell me your story. My staff and I will select one or two sites to look under the hood of and share findings in a future column.

[Editor's note: the author of this post is now blogging at bryaneisenberg.com]
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Starting as low as $1000 per month: FutureNow's OnTarget provides on-going expert analysis and prioritized recommendations to improve website conversion rates 40-80% or more. Lead generation and ecommerce versions available.

Segment Your Way Out of Sadness

Bryan Eisenberg — Fri, 31 Jul 2009 13:21:08 +0000

Last week, my team of analysts and I were discussing a client that wasn’t getting the types of results we had expected. This particular client was implementing changes well and clearly should have seen the conversion rate needle move based on those efforts. Instead, the numbers were flat. Something was clearly wrong.

We began to dig deeper. We learned that the client, an online software service, was pushing current customers through a key selling page we were optimizing. Because these customers had already converted and were simply on their way to sign in, it was causing noise in the data, canceling out any movement we might have seen otherwise.

I instructed one analyst, a competitive type who takes great pride in delivering results for our clients, to segment his way out of sadness. The analyst was able to shortly report some very positive results underneath the noise.

He segmented out current customers and was able to analyze optimization results using cleaner data. Simple. And overlooked, more often than you’d think.

Of course, segments can be used to filter out visitor noise, but they can also be used to keep a close eye on specific campaigns and events and to hunt for opportunities. Let’s look at a few ways you can use segments to get a better idea of why visitors do what they do on your site.

First, for the sake of simplification, I’ll refer to segmenting in the free Google Analytics tool, but know that segmentation is available in almost any major analytics offerings. While viewing visitors by segments isn’t new or novel, it’s becoming easier to do.

What Are Segments?

Google Analytics calls them advanced segments. Here is its official definition:

Advanced Segmentation is a tool you can use to slice and dice your Analytics data with great precision. Advanced segments allow you to choose what types of visits you want to be considered when generating the data for a report.

If you find that you have a large amount of data but you’re having a hard time filtering the information into a report, you can easily create your own segments or use our default segments and apply them to any report instead of creating different filters for each profile. Use advanced segments to further understand, anticipate and react to your customers by identifying key trends and common behaviors.

Ideas for Happy Segmenting

Let’s start with a few ideas courtesy of ROI Revolution. Here’s one specifically for e-commerce sites:

If you have any sort of membership programs, tracking returning transactions and customer retention is a great way to increase revenue. Using the New vs. Returning report is a very basic way of examining these trends, but it’s based on the Google Analytics cookie. People surf from multiple browsers and multiple computers, but if you have a membership program or the ability to track customer accounts, chances are you will know whether someone is a return customer…

You can create an advanced segment to zoom in on only those with the “return” tag.

Now monitor your retention efforts. You’re testing out a new coupon program? Did it boost your return customer transactions? Did it boost overall revenue? Now you can find out.

And another:

The Top Landing Pages report is great if you’re only interested in bounce metrics, but what if you want to see how much money a landing page generated? One way of getting at this data is by creating an advanced segment for each landing page.

Once you apply these segments to your reports, you can see all traffic that originated at a specific landing page. In addition to revenue, try analyzing time on site, internal site searches, and clickpath data. You can use the information that you collect here to supplement your Google Website Optimizer reports with additional metrics. If one landing page generates more orders but the other generates more revenue, which is the true victor?

In our practice, we look at several segments by default. The new vs. returning visitor segmentation is always helpful. This segmentation allows us to see how well a site is doing with first-time unique visitors compared to returning visitors. It gives us insight into the length of the buying cycle and can help us determine if a site has credibility problems.

We also do a lot of persona-based segmenting and segmenting by buying stage. But that is another, much longer column.

You can also set up segments to track how visitors might be behaving based on traffic source, such as why one traffic source, such as affiliate traffic, is outperforming your own PPC (define) campaigns. The possibilities are endless and fun, and can be very profitable.

For lead-gen sites, segments can be set up to cross-analyze conversion rate among content pieces that people visit. You can then drill-down and learn why Whitepaper B converts at a higher rate than Case Study A.

Maybe you just produced a few new product demos and videos to sell your goods and you’d like to know if they’re working. In Google Analytics, you can easily set up event segments and isolate the traffic that has actually watched your new video events. Are those visitors indeed converting higher than those who don’t see a video?

Get some more ideas directly from Google and Omniture.

Last Words and Caution

One caution: Segments can be used to torture data into saying whatever you want. Resist the urge to segment and segment and then segment again until you see the positive result you’re looking for. Simply use it as a way to either zoom in on a specific visitor behavior compared to a control of some kind or as a way to filter out unqualified, or noisy, traffic.

If you’re a little bit of an analytics junkie but have hesitated to jump into segments, you’re doing yourself a disservice. Jump into segments, the water is warm. You don’t need to be an analytics ninja to set up a few helpful segments. Remember, metrics based on averages produce average results.

Have any interesting lessons from your segments? Tell us all about it.

[Editor's note: the author of this post is now blogging at bryaneisenberg.com]
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Starting as low as $1000 per month: FutureNow's OnTarget provides on-going expert analysis and prioritized recommendations to improve website conversion rates 40-80% or more. Lead generation and ecommerce versions available.

Turning Web Analytics into Nonprofit Success

Brendan Regan — Wed, 29 Jul 2009 15:34:39 +0000

I know, I know, you think I’ve gone crazy with the heat. But today, we’re talking about how web analytics can set you up for success, even if your tax status is a bit different.

Sarah from Seattle tweeted Bryan the other week, asking for some advice on how to use web analytics, and specifically “goals,” to help her with a nonprofit website supporting the Burke Museum of Natural History and Culture. We thought it would be good topic to explore a bit, so we’ll start with the basics.

Even the most “nonprofit” website still has goals, and let’s face it, they’re still “business” goals. Keeping that in mind, I’m going to try to label some different types of business goals you could track in web analytics, and how to measure success.

Memberships & Donations – We won’t spend much time on this one because it’s pretty obvious. Most nonprofits’ main business goal is to solicit memberships or donations. And tracking them using web analytics is no different than ‘for profit’ sites. The only caveat is that (unfortunately) human nature seems to dictate a longer consideration cycle for donations than, say, buying a fancy new smartphone. Knowing this, it’s wise to track the content and micro-conversions that might lead to a donation (micro-conversions). Think about downloading brochures and visiting particular pages about the mission statement, leadership, whether donations are tax-deductible, etc.

Logistics – For physical spaces like galleries, museums, and parks, there are goals related to logistics that indicate a strong likelihood of a visit. These should be tracked as goals, and optimized on an ongoing basis. Some examples here are downloading a map, visiting a page that lists directions and hours of operation, or even interacting with content related to “events.” For maps, it would be great to track that a visitor had mapped from their location to the nonprofit’s location, as that indicates strong intent to actually visit. For events, some sort of “add to calendar” micro-conversion would indicate strong intent. Another great goal to track regarding events is getting prospects to sign up for time-sensitive “reminders” via email or SMS.

Opting In to Content Pushes – That’s an odd phrase, but my way of saying that nonprofits should be tracking goals where prospects allow you into their lives a bit. Anytime a prospect opts to become more than an anonymous site lurker you achieve a portion of your business goal! The Burke Museum has lots of great options already, so it would just be a matter of tracking goals related to: subscribing to their blog, signing up for their email newsletter, taking action to follow them on Twitter, and taking action to friend them on Facebook. If you can’t track with 100% certainty that a conversion has occurred, track the action taken (e.g. clicking a Facebook icon) that shows strong intent.

Note that most web analytics programs won’t necessarily allow you to track all of these things as goals “out of the box,” but with some technical knowledge (especially JavaScript), perseverance, and creativity, they’re all quite achievable.

Calling all NPOs! What else are you tracking (or wishing you could track) as goals in your web analytics?
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Starting as low as $1000 per month: FutureNow's OnTarget provides on-going expert analysis and prioritized recommendations to improve website conversion rates 40-80% or more. Lead generation and ecommerce versions available.

Turning Web Analytics Into A Money Making Machine

Bryan Eisenberg — Thu, 23 Jul 2009 15:07:45 +0000

In a few weeks, I’ll be headed to San Jose to the Search Engine Strategies conference. The post title is the same as one of the sessions I’ll be present. It was a session I am most looking forward to as I’ll be speaking with my good friends and web analytics luminaries Jim Sterne and Avinash Kaushik. Each of us are promising at least 3 actionable takeways from the session. Here is my first one:

To do web analytics correctly you have to make a to-do list regularly.

That list should be done monthly or weekly depending on your organizational needs and should include:

What marketing efforts or parts of your site have challenges.

What you think needs to be improved.

What things you want to test.

It should also include (based on your results and your resources):

What efforts you should do less of.

What efforts you should do more of.

Are you currently generating a to-do list to keep your goals on target?

I’ve got many other secrets to share on how to turn your web analytics into a money making machine, but I’ll wait to share those at Search Engine Strategies. Will you be there?

Do you have any tips you want to share?

[Editor's note: the author of this post is now blogging at bryaneisenberg.com]
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Starting as low as $1000 per month: FutureNow's OnTarget provides on-going expert analysis and prioritized recommendations to improve website conversion rates 40-80% or more. Lead generation and ecommerce versions available.

Beware Marketing Automation Without Data Clarification

Bryan Eisenberg — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 14:55:38 +0000

We marketers are very busy people. In today’s challenging economy, with its rapid digital pace and customers empowered like never before, the demands are never-ending. So, we love things that make our job easier. Or at least appear to.

The Words ‘Marketing Automation’ are Like Music To Our Ears

According to one definition:

Marketing automation is the use of software to automate marketing processes such as customer segmentation, customer data integration (CDI), and campaign management. The use of marketing automation makes processes that would otherwise have been performed manually much more efficient, and makes some new processes possible.

In plain English, marketing automation uses data (like your web analytics) to do some of your marketing tasks for you. Herein lies the problem I keep running into: Your decisions and those of your marketing automation platform are only as sound as your data.

I’ve seen marketing automation software that helps your email marketing, your ppc bid management, segmentation and personalization, and others. As Jeff Sexton recently pointed out, if you have the wrong analytics it could cost you 30% of your sales. Can you afford that today?

A few weeks ago we were helping a client optimize her website and we wanted access to her historical data. All she had was the analytics from her marketing automation vendor. Now the fact that you could only access these analytics using Internet Explorer (we are mostly on Macs) was one failure, but the main failure was that it looks like the analytics was an after-thought by the vendor. Anyone can throw up some reports on a screen — but the issue is, do they tell you anything meaningful? There was virtually nothing to make you smarter as a marketer. Today’s smart marketers understand the value of data-driven decisions. Unfortunately, this vendor’s reports provided in an abstract way what happened but did not provide the vital statistics to diagnosis and prescribe any sort of optimization to the company’s efforts.

Marketing Automation Must Make You Smarter Not Lazier

I was talking to friend who is a superstar B2B marketer. He was telling me about this new enterprise PPC bid management software he was evaluating. He deals with thousands and thousands of terms so automating the bidding would be a huge help. He told me about the slick interface and the bidding rules, etc. Then I asked him the question that made him stop like a deer in the headlights.

“Have you checked out the data reporting behind the algorithm? What actionable insights does your ppc automation vendor provide you?”

Of course, vendors will shout “proprietary formula” and we marketers fall for this marketing B.S. We don’t need the complex details behind it but we do need to get a sense of what and how they look at data, keyword attribution, etc. What metrics do they value most? If you fall for the “black box” how do you and the system continue to learn? How do remove it if you are unhappy with the vendor? How do you create your internal best practices unless you have a clear picture into what is happening?

Without good data at the core, you may just end up with a mechanical turk. You need data to share in your organization and data that tells you details of what you’re doing and how to improve it. Also, beware of bad software that takes what you need done and tries to completely automate it. Just because it is automated won’t guarantee it is optimal for the way a good marketer works.

Don’t Forget Your Job Is to Make More Money, Not to Make Your Job Easier

The point of marketing automation is to free you up to do more of what you are really good at by letting the glorified calculator do what it is really good at. Good marketing automation lets you use your insights about your customers in ways you couldn’t before; bad software takes those decisions away and prays that the computer will do it for you. Keep in mind we have created a computer that has barely beaten a great human chess player, despite its intricate and complex algorithm – and we’re still far off from a computer to beat the best human poker players. Do you really believe that some algorithm is going to be better than you at creative marketing insights?

Without solid data, scientific method and reporting, how does your marketing automation software show you it is making money? Whether or not you are using marketing automation, you still need access to great metrics. In the case of marketing personalization, how do you know if the efforts are working if there aren’t control groups to measure against? How do you control for other external factors?

The Marketing Automation Future, Now

Don’t get me wrong — I am an advocate for marketing automation. But only if there is a core focus on the insight derived from data, not the automation, first. Analytics must be at the foundation and not an afterthought. You can identify first generation automation tools by their focus in on automation first and reports second. Today’s next-generation state-of-the-art tools have to have great metrics and analysis at their core and are focused on helping you optimize your business; that is, making you more money and proving their value to you.

Please feel free to tell me more about your marketing automation love fest or worries.

P.S. Full disclosure: like my good friend and analytics evangelist Avinash Kaushik, I work for and sit on several advisory boards of companies that use data as their foundation for marketing optimization and automation.
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Starting as low as $1000 per month: FutureNow's OnTarget provides on-going expert analysis and prioritized recommendations to improve website conversion rates 40-80% or more. Lead generation and ecommerce versions available.

Dear Confused By Personas

John Quarto-vonTivadar — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 14:28:32 +0000

A student at the University of British Columbia Web Analytics course reached out to us via Twitter to ask some questions about creating personas, specifically Persuasion Architecture® Personas and the information is important enough that we thought we’d share our response:

“Are you saying that we shouldn’t bother with creating multiple personas with granular details but rather focus on creating only a few (4 if we use the logical-emotional, quick-deliberate quadrant)? But if we add the stages of the buying cycle in there, we could end up with [too many] personas. This is still unclear to us.”

First off, thanks for reiterating these common issues. You probably won’t be surprised to hear us suggest what we’ve said on numerous occasions before: start with what you can handle. If you are unsure of how to proceed, that in itself tells you to shoot for the simpler solution by focusing on the *actual* goal, which is to improve conversion, sell more widgets, get more leads, etc. If you do nothing, you obviously will just continue to have the same results you already have. But if you over-reach for “perfection” to the point at which your eyes glaze over and you become catatonic then you’ll also have the same results you already have. So start small. A subtle and deep Persona development that doesn’t get implemented correctly is hardly better than using the quadrant approach, and both approaches will definitely work on the important stuff that ought to be improved first. In fact, if that wasn’t the case, then you’d have to worry, right? Navy blue is still blue, right? An Anjou pear is still a pear, right? And meerkats are still…oops, ditch that last.

And just to let you know: there’s no particular reason that smaller companies should find this harder than larger companies…just the opposite, in fact. We had a recent client, a *huge* technology company, who’s marketing pros convinced themselves they “got personas” and then wondered why their recently-developed PA personas were different than their expectations. So they missed the real point, which is not to reinforce a company’s self-centric approach, but instead to re-think their marketing to be customer-centric. Smaller companies tend to be more likely to implement change, often because fewer sacred cows need be put out to pasture before improvement can begin.

In short, go with the quadrant approach (or even one-dimensional, if need be!) and move on from there. Add in buying cycle, but don’t add a dimension just to keep the count “evened out” — add in distinct differences that result in a required change in persuasion, not a change in demographics. A Spontaneous persona, for example, will often breeze through her Early and Middle stage buying process faster than you can model for, so there’s nothing to be gained by inferring a difference that cannot be measured. Think of buying a candy bar — the buying process is fast for pretty much everyone, except outlier demographic specialties (a diabetic, a seed nuts allergy, a strict bodybuilder, etc). I often refer to this as “the demography seasons the modality.”

Now think of buying a house — surely the Spontaneous is going to go through a completely different process buying a home than buying a candy bar. There will be a Early buying process, and a Middle as well before the house is chosen, inspected the deed is signed and the lawyers paid. The nature of the underlying goal influences how the customer goes about achieving that goal, even when she has a pre-disposition to act in one preferred mode or another. Got it? I like to refer to this as, “The topology mediates the modality.” How much of your content strategy today answers the Methodical’s early stage buying needs?

“We also began questioning the practicality of designing at the page level for all of our personas. Some of us feel that it is possible to use personas for creating a scent trail at the individual page level if personas are very clearly defined but we also believe very large international sites would become extremely cluttered if multiple personas were used in the persuasion architecture of each page. Could you explain your
position on this?”

Another great question, probably because we hear this one a lot as a “freeze” point for larger companies. The answer is almost *never* to be creating multiple page versions, one variation for each persona. That’s not working for personas; that’s working for personalization in an aggregated populance. And if that worked, you’d've seen that emerge a decade ago as a solution that everyone would have jumped on. The reason it doesn’t work is that Persuasion Architecture(TM) Personas aren’t designed to be stereotypes of demographic groups; instead, they are representative models for the buying process and there’s a limited number of ways that the Human Operating System works. Each of us is a little mix of each of the modalities, and even that varies in time, place and context. The Personas are models; the Customers are not. So each of us, as individuals, exhibit varying relative balances of the PA Personas at each step in our own buying process.

So when you design for persuasive scenarios you’re optimizing how the various personas *could* move through the site *persuasively*. Not all possible paths; just those paths along which effective persuasion occurs (that distinction will drive your IT folks crazy. Sorry! ). And to answer the final part of your question, the question of internationalization is a good one, but again is answered by the persuasive process. If someone from Japan buys a camera the same way as someone from Poland, then your issue is one of language. If those processes are culturally different, then the persuasion is different, and has to be analyzed to really lead to optimization (and you’ll have to also determine for yourself, if, say, one quadrant type is different from one culture to another while another quadrant might remain the same), and then you layer the internationalization on top of that. Usually, though, when one mode changes due to culture, all modes change and the relative mix of modes changes as a whole.

Again, keep the goal in mind: more conversion, more sales, more leads. You’re looking to optimize your sales system by optimizing all parts of the process. You correctly comment that this can get complex and, in your words, “extremely cluttered”. The “clutter” claim often comes when a company attempts to graft persuasion architecture on top of information architecture — without having understood the persuasion first, an information system was designed and implemented un-prepared to persuade — of *course* it’s going to turn out complex and cluttered. Our experience has been that when you plan the persuasion first, you’ll actually be amazed at how un-cluttered your very talented information architect’s work will be since she’ll be working to a plan for persuasive paths.

I hope that helps! Let us know if you need any further clarification.

This post is intended to respond to the questions we were asked. If you want to know more about personas I’d recommend you read our books or if not download two documents: our Persuasion Architecture (PDF) & Getting Started with Building Persona (PDF) whitepapers.
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Starting as low as $1000 per month: FutureNow's OnTarget provides on-going expert analysis and prioritized recommendations to improve website conversion rates 40-80% or more. Lead generation and ecommerce versions available.

Web Analytics and Yellow Lobsters

Bryan Eisenberg — Fri, 19 Jun 2009 12:51:16 +0000

I’ve been curious about what kind of effect the economy is having on how companies use Web analytics. Econsultancy just released its “Online Measurement and Strategy Report 2009.” This is its second annual report, and the results are fascinating.

First, the pleasantries:

“Companies are focusing on analytics which help them improve their customer acquisition and customer retention. The recession has helped to bring into sharper focus the importance of understanding return on investment and how individual elements of digital marketing impact the bigger picture.”

“There is a prioritization of information requirements which relate directly to business efficiency. The biggest focus is information relating to the cost of acquiring a customer or lead which is regarded as a ‘high priority’ by 59% of responding organizations.”

Overall, the interest in Web analytics and using it to improve continues to creep upward. The report also clearly shows that as the interest grows, so does confusion:

“There has been a slight improvement since last year but only one in five companies (22%) have an internal strategy that ties data collection and analysis to business objectives. More than half (60%) of responding organizations said they are ‘working on this’, while 18% say that they don’t have such a strategy.”

“There are still only a quarter of company respondents (27%) who say that their Web analytics ‘definitely’ provide actionable insights, with a further 55% saying that this is only sometimes the case.”

Another trend is that more companies are using Google Analytics: 23 percent use it exclusively, compared to 14 percent last year. For Internet marketing consultant Andy Beal, this is why the following is also a key finding in the report:

There has been a marked shift from spending on technology to spending on internal staff, with companies now spending more on human resources than on software and licenses. The proportion of spending on internal staff has increased from 36% to 42% of total Web analytics spend while spending on technology has decreased from 45% to 38%.

Obviously some companies are hiring analysts rather than paying for analytics or some other technology. A welcome bit for those trying to make a career as Web analysts.

Still, I wonder how these analysts are faring. We all know the challenge in finding qualified candidates. When asked if companies were getting a return on investment from their analytics, a whopping 65 percent of respondents didn’t know or said they weren’t getting a return.

Andrew Hood, managing director at Web analytics consultancy Lynchpin (which cosponsored the report), said: “While the technology gets more and more sophisticated (and arguably more accessible from a cost perspective), the challenges in interpreting and actioning the data only get bigger…Resources [are] still a massive issue, and while companies are looking to increase spend on people, there looks to be an underlying skills shortage operating against this.”

It seems like good Web analysts are like yellow lobsters: they’re very rare.

What’s a Company to Do?

Before you do anything else, define your business goals. What do you need visitors to do to make your company more profitable? How will you measure success? You must tie your business goals with online efforts, or this is all for nothing. When you invest in improvement, you must at least know where the goal posts are.

Next, don’t let budget be a barrier to improving your Web site. What you don’t have in the budget you can pay for with a little more time and effort. Take the time to learn.

I’ve said it before and I say it enough: commit to a culture of continuous improvement, not a culture of set it and forget it. If you only focus on improving a few landing pages here and there, testing a few variations here and there, tweaking creative here and there, you’ll never reach your highest potential number of conversions.

Don’t worry, your customers won’t go unsatisfied. Sooner or later your competitors will figure out how to satisfy your visitors’ needs. Hopefully that will motivate you to get your goals on target by investing in continuous improvement.

What is your company doing with your analytics these days? How do you turn your analytics into actions that improve on your goals? Let me know below.
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Starting as low as $1000 per month: FutureNow's OnTarget provides on-going expert analysis and prioritized recommendations to improve website conversion rates 40-80% or more. Lead generation and ecommerce versions available.

Are Your Analytics Causing You to Lose 30% of Your Sales?

Jeff Sexton — Tue, 16 Jun 2009 19:14:17 +0000

Most companies measure keyword performance – and especially PPC keyword performance – based on one factor: did that word or phrase bring converting visitors to the site on the visit in which they converted.

So the natural thing to do is trim non-performing words and phrases in order to increase the efficiency of your PPC spend. And that’s exactly what one client did, except rather than increasing his efficiency, he dropped his sales by 30%.

Why?

Because, depending on what you sell, lots of people buy on their second, third, or umpteenth visit to your site, rather than the first visit. Those visitors are building confidence in you as they move through their buying process. But most systems don’t (or can’t) track user behavior over multiple visits.   So when those early and middle buying-stage keywords shown up as non-converters, they get cut.

The shame is that not everyone is able to track the following sales drop off, which may not occur for days, weeks, or months, back to the act of cutting those keywords.

Trading away Dennis Rodman as a Non-performing Player?

Would you trade Dennis Rodman for non-performance? Of course not, right? Rodman’s defensive stats alone tell the tale. At his prime, Dennis was pulling down a truly astonishing 18.7 rebounds per game. For reference, the previous year’s league leader in rebounds (David Robinson) averaged 13 per game.

But if the only stats you looked at involved scoring, you’d get a different picture. Comparing Rodman’s 8-9 points per game against other star players’ 20 or more points per game, you’d likely have been misled into trading Rodman, only to find yourself wondering why you started losing games and everyone else’s scoring stats went up against your team.

Think of your assisting keywords terms as the Dennis Rodman’s of your PPC campaign, except you’ll get all the assists and none of the off-court shenanigan’s.

There’s plenty of other ways myopic analysis can leading you astray

A recent eConsultancy post discusses how Google’s default window for tracking cookies can distort traffic data. Left in its default cookie window setting, Google Analytics (GA) will classify visitors as “search”-driven traffic for six months following a single search based click through to your site – regardless of how they got to your site previous to that search or how they might arrive at your site following that search. Here’s an example of how this might skew your results:

Let’s say you’re driving traffic to your site via radio ads and that a listener, after hearing your ad, types your url directly into his browser. Later, he comes back but this time, he types your business name into Google and clicks through on a displayed search result. Following that, he visits your site three more times via bookmark or directly typing your URL into his site. That’s a total of 5 visits.

Question: How many of those visits would GA classify as search-driven?

Answer: 4 out of 5.

GA would count the first search-based visit and then all of the remaining 3 visits, despite the fact that the following three visits didn’t use search and may have taken place several months after the initial search. Multiply that by all your visitors/visits, and you can see how your understanding of what drives traffic to your website might be distorted in favor of search. And under the impression that your traffic was mostly generated by search and not, say, your radio ads, you might be tempted to cut them from your ad spend.   Obviously, the same thing could apply with e-mail campaigns, magazine ads, etc.

Bringing Clarity and Orientation to Web Improvement Efforts

Any experienced Web Analyst or Website Optimizer could extend this list of “gotchas” and “classic mistakes” almost indefinitely. It’s just not that uncommon for an uncareful analysis of data to lead online marketers either to analysis paralysis or sub-optimal optimization strategies. Is it any wonder that 70% of businesses collecting wed data fail to act on their analytics data?

Obviously this issue has been central to Bryan and Jeffrey Eisenberg’s Web careers since the beginning. It’s why they helped found the Web Analytics Association; why they published The Marketer’s Common Sense Guide to eMetrics, Call to Action and Always Be Testing; why they created Persuasion Architecture; and ultimately why they’ve built the OnTarget program.

The central theme amongst all of these issues is bringing clarity and actionable insight to Web improvement and online marketing efforts. They are all answers to the business owner who feels confused or disoriented by the data he’s given and want’s a clear direction toward more sales/conversions and improved website performance.

So, if you find yourself struggling to make sense of your online marketing data, or frustrated by non- or counter-productive optimization efforts, ask yourself: are you giving credit where it’s deserved? Or do you need help achieving greater clarity and actionable insight from your optimization efforts?
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Starting as low as $1000 per month: FutureNow's OnTarget provides on-going expert analysis and prioritized recommendations to improve website conversion rates 40-80% or more. Lead generation and ecommerce versions available.

How Many Potential Buyers Are Visiting Your Website?

Bryan Eisenberg — Wed, 03 Jun 2009 13:27:05 +0000

Yesterday, Jeff Sexton blogged about the importance of watching your cost per visitor (CPV) and revenue per visitor (RPV) trends. One of the best ways to get a handle on optimizing these key performance indicators is to get a better sense of your traffic mix.

Instead of looking at your traffic by what marketing efforts are bring the most amount of visitors and converting best, look at your visitor mix as a starting point.

There are 3 types of visitors who can come to your website:

1. Buyers – you know who they are because they converted to a sale or lead.

2. Potential Buyers – these are visitors who are in the market for what you offer, but for any number of possible reasons, don’t buy. They may be at earlier stages in the buying process, doing research to sell it internally, not adequately persuaded, driven away by bad usability, etc. The upshot is, there are countless number of changes/improvements you can test and make to bump these visitors from potential into actual buyers.

3. Disqualified Traffic – these are visitors who wouldn’t buy no matter what (maybe they arrived to your website by accident – they typed shingles and were looking for the medical condition not what you put on roofs, or maybe they don’t have the type of budget your product or service needs, etc.).

On a typical website, 3% of visitors are Buyers and the other 97% is distributed among the Potential Buyers and Disqualified traffic. You should be asking yourself these 2 key questions:

1. Of your non-buyers what percent are potential buyers? And how can you increase those?

2. What marketing efforts are bringing ample amounts of traffic, but with poor quality traffic – i.e., what’s driving a disproportionate amount of disqualified traffic?

Your web analyst should be able to tell you the answers to these questions.

The opportunity to increase sales is in:

understanding that 97% of non-buying traffic better,

bringing in less Disqualified traffic and more Potential Buyers, and

More effectively turning those Potential Buyers into Buyers.

For example, if you look at the top converting retail websites, one of the key reasons they have such high conversion rates (way above 3%) is their intense focus on bringing back repeat customers. Note: You should subscribe to each of their newsletters to see some of what they are doing!

What you should do next:

Find your expert (if you have them) and coordinate their efforts to get it done.

Educate your team and then coordinate their efforts to get it done.

This is what we do, if you would like you can talk to us.

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Starting as low as $1000 per month: FutureNow's OnTarget provides on-going expert analysis and prioritized recommendations to improve website conversion rates 40-80% or more. Lead generation and ecommerce versions available.

Have You Given Your Website a Mid-Year Check-up?

Jeff Sexton — Tue, 02 Jun 2009 14:49:29 +0000

We’re now 6 months into 2009, and if you’ve embarked on a program of Website/ Marketing optimization, you’re probably looking for some clear, common-sense benchmarks to measure your progress. Here’s what you should be looking at:

Cost Per Visitor (CPV) – How many advertising, marketing, SEO, etc. dollars do you need to spend to bring in each Website visitor you’re getting.   Don’t look at conversion just yet – it’s your website’s job to convert the visitors; marketing’s job is to get them there in the first place. So Cost Per Visitor is the best starting point for measuring your return on marketing spend.

Also, feel free to break this down by channel: SEO, e-mail marketing, PPC, conventional media, etc. Some channels are easier to track than others, but give all of them your best shot. Now plot your CPV performance from the beginning of the year till now and see how you’re doing.

Revenue Per Visitor (RPV) – Top line revenue is usually easier to calculate and track, so we go with RPV, but if you’ve got the metrics to figure out bottom line Profit Per Visitor, all the better. So basically you’re looking for how much money you are bringing in per Website visitor, and you’re looking to see how this metric is changing from the beginning of the year until now.

CPV should be decreasing and RPV should be increasing

What to do if these metrics aren’t moving in the right direction:

Take a look at your marketing spend. What’s working? What’s not working? Look at differing channels, keywords, time of day, etc. Get accountability from the tactics you are using to drive traffic.

Focus on improving your conversion rate. Your Website’s conversion rate can act as a lever to both CPV and RPV. By examine keywords and marketing campaigns in terms of scent and scent trails, you can improve the performance of your campaigns and drive down CPV. By improving micro-conversions throughout the buying process, you can increase macro-conversions, average order value, repeat customers, etc – thereby improving RPV. For tools on how to do this, take a look through our archives, read Always Be Testing (or any of our other books), or give us a call.

Feel free to let us know how you’re doing, or to post any questions you have on these metrics and improvement tactics. We’d love to hear from you.

[Editor's note: the author of this post is now blogging at jeffsextonwrites.com]
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Starting as low as $1000 per month: FutureNow's OnTarget provides on-going expert analysis and prioritized recommendations to improve website conversion rates 40-80% or more. Lead generation and ecommerce versions available.

Why Bother to Collect Data?

Bryan Eisenberg — Wed, 20 May 2009 14:50:37 +0000

According to a recent study, Marketers are more likely to “monitor” than act on or react to Internet data. While 79% of businesses reported capturing Internet traffic information, only 30% of them actually modified their Websites as a result of traffic analysis. It makes me wonder if this move to be accountable by marketers is only important to them when they are measuring vanity metrics versus actionable metrics.

Are they only using metrics to make them feel better about their efforts or are they using the data to find ways to continuously improve their efforts? And with the widely available tools today, why aren’t the other 21% of businesses even capturing this web analytics data?

Is it because as John Lovett, Senior Research Analyst at Forrester claims in his post Forecasting Change for Web Analytics, that it because of unfulfilled promises by the analytics vendors, that their isn’t enough talent available to analyze the data, or is it because the tools available were too limiting?

Why do you think marketer’s collect data and don’t or can’t act on it?

P.S. During editing, Jeff Sexton reminded me of one of his favorite jokes: “What’s the difference between a used car salesman and a hi-tech salesman? The used car salesman knows he’s lying.” No offense to my vendor friends
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Starting as low as $1000 per month: FutureNow's OnTarget provides on-going expert analysis and prioritized recommendations to improve website conversion rates 40-80% or more. Lead generation and ecommerce versions available.

Make Your Web Analytics Actionable in 5 DIY Steps

Jeff Sexton — Thu, 14 May 2009 15:08:13 +0000

I’ve written about this before, but new reports keep reinforcing the point that most organizations don’t know what to make of their Web Analytics, meaning they can’t take action to improve their site based on the information they have. And while the best bet in these situations is simply to hire an expert guide, that may not be an option for you (or maybe you’re just a hard-core DIY-er when it comes to website improvement). If that’s the case, here is a quick and dirty 5 step process to get you started:

1) Where are they entering?

Most analytics packages (including Google Analytics) make it easy to view your top landing pages. If you haven’t checked this before you might be surprised at the number of visitors who aren’t entering your site through the home page. That can be crucial information.

Maybe your PPC landing pages don’t provide all the information visitors need and you’re not giving visitors clear links back to your main site. Maybe your UVP is only clearly explained on the home page, so that someone landing on your services (or a product category) page wouldn’t get that info.

But more than all of that, you’re trying to get an understanding of how visitors move through your site and why they take the actions they do, so you’ll need to know visitor entry points.

2) How are they entering?

Your analytics package should let you analyze traffic, breaking visitors down by source: organic search traffic, paid ads, direct traffic, etc. And for organic and paid search, you should be able to see what keywords brought the majority of your visitors to your website. From this information, you should be able to get a sense of the following:

What are their expectations? Given your visitors’ traffic source and keywords, what are they looking for? What would they most expect to find when they land on your website? What scent are they following?

What are their likely goals? The same key word search could easily be used by people with differing goals. Chances are you might be ignoring all but one of them. For instance, I could be searching on “Pensacola Day Spas” because I wanted to buy a gift certificate for my wife.   Whereas my wife might search the same term to see if they take last-minute or walk-in appointments. Or maybe she’s searching to see if they have a specific treatment? The point is, it helps to mentally force yourself to brainstorm as many real-world behind the search terms as possible.

What do they already know? Someone searching on your name or on the name of a specific service or product line obviously knows more than a visitor entering from a general search term. Use your keyword knowledge to get a sense of visitors’ differing stages of the buying process?   Are they just starting out and searching for general info? Do they already know exactly what they want? Or are they somewhere in between?

How well is your landing page matching up with visitor expectations and goals? Would visitors find their keywords on their entrance pages? Would they know that they are in the right place, based on a 7-second scan of the page? Do your entry pages have high bounce rates? What is the average time spent on the page?

3) Next-page navigation – where are they going when they first hit your Website?

Now that you know where visitors are entering your site and you have a sense of their motivation upon arriving at your site, take a look at where they navigate to upon their arrival. What are the most popular next pages? Look at this information while looking at the actual landing page.

Are the most popular “next pages” the same ones you would have guessed?

Are they pages linked to by prominent calls to action or embedded links placed within the active window? Or are they pages only accessible through your top or side navigation?

What questions would those pages answer for the visitor? Why do you think the visitor is moving to those pages? Is that action congruent with what you’ve seen of visitor motivation from their keywords/scent?

After you see what those most popular next pages are, click through to them within your analytics package and see where visitors are going from that next page. If the majority of entering traffic (for a given page) is clicking through to a couple of different pages, you’ll often find that visitors navigate to the remaining popular pages following their first click. You should start to see patterns forming – key, or most navigated to, pages will stand out.

Watch out for situations where your most persuasive content is NOT one of those most navigated pages; you can’t persuade visitors with content they never see. Also, watch out for situations where one of your most navigated pages are also exit points, in those cases the visitor either lost confidence or didn’t find what they were looking for.

4) Where (and Why) are they leaving?

First, let’s talk about the difference between bounce rate and exit rate. A bounce is sort of like it sounds, someone came in on a given page and left on that same page without going anywhere else on the site. Unless visitors are also converting on that same page, bouncing is bad. It means visitors are rejecting you – either because you are attracting the wrong visitors, or because your landing pages are not re-assuring them that they are in the right place to find what they came looking for.

An exit rate simply tells you how many of the people who came to that page also left your site from that page, including both people entering the site on that page AND people navigating to that page from somewhere else on your website.

Planned and unplanned exits. Some exits are good. You expect people to leave your site after buying something/filling in a lead form. Customers who log-into a registered user domain from your home page will likely show up in your analytics as a bounce. Etc. But you obviously don’t want customers to leave before reaching their goal or your goal. Often you’ll find visitors exiting from pages containing your conversion beacons – product pages containing the “add to cart” button, service pages containing your lead form, etc. Or you’ll see cart/form abandonment, where visitors start to convert and then back out.

Take a look at “time on page” for the conversion beacons. Abandoning a page after a few seconds isn’t the same as dropping it after a few minutes. A few seconds means it was the wrong product or service for them. Someone leaving your page after a few minutes engaged with your content and never got the answers to their questions and/or simply didn’t have the confidence to buy. Take a look at the page itself, what information are you not giving them? Are you using great photos, persuasive copy, points of action assurances, risk reversals, etc. in order to instill buyer confidence? What about shipping information? Most of the exits on both this page and the cart page are caused by inadequate information and content on these conversion beacon pages.

Page prior and broken scent? If you find a high exit rate page, look at the most popular entry paths to that page. Look for mismatches between expectations in moving from the prior page to the exit page. What were visitors hoping to find on that exit page and what did they actually find? Was the hyperlink misleading or was the content simply anemic? Try to figure out the Piss-Off Factor.

5) Form a hypothesis and test

Completing steps 1-4 should have shown you several mismatches between what you and/or your visitor expected and wanted to happen vs. what actually happened. You should also be able to come up with some pretty good theories for why these mismatches are happening and what might fix them. Even better, you should have a strong idea about what success would look like if your tested theory proves true. In other words, you know what metrics are indicating a problem, so you know what metrics you should see change. Congratulations, you’ve now made your analytics actionable.

Here are some further tips to help keep you going down the right path:

Don’t test randomly - always test with a hypothesis regarding visitor motivation/behavior. You’re after insight as much as lift – a “negative” test that gives you a better idea of what motivates your visitor is     actually better for your long-term success than a positive test that provides little or no new insight.

The difference between micro-conversion vs. macro-conversion. Testing a page variable that reduces bounce rate and/or moves more people to a key persuasive page may or may not immediately impact your conversion rate, as you may be moving people down a funnel that’s leaking somewhere else. Or maybe you’re engaging early stage buyers that won’t convert for another month or so.

Know when to test for micro-conversions, such as moving from one page to the next; when to test for macro-conversions, as in how much bottom-line impact this change made; and when to set-up a secondary, earlier-stage conversion, such as signing for the newsletter or downloading a white paper vs. buying or filling out a lead form.

Bonus step – answer their questions, manage their anxiety, stoke their imagination.

When looking at a page in terms of visitor behavior and motivation, always ask yourself how well that page is answering visitor questions, how well it is re-assuring them emotionally that they are in the right place and on the right track to accomplish their goal, and finally how well it is appealing to their real desires.

P.S. A quick note on how to integrate “best practices” into your optimization efforts. Rather than blindly testing best practices, allow your knowledge of them to help you form theories about why visitors are or are not taking a certain action. For instance, it’s a best practice to place your calls to action within the active window. If your main call to action is in a side-bar and almost no visitors are taking that action, you might test moving your CTA into the active window. For some fabulous books on best practices and testing, take a look at Call to Action and Always Be Testing.

P.P.S. If you enjoyed this post please consider Tweeting it please.

[Editor's note: the author of this post is now blogging at jeffsextonwrites.com]
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Starting as low as $1000 per month: FutureNow's OnTarget provides on-going expert analysis and prioritized recommendations to improve website conversion rates 40-80% or more. Lead generation and ecommerce versions available.

Can your Website Handle the Complexity of your Sale?

Jeff Sexton — Tue, 21 Apr 2009 18:02:36 +0000

As weird as it sounds, it’s the norm for businesses with sales cycles that might be as long as several months to a year and that might involve multiple decision makers and influencers to utterly fail to take these factors into consideration when constructing their website or selecting an analytics package.

In fact, whenever I work with B2B and complex sales clients it’s a sure bet their website won’t:

1) Adequately address the multiple decision-makers and influencers involved in securing the lead

If a sales manager needs to justify a training expense to his CEO and CFO, wouldn’t it help to provide your inside champion with messaging and tools to help him make his (read “your”) case?

It’s usually good to have sections of your website and messaging designed specifically for those secondary decision-makers and influencers that need to sign-off on the decision of your inside champion. As an analogy to the consumer world, would you really want to construct a website that sells engagement rings without providing content and messaging for the prospective fiancee?

2) Have planned (and tracked) conversion points for visitors who are early in the buying process

To keep with the consumer analogy, let’s say you’re considering having a pool put into your back yard. Assuming that one of your local pool suppliers/installers had a website with valuable early and middle stage content, how many times might you visit their website before actually contacting them and becoming a lead?

You might come to them early on when doing preliminary research regarding what type of pool you wanted, what size, shape, depth, etc you should look at, what kind of associated expenses and purchases are involved, etc. Reading this stuff might take 3-5 or even 15 different visits. How would you know if any of these visits are successful? How could you measure or get a handle on your Website’s influence on such a buyer?I’d normally suggest having a goal for these types of visitors. Maybe it’s downloading a pool planning or pools for dummies report/PDF. Maybe it’s playing with an interactive pool builder or pool cost calculator. Whatever it is, having a trackable (and helpful) event for these early stage buyers helps to track your Website’s success in attracting and engaging

Moving to the middle stage of the buying process, you might touch the site again when you are closer to buying and constructing a short list of potential contractors/installers. This time you might drill down into why you should do business with them and not someone else, reading up on their installation timelines, the skill of their install crew, etc.You may or may not feel like filling out a lead form at this point. But a valuable and well-merchandised free download titled something like, “10 Questions to Ask Any Pool Contractor,” might look far more attractive to you – especially if you only had to provide a name and e-mail (rather than the lead forms more detailed info requests) to get it.

And then at the late stage of your buying process you might look at the site a third time to fill out the form or get the phone number to actually buy the pool. What a waste if the pool website only had the lead form as a conversion point, without ever providing (let alone tracking) any of the early and middle stage downloads and conversion events. Questions would go unanswered, and prospective buyers would go unengaged / go somewhere else.

Needless to say, the exact same patterns of behavior occur for B2B sites as well. And yet most B2B sites don’t have defined content and conversion points for their early and middle stage visitors. Your prospective leads are going to go somewhere to get their questions answered, shouldn’t it be on your website not your competitors?

3) Have metrics/analytics capable of tracking visitor behavior over multiple visits.

While early and middle stage conversion points help a Web analyst/website optimizer get a better handle on a sites overall success in engaging early and middle stage buyers, it still leaves them guessing at the big picture, simply because they can’t track a lead generation or sale all the way back to that prospect’s first visit to the Website. This can be crucial for gauging the real success of a PPC campaign. Key words that might look unprofitable (because they target earlier stage buyers) might be spectacularly profitable – but only after the 8th (or 20th) visit to the site. Unfortunately, if you can’t track visitor behavior over multiple visits, it’s difficult to get a handle on real – vs. false- measures of keyword performance.

While I love, love, love Google Analytics / Google Ad Words, this is exactly one of these tools shortcomings. And it’s one reason that we insist that our OnTarget clients install our software in addition to GA/GWO: OnTarget can bracket visitor behavior through keyword entry and track individual visit behavior over multiple visits. It’s a wish-list come true for us Future Now Persuasion Architects and can be a positive boon for our On Target clients.

So there you have it: start matching your B2B and complex sale website to the real complexity of your sale. I’ll be writing follow-up posts with exercises and steps on how to do this, but in the meantime, would it be too forward of me to suggest you sign up for On Target?
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Starting as low as $1000 per month: FutureNow's OnTarget provides on-going expert analysis and prioritized recommendations to improve website conversion rates 40-80% or more. Lead generation and ecommerce versions available.

Dirty Diapers, Shame and Web Analytics

Jeffrey Eisenberg — Tue, 14 Apr 2009 12:31:55 +0000

Kudos to Omniture for posting “Survey: Search Marketers Underutilizing Sophisticated Metrics.” It takes guts to stop applauding customers and share some tough love.

According to the Omniture survey:

Marketers picked cost per click and click through rate as among their top metrics to optimize search campaigns instead of deeper metrics such as return on ad spend, cost per customer (or sale) or profit per order

43 percent of e-commerce respondents do not know how to accurately measure profit per customer (or order)

67 percent of respondents indicated not having enough time to effectively manage campaigns as their top issue in search marketing, while only 35 percent use an automated bidding solution

Are you surprised? We aren’t; check out the 7 Deadly Sins of Web Analytics.

Every day leading companies strut their James-Bond-cool stuff, showing off their sophisticated tools and fancy talk about ROI.

It’s hard to take them seriously knowing that underneath that James Bond tuxedo their diapers are soiled.

In 1998 we were frustrated because companies didn’t understand their conversion rates. In 2009 we remain frustrated.

Much less than 1% of the thousands of companies we’ve spoken with are the exception.

Do you have any insight as to why marketers remain enamored of the shiny new object but reject focusing on the fundamentals?

___________________________________

P.S. Josh James, the CEO of Omniture, in January of 2005 said “Web analytics can pay for itself with a single business improvement — so the real question is how quickly can companies make data-driven decisions? This willingness to change will ultimately dictate time to ROI.”
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Starting as low as $1000 per month: FutureNow's OnTarget provides on-going expert analysis and prioritized recommendations to improve website conversion rates 40-80% or more. Lead generation and ecommerce versions available.

You Don’t Own That Customer

Jeffrey Eisenberg — Mon, 16 Mar 2009 13:09:24 +0000

John Gaffney’s “Ruining the fantasy of customer ownership” is worthy of a high-five. Read the entire post, it’s short, but don’t miss the conclusion:

“…at no time does a brand own a customer. That chain is cut loose too easily. Brands that approach the online marketing space for customer ownership will be disappointed. Come looking for that precious bit of attention, and marketers get paid in full.”
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Starting as low as $1000 per month: FutureNow's OnTarget provides on-going expert analysis and prioritized recommendations to improve website conversion rates 40-80% or more. Lead generation and ecommerce versions available.

Building An Optimization Culture

Bryan Eisenberg — Fri, 27 Feb 2009 11:54:00 +0000

There has been plenty of hot air blown into the bubble that’s getting ready to burst on Internet marketers again. I watched it happen the first time. With all the financial chaos crashing around us now, the last we need is the blind ignorance of the “new economy” happening again.

Earlier last month some hot air came from Interactive Advertising Bureau CEO Randall Rothenberg, who wants to prevent the Internet advertising economy from becoming “performance based.” This week provided another more disheartening statistic. Helen Leggatt, of BizReport, writes:

With the number of channels a marketer has to manage and monitor increasing, you’d think technology would be employed to make their job easier. Not so. It seems marketers are foregoing analytics to measure their online marketing campaigns…When asked about their use of measurement applications, less than half (47%) of the 1,545 American and British marketing professionals polled by Alterian said they currently use analytics to measure their online campaigns.

Sure, the shear number of those ignoring analytics in today’s marketplace is alarming, but it’s not all that surprising.

At first blush, one could conclude that site owners suffer from either arrogance or ignorance. Marketers either believe they don’t need analytics because they are smart enough to trust their gut (arrogance), or they don’t know what to do with them (ignorance). The Web analytics community has been split on this issue. Eric T. Peterson, Web analytics consultant, argues Web analytics is hard, while Google’s analytics evangelist Avinash Kaushik argues Web analytics isn’t hard. This still doesn’t sufficiently explain why more than 50 percent of marketing professionals fail to integrate analytics into their marketing efforts. (No doubt, getting value out of Web analytics is complex, something I’ll address in a future column.)

Mitch Joel, author of “Six Pixels of Separation,” offers some valuable insight:

It’s hard to measure the success and efficacy of your Digital Marketing initiatives if we’re feeling like our own home base could use a little renovating and extreme makeover. The problem is that many people built their online presence with a one-time budget. While they may have factored in ongoing budget for Web hosting and occasional updates, this strategy has left them paralyzed.

The bigger problem I’ve encountered in company after company is that most have failed to make Web site optimization a part of ongoing business operations. And who can blame them? For many, analytics have failed to live up to the promise that analytics vendors have been selling. Many companies have “been there, done that,” honestly attempting to use analytics to improve and have seen very little result in comparison to their effort.

As I commented on Mitch’s blog:

I blame it on our ADD mentality. Campaigns are exciting and change frequently, providing us with our next, new, shiny object fascination. Most people’s websites are static and lack the ongoing imagination and efforts required to reap the benefits of continuous improvements.Most campaigns would perform better if people only realized how many times a visitor engages with your campaign and then abandons only to search or reach for your “home base” later. This recession will weed out many of those who don’t pay attention to this.

If only they had stuck with their effort to make Web analytics work.

Still, commitment alone could put you on a hamster wheel. How does one know when to stop a particular test, stop improving a particular element, or drop a complete design in favor of something new? You must also commit to learning. Learn about your visitors, why they do what they do, and how you can better give them what they need and want.

The companies that benefit most from analytics have a culture of optimization. Whether it is explicit effort or part of a company’s DNA, each of these has some sort of process or system for analyzing the data, generating recommendations, and most important executing improvements, learning, and starting the process all over again. This improves the ROI (define) of efforts and ends up paying for itself and much, much more.

Optimization using analytics causes an interesting dichotomy. It is a rather simple concept, and there are many valuable and impactful “simple” lessons to be learned. But it is also complex; you can go very deep in analysis. To get the most out of your analytics — or just your optimization efforts — develop a cost-effective, smart system for improving continuously.

Not Using Analytics?

You are running out of excuses. Let’s deal with some of the smaller ones.

If arrogance is your problem, do nothing. Your competitors will soon overtake you.

If ignorance is your problem, learn. A good start is to get good at using a free product, eventually you can pay for more.

If budget is a problem, it doesn’t have to be. You can do all kinds of things for much less money than you would imagine. Some of them are even free.

If resources are the problem, that’s OK. Just move forward at a slower pace. Optimize what you can as often as you can with the resources you have now. Soon you’ll catch up and surpass the arrogant company mentioned above.

Optimizing the Organization

Want to have a culture with a constant eye toward getting smarter and better? Here are a few things that your organization can do:

Adopt an attitude that every action measured in analytics has an actual human being behind it. Don’t allow your optimization team or analyst treat your visitors like stats. Try starting by looking at them as personas.

Don’t get overly addicted to shiny new tools and technologies, or even to marketing platforms. New isn’t always better. Here are a few wise words from the lovable venture capitalist Guy Kawasaki:
Follow through on an issue until it is done or irrelevant. Many organizations set goals and even measure progress toward them. However, after a short time, some goals are no longer on the radar because people start focusing on the coolest and most interesting stuff. For example, fixing bugs in the current version of a software application is not as interesting as designing a new, breakthrough product — but your current customers think it is. Legend has it that Pat Riley, the coach of the Los Angeles Lakers, measured stats of his players and posted each player’s progress on his locker.

Commit to a culture of execution. “Execution is not an event — a onetime push toward achieving goals. Rather, it is a way of life,” says Kawasaki.

One of the most important things about improving is making it a way of life, so that it happens over and over.

What’s keeping you from using analytics to optimize your marketing?
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Starting as low as $1000 per month: FutureNow's OnTarget provides on-going expert analysis and prioritized recommendations to improve website conversion rates 40-80% or more. Lead generation and ecommerce versions available.

Are Your Existing customers Messing Up Your Analytics?

Melissa Burdon — Thu, 26 Feb 2009 13:53:34 +0000

If you offer a subscription based product or service, you may find that your “direct traffic” is above average. This could be an indication that your existing customers/members are coming back to your site for additional information they need.

If these customers aren’t tagged somehow and you don’t have in depth analytics in place, you probably aren’t effectively separating their behavior from the behavior of new visitors to your site. This makes it difficult for you to point out stumbling blocks on your site because your existing customers and new visitors may be landing on the same pages and navigating to the same pages on your site even though their tasks may be very different. You should suspect that their behavior would be dramatically different, but you have no way of separating them.

In order to gain valuable insight from looking at your analytics and trying to help new visitors buy more effectively, you need to be able to assess their behavior without the existing customers providing additional noise to the data.

If this rings true for you, what are you currently doing to be able to make effective assumptions from analytics?
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Starting as low as $1000 per month: FutureNow's OnTarget provides on-going expert analysis and prioritized recommendations to improve website conversion rates 40-80% or more. Lead generation and ecommerce versions available.

Seth Godin’s Two Simple Web Businesses Rolled Into One

Bryan Eisenberg — Wed, 04 Feb 2009 15:55:51 +0000

How would you like to get business advice from Seth Godin? I did. But then again so did you. Let me explain:

On Independence Day, July 4th, 2008, Seth Godin wrote a post titled “Two Simple Web Businesses” where he declared the world’s need for “fixed-price web podiatrists.”

Podiatrist? Hmmm…OK, well I don’t have a foot fetish, but I do have a fetish for helping businesses make more money from their website by improving their conversion rate.

Seth explained:

“So, a pretty smart web-savvy person could have a checklist of fifty items and work her way through a corporate website. She could come back with a simple, easy to execute list of things worth changing…

…Low hanging fruit, stuff that doesn’t need approval from the CEO to fix. Maddening idiosyncrasies, worth the few minutes it takes to fix them.

Second gig: Web analytics pro. Someone who can, for a generous hourly fee, set up analytics for a website and do weekly reports (by email) that are actually useful and actionable.”

Seth saw these businesses as “Neither will make you rich. Either might open doors for your next step in life.” I felt a rush of adrenaline that day, knowing with even greater certainty that FutureNow was already on to something big. We had seen a huge opportunity to scale our services to the the thousands of small-to-medium size businesses that felt like they couldn’t afford our services before and were already deep into molding that concept onto a software platform.

The OnTarget™ service-as-software program was meant to liberate businesses who couldn’t make sense of their web analytics. Businesses who didn’t know the next step they needed to do to improve their marketing campaigns and what to change on their website or campaign to increase their conversion rate.

In March 2008, FutureNow completed our acquisition of Elemental Business. In their software and wonderful team we envisioned how we could deliver not only highly impactful recommendations but actionable recommendations with precise directions. The recommendations needed to be good enough that anybody regardless of experience could make the needed changes and get results. By July 31st we completed our transitions to the software environment and announced the Alpha version, code-named “Dr Phil,” and moved into Beta in October. By January 15th of this year OnTarget™ was out of Beta and ready to offer it to the world.

OnTarget™ clients have been thrilled with the program. The results come faster and more often than when we were just consulting. Here’s a just few samples from both ecommerce and lead generation sites, though there are dozens more:

A retailer increased their conversion rate by 59.3% resulting in a financial impact of more than $70,000 per month

A brick and mortar store increased their website referred sales by 31% while overall website traffic was down by 10%

A travel destination site increased online booking by 10.13% year-over-year in this recession

A retailer optimized their checkout page to increase conversion rate by 6.25%, leading to $150,000 additional revenue annually

As a by-product of our conversion recommendations a retailer increased organic search traffic by 19.91%

A subscription service increased their visitor registrations by 12.5% by optimizing landing pages and the sign-up form

A retailer increased their overall website sales conversion rate from 3% to 7% (a lift of 133%) during his first quarter with us

OnTarget™ client Brian Schmitt explains it this way:

“I’d been staring at Analytics for months wondering what I was missing. I had to be missing some mysterious key that would explain it all and allow me to take action based on the data. After all, everyone else is doing it.

I finally found the key. It’s even got a classic “O” for a handle and a dangling tooth. OnTarget™ is Fischer Price simple and works like a master key.”

Brian Schmitt is keeping his goals “On Target” and we hope you do, too.

I want to thank Seth, the Alpha and Beta testing customers, and our own hard-working people at FutureNow for everything they did in helping OnTarget™ become a reality.
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Starting as low as $1000 per month: FutureNow's OnTarget provides on-going expert analysis and prioritized recommendations to improve website conversion rates 40-80% or more. Lead generation and ecommerce versions available.

An Analyst’s Wishes for Wish Lists (Say 3 Times Fast)

Brendan Regan — Tue, 03 Feb 2009 12:54:16 +0000

This post is for anyone who’s using some sort of “Wish List” feature to encourage visitors to save something for (hopefully) later purchase.

This feature has become ubiquitous, probably due in part to the “Let’s Copy Amazon.com Syndrome.” I encounter it on nearly every “first date” I go on with a website.

I agree with the concept of saving items pre-purchase. It’s a great micro-conversion to start measuring and optimizing. It’s a natural step for Early Stage or Middle Stage buyers. And for more complex or high-dollar purchases, it’s a way to store an item until consensus can be built.

But every time I try to use one, I disagree with the execution of it, the positioning of it, and the requirements put in front of it as a barrier. It all adds up to a lousy customer experience and lack of adoption for a feature you’re paying for. I think our poor implementations of Wish Lists Internet-wide are actually training shoppers to mis-use the Shopping Cart feature!

A scenario:

An Early Stage buyer comes to a website to do some researching and maybe a bit of comparison shopping.

On a favorite product detail page, she has several options (usually bookmark the page, email to someone, add to cart, add to wish list, etc.)

She isn’t yet persuaded to make the purchase, but is well on the way. She clicks “Add to Wish List,” which is highlighted as a secondary call to action.

She’s asked to register an account (we all know what a painful interrogation that can be) or leave the shopping process to at least enter a little personal information.

She balks at this request and backs out of the Wish List

She knows that the Shopping Cart will save the item just as well, and because you can remove items from the cart before you checkout, can also be used as a storage or comparison function.

She adds the item to the Shopping Cart.

Not the end of the world, right?

But here’s a few things to think about from an analytics standpoint:

If you’re measuring “Add to Cart” as a micro-conversion, or as the success in a test scenario, you’ve increased your count by 1, but that increment is invalid traffic.

If you’re measuring views to the Add to Cart page as some sort of KPI, you’re measuring someone who’s mis-using the feature.

If you’re measuring “Cart to Conversion” as some sort of goal or funnel report, it’s skewing your conversion rate down because some people in that funnel weren’t persuaded in the first place.

Now, let’s go to the retail world to see how this should really work. A store visitor walks into a clothing store, browses around, checks some prices, maybe holds a few things up in front of a mirror. We are nowhere near “conversion” at this point. Eventually, the visitor picks out a few things and asks their significant other to “hold this.” Or, seeing that the visitor is starting to amass some items of interest, a helpful store clerk volunteers to put the items in a dressing room or hold items at the register so the visitor doesn’t have to lug them around the store.

The store clerk doesn’t ask for email address (twice!), password (6 to 10 characters, at least one alpha and one numeric, and no special characters!), First Name, Last Name, Daytime Phone, etc. NO! They simply lighten the visitor’s load and hold the items. No strings attached.

Back to your website. A visitor clicks “Add to Wish List.” She’s notified that the item has been saved, and how to access it. She’s also told the item is saved during this visit only, and to save it for longer, she’ll need to register an account. Done. You’ve just “lightened her cognitive load” in a simple, helpful way. And you’ve started to sell the value of registering with your site!

As they say on the TV show, We have the technology.

If you can leverage your technology to make a feature that’s easy to use, and that adds value to your visitor’s shopping experience, then by all means use a Wish List

If your Wish List isn’t attractive to an Early Stage or Middle Stage buyer, if it requires full registration, or if it doesn’t test out as a value-add to your bottom line, it’s clutter! It’s distraction! Remove it!
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Starting as low as $1000 per month: FutureNow's OnTarget provides on-going expert analysis and prioritized recommendations to improve website conversion rates 40-80% or more. Lead generation and ecommerce versions available.

On CMOs, Customer Service, and Birthing Elephants

Howard Kaplan — Wed, 28 Jan 2009 09:09:48 +0000

If you’ve been to one of our trainings over the past few years, or seen any of us present at a conference, you’ve probably heard the line about the average tenure of a Chief Marketing Officer being less than the gestation period of an elephant. Well, it’s time for some new material. New research from executive search firm Spencer Stuart shows that CMOs are making it into their 3rd year with the same organization, on average, based on a review of the 100 most advertised brands in the U.S.

The CMO Strategy column in Ad-age does a good job postulating why CMO tenure is rising, and soliciting feedback from the folks who put together the research for Spencer Stuart, as well as a few who currently hold the position of their firms marketing top dog. I’m encouraged to see most interviewed recognizing the (necessary) shifting role towards more accountable marketing- establishing hard measures of success and utilizing Analytics tools to help achieve the organization’s underlying objectives:

“Elisabeth Charles, who starts a new post as CMO of Petco in mid-February, also credits analytics and measurable results for the increased tenure. “You see a lot more folks doing marketing ROI studies, using more direct marketing that can be measured and shows a payback, as well as really scrutinizing the balance of brand investment vs. traffic or sales driving initiatives.”

Ms. Charles goes on to point out an area that has improved but “is still highly underleveraged”, that of utilizing technology & tools to better tap into consumer insights- listening to the voice of the customer. Interesting she brings that up, as it dovetails with a another piece of research on CMOs, seemingly far more negative.

Bestselling author Scott McKain (@scottmckain) points to a new study by the CMO Council, and opines:

“While we often first point the finger at the Chief Financial Officer as being disconnected from customers, the truly shocking part of the study is that it is the Chief Marketing Officer who fails to listen to, and learn from, the very people they are marketing to!”

Now before you get all hot and bothered by Scott’s comments, he’s simply reacting to the CMO Council’s published statistics. MediaPost spoke with the Executive Director of the CMO Council, Donovan Neale-May, and when you understand the lens through which he views the role of CMO, it makes sense why he’s led Scott to the conclusion above.

Donovan defines the CMOs most critical role as “owning every facet of listening, learning, interacting, engaging, and optimizing the relationship with the customer, and understanding where the attrition, pain and aggravation is, and doing this in real time.” I like that definition, although I’d offer we need to add an explicit benefit/outcome- optimizing the relationship with the customer, to what end? As long as it’s help them achieve their goals, and by extension, our business goals, I’m on board. Doing so also reminds ourselves of our responsibility to our organization to be new age accountable marketers I digress.

“Neale-May argues that the study shows that marketers tend to view customer services reactively, as a function for resolving a problem, not enough as an opportunity to engage or interact. Only about 37% of companies surveyed gather customer insight from customer engagement situations, per the firm. Only 15% use such situations to identify and cultivate potential customer champions and advocates. Only a third reported that they look for ways to turn problems into new sales opportunities, and only 16% introduce new products or services to further monetize the relationship.”

Apparently this research seems to validate what Elisabeth Charles expressed in her Ad-age quote, underleveraged indeed.

However, I think these two pieces of research, taken out of context, simply show (or aim to show) extremes on a continuum. This shouldn’t be a sky-is-falling blog post, there’s good news and opportunity here. As a marketing community as a whole, there’s still plenty of room for growth, but collectively *I think* we’re improving. I look at brands like Comcast (with Frank @ComcastCares), Dell (@RichardAtDell), JetBlue (@JetBlue), Southwest Airlines (@SouthwestAir) as signs of a positive trend. I look at service providers like BazaarVoice, who not only get it themselves, but can be legitimate resources to helping their client organizations improve their efforts to better listen and serve their customers. I look at CMOs like Barry Judge (BestBuy), Sam Decker (BazaarVoice), Patrick Moran (Mzinga) who are clear examples of accountable marketers, who know the value of (and have the discipline to) measure success and continually optimize, not to mention constantly listen, learn & interact with their customers. These signs point me to this trend accelerating in the future, despite the current research. I choose to see the glass half full, although I know, hope is not a strategy.

All that said, I can be as optimistic as I choose to be, but I’d much rather listen to the marketing practitioners themselves, you guys out there with your feet on the street.

Do you see a shift in your organization towards aligning your business objectives with your customers?

Do you see the Marketing group and the Sales groups breaking down silo walls and collaborating on the same performance goals?

Are you finding service providers and tool makers who help you leverage the social web to get closer to your audience, to better understand them, and to better service them?

If so, we’d love to listen and learn from you, so please share with your community here and don’t be a stranger.
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Starting as low as $1000 per month: FutureNow's OnTarget provides on-going expert analysis and prioritized recommendations to improve website conversion rates 40-80% or more. Lead generation and ecommerce versions available.

Could You Be Certified?

Bryan Eisenberg — Tue, 27 Jan 2009 11:50:26 +0000

Maybe? But today, January 27, 2009 at 12PM EST, you can join me and the rest of the MarketMotive Master Certification Faculty at a live web event – a unique offering, even by Market Motive standards.

The description of this final project–a live panel review gauntlet–reads like a wild fusion between American Idol, a PhD dissertation defense, and a lightning-round news roundtable show. Candidates will vie for faculty endorsements under the scrutiny of a live audience and a few surprise marketing critics like George Michie, Mary Huffman & Mark Evans.

Taking their concept a step further, Market Motive has opened up the event to the public for free—and not just for passive onlookers. You may choose to absorb the dissertation on the latest standards or opt to have your website evaluated by the graduating consultants. For event information and free registration, visit http://www.marketmotive.com/master-certification-graduation.php .

The endorsing faculty panel is truly a who’s who of Internet marketing and includes:

* Bryan Eisenberg on Conversion Optimization
* Greg Jarboe & Jamie O’Donnell on Online PR
* George Michie, Mark Evans on Paid Search / PPC
* Matt Bailey on Social Media
* Avinash Kaushik & John Marshall on Web Analytics
* Todd Malicoat on SEO
* Michael Stebbins on Email Marketing

Candidates who pass the final challenge will receive certification status for one year from graduation and a listing on the Market Motive site.

Registration Is Open for the Next Master Certification

Market Motive is accepting applications for the next round of Master Certifications, slated for a February 2009 start, at http://www.marketmotive.com/internet-marketing-certification.php.
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Starting as low as $1000 per month: FutureNow's OnTarget provides on-going expert analysis and prioritized recommendations to improve website conversion rates 40-80% or more. Lead generation and ecommerce versions available.

A Sterne Look at 2009

John Quarto-vonTivadar — Sat, 17 Jan 2009 21:26:59 +0000

We’re pleased to replay Jim Sterne’s recent webinar with us, “Turn Web Analytics into 2009 Revenue”.

Come watch the Chairman of the Web Analytics Association talk with our own Bryan Eisenberg (himself Chairman Emeritus of the WAA) about proactively using Analytics Data to drive continuous Testing and generating actual dollars, a concept even more important this year than last.

Click the above image to watch.

By the way, we received a number of inquiries from folks who saw the video already asking, “what software is being used in the screenshots?” That’s our OnTarget™ software, and you can learn more about it in a separate post we did a few days ago: “Please Keep Our Message OnTarget“
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Starting as low as $1000 per month: FutureNow's OnTarget provides on-going expert analysis and prioritized recommendations to improve website conversion rates 40-80% or more. Lead generation and ecommerce versions available.

FutureNow's GrokDotCom / Marketing Optimization Blog » Web Analytics

A Clicks-to-Bricks Site Optimization Checklist

What Is Your True Conversion Rate?

Nikon’s Email Marketing is Out of Focus

Broken Scent Renders Landing Page All But Useless

When Landing Page Optimization Isn’t Enough

Segment Your Way Out of Sadness

Turning Web Analytics into Nonprofit Success

Turning Web Analytics Into A Money Making Machine

To do web analytics correctly you have to make a to-do list regularly.

Beware Marketing Automation Without Data Clarification

The Words ‘Marketing Automation’ are Like Music To Our Ears

Marketing Automation Must Make You Smarter Not Lazier

Don’t Forget Your Job Is to Make More Money, Not to Make Your Job Easier

The Marketing Automation Future, Now

Dear Confused By Personas

Web Analytics and Yellow Lobsters

What’s a Company to Do?

Are Your Analytics Causing You to Lose 30% of Your Sales?

Trading away Dennis Rodman as a Non-performing Player?

There’s plenty of other ways myopic analysis can leading you astray

Bringing Clarity and Orientation to Web Improvement Efforts

How Many Potential Buyers Are Visiting Your Website?

What you should do next:

Have You Given Your Website a Mid-Year Check-up?

CPV should be decreasing and RPV should be increasing

Why Bother to Collect Data?

Make Your Web Analytics Actionable in 5 DIY Steps

1) Where are they entering?

2) How are they entering?

3) Next-page navigation – where are they going when they first hit your Website?

4) Where (and Why) are they leaving?

5) Form a hypothesis and test

Bonus step – answer their questions, manage their anxiety, stoke their imagination.

Can your Website Handle the Complexity of your Sale?

1) Adequately address the multiple decision-makers and influencers involved in securing the lead

2) Have planned (and tracked) conversion points for visitors who are early in the buying process

3) Have metrics/analytics capable of tracking visitor behavior over multiple visits.

Dirty Diapers, Shame and Web Analytics

You Don’t Own That Customer

Building An Optimization Culture

Not Using Analytics?

Optimizing the Organization

Are Your Existing customers Messing Up Your Analytics?

Seth Godin’s Two Simple Web Businesses Rolled Into One

An Analyst’s Wishes for Wish Lists (Say 3 Times Fast)

On CMOs, Customer Service, and Birthing Elephants

Could You Be Certified?

A Sterne Look at 2009