May 15, 2008

My College President Kills Kittens!

Posted by Lisa Barone

I don't care if you plan to launch a social media campaign or not, stop what you're doing and head over to the top social sites and claim your company name and the names of your high level folks.

No, do it now. Otherwise, prepare to be sorry when someone comes along, snags up your name, and begins using your brand in ways you may not appreciate.

Shockingly, I have an example!

I received a Facebook Friend Request this morning from Jackie Liebergott. Jackie is the president of my alma mater Emerson College. Emerson has always been fairly tech savvy and on the cutting edge of new media types, but even so, when I received the Friend Request I wrinkled my nose and wondered if it was legit. I also remembered that in the four years I attended Emerson, I never once had a conversation with Jackie Liebergott so the chances of her knowing me and trying to connect were...well, slim to none.

Still, maybe Jackie does know me! Or maybe she's decided to create a Facebook profile to build a bridge between her and Emerson students and is adding everyone who lists Emerson College on their profile. How novel! I headed to Jackie's profile to see if it was in fact legit. When I got there I found this:

Heh, yes. A profile picture designed to show Jackie doing her best dinosaur impression and a status message that tells people she's out killing kittens. Excellent. Jackie currently has 68 Facebook friends. She belongs to six groups, has 27 photos uploaded, and has some very interesting activities listed.

This is what happens when you don't claim your name and open up the chance for someone else to do it for you.

Friends, do yourselves a favor and go stake your claim on your name in the social media networks. A few months ago Michael Gray sent me an email reminding me that we should claim our brand on Twitter before someone else does. It was great advice and we jumped to it immediately. We even decided to turn BruceClayInc into our official blog Twitter feed that provides automated updates for readers who prefer to get notifications that way..

But even if we hadn't decided to use the account, just having it is a smart business move. I'm sure to many people, the idea of having to take the time to create profiles on a bunch of sites you don't intend to use sounds like an overwhelming and silly task. However, consider the consequences. Isn't the credibility of your brand worth it? If you're not sure, ask Jackie.

Or Seth Godin. Seth is a perfect example that sometimes fans claim your name with good intentions and end up causing more harm than good. I fully believe that whoever created the SethGodin Twitter account (hint: It's not Seth) did it to because of how passionate they are about the Seth brand. And that's great, but it now gives Seth no way to control how someone is using his name. That's not great. It's even less great when consider that the account has more than 5,000 followers. Right now the person in control of Seth's account is playing by the rules, but what if that changes? What if they start pushing their own content or badmouthing others? What if people didn't realize it wasn't really Seth speaking? Kiss your brand of excellence goodbye and prepare to lose the trust of your customers.

Oddly enough, Seth actually did receive some backlash for his Twitter account, especially from people who were offended that he was collecting followers and not following people back. There were even open letters written to get him to change his ways. All for an account he doesn't even own.

Take a few minutes today to create accounts for your company on the major social media outlets. Be proactive about protecting your brand. Otherwise, prepare to have your best T-Rex impression representing you on the Interwebz.

Posted on 05/15/08 at 3:38 PM | Comments (0)
See more entries in Branding, Social Media

May 13, 2008

Corporate Blogging Isn't About the Media

Posted by Lisa Barone

I came across an interesting post today while perusing Sphinn. Search Engine Optimization Manager says the number one reason traditional corporations shouldn't blog is because they don't understand media. Hold me, my head hurts.

There are three things very wrong with that statement:

1. If your company doesn't know how to use the media to spread your message, then you're dead in the water anyway. Either learn or close up shop.
2. Blogging isn't about engaging the media. It's about engaging and empowering your customers.
3. It's 2008. What the heck is a traditional company?

The logic behind the post is all very confusing, especially when the author suggests that blogs are only suited for "Web-based" companies and that if you're one of those traditional types you should stick to the "more appropriate" press release model. Right. Because a blog and a press release are the same and accomplish the same goal. Only not. Come closer so that I may I hit you.

The sooner you realize that your corporate blog isn't about you or your company or the media and that it's about your audience, the greater your blogger experience is going to be. Sure, blogs allow you to do lots of great things -- to put a face on your company, to do reputation management, to deal with negative feedback, and to strengthen the focus of your site with new ideas and content -- but you're not doing any of that for yourself. Not really, anyway. You're doing it for your customers. To make them trust your brand and improve their experience with you, so that they're more likely to associate themselves with you in the future. All of this will help you in the long run, but your short-term objective is to appeal to them.

If you're looking at your blog as a tool that you're going to use to promote yourself or your business, just stop. You're missing the point. You're not going to engage or excite anyone by talking about how great you are or what you're up to. A blog is not a press release and if you try to turn it into one so that you can be "more appropriate" you're going to enrage the audience you meant to empower.

I also really question who these "traditional" companies are the author mentions anyway. I assume they're talking about companies who provide some sort of offline service and who have been around for years and years. Someplace that just reeks of stodgy old money. You know, like airlines! Only JetBlue and Southwest are two companies pioneering the whole corporate blogging thing. They must not have gotten the "write a press release" memo. Don't they look silly?

If you're a "traditional" company that doesn't understand how to leverage the media, then I suggest you learn. I don't think this Web thing is going to go away. Nor will social media. You don't want to be the great content that fails because you don't know how to submit or promote yourself. Instead of hiding in your corner because you're unfamiliar, try embracing it. You don't have to jump into blogging, but I think you do have to enter the social sphere in some form.

The author is right on one point, though. You should definitely know what your end goal is before you start. You want to know how this will help you connect with your customers, whether you'll be adding to the conversation, and if customers even care what you have to say. That's all solid advice. However, I'd shy away from discouraging people from jumping into the conversation simply because they have no media experience or because they don't fit the presubscribed mold. It's like bashing Shel Israel for attempting to stray away from the short video model. Be a little daring. Go blog something. Step out of your comfort level. Stop being so "traditional".

Posted on 05/13/08 at 2:25 PM | Comments (4)
See more entries in Blogging, Social Media

May 12, 2008

SEO Weekend Update

Posted by Lisa Barone

The Social Networks Get More Social

Something must have been in the water this past weekend because Google and the social networks have decided to be just a little bit sweeter to their users.

Both Facebook and MySpace revealed portability options that will allow members to take their information off the site and use it in conjunction with other trusted sites. MySpace's program is called the Data Availability initiative and will allow users to share their public photos, videos and text on sites like Yahoo, eBay, Twitter, Photobucket and beyond. Similarly, Facebook announced Facebook Connect, a program which will allow members to take their Facebook identity and use it across the Web.

Google isn't making user information portable, but they did launch Friend Connect to help site owners add social features to their Web site with just a small snippet of code. Google thinks of Friend Connect as a "shortcut to connections you've built up somewhere else". It will work with OpenID, OAuth, OpenSocial, as well as with APIs from Facebook, Google, and MySpace. Good stuff.

Looks like the future of the Web and social applications will be all about letting people create one Web identity and then giving them the ability to take it wherever they go. We like.

10 Percent of People Say Design Is Part of SEO

A frightening article over at Web Designer Wall signals that only 1 out of 10 Web designers think design should be a consideration to search engine optimization. I suppose that's actually not too surprising considering that 24 percent of people didn't even know what search engine optimization was. Oye.

The article, geared towards design professionals, goes on to explain what search engine optimization is, why it's important, and how certain design and architectural elements may impact the spiderability of your Web site. It's one of those posts you want to bookmark and then send to clients when they get mouthy. I mean, confused. ;)

Seriously though, it's a bit frustrating to see that so many in a related field have no idea what SEO is and continue to make it an afterthought. Search engine optimization should be a part of your site design process from the very beginning. We actually believe that you should know your keywords before you even begin designing. For a good rundown of how we look at SEO design, you can take a read through our How To: SEO Web Design post from a few months back. It explains how knowing what terms you'll need to target is going to determine how your site is structured, how your navigation will come together, how deep it will be, and will influence nearly every design decision you make.

Third Annual SEM Scholarship Contest Launches

Andy Beal has revealed that the 3rd annual SEM Scholarship Contest has officially kicked off and it's promising a prize package worth more than $10,000. Yowsa!

To enter, simply submit an article on your favorite Internet marketing topic between the deadline of May 23rd. From there, the finalists will posted on the Marketing Pilgrim and the five that receive the most traffic will go before an expert panel of judges. Have I mentioned I'm on that fine panel? Yeah, I don't know how my name got there either. :)

It's a great chance to give back to the community and help some new search marketing faces find some recognition. We hope to kick off the third edition of our SEO Charity Contest soon, as well. Good to see so many people fighting for SEO education. Kudos, Andy!

Fun Finds

Matt Cutts tells us what Google knows about spam and says, on the record, that search engine optimization is NOT spam. All hail, Matt Cutts!

The always smart Kim Krause-Berg says the key ingredient for SEO and Web Design is true passion.

Posted on 05/12/08 at 5:06 PM | Comments (1)
See more entries in SEO, Search Engine Optimization, Social Media

May 9, 2008

Friday Recap

Posted by Lisa Barone

Hey, Friends. I hope everyone had a fantastic week. But, in case your week was like mine, I offer up Performancing's Bloggers: What Do You Do to Relax? Also, feel free to share your own ways of relaxing in the comments. My goal for this weekend is to get my heart to stop racing before I collapse. Huzzah!

Speaking of Performancing, James Mowry woke up to find that he had 11,072 unread items in his feed reader. Just thinking about that raised my heart rate to an unhealthy level. I'm so going to die.

You know what's not going to die? SEO! Michael Gray issued the best rebuttal to Shoemoney's recent the-sky-is-falling post with Yes Shoemoney SEO Does Have a Future. Read Michael's post and I guarantee you that by the end you will have climbed right atop his soapbox with him.

Earlier this week, Ask.com celebrated Cinco de Mayo by showing everyone how absolutely irrelevant and ridiculous they've become. The shame of that company saddens me.

Have you ever wanted to see what Robert Scoble would look in an Ansel Adams photograph? No? Well, let him recreate it for you anyway.

The Consumerist compiled the Top 5 Guerilla Marketing Mishaps. I'd like to add Ask.com's Information Revolution campaign in the UK to that list. Epic fail.

In Twitter this week we saw TweetShirts, Who Should I Follow, and my favorite, LiveTwittering -- a brand new way to livetweet conference sessions. Livetweeting is the new liveblogging, you know?

Keeping with the Twitter theme, I'd like to award JetBlue with the Best Tweet Of The Week:

Their award? I'll be more likely to fly JetBlue in the future because I know they get "it".

David Mihm posted a great interview with Matt McGee. They dish about search, life after Marchex, photography and how he manages to squeeze 35 hours of work into a 24 hour day. Matt McGee is one of my favorites.

As hard times approach, Code on the Road offers up the one thing you absolutely need to do the first day after you've been laid off. It's a great piece, though I'd probably never be gutsy enough to do it.

If you have dreams of attending Search Marketing Expo Advanced in Seattle, the early bird discount ends today, so head on over there. If you're looking for another reason to attend, Virginia and I will both be there liveblogging! You know you want to hang with us. Okay, maybe you just want a chance to meet Virginia. I don't blame you. She's pretty awesome. [*Blush* --Virginia]

In non-search stuffs, Esquire posted The 75 Skills Every Man Should Master and I swooned. If you know a man with half of those skills, please send him my way. I'm willing to provide a headshot and brief bio, if needed.

Eric Lander sent me the Guidelines for Cats. Total giggle fit. In fact, I'm still giggling. It's so sad how every moment of my life is documented in that one list.

In other news, Gizmodo shows us the redesigned NES and it's everything you hoped it would be. Sigh.

Things I Learned From Boing Boing This Week:

• Some dude made the coolest coffee table ever. It's a giant NES controller and it's functional.
• Apparently there is also a duck hunt lamp in existence. Just one question: Where do these nerds live and how do I get them to make me stuff?
• If you want to scare your children, plush roadkill animals should do the trick.
• These animal silhouette bookshelf dividers are actually pretty cool. You know, if you have a bookshelf. Which I don't.
• Just what your hamster always wanted, its very own pink Barbie dream car!

Lastly, Happy Mother's Day to all the moms out there. Hopefully you don't have 17.5 children like this crazy woman does. Holy Jesus.

Posted on 05/ 9/08 at 5:28 PM | Comments (2)
See more entries in Fun Stuff

May 7, 2008

How Do You Calculate The Value of a Friend on Facebook?

Posted by Lisa Barone

C'mon, if that's not the best session title of the whole darn show, I don't know what is! Ben Rattray (Change.org) is here to help us find the value behind all those "friends" on Facebook. Hopefully they're worth something a little more than all those pokes and zombie requests.

Oh, and cause I know you're interested, Ben is a total hottie. ;)

Ben starts off by showing the audience a cluttered montage of Web 2.0 properties. It's overwhelming and daunting. But that's the idea.

Web 1.0 was about digitalizing information. In the Web 2.0 world, it's easier to publish content, and easier to connect, communication and collaborate with people. Yes, there is some hype. But it's also a real shift.

Web 2.0 does NOT mean that your Web site or email is going away. It doesn't mean that you have to be everywhere or anywhere. Rather, it's a brand new opportunity. Take it and know what you're looking for.

Nonprofits can use social networking to help spread their message and capture new audiences, to deepen engagement with their supporters and to inspire action.

There are lots of people who already care about you but who right now have an impersonal interaction with you. If they can come read your blog or see your video on YouTube it can help deepen that relationship.

Blogs: Ben says that blogs are unhip now. They were hip in 2002-2003 but a lot of people have already moved on. Still, blogs are a niche media outlet and can connect you to valuable eyeballs. Use it to measure your blog and media mentions and to drive direct traffic to your site. You should also be using blogs to protect your own brand and direct conversations.

News and Bookmark Sharing Sites: The only value to these sites is direct traffic. You can't just post a link and expect traffic; you have to push it and fight for it. Don't use it for brand building. Relative to blogs, these sites have a very broad base audience. The value of the visitors is much less than what you'll get from a blog.

Video Sharing Sites: When we talk about video sharing sites, we're really only talking about YouTube. It's people looking for fun. YouTube has a Nonprofits Channel, but the biggest problem with it is that nonprofits don't have quality video. Even if you get someone to watch your video, if it sucks it's not going to help you. Also consider, what's the call to action in the video? There are no links out available. Donations are available but nobody is making them.

Social Networks: Lots of people on these sites - more than 80 million in the United States. There are tons of networks out there like MySpace, Facebook, Bebo, Friendster, hi5, Tagged, etc. If you're going to do social networking, focus on MySpace and Facebook.

• MySpace: Being used by >10,000 nonprofits. Friending doesn't mean a whole lot. The benefits are that it's easy to communicate, there's lots of interaction and it provides a branded experience. Still, it's difficult to convert. The unique thing is the difference between using it for a consistent presence and simply using it for a single campaign. Campaigns can be really powerful. If you're going to create a profile to create a presence, you won't find much value.
• Facebook: It's been everywhere lately. There's a huge amount of interest, especially in the developer platform. The excitement is due to the virality of the applications. There are lots of ways to establish a presence - groups, pages, causes, etc. Joining a group/page/cause doesn't mean much. The average value of a member of a cause is $.02. The problems with Facebook are that it's difficult to get back in touch with people (you can't mass email your groups) and it's hard to establish your brand.

What's the future of Web 2.0 and Nonprofits?

• Focused Campaigns: Being sure exactly why you're going there.
• Deep Integration: Thinking of social networking as the possibility of taking over an existing stream of communication.
• Use them as tools.

Question and Answer

Have you had any success with using widgets?

Yes. Widgets are great for driving traffic. DonorsChoose.com and Kiva are great examples of nonprofit sites doing great things with widgets. They drive about 25 percent of their traffic. For widget campaigns to be successful the person has to be really passionate about it

It sounds like a lot of this is driving brand recognition. How have you found it effective to measure brand lift?

He measures blog mentions and advises going to Technorati to see who's talking about you and how often. He says that almost no nonprofits are doing measurements.

How involved should organizations be in participating in the conversation? Should you respond to people who are talking about you?

If you have your own blog and you're not blogging at least once a week, it's going to be hard to generate a conversation. If you want to get real value out of things like MySpace and Facebook, it's going to take a lot of work. You have to get people to really engage. If you see that someone is commenting negative information about you on a blog, you should step in and respond in a tactful way. People love it when companies get involved. It's great personal recognition.

I can see how this can deepen engagement, but do you think it can be negative if you DON'T have a presence on these sites? Is it essential for people to be in this space?

Over 50 percent of social media users expect nonprofits to have some type of presence. Increasingly, nonprofits will need to have some type of a presence. There's a big difference, though, between having a MySpace profile and being active in that community. He's not sure if you need to spend a lot of resources on it. Unless you have very specific reasons, you may not find a lot of value.

Posted on 05/ 7/08 at 2:59 PM | Comments (0)
See more entries in eMetricsSF08

Measuring the Success of Non-Commerce Websites

Posted by Lisa Barone

I just had some coffee. I feel better.

Alex Langshur (PublicInsite) is here to talk about how to measure success when it's not about sales and shopping carts. I'll admit; I've been looking forward to this one since I got here. I hope it delivers.

Alex jokes that his session is up against Avinash Kaushik and Jacob Nielsen so he has a bone to pick with Jim Sterne. Heh.

Alex starts off saying that there are plenty of institutions where dollars are not part of the equation. They're working a lot with Harvard University. Harvard is struggling to find the value of the online channel to their organization and they're trying to help them with that.

Every time they try and quantify the value of the online channel people are still looking at shopping carts. It's like trying to shove a square peg into a round hole. What's interesting is that sometimes you can actually use a square peg to fit the round hole problem. Like with square watermelons!

Engagement: It's a buzzword but we're stuck with it. If you go and look at Eric Peterson's engagement equation, it's still a number. And numbers don't necessarily help you manage all that well. It's one way of approaching it but he's not going to focus on it.

What should I measure?

When you try and reduce really complicated sites that are an expression of the organization into a simple number, it doesn't work. You have to find another way. There are two things you need to look at:

Pre-click behaviors: These are leading indicators like visibility and alignment
Post-click behaviors: These are lagging indicators like conversions and intensity.

Pre-click is going to drive post-click behavior. You have to use benchmarks in order to give these things value. If you're not using benchmarks because there's "nobody like you", you're missing it.

Benchmarks are really important because they give you perspective. It helps you to understand potential audience size and where you sit relevant to others. Excellent free sources include Google Analytics, Compete.com, Quantcast,com, index.fireclicks.com and your own analytics vendor.

Measurework framework:

Visibility: What affects our online profile? SEO (recommends using Yahoo Site Explorer to check backlinks), traffic acquisition campaigns, buzz monitoring (he recommends Trackur). Who's talking about you, where, when & what is being said?

Alignment: What is our alignment to the audience and its needs? Look at the intent. What keyword themes bring visitors to the site? Look at your search analytics. Also pay attention to audience segmentation. Are we reaching the right audience? Are we tracking the right audience? Can we segment, and if so, how?

When you're doing keyword research, there are a million of opportunities for segmentation and alignment in the long tail. The head may be your bread, but the long tail is your issues. They're the authors on your Web site, the books you're publishing etc. You need to look into it.

You do that by reverse engineering the Information Architecture and breaking the long tail terms into categories. You can use text mining tools to help you, but you really have to create the categories and themes by hand.

Another part of alignment means asking yourself if you're getting the right people. Do these 1500 visits you're getting from Europe influence the key site metrics? If they're not aligned to you, those visitors degrade your stats and skew your metrics in a negative way. You must find a way to address that. It may mean playing with your geo-targeting.

Intensity: What is the change in key performance indicators for visits? There are a wide range of KPIs to choose from. Things like page views/visits, average visitor duration, unique visitors, user generated content volume, etc. Don't track them but all figure out which ones matter to you. The Web Analytics Association has a big book of KPIs. You can reference that. If you go beyond 15 KPIs, you have too many. He prefers to go down to 10. When you're dealing with non-commerce based organizations you have to crystallize the mission or you risk losing the discussion when people become too tied up with the numbers. Don't design the indicators by committee.

Conversions: How are value events performing? Things like email sign ups, RSS feeds and clickthroughs, downloads of key content, AJAX/Flash events, Send to a friend/print pages, social tags and bookmarking, and satisfaction survey results. In a Web 2.0 world you can use tools like Feedburner to track value events.

How should I report?

• Don't provide access to raw data, reports or the tool
• Find the hook that can start a conversation, then build the story
• Take the time to report less and inform more
• Contextualize data in terms that matter to the recipient
• Look for champions in the organization
• Nothing succeeds like success

Case Study: Public Sector, health promotion

Goals: Encourage visitors to inquire about healthy eating and inform them of the benefits of healthy eating

Desired Outcome: Encourage them to take action that reflects a shift in their thinking about that subject.

Visibility: Find actions that would raise awareness - SEO
Alignment: What is KW analysis saying about intent?
Intensity: How are they using the site?
Conversions: What are the outcomes?

Visibility: If they hadn't raised visibility, they would have had a very low amount of traffic. It was one of those things where you can do great stuff, but if you can't get people to come to the site, no one will know about it. And if that happens, you won't get the money to do it again in the future.

Alignment: They were looking for people who were at home and people in the K-12 segment. They had 20 percent of their audience from those segments. It was a lot higher than previously.

Intensity: People were coming but they weren't coming back. Wasn't a lot of intensity of use. That was a problem going forward.

Conversions: Terrible conversion ratio of .26...but it was double last years. They had a fairly respectable sign up rate. How do you report that?

Created a color-coded scorecard that explained the define objective, the result and a color-code that said if the objective was met. The purpose was to start the conversation. They knew if they gave them a report no one would read it. They didn't send it by email. They printed it and distributed it by hand.

Question & Answer

Do you have any preferred methods for doing long tail keyword analysis and putting things into buckets?

The short answer is no. They've run studies looking at the top 100, 200, 300, 400, etc keywords. The curve is like a normal distribution where once you go beyond 600 keywords, the deltas are under a percent. If you do the Top 500 you're going to be capturing the major portion of what the intent is. If you still to that, you'll have a good understanding as to what's going on.

You talk about profiling segments. It's hard to do in practice. How have you gone about profiling segments?

1. Geographically profiling: You HAVE to be doing this.
2. Profile-based navigation
3. Qualitative analysis

How do you establish ROI?

In a public sector org, ROI is meaningless because you can't bring it back to profit and loss centers. In a nonprofit org, it might be a little bit easier but it's tough to do. He believes in establishing ROI based on programs and initiations. ROI is "are you reaching the right target audience?" He goes back to those kinds of value adds.

Posted on 05/ 7/08 at 12:35 PM | Comments (0)
See more entries in Analytics, eMetricsSF08, liveblog

eMetrics Keynote - The Coca-Cola Marketing Metrics Journey, Part Two

Posted by Lisa Barone

Ready for a keynote? Well, good, cause one's about to start. Jim Sterne welcomes Tim Goudie from Coca Cola. This keynote is labeled "part two" because Part One was given about a year and a half ago in Washington DC at the eMetrics event down there. Tim's here to update us on what's been happening over the past 18 months.

Tim has been involved in brand marketing since day one. He knows the importance of metrics and measurements. He's going to talk about the global perspective of digital marketing.

Metrics is about knowing exactly where you are. If you're running a business and you don't know how you're doing, it's because you haven't planned ahead of time to know where you are. The consequence of not knowing where you are results in disaster. He shows some examples of people who ended up in disaster because they didn't know where they are or where they were going. They're historical references and one of them involves cannibalism. It's a bit early for that, isn't it? I haven't even had my coffee yet (though I did have a cupcake!).

In July 2006, Coca Cola started building a Web site called The Coke Show. They were trying to get people to upload videos and share UGC. People wanted to share, create and be recognized. The site got so heavy it could hardly move. Consumers weren't taken to the point where Coke thought they would be. The site kind of flopped but Coke learned a lot.

He also talks about MyCokeRewards.com. It's all about loyalty. You can register and build your profile. It was the first time Coke had used precision marketing. It collects data about your customers and then dishes out particular content that they've either asked for or visited on an ongoing basis. It's powerful, but it's expensive. The impact of the program was that it lifted all the pack sizes. The average lift was 15 points over the average consumer.

DesignTheWorldInCoke is a new site to support the upcoming Olympic Games. They unveiled it in 32 markets at the flip of a switch. They've been able to learn as they go.

Metrics are ridiculously political

People will fight and die over numbers. They don't want their numbers exposed. You can overcome this by creating an even playing field. Find out the top KPIs. If you're going to have a constant set of KPIs, stick them on the dashboard so that everyone can see them. It creates a wall of shame or fame and tugs at people's Type A tendencies to be on top. Publish your metrics widely so that everyone has access to the data. Never ever believe that the metrics are neutral. You have to ask why you want that data and what people are going to do with it. Are you going to use it to improve things or do you just think it's pretty?

You need to make sure the executives know that you can't just turn off the metrics. You have to invest in the system.

What is the business that you're in?

Tim's organization is about selling bottles of a beverage. He doesn't care about how many visitors come to their Web site or how many uniques the new marketing campaign will bring in. He wants to know how many cases of Coke it will help them sell. You have to make sure your metrics go back to the fundamental objective of the business. That's how you're going to get your buy-in. It has to go back to the bottom line and how you're going to promote what the business is about.

You need to be where your consumers are and you need to get your organization to think about where your consumers are spending their time and how they're consuming media.

From Web Metrics to Business Measurement

Coca-Cola created a framework that looks like this:

1. Brand Health: They have a tool that measures Brand Health all day, every day.
2. Brand Advocacy: It's the next level of commitment. Would someone refer your product to their friend? Would they recommend your Web site? They're monitoring that. [Tom opens up a bottle Coke. Heh]
3. Volume
4. Media Value: What's your reach? Your frequency?
5. Marketing Productivity

Our Challenge:

[He takes a swig of his Coke. Product placement, FTW!]

You have to measure offline data with digital behavior. You want to link them together. If you know who your consumer is and how they're spending their time, you can dish back messaging that becomes more and more relevant to them. You can't always measure everything you want to measure.

Listening to your online customers. Not every business is the same. You want the data to build the relationship with the consumer, not just to store it.

Tracking Brand Health Online

Coca-Cola put a brand survey on their Olympics-related Web site to see how/if its helping brand health move in the right direction. They focus on brand health because there's a built in assumption that brand health is a good indicator of future consumption.

Go External: If you don't have the skills internally, find them externally. Find someone who can help you with tagging, optimization and interpretation and dashboards.

There's a whole new set of digital applications that are emerging. Things like mobile marketing, widgets, social networks, etc. Imagine if you could deliver a message to a consumer at lunch time telling them that there was an offer waiting for them at the McDonalds located around the corner. That's useful.

The problem is there's no such thing as a mobile cookie. Have you tagged your widget correctly to map those transactions? That's the type of information you need to know.

Find internal patrons of your will die: Find someone who believes in metrics. Find people who understand how metrics can be used and leveraged. Find an executive whose eyes light up when you talk metrics.

Distributing the data: Having the data is one thing, knowing who to get it to and in what format is another thing. You need to give your executives pretty data. It needs to be in a chart or a graph and use color. Management level people can dig a bit deeper.

Leveraging the data: The most important learning for Coke has been that it's okay to have red dials and switches and data, but if you don't have the people to manage it and determine who gets what data, it doesn't matter what kind of car you've bought. If you don't know how to drive it, you've just wasted it. You need to have the right resources on the ground. You need to map your web behavior back to your users.

Key Learnings

• We are evolving in the digital space.
• Metrics are ridiculously political.
• From metrics to business measures.
• Go external.
• We're learning.
• Find internal patrons.
• Dashboards.
• Distributing the data.
• Leveraging the data.
• Educate yourself.

Posted on 05/ 7/08 at 10:42 AM | Comments (1)
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May 6, 2008

On-site Search As A Crystal Ball

Posted by Lisa Barone

Last session of Day 2. We've almost made it! This time Daniel Shields (Wicked Business Sciences) and Phil Gibson (National Semiconductor Corporation) are talking about On-Site Search as a Crystal Ball. This should be fun.

Daniel is up first.

What makes site search important?

• 65-70 percent of clients' visits originate from the search engines. This means they're possibly predisposed to using searching navigation
• Users engaged in search are almost 1,000 percent more likely to convert [A thousand percent? Really?].
• More easily identified search cues lead to 30-35 percent more searches being performed on a site. More searching activity promotes most algorithms built into commercial site search solutions.
• Simply, more searchers = more engagement = more data = more opportunity for success.

What Should You Measure?

First, are you measuring at all? Are you using Google Analytics? Site Search is now part of their package as of last July. Omniture offers eVars, S.props and Custom Links to help gather all the angles. Other solutions?

You should be measuring clicks, engagement indicators, action-ability, behaviors, and conviction.

What Data is Useful? Words, clicks and correlations. Basically, all of it!

Qualitative data helps breed understanding of what intent the majority search-engaged user are trying to accomplish.

Quantitative data provides a clear sense of the specific items or subject users are interested in and provides statistical support for new products, investing in search terms, rethinking SEO, taxonomy and silos, etc.

Site search helps you to grow your business by making you aware of your content and telling you what terms to bring into your search marketing campaign. It works as a personalization application and helps with URL analysis, SEO and internal crawl development, new product suggestions, landing page optimization, behavioral targeting, etc.

How do I Capture Search Terms?

Google Analytics

1. Identify how your search solution outputs data with regard to the search.
2. Edit your reporting to include site search metrics
3. Place appropriate URL parameter into text box
4. Identify if you are or are not eCommerce
5. Wait a day to see if it works.
6. Check to make sure you placed tags on the target results
7. Wait another day to confirm that it is now working

Omniture

1. ID how your search solution outputs data with regard to search


2. Allocate an eVar in Admin together data with FULL Subrelations


3. ID and tag script execute event


4. Prepare S.Code


5. Run tests to see if it works

Phil is next.

Phil says the audience is graying and getting older. I guess I'll just be over here trying not to snap my gum too loud.

He says he's got all kinds of search tools but he's focused on dialects and terms. People in his business have their own concepts and terms that mean certain things. They do a lot of visual search and general navigation search.

They created WEBENCH - it's an online design and prototyping environment. You can choose the part, design it, analyze the design and build it. Anyone in this room can turn the knob in any direction they want.

He spends a lot of time talking about the company he works for and what his customers/engineers are looking for.

What do Engineers Notice? What are the headlines they're looking for?

• Lowest input bias current
• Low-noise 1.6GHz Clocking Family
• New High Current Flash LED Driver for Handhelds
• New Technology for suppressing background noise
• Synchronized signaling

Once you have those headlines you can use them for:

• Direct Navigation
• Exact hits: Straight to the answer
• Prioritize: Highest margin parts first
• Targeting 3 Options for Visitors
• Review by Key Parameters - Money spec
• Refine/Reduce - Narrow choices
• Ask for satisfaction - Survey, Respond promptly
• Convert to FAQs

To do that they monitor general trends in their statistical data. They focus in on the Top 100 queries on the site and their top accounts. What do their power users search for? What are the differences between what the power users look for and the general population? Drive actions on what you find. Review overall experience every three months.

People will type in terms you have no idea about. It shows you what you're presenting to users.

Metrics Reporting: Drive Actions

• Leads to Field Sales
• Statistics to Product Lines
• New Concept Keywords to Content Creators
• Google Referral Monitor: Top keyword referrals, keyword insertion assignments, source document tuning
• Critical actions as a result of observation
• Recognize common mistakes and correct them
• New Concepts: Concept creation, friendly URLS for spiders, page title adjustments, h1 title adjustments, h2 section title adjustments
• Training & Trend Reviews with Product Lines: Keyword concept reviews, integrate into new launches, and reinforce one topic per page.

Conclusions

• Satisfied Customers Engage More
• Clear return for your efforts: Repetitive improves over time. Deep understanding of your content and your audience.
• Improve brand perception and customer satisfaction
• Big opportunity cost if you DON'T

Question and Answer

What kinds of things are you tracking?

Dan: The number of searches performed. We column out all the data that we have and take a look at it with number of times it's been executed, number of card editions that they're getting, the orders that exist after a card edition and the amount of revenue that's collected for each term. They pass all that information into a scoring system.

How are you dealing with the long tail of search terms?

Dan: In essence, everything is long tail until it gets lumped into some kind of segment. Every instance is individual until you see a pattern. We take it in stride. We see that we have particular terms that may only appear once and awhile. We may throw them into some of our campaigns, but we don't pay too much time.

How are you bucketing them?

Dan: Mostly it has to do with finding two or three like terms within a phrase, and then trying to find columns of data that are related to subcolumns of data.

In the case of multiple search terms, do you look at assist keywords?

Dan: They've isolated negative keywords, stop words and information seeking keywords. They're starting to cater the search results so that the info searches are also there but not in the product searches results. They're segmenting their search results to match the intent of the user.

What's the tool you're using as far as the site search that lets you customize it?

Phil: Theirs is homegrown. They also use Google Analytics. From a site search standpoint they use IBM's search engine. They write a lot of scripts on top of that. They're doing a lot of parsing of the incoming message.

So you're getting API results and then writing scripts on top of that?

Phil: Right. They look for frequent hits.

At what frequency are you monitoring the onsite search data? You said you gleaned some insights, how long does it take to make changes?

Phil: Daily. They can make changes daily but they have real jobs. We have monthly meetings. We try to give them a short, prioritize list of things to do and give them that once a month. Site search drives the other actions around the Web site. It's incredibly important. He spends 45 minutes a day himself working on it.

To Phil: You mentioned merchandising the search results. Are you using the right pane for promotional purposes within your site

Phil: Yes, for our own products, not for other people's products. We promote things up.

Dan: There are a lot of solutions that have similar things built into them.

You mentioned that you've done studies about the placement of search. Any conclusions?

Dan: The contrast is very important. People generally go towards the most intense call to action on the page. What we did was run a lot of multivariate tests testing the intensity of the colors leading to the call to action itself. They started with a pastel blue and went to a neon, glowing off the page blue. They found that it has to jive with the theme of your site, but contrast is very important.

How do tell a company that the call-to-action is more important then their logo?

Dan: Data. Analytics transcends the Internet. You're looking at what somebody wants and what realm of the world they want it in.

Posted on 05/ 6/08 at 6:30 PM | Comments (4)
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Reputation Management in a Social Media World and On Your Site

Posted by Lisa Barone

Hey, hey! Time to talk reputation management and social media with Katie Delahave Paine (KDPaine Partners) and Steve Bernstein (PayPal). Let's do it.

[Or not. We're having some technical difficulties so the session is starting a bit late. Amuse yourselves. I'm cruising Facebook.

Okay, it looks like we're ready. Yey!]

For years the big thing was counting eyeballs. Then it was hits. Now it's engagement. The biggest piece of this is to understand that measurement and engagement mean different things to different people. If you're trying to sell something, engagement means 'did you move someone down the conversion path?' If you're just trying to get some influence out there then its comments and links.

How do you measure the impact of all those various communication efforts?

Six Steps to the Perfect Measurement System

• Define your goals
• Understand your audience and what motivates them
• Define the metrics
• Determine what your benchmark is
• Pick a tool and undertake the research
• Analyze results and glean insight, take action, measure again.

A proposed engagement index:

Output: The activity
Outtake: What do people believe about you
Outcome: What do you want them to accomplish

It's the combination of those three things that define engagement. You can't just do one without the others.

Katie says they're also trying to measure the impact of social media networks. You can see your share of discussion on Technorati and YouTube. But what does this all mean? Is there a connection between YouTube content on the Presidential candidates and their share of votes? Does it impact the outcome?

Katie analyzed the traffic patterns for Obama and John Paul and found that they dominated YouTube. Then she analyzed the amount of videos for each on YouTube and the extent that they were commented on, viewed, etc. She found that there was a direct correlation between the activity on these videos and the voting patterns. [Yes. I am so sure that YouTube is directly influencing people's voting. What?]

Components of an Engagement Index

• Involvement: Web site visits, time spent, page view
• Interaction:: Comments, reviews
• Intimacy: Sentiment, positioning
• Influence: Likelihood to recommend, brand affinity, forwards, links.

You also have to test relationships, taking into account control mutuality, trust, satisfaction, commitment, exchange, and command.

Measuring Facebook

Katie throws out some stats:

Engagement in external blogs = 13 comments
High engaged admissions blogs = 35 comments per post
Good momentum on social bookmarking sites = 1 submitted item every other day
Average positive = 50 percent average, negatives 9 percent

Most of the content shared on Facebook is video. Traditional news media plays a much bigger role in sharing information than people think. Thirty eight percent of people get information from sites like Flickr and YouTube.

If you think you're going to put a video out there and control it, forget it. 86 percent of watched videos come from individuals, not corporations. If you're corporation trying to release video, hide that you're a corporation. Otherwise it will be rejected. [It will also be rejected when people find out you were trying to hide your identity.]

Takeaways

• The reality is if you want to be popular, be video and don't be corporate
• Traditional media is much more important than you think
• If you want o reach incoming Freshman, you have between March and Aug to get your message out
• In terms of tonality, neutral is the norm.

Engaging allows you to join in the conversation and correct bloggers who are saying bad stuff.

ROI: Trying it all back to the bottom line

• Define "R" - what's your mission
• Define how you contribute to that mission
• Define the 'I' - what's the investment

Steve is up next. He's going to talk about qualifying the quantitative. My fingers are crying sweet baby emo tears. Why all the long words?

Why did PayPal start getting site feedback?

They had the "what" but they needed the "why". They could see in their data that there were people going down the same path a few times. Why were they doing that?

If you go to their site and click on "site feedback", a comment card will pop up. The two most important parts of the card are "Would you recommend this site to a friend?" and the abbreviated net promoter score. Whatever that is. Basically they want to force people to make a decision. They're looking for trends over time.

Maximizing the Value

• Data is worse than pointless if you don't use it
• In an ideal world, each comment would be read, and actionable comments would always be acted upon or at least considered for action.
• It's more than just labor-intensive, that's just hard.
• Quantifying the Qualitative: Qualitative research is thought of as focus groups and interviews. They're free-floating and are about discovery. Comment boxes are kind of qualitative because people can right whatever they want, but you can quantify it because you're presenting the exact same experience for everyone.

Comment Categorization: Categorize comments by themes and traffic them to appropriate product management teams. There are many commercial categorization tools available to help you do this. Comments typically categorize well because they're one-dimensional.

He takes every comment and normalizes it using porter stemming. You want to clean it up by taking out stop words and put everything in the same tense. Then they use trigrams - a three word phrase - to move through the content and count all the three word phrases that appear. It gives you a histogram of each comment and lets you "cluster them into galaxies". You can find commonalities.

And that's it. Wow, that was a somewhat confusing session that failed to deliver. Bummer.

Posted on 05/ 6/08 at 6:24 PM | Comments (0)
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Actionable Organic Search Analytics

Posted by Lisa Barone

We're back in the search track with Matt Bailey (SiteLogic) and Diane Hoag (IBM developerWorks). Matt is giving me a hard time for going to bed early last night and missing out on all the debauchery that went down after I left. Based on how tired Matt looks, methinks I made the right decision. :)

Mikes moderating and starts off by telling the story about his stick. If you know Mike, you know what I'm talking about. Basically he takes it everywhere and it's been around the world. If you haven't heard the story, ask Mike the next time you see him. He loves to tell it.

Up first is Matt Bailey.

Matt says conferences like this are the 'dump truck conferences'. You come, the conference dumps all this information into your brain, and then you have to go back and apply it.

He says that Plato talked about three different groups. The first were the gods and they already knew everything. The second were the beasts. The beasts didn't know anything. They didn't ask questions. The third group was the people. People are the only ones who can ask questions. We're the only ones with the fundamental ability to ask.

[I know I say this all the time, but I love listening to Matt Bailey speak. He's so animated. He gets people excited!]

We can't look at our dashboards of information and expect them to tell us what to do. They don't function that way. We have to pull information out of the machine data and interpret it.

You start with the data - 34,000. There's nothing you can do with just the number. You have to add a bit of information and context. There's no such thing as complete and true accuracy. If your supervisor is asking for accuracy, you need to let them know it's impossible. Instead, you have to look at the trends and gather the information that's happening on your Web site. Adding context to the equation doesn't make things actionable. What makes things actionable are when you can create a story. Visitors who searched for X stayed on the site for X minutes and looked for Y and converted at a rate of Z.

You want to get beyond knowledge. You want to get to understanding and that comes from people. People are the central focus for adding that understanding and figuring out what to do on your Web site. No program is going to give you understanding. It can only give you information and knowledge. Avinash said that analytics are 90 percent the person and 10 percent the tool. That needs to be your mantra.

Reporting or Analysis?

Reporting just gives you information like path views, path analysis, hits, monthly visitors, etc. That's not actionable.

You can't do analytics on an ad hoc basis. You have to have clearly defined goals. If you don't have goals you don't have measurements. Your goals need to be written down. If there are no goals, there are no insights.

Your goals can be anything. They can be downloads, page views, contact form leads, sales, etc. You have to ask question of the data. That's how you're going to improve those numbers.

He starts talking about segmentation. It's an essential part about beginning to ask questions about your Web site. People are not cattle. They don't come to your site in a herd and move from point A to point B. We don't have a herd mentality. (Matt has clearly never attended high school) People come to your site with vastly different motives. You can't treat them all as one group of visitors.

He brings up the famous Star Trek segmentation example. I'm going to copy and paste it from our coverage of SES NY to save my fingers a bit of retyping.

The Starship enterprise had a crew of 430 people. He knows this because startrek.org told him. There were 59 total deaths in the 5 year mission. That's a 13.7 percent mortality rate (aka conversion rate). Of the 54 deaths, yellow shirts made up 10 percent, blue shirts made up 7.2 percent and red shirts made up 72.8 percent. That's our data but we still have no action. We have knowledge, but no indicator on how we can improve it or make it worse.

Factors that lead to a red shirt death: If you beamed down with Captain Kirk and wore a red shirt, you died 57.5 percent of the time. This is the number one factor that leads to the death of a red shirt. OMG the giggles.

To increase the survival rate: You'll see that if Captain Kirk meets an alien woman, the red shirt survival rate increases to 84 percent.

How often do these factors occur? Capt Kirk has a conquest rate of 30 percent. If you go to a land of [insert name of things that fight Captain Kirk. I'm not geeky enough for this.] and you're a red shirt, you'll probably die. If you go to a land of peaceful women, you'll live 30 percent more of the time. That's segmentation!

Say you have an electronics Web site. You have a visitor who comes and is trying to locate a digital camera. They're looking for price, brand, size, battery life, etc. On the other side of the site, someone is looking for an MP3 player. You need to understand that you can't classify these two people with a single conversion rate. It doesn't tell the story. It actually ignores the story that you have two people looking for two different things on two different sides of the Web site. Each group needs a new conversion rate. People see your Web site differently based on what they were looking for.

Three C's of Analytics: Context, Comparison, and Contrast.

Key Performance Indicators:

• Time on site
• Pages Viewed
• Conversions
• Goals

By Segment:

• Blogs
• Web sites
• In-market links
• Social News
• Search
• Actions
• Content
• Media

Anyone who clicks on a link about you from a blog has a high context for your site. They have a specific expectation and you need to know what that is. On topical sites, you have lower context and a lot of competition. You have to be unique to stand out.

Use your analytics to tell the story. Find out where the Red Shirts are on your Web site. Find out how you can improve your site for all the different segments. Add more context to the situation. And then do something.

Forrester says that bringing in an analytics person will result in a 900-1,200 percent increase in ROI. You can't just collect the data; you have to do something with it.

I'm just going to say that if Matt Bailey was a priest, more people would go to church. He can get you excited about pretty much anything. Seriously.

Diane Hoag is up.

Diane works for IBM and says that in 2005, out of nowhere, their Google referrals dropped off. They started missing monthly targets in June. Analysis exposed search (Google) issues. They went to the Internet (as you do...) to see what was happening and found that in May Google had released the Bourbon algorithm update. It focused on sequence and types of redirects. The intent was to discourage URL hijacking. They don't do any blackhat SEO techniques so they didn't understand why their traffic dropped off. They did more analysis. They finally concluded that it was due from moving to different hosting environments, which led to long redirect paths.

What resulted was that their URLs had incredibly long redirect paths. Some were 7 or 8 redirects long. Sometimes they even circled back and went through the same server a second time. They needed to clean up their redirects.

Steps to Recovery:

• Established canonical URL: www.ibm.com/developerworks
  • Internally: Changed links on their content to the canonical URL
  • Externally: Asked marketers to use the canonical URL
• Cleaned up their redirects: Monitored progress with HTTP simulate textbed of 33 URLs
• Made DNS changes
• Eliminated unnecessary Meta refreshes: Developed a redirect application for Web editors to use.
• Established a unified proxy with ibm.com: Eliminated redirects. The canonical URL appears in the visitor's browser - beneficial for social bookmarking.

She shows how well IBM has recovered and that they're growing their visitors.

Take a look at your own infrastructure and redirects. No matter how bad your situation is, recovery is possible! Aw.

Mike Grehan takes a moment to plug Mike Moran's new book and wants to make sure it gets mentioned in the liveblogging. See, Mike, I got it.

Question and Answer

To Diane: Did Google provide any assistance when you were in this train wreck?

They got a letter from Google because they had a personal contact there. But that was it.

To Diane: What analytics were you using when you discovered the problem?

They used SurfAid, it's an IBM product. They're transitioning to CoreMetrics right now. She pitches SurfAid a bit.

To Matt: Did you actually watch all those Star Trek episodes? (Hee!)

Matt says he watched about half. Sci-Fi has an episode-by-episode recap and they list Red Shirts. He got his "data" from there.

For Diane: After you consolidated those URL, did you notice any changes outside of Google?

Google makes up 90 percent of their search engine referrals and has forever. They didn't notice any changes with the other engines.

Posted on 05/ 6/08 at 2:44 PM | Comments (1)
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Essential KPIs for Search Engine Optimization

Posted by Lisa Barone

Time to kick off the Search Analytics track here at eMetrics. Finally something I almost recognize! Brian Klais (Netconcepts) and Richard Zwicky (Enquisite) will be taking charge of this one with Mike Grehan and his famous stick moderating. Curiously, the WiFi that was working yesterday is now nonexistent. Guess that means lots of trips back up to my hotel room on the 6th floor to post. Fun times!

[Note: If you're a crazy stalker, I'm not really on the 6th floor. I'm on the...12th. Yes, the 12th. Are there even twelve floors in the Palace Hotel? I'm not sure.] You fail stealth, Lisa --Susan

Up first is Brian to talk about the 10 essential natural search KPIs.

At NetConcepts they have a technology called GravityStream which helps large Web sites automate the application of search engine optimization best practices. They have a channel management dashboard to give people more control, as well as proprietary natural search analytics. It's the analytics he's going to share with us today.

These are the questions Brian's company is asking itself:

• Is our natural search performance good or not?
• We've eaten the low hanging fruit. What's next?
• How much more upside is there or is this it?
• How do we calculate ROI on SEO initiatives?
• My CEO wants 50 percent growth. Is it possible?

They had to develop metrics to help them answer those questions. There's more to search success than measuring hits and rankings. He looks at KPIs like brand-to-non-brand ratio, unique pages, indexation rate, phrase per page, visitors per phrase, page placement, yelling pages, and engine yield rate.

His goals in the business are to maximize the performance of 100 percent of the pages he's entrusted with. They treat natural search like a direct response channel, not a project. They want to improve as many pages as possible with the least amount of effort. They want to lead data driven decisions.

He brings up a tag cloud that shows us how we search. We're not looking for brand names. We're looking for a solution to our needs. We're looking for "jeans for women with no butts". Hee. It's hard to predict these searches, so how do you make your content rank well?

Essential KPIs for Search Engine Optimization:

1. Brand to Non-Brand Ratio: Traffic driven by brand keywords vs. non-brand. This indicates remaining opportunity. Long tail search = 40x brand search. Ideally your traffic is dominated by non-brand queries.
2. Unique Pages: Non-duplicate pages crawled by the bots. This establishes the size of your Web site and forms the top of the funnel. Think: tonnage or emails sent. I don't know what tonnage means, but hopefully all of you do.
3. Indexation Rate: How many of your crawled pages are actually making it into the index? This tells you your advertising inventory. Example: if Google crawls 26,000 of your pages and Google has 15,400 indexed, that means you have an indexation rate of 58 percent. That's good but where is the other 42 percent? Are they stuck in the supplementals?
4. Yielding Pages: How many of your pages are actually driving traffic? How many searchers clicked on your ads? It measures ad efficiency. Think: Email click through. It helps you identify your non-performing pages so that you can optimize them and get them to convert more often.
5. Phrases per Page: Reflects on page keywords and internal anchor text. Surgical optimization (title, meta, content). Can help you outsource the longtail to your users? Maybe by using UGC?
6. Visitors per Page: Reflects brand strength and rank. Talks about HSN who enhanced their URLs to include keywords. Ended up influencing and increasing the PageRank score. Increased traffic 550 percent.
7. Page Placement: Looks at click throughs as a function of ranking. Where are your pages ranking within the SERPs and how much traffic are you getting from those ads? Quantify the value of Page 1 placement. Develop strategies for Page 2.
8. Engine Yield Rate: Compares return on crawler investment. Shows you which engines you should target based on which return the most searchers.
9. Natural Search Sales: Gives you your ROI.
10. Brand Reach: 114,000 searchers found the brand useful for their query. Won 43,000 unique keyword market battles. How many didn't find the brand? Allows you to back into estimating the market size.

Ideas to start experimenting with: Looking at keyword URLs, tag cloud navigation, PageRank sculpting, alternative navigation links.

Next is Richard Zwicky. The computer just crashed so Mike has to restart it. Richard gives his intro while Mike plays in the background trying to get things up and running. Richard says his office burned down in the past week. For serious? Oh noes!

Using Analytics to Drive Big Wins:

Over 90 percent of search referral traffic comes from page 1. Identity which Web pages are driving Page 2 traffic. If 95 percent of referral track comes from page one and 2.2 comes from page two, if you can move a page to Page 1, you can increase traffic by 4550 percent!

Step 1: Identify and monitor which pages are being found for relevant terms by your visitors from page 2 of the SERPS.

How do you do that? First, identify which queries drive valuable traffic. Which Web pages do you listed on Page 2 of the SERPs that get the most referral traffic for those queries? Identify which the queries matter to you and optimize the pages for those terms.

He talks about some rank checking software.

Strengths of rank checking software: These tools allow you to show actual SERP results in reports. You can track competitors. This will give you great insight into precise positioning in results. They allow you to monitor movement/progress

Drawbacks: The weaknesses are that it doesn't always correspond to results in your location. You need to specify terms, pages, etc. There's a risk of violation the T&Cs from the engines, as well if you abuse it. It takes hours to set up properly.

Alternative to rank checking software is using your analytics package. This allows you to look at the terms your customers are using, to see real phrase, understand traffic based on where your customers are located, ID pages to target as opposed to guessing, automatically keep tack of all the long tail variations, and to show you which terms convert. You can do all of this in 30 seconds.

The weaknesses are that it doesn't show precise position on page and that you have to manually build campaign profiles.

Identifying the pages that are underperforming (ranked on page 2) gives you an incredible opportunity. These pages are almost there. You can now focus in, cut to the chase, and that site popped up to page 1.

What to Optimize:

Content: The long tail phrases people are using. Look for the root terms and build out from there. Build targeted content and link it to the target pages.

Links: Where are you underperforming? Get links targeted to your location and topic.

Question & Answer

Mike Grehan: Isn't ranking checking very 1999?

Richard recommends looking at how well you're placed to find opportunities for optimization. He doesn't recommend using it as any kind of benchmark for clients.

Isn't PageRank sculpting just spam?

Brian says no. PR Sculpting is the idea that every certain page has a PR score and you want to maximize how that PR asset gets spent. All pages aren't created equal. You don't want some pages to be diluting your presence so you nofollow the links going to those pages so the bots don't pay attention to them.

If the rel=nofollow tag was developed to say "I don't trust this link" why would you use it on your own Web site?

Brian thinks it's a strategy worth experimenting with. Vanessa Fox is in the audience and advises everyone to go read our interview with her from last week where she talks in depth about PageRank sculpting.

Top Secret Tip From Vanessa Fox!

Vanessa offered up a tip for finding out how many of your site pages Google has indexed. She says that if you submit an XML Sitemap to Google and list all the URLs you want indexed, Google will keep track of how many of those pages are indexed. Basically, it will give you a total number of pages indexed from the site map. So if you list ALL your pages, Google will tell you how many pages are indexed. Great tip from Vanessa!

[If you missed Vanessa's pre-eMetrics interview, be sure to read Six Questions With Vanessa Fox.--Susan]

Posted on 05/ 6/08 at 12:53 PM | Comments (2)
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eMetrics Keynote: Optimizing eBay - Improving Customer Experience at the World's Marketplace

Posted by Lisa Barone

Happy Tuesday. Time for a morning keynote where everyone gets free coffee mugs and are then blinded by strobe stage lights. Yey! Jim Sterne welcomes Elissa Darnell and Deepak Nadig. I think. His voice is really distorted over the microphone. Elissa and Deepak are from the eBay.

Up first is Deepak Nadig. He's going to give us an overview of eBay. The microphone is really bad. This should be interesting.

In the beginning, eBay started out as an experiment. The founder had a broken laser pointer and thought it would be interesting to start an auction to see if anyone wanted to buy it. He set the bidding price at $1. At the end of two weeks, someone had paid $40 for the broken laser pointer. He contacted the guy to make sure he knew it was broken. The guy said he knew and that he collects broken laser pointers. An industry was born!

In 1996, eBay had 41,000 users. In 2008, they have 276,000,000 users with over a billion photos. The site gets more than a billion page views a day. An SVU is sold every five minutes. A sporting good sells every 2 seconds. There are over ½ million pounds of kimichi sold every year. It's in 39 countries, in seven languages.

Elissa jumps in. eBay is really about the people who use it. To optimize the user experience, they need to know who they are and what they do. Users trade in over 50 thousand categories on eBay. They want people to have a fun shopping experience and to find good value. They want to help sellers find buyers. They want to know more about their buyers and sellers - what motivates them, how often do they use the site, why do they go to other sites, etc. They break their buyers and sellers down on their experience, frequency of use, and lots of other metrics.

What do they mean by user experience? They're talking about things like the utility of the site, usability, desirability, and the brand experience.

They use an assortment of research methods, including lab testing, field visits, participatory design, surveys, eye tracking and card sorting. They want the users to help design the user experience.

For lab testing they bring in representative users individually into their usability labs. They observe them perform assigned tasks. They use either prototypes or the live site itself to test. This enables direct observation of target users as they interact with the Web site or a design prototype. They're able to identify areas that are confusing and potential fixes. Testing is done iteratively through the design process.

Sometimes they'll have people use low fidelity (paper) lab testing where the designs are shown on paper. The researcher or designer acts as the computer and the participant uses their finger as the mouse.

They also do RITE testing - Rapid Iterative Test and Evaluation. It forces more rapid testing and retesting of the design based on a very small sample.

They have a program called Visits, also known as Field Study or Ethnography where eBay employees go to their customers' homes and watch them use eBay. They've taken their CEO, CMO, designers, finance people, etc into peoples' homes. They want everyone to understand the customers.

Visits involve going into peoples' homes and spending several hours watching them use eBay. They don't give them a set of tasks; they just let them do what they would normally do. The eBay rep takes notes or films video. The findings are summarized across participants. It reminds eBay employees that they are not their customers even they though have experience using the site. They have to get to know their real customers.

When they do Visits, they get to see people use eBay. They see them on their computers, switching between computers, what kind of connection they have, what kinds of equipment they use with the site, etc. They see them with life's normal interruptions (talking parrots and messy desks). They see that people weigh objects using their bathroom scale. People let their guard down when you go into their homes. They followed people to the post office to see how they ship their items.

Questions they focused on during the Visits:

• What is the larger context of use?
• What issues exist and WHY?
• What can we do to address the issues?

The visits are not about the numbers, or the question "how many users experienced that?"

To optimize the user experience they do research. In the beginning they do strategic research to inspire (field visits, competitive evaluations). Then they do design research to inform and assessment research to track.

Case Study

They redesigned the View Items page this year. They wanted to increase BID/BN efficiency and to improve the user experience by reducing the complexity and the clutter. They use a combo of qualitative and quantitative techniques. They used research from multiple teams.

She shows us what the View Item page used to look like in 2000 and how it's evolved over the years. A new design will be unveiled soon.

Research Overview

• Understand the User Needs: They conducted a compelled lab study to understand user experience. They also did participatory design studies to try and come up with the ideal design.
• Concept Testing: Held focus groups.
• Iterative Design: Used Rapid Iterative Testing to gauge use reaction.
• Visual Design Research: Use a desirability study. Tested the tabs, a new visual element they added.
• Implemented a Diary Study: Had users give input about how they're using the site at home.

How do they know the View Items page will be a success? Research was conducted through the product lifecycle to evaluate the current strategy and design at each stage. They had focus groups on the early concepts. They did desirability studies, and used eye tracking to help them pick the best tab design.

Deepa is back up.

Experimentation Lifecycle

1. Hypothesis: Idea and learning
2. Experimental Design: DOE, define samples, treatments, factors, etc.
3. Setup Experiment: Setup experiment samples, treatments, factors, implementation
4. Launch Experiment: Serve treatment
5. Measurement: Tracking, monitoring
6. Analysis & Results: Metrics, reporting

Automation

• Dynamically adapt experience: Choose page modules and inventory which provide the best experience for that users and contest. Order results by combination of demand, supply and other factors.
• Feedback loop enables system to learn about improve over time: Collect user behavior, aggregate and analysis offline, deploy updated metadata, decide and serve appropriate experience.
• Best Practices: "Pertubation" for continual improvement. Dampening feedback loop.

What they think about during and experiment: The fidelity (how representative is it of the product?), the cost (total cost of designing, building, running and analyzing an experiment), the iteration time, the concurrency (how many experiments can be done at the same time?), the signal/noise ratio, and the type/level of the experiment.

Challenges to Experimentation

• Stickiness to the user
• It gives you the "what", not the "why"
• Duration and long term effects
• Minor vs Major differences
• Extend of generalization

Qualitative research such as lab test and field visits give us rich data about usability problems, discoverability, navigation, terminology, more complex problems.

Understanding the customer experience requires insights into what they do, why they do it, attitude, motivations, etc. Qualitative and Quantitative both have their advantages and limits. Using them together helps you gain a holistic understanding of the user experience.

Posted on 05/ 6/08 at 10:18 AM | Comments (0)
See more entries in Analytics, Design, eMetricsSF08, liveblog

May 5, 2008

Multivariate Testing Panel

Posted by Lisa Barone

We're switching things up a bit this afternoon. Instead of the Web Analytics: Road to Marketing Optimization panel we'll be covering the session on Multivariate Testing. And it's not just because they're giving away free Google T-shirts over here. Well...not entirely, anyway.

Up we have Jon Diorio (Google) moderating speakers Andrew Anderson (CNET) [Andy Anderson? Like in How to Lose A Guy In 10 Day!], Tim Ash (SiteTurners.com), Matt Conahan (StubHub) and David Rogers (Red Envelope).

Tim Ash is taking pictures of the audience and blinding me. Thanks, Tim. Trying to write some witty banter here. Jon is now up and saying that he doesn't appreciate Jim Sterne delaying happy hour by putting a session in at 5pm. Personally, I'm still trying to find someone to go to dinner with me. I can has friends?

If you're considering your first multivariate testing experiment on your Web site, how do you decide where to get started?

David says there are two pieces - there's getting buy-in and then getting started for real. You get buy-in by starting with an argument. If you give me X amount of time, I'll make you X amount of money. Or, let me invest this much energy and I'll return this much money. Focus on results and the changes you're going to make and how it's going to hit the bottom line. The second argument you need to make is that smaller changes will impact the bottom line. Give attention to that.

If you google "multivariate testing" you'll find a lot of ideas on how to get started. Don't involve everyone up front. If you don't need to start with creative, don't. They're going to hold you up. IT has to be involved somehow. Involve one or two people who will spearhead you. Once you get going, then you get everyone involved. You don't want people holding up the process.

He talks about a case study with Red Envelope. They started multivariate testing about two months ago. Tim Ash came on board and told them to focus on their product page. They focused on 8 different variables - they added a new page section order, new page title, presented the price in different ways, and did a lot with the submit button (changed shape, text and color). Three of the eight changes worked really well. It helped him make the argument. They had a 4.4 increase in "add to cart" conversions. That goes right to someone's bottom line.

He involved a lot of the thought leaders and skeptics in the organization. They used Google Optimizer; it's a great way to get started from a cost point of view. When he presented results, he annualized it. Put a number in front of people.

Matt says the alphabet starts with A/B and so should you. Hee! Why A/B? It's simple. People get it. When you get into multivariate testing, there are a lot of different factors. Multivariate testing is better, but when you're first starting go with A/B. At the end of an A/B test you may not know what provided lift, but it will give you a stepping stone to the more complex stuff. You can use it to get more money to do advanced things. Before you start any test, you must have agreement on what the measurements of success are.

Is there any an occasion where it's appropriate to begin with multivariate testing?

David: If the people around you understand what's going on, sure. The reason you don't start with multivariate testing is an education thing. If people are willing to run with it, then you don't have to start with A/B.

Matt agrees with David. If people on your staff "get it" and you don't have to explain what the word 'multivariate' means, then do it.

Tim: You should do A/B split testing first. It's a lot easier to do, and what matters at the end of the day is the result, not the method you used to get the result. Until you've exhausted the possibilities of A/B split testing, keep doing that.

What are the landmines/pitfalls that people should look out for?

Andrew: Know your tools. Not only your own systems, but the difference between A/B testing and multivariate testing. Multivariate testing will you help you reach an end point faster, but if you're talking about being able to transition ideas from one page to the next, A/B testing is an amazing tool that leads to learning when done right. It shows you what matters and what doesn't. You have to have buy-in. You have to build this case about what this test is going to gain them in the end. When you're doing a full testing series, being able to take the results from one part of it and use it to feed the machine is valuable.

[I must be typing really fast and making a lot of noise because people are starting to stare at me.]

Tim, can you explain the difference between full-factorial and partial-factorial testing.

Say, you're testing four things on a page and each thing has two different versions. If you're doing full-factorial, it means you'll show all 16 versions evenly. If you're doing partial, you'll only test some of them and predict how the others would behave. Once you do partial factorial, you can't analyze the data in a complete way. Collect the data in full-factorial fashion. And if you do that, you'll get better estimates with no loss of data collection.

Won't you end up with a lot of permutations?

Tim: Yes, but you've already designed all those permutations. To show a new version of that page is free. Don't worry about the number of different versions in your test. It takes the same amount of time. If you're not sure what you're running, ask your vendor.

Tim: You're building a model here. With every multivariate test you have to do a split AB test afterwards because it's just a model. It could be wrong. You have to do a follow up test. That's where you find your actual lift.

We are going to start A/B testing soon. Is there a particular amount of traffic that you want to test? How small can my sample be?

Andrew: One of the methods CNET uses is constant iterative testing. They'll start a test and look at data instantly. If they can use that method to cut out options, the cost goes down. It gives you a faster way to reach a point where you can gather information. You're just tracking trends.

Tim: There are two knobs you can turn. How big of an effect do you want to find and how confident do you want to be of that answer? If you're not looking for massive effects, then you don't need a lot of data. If you do, you have to let it run long enough for it to stabilize.

What's the panels opinion on continual testing?

David: That's the goal. Test different parts of the site. Look at the different parts of the funnel.

Tim: In regards to a particular landing page, there is a point of diminishing return. Once you see things flattening out, go test something else.

What is the minimum period of time to test for?

Andrew: There's a natural burn rate with some of the changes you make. It's important that you always go back and restart old tests. Your users change so frequently and what they're looking for changes. Once you think you have a page optimized, it doesn't mean you'll have it optimized forever. You can step away, but you have to come back.

Tim says he totally disagrees with Andrew. They test in one week increments so you get rid of day of week effects and time of day effects. Your tests will run several weeks, maybe a couple of months. This isn't daytrading on PPC. Wait until you get enough confidence in the answer.

Andrew: On a content site, you're trying to get people to engage. The ultimate engagement is about changing users' classes and getting them to come back. So there are two ways to look at that. You have constant analytics and passive analytics. They'll try to drive people to do some goal. They'll do testing that goes a long time and then they'll do iterative testing. You can use that to get to the end point much faster. You can't take a week for every single version of a test. He tries to get give versions of a page tested in a week.

Tim disagrees and now he and Andrew are sparring. It's fun to watch. They're both talking really fast, especially Andrew.

David says he agrees with Tim. You have to think about time of day. People act different at lunch time. Andrew says they have that data and they look at it and take it into consideration. It's about patterns.

It sounds like you run a lot of tests. How do you keep track of all of your learnings? And if Andrew gets hit by a bus, how do you make sure CNET doesn't lose that information?

Andrew: We have people who keep me away from busses. They also have an ongoing Wiki, they teach teams, etc. You have leaders who are in charge and are responsible for teaching others.

Tim: The concept of learnings is pretty limited. In different context, different things are going to behave differently. A green button may work better here, but a red one will better over there. Is it green vs. red or is it the contrast that stood out? It's not always what you think it is even if it's really simple stuff. You're going to have to retest a lot of the same things.

Andrew: They keep a library so they can share it with everyone. It gives them a starting point, a conversation. They can pull up what they know about color, what they know about buttons, etc. It's a good way to let people know what's been done and what's worth testing.

How do you suggest dealing with the organization inertia when getting started?

Andrew: It takes everyone having this understanding that we're all trying to get things to grow. Nine out of ten times the thing you think is going to win, won't. It's that thing that you don't even know why it's in the test that blows everything else away. Talking about your C-level management, you're talking about ROI. Testing is such a great way to show growth.

Tim: Instead of having this butting heads thing, point it out at the mystical audience. It's not "my idea is better than yours" it's "let's see what the audience thinks..."

When is it a good time to use a sample size of less than 100 percent [of their traffic]? Is there any benefit to using a smaller sample size?

Andrew: You need enough data for it to be meaningful. It's all about pattern.

Posted on 05/ 5/08 at 6:18 PM | Comments (1)
See more entries in Analytics, eMetricsSF08, liveblog

Behavioral Targeting Across Ad Networks and On Your Site

Posted by Lisa Barone

Back from a delicious, delicious lunch and it's time to talk behavioral targeting. Please welcome our speaker Anil Batra (ZeroDash1). Yey! Our moderator says there's a one cookie fee for anyone whose cell phone goes off during the session. Yes. If your phone goes off, you have to give me a cookie. Lisa likes that idea.

Hee, just as she finishes saying that Anil's cell phone starts vibrating loudly. He owes everyone a cookie!

The behavioral targeting field is growing and changing every day. Anil says that with multivariate testing you're considering all users to be the same. It's the all men are created equal approach. What if you're able to segment? Then you can decide which ads to show and which will convert better. That's behavioral targeting.

What is behavioral targeting? It's the ability to serve relevant content/products/advertisements to users based on their past actions. Users are usually placed in one or more segments and then content/products/advertisements relevant to those segments are served. When you come to the site, it understands who you are based on your behavior.

How does it work? A user navigates to a Web site and requests a page. When the user comes, the request goes to the Web server. The Web server makes a call which evaluates the user's cookie. Based on that segmentation scheme, the cookie is then placed into the appropriate bucket and served relevant content.

Behavior is determined by pages/content viewed, the number of visits, entry pages, the path taken, products viewed, frequency of page views, conversions, internal search keywords, the referring site and the referring keywords.

You can enhance your behavioral data with non behavioral data like geographic location, IP, language, connection speed, domain, data/time, home/business. Demographic information can be used, as well. Stuff like gender, age, location, income, likes/dislikes, hobbies, and the list goes on. Be careful with user-inputted data because people lie. Anil tells everyone he's a CEO because he wants the magazines they give to CEOs. Heh.

Once you understand the user, you can target online media (banner ads), in-house ads, site images, site content, landing pages, email to them.

Why use behavioral targeting? The broadcast approach (traditional targeting) treats everyone the same. Behavioral targeting delivers a personalized message. They know who you are and what you want. You develop a unique relationship and then you can leverage it. Behavioral targeting delivers consistent, relevant messages to the user on any site on the Internet. You can measure and optimize multiple segment marketing goals simultaneously. Find the right message for each users segment.

On-Site Behavioral Targeting

Personalized site content for each user based on the market segment. If a user enters from your home page, clicks on the mortgage section and visits a few pages in that section, you know that person is interested in mortgages. You know what products they looked at in the funnel. Why not show them mortgage ads?

What tools/vendors are available? Optimost, Omniture, Kefta, Certona.

Network Behavioral Targeting

Behavioral Ad Networks: Online media inventory targeted to users who fall into specific market segments. Users are tracked and targeted where they go on the sites participating in the behavioral ad network.

Show ads to people, not pages. Behavioral targeting is relevant to the person. Tailor messages based on where customers are in the funnel. You know where they are based on what they've done. Keywords also tell you their intent. If someone searches for [ipod], they're looking for information. If they add a price, they're looking to buy. Mobile devices have ad targeting coming.

How do behavioral targeting networks work? Data is collected by Behavioral targeting networks across the sites participating in the network. User is put in segments based on their behavior. User is followed with a relevant ad anywhere he/she goes on that network.

If you went to Dell and configured a computer, when you go to a participating site, they'll show an ad for Dell and charge Dell double the price. They know you have a vested interest and are more likely to click through. The ad makes more sense.

Companies doing BT: ValueClick, RevenueScience, Tacoda, Blue Lithium.

Amazon can target ads on other sites based on what you do on Amazon.com. The JavaScript calls the same cookie and the same server. Amazon can track you all over the Internet. Heh. [I hate that so much, personally. --Susan]

The Process for Behavioral Targeting

• Define your goals: Consider your business and what it wants to accomplish, learn or measure.
• Define customer segments: Who are you going to target? Start small.
• Understand success: What does success look like? What are the conversion funnels? Have a baseline to measure against.
• Select the tool and vendor: Examine your current business goals and identify what site analytics tools are currently in place and see what kind of resources are available for implementation and maintenance. Consider what kind of reporting will be required and how often.
• Continuously improve: Analyze improvements from using BT for continuous improvement in your business and optimize tool for A/B testing and MT.

Networks do not reach everyone. Behavioral targeting is often served on remnant pages, which pages that people don't see.

There are lots of privacy issues with behavioral targeting. Most networks use only non-PI data. There are no guidelines. There are no final standards. Make sure you include BT information in your site privacy policy. You have to tell people how you're going to use their data. Most times you're automatically opted in to behavioral targeting. You can opt out, but most users don't know that or how to do it.

It's an issue because people (like DoubleClick) have misused data in the past, there's a lack of consumer information and it raises issues regarding who owns the data.

71 percent of online consumers are away that their browsing information may be collected by a third party for ad purposes. Only 40 percent are familiar with the term behavioral targeting.

57 percent of responds say they are not comfortable with advertisers using that browsing history to serve relevant ads, even when that info cannot be tied to their names or any other personal information.

Easing Privacy Concerns

• Build trust with your customers.
• Educate them on what BT is and how you collect the data and use it.
• Provide them with a compelling reason to allow you to collect their data.
• Build an opt-in model allowing users to control what data they want you to use.
• Give users an easy way to opt-out.

Posted on 05/ 5/08 at 3:16 PM | Comments (0)
See more entries in Analytics, eMetricsSF08, liveblog

Creating A Web Optimization Culture

Posted by Lisa Barone

We're live from San Francisco!

eMetrics is already proving to be completely different from any other show I've liveblogged. There are seats for about 60 in this session room and I actually have to sit a few rows back to see the projector screen. No front row liveblogging? It's like the Twilight Zone! Luckily I've already run into some search friends so I'm not feeling completely unsettled. And Matt Bailey gave me cool SiteLogics schwag. I'm going to stop rambling now.

Judith Pasual (ZAAZ) and Kristen Findley (Ameriprise Financial) are kicking things off for us at the Creating A Web Optimization Culture panel. Here we go.

Judith starts off by doing her nervous dance. It looks like Ashlee Simpson's SNL jig. It's not about just analytics. You're doing all this for a purpose. You're trying or refine what you're doing and make better business decisions.

Methodology for Success

Establishing the organization framework: Conduct an internal analysis. Create a distinct and clear vision to help direct the optimization culture. Identify where analytics and optimization needs to reside. Set short-term progressive goals.

Leader sponsorships: Identify your executive champion. Seek this person out. Identify your opposition and understand why. Use the framework and competitive information. Conduct a Persuasion Campaign (you're on a PR mission!). Give them more than what they asked for. Report back on wins and monitor critical failures. Build a matrix putting in what successes and failures you've had and put it on the desktop of your leader.

Community/ Establish a Guidance Coalition (aka Steering Committee): Set short-term goals. Choose specific project types. Hold off-sites. Tie results to the coalition's work performance. She advises looking up Kurt Lewin. He's recognized as the "founder of social psychology" and was one of the first researchers to study group dynamics and organizational development

Leveraging resources: Your key partners are the product managers/producers, the technical resource person, quality assurance people, IA, research and the happy volunteer (you'll have to search for this person. Try to get a third of their time). Partnerships require traveling a long road, so communicate. Take them out; learn what they do and what they go through. Be involved.

Education/ Spreading the Wealth: When adults learn you have to make sure that the new ideas are tied to stuff they already know. Do assimilation. Relate whatever it is you're doing to what they already do. You also have to tell them why they need to be doing this. Why do they need this new skill? Tie it back to their performance. You have to give them the who, what, when, where and why. All of this will save you time.

Common Traits of Success

• Company vision established to help direct the change
• Maintain the sense of urgency throughout the process
• Plan for short-term progressive successes
• Knowledge base of success and pitfalls
• Assembling a group with the power to lead the integration
• Avoid the culture of "no"
• Established accountability

She's working with a global client who has all these different regions. She's interviewing all these different groups from around the world. The groups that are successful act on the data they get and hold their team members accountable for the metrics. That's what makes groups successful.

Getting Started - When you are a one man show!

• Develop standard documentation and publish it. (Start a company wiki. Put it there.)
• Outline the list of projects and prioritize them.
• Train business users, then schedule a follow-up session.
• Create a matrix of successes and pitfalls.
• Meet often with your executive champion.
• Ask for help.

Up next is Kristen. Her dad was a professional hockey player. He played for Toronto. Maybe Susan can look that up for us. [No luck. --Susan]

Development of an Analytics Team

Building the base - Know your teams, establish your standards and find a champion
Project Team - Getting in on the daily work
Influencers - Your information starts driving decisions

The Project Lifecycle: Discover/Define, Define, Develop/Deliver, Data. Analytics should be involved from the very beginning, not just in the Data step.

Becoming Part of the Project Team

The soft skills: Bonding, give them more, make the connection, pinch-hitter.

The deliverables: milestones, documentation, results and options.

Discover/Define: You're meeting with the business partners. Ask the questions everyone is afraid to ask. Ask "why are we doing this project? What's the point?" Know the business needs and site objectives. Attack 3-5 Metrics to answer KPIs. Know the macro and micro indicators.

Example: Her company is redesigning their site.

The KPIs for her site are to deliver the brand and provide lead generation for the site.
The goals are to improve navigation, refresh content and re-align with business partners.
Macro indicators: Conversation average and the satisfaction score.
Micro indicators: Bounce rate, exit page, rate, contribution, etc

Design: Should it be a blue button, a red button or a green button? It drives her nuts that people care about this. She tells them "we'll test it". Plan your tags - Flash, AJAX, page names.

Develop: Confirm tagging and debug. She plugs Omniture's debugging tool. Consider your micro and macro indicators. Do you have what you need to track these things? Can you answer your KPI questions?

Data: Consider your discover phase KPIs, your audience, size/length of the project, and the impact of results. When you're delivering the results, always try to give a high-level summary, number details, conclusions and suggestions. Don't just send out an email and dump the data in someone's lap, especially if it's bad news. Find options. It's more fun to become the "answer" person than to be the one delivering the bad news.

Getting Started

• Create basic documentation
• Site objectives/KPIs/goals to share
• QA Tracking Sheet
• Monthly scorecard (not so basic!)
• Get to know your variables - document them if you haven't!
• Use your committee and champion to help you be in the right meetings.
• Start small - try this process on a small project. See what works for you.
• Who likes what I'm doing, who doesn't - WHY?
• Outline how this paradigm shift will affect everyday work.
• Get over yourself.

Judith steps in again to say you have to find out who likes what you're doing, who doesn't and why. How will what you do affect your company? You really do have to get over yourself. It's not about you. It's about your internal and external customers.

Question & Answer

When does Web analytics stop being a cost center and start becoming a profit center?

Kristen: They're in transition to become more of a profit center. Her monthly scorecard includes a monetization on it that helps her monetize the positive behaviors on their Web site. Her CMO loves it. That was one of her major breakthroughs. It's open the door for new conversations.

How do you get everyone on the same page to come up with the goals you're trying to track?

Kristen: Bring someone in to help you. Write up four goals, justify them and explain them. Once you have them, bring them to your VPs. Once something is down on paper, they can tweak and move things around as they see fit. She talks about her scorecard that puts the four goals in different sections. She went to the execs with an idea and didn't want on them to do it.

How much autonomy do you have in making decisions?

Kristen: She has to justify everything. She tries really hard to say, this is the test we ran, these are the results.

[The downside of being only one of 60 in a room? Everyone is totally watching me type. Performance anxiety, much?]

Posted on 05/ 5/08 at 1:16 PM | Comments (0)
See more entries in Analytics, eMetricsSF08, liveblog

May 2, 2008

Friday Recap

Posted by Lisa Barone

It's Friday. I'm trying to fake excitement but even the donut-induced sugar high isn't helping me today. I wonder if that means I need more donuts? Mmm, donuts.

Jennifer Slegg asks is blogging running your life instead of you running your blog. The answer is, yes, Jennifer. Yes, it is.

Also, Chris Garrett wants to know if bloggers are opinionated. Yes, Chris. Yes, they are. Hee.

McSweeney's published an open letter to Mark Zuckerberg...from a New Yorker Magazine Fact Checker, which illustrates one person's rage over the misspellings, blatant lies, and other debauchery contained in many users' Facebook profiles. We hear you, Streeter, we hear you.

Matt McGee, who was once trying to become last person on Twitter, has finally succumbed to its allures. Well, sort of. Matt and Jeff Quipp have gone head-to-head to see who can reach 500 followers first. The winner will get $500 donated to the charity of their choice. Join in the fun by following one (or both!) while helping a good cause in the process.

Twitter (and Rae Hoffman) helped me find this condensed video of a man trapped in an elevator for 41 hours. [It's not the confined space, it's the lack of Internet access that would kill me. --Susan] Twitter also helped Chris Winfield write his most recent Search Engine Land column. What can't Twitter do>?

Red vs. Blue explains the difference between the Internet and real life, while Idiots of Ants shows us what Facebook in reality would be like.

Dave Utter writes that Danny Sullivan Downgrades Ask.com To Irrelevance. Silly, Dave. Danny didn't do that. Barry Diller did back in March. Remember? [It's funny cuz it's true! --Susan]

Barry Schwartz helps the industry coin more ridiculous words with this post Buying 70,000 Links From Same Site Equated to "SEOcide". It could be worse. He could be writing about going to the bathroom in the dark. Again. Oh, Barry.

In case you're hard up for things to do this weekend, here's some video of the world's craziest rollercoasters . Just a tip, don't watch those videos after a large meal unless you want to relive it. The meal, that is. Or, if that's not good enough, reminisce over the 31 TV shows you loved and lost.

Things I Learned On BoingBoing This Week:

• Japan hates umbrellas. Personally, I don't understand how anyone could hate umbrellas. They're so Mary Poppins!
• A note to parents: Not all lemonade is suitable for 7-year-olds. Remember this or you will be arrested and your child taken away.
• Spiders make better spider webs than people. [In other news, snow is cold, water is wet and donuts are awesome.--Susan
• Numbered drawers. I can has?

And to end this Recap on a completely ridiculous note, say hello to Emo Lincoln. I know, but I couldn't stop giggling.

See everyone next week, live from eMetrics!

Posted on 05/ 2/08 at 2:15 PM | Comments (0)
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Six Questions With Vanessa Fox

Posted by Lisa Barone

It's time for the last speaker interview before I head up to San Francisco to attend eMetrics. This time around, Vanessa Fox graciously agreed to let me put her in the hot seat and grill her on everything from common search engine optimization pitfalls, blogging, to what the heck she actually does these days.

Vanessa needs no introduction but in case you live under a rock, you can find her blogging at VanessaFoxNude.com, she used to work here, and she has now moved to Seattle where she acts as an Entrepreneur in Residence at Ignition Partners. Have no idea what that means? I didn't either. On to the interview!

1. Okay, I've heard you explain what exactly you do as Entrepreneur of Residence at Ignition Partners at least three times but I still have no idea what it means. Can you help break it down for me? Maybe if you type slowly I'll understand this time. (No promises.)

I started working with Ignition Partners because we had a mutual idea that we felt was worth exploring. Business is increasingly moving online. There are lots of things to think about when you're operating online: Who are your customers and what's their behavior on your site? How can you better understand them and connect with them for a strengthened long-term relationship? How should you build your site to get lots of qualified visitors from search? What about advertising and email marketing? I've found that all these things impact the other and they all are really about the customer, but companies look each of them in siloed ways. If you change your page for SEO, for instance, that will impact usability and conversion. If companies can look at these types of things holistically, they can make one set of changes to improve multiple areas at once, rather than make a change for one silo at the expense of another.

In addition, companies have all kinds of data about their customers -- web analytics, keyword research, search volumes, purchase history, email stats... But there's so much of it that it's difficult to know what's important and what's noise. And there's no easy way to tie it all together to get true picture of the customer and make strategic decisions.

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