A few months ago, someone wrote about how a large chunk of e-commerce’s future is extremely likely to lie with Facebook. The recent announcement of half a billion active members should be enough to have any e-commerce or marketing professional chomping at the bit to seize the opportunity, get engaged and start selling.
Surprisingly though, there seems to be a lack of exploration into the existing possibilities...
I’m not suggesting that setting up shop on Facebook is suitable for everyone, but I am suggesting that there is potentially an enormous and currently untapped opportunity for retailers that they need to explore. There *are* examples of companies experimenting with Facebook as a platform to sell products and services, but they seem to be few and far between. Leaving aside the well-worn and over-cited 1-800-Flowers.com example, there only seems to be a handful of the larger companies getting in on the act.
Disney recently begun selling cinema tickets for Toy Story 3 across Facebook and Procter & Gamble has reportedly dipped its toe into f-commerce, including setting up an impromptu store to make the most of the Old Spice buzz.
Smaller organisations are also trying to get in on the action. For example, the cosmetics company, Mark, now has online shop on their Facebook page and Fashion company NineWest is toying with an f-commerce store. Kudos for these guys taking the first steps into relatively unchartered territory.
I’d go so far as to suggest that there’s no real excuse to not be at least considering experimenting in this area. It’s relatively cost-effective, quick and easy to set up an f-commerce platform within a Facebook account, especially when third-party solutions are brought into the equation. I’ve scouted around a picked out a few that exist.
Many of these examples redirect users from Facebook to their own online stores, but given that best practice e-commerce is about making a transaction as easy and seamless as possible, then, depending on the circumstances, keeping a potential customer within a Facebook page generally seems like a sensible option to explore.
However, I'm expecting this current practice of redirecting to change in the coming months, especially as the bigger players in the e-commerce technology market, such as those in our E-Commerce guide, begin to look more seriously towards leveraging Facebook in this way.
Google has announced changes to the way in which it deals with trademarks and Google AdWords at a press conference this morning.
In a move which brings the UK in line with its US policy, advertisers will now be able to include trademarked words and phrases in their Google ads without the trademark owners permission.
Since a change back in May 2008, advertisers have been able to bid on trademarked phrases on Google, but until this latest change, use of trademarks within ad text has strictly been with the trademark owner's permission only.
The changes, which come into force on September 14, will see Google wash their hands of the trademark argument, and come soon after winning a high profile legal battle against Louis Vuitton in the EU law courts.
Why has Google made this move?
Im sure Google would argue that it is just bringing the UK in line with its US trademark policy and also that it is in the interest of user experience.
One of the stipulations of being able to include trademarks in ad text is that you must link through to a page about the trademark or product. This effectively means that retailers and resellers will be able to use the trademark, but competitors will not.
Google has perhaps decided, through its US experiences and through the Louis Vuitton case, that it is unlikely to be liable for any cases brought, and it removes a large administrative burden.
At present, if an advertiser wants to be approved for use of a trademark they must provide an email stating approval, which then has to be processed by Google before their account is white-labelled. This process needs to be managed by Google and once removed, this will free up the staff and technology currently involved.
What can we expect on September 14th?
There will probably a little craziness for a short time, but it will soon sort itself out. I imagine the market will still be policed, just not by Google. Retailers and trademark owners will find new ways of limiting unwanted trademark usage via business relationships and affiliate terms.
It will probably take a little while for them to develop their stance and enforce it, but things will probably calm down within a month or two.
How should you prepare for this?
As an trademark owner, have a look around your trademarked terms now and have a look who is appearing on them, have they got content about your trademarked phrase or product? If so, they will be able to include the phrase in their ad text.
Consider what implications this has to you and whether you want to find other ways to enforce a trademark removal. If they are resellers of your product you can still enforce a ban through this relationship, regardless of Google's stance. If they are an affiliate then you can do this through your affiliate marketing terms and conditions.
As an agency, you need to speak to your clients and agree how you are going to deal with this. In many cases it may not actually impact your click through rate (CTR). If you have a clear URL and prominent positions you may see little change.
If you are acting on behalf of the reseller, then make sure you have a whole host of new ads lined up for submission in September, as it could provide a boost to your performance.
Social media advertising may still be seen as chump change by some, but brand advertisers like what they see on Facebook. And according to the company's Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg, many large brand advertisers have increased their ad spend on the social network by 20 times or more.
If Facebook can retain — and even grow — its userbase over the next few years, the site may soon be stealing large brand contracts from larger digital publishers.
On Wednesday, Sandberg told BusinessWeek:
“Two years ago the big brands were experimenting with us. They started buying with us a year ago. Now, they’re going big.”
Sandberg also says that some of the social network's biggest advertisers have increased their spending with the network by at least 10-fold in the last year.
That's especially interesting considering that Facebook's new dominance in display is thought to be built on the back of small advertisers. Facebook's self-serve display product helped the company topple Yahoo as the biggest provider of display advertising online this year.
Facebook took 16% of the display ad market in the first quarter of 2010, up from 11% in the fourth quarter of 2009, according to comScore.
But the ads they're selling are also cheaper. comScore estimates that Facebook and MySpace brought in an average CPM of only 56 cents last year, compared to the $2.43 average for most advertising inventory online.
If the company can court large brand advertisers, it will be an even stronger player online. And according to Sandberg, that's what they're doing. As she says:
“A movie studio last year that did three movies with us -- this year, if they’re releasing 12 movies, they’ll do 10 of them with us. A company that did one product launch with us -- this year they’re going to do half of their product launches.”
That's why Facebook estimates that its sales could rise to at least $1.4 billion in 2010 from between $700 million and $800 million last year.
However, Facebook ad prices have remained steady over the last year, which is sure to concern competitors.
Keith Lorizio, Microsoft's newly installed head of U.S. sales told AdAge recently:
"Social networks are going to be a challenge for everybody, as the sheer dominance of the impressions they're making flood the marketplace with inventory. And it's especially a challenge for every publisher, as they drive down CPMs."
If Facebook is recruiting large brands to the site, it's because they are seeing good results. And good results are worth paying more money.
For the social net to become a major player in major brand plays online, it has to even further cement its dominance in social. Already, the site has 500 million users. But the site's ongoing display success depends on maintaining the existing userbase. And making it even bigger.
As Michael Gartenberg, a partner at researcher Altimeter Group, tells BusinessWeek:
“Facebook’s value is being able to preserve that user base. Those 500 million users -- advertisers not only want to make sure that those people aren’t churning and that they’re actually using their accounts, but that there’s growth here as well.”
Business Analytics is a means of analysing all that is important to your business!
That means pulling in your social media, email marketing, video, mobile, web and plenty more together! Reason for pulling all together? It allows you to truly deep-dive the meaning of your site performance.
For example, share price of your company falls by a few points - why? One afternoon, the sales from the web channel nose-dive but telephone sky rocket - why? One busy morning, sales through the voice channel nose-dive - why?
There will be plenty more questions asked by many people in many organisations, however if all you do is focus on one channel, how can you truly understand the impact your business has if someone says something good/bad about your products/brand on social media? If someone is waiting in excess of 10mins in a queue on the phone or if the web site encounters a problem, preventing people from completing their action online?
If you bring EVRYTHING into once place, correlate it, then analyse it, you can see trends appear better than before (spot problems as they start or before!).
Not to mention, you can re-use all this data - re-inject it back into the web site; personalise the visitors experience, feed into Salesforce.com about the actions a given visitor is doing on the web site (within your site area), feed the visitor very specific online surveys about their experience and plenty more!
This is what Business Analytics is/means! It is new, it is what every business wants to do but cannot due to complexities, costs, timescales... But just before you right off Business Analytics, speak to Anametrix, Qlik View, Omniscope. They all do a form of Business Analytics (some better than others). These tools ARE affordable and very quick to implement/get up to speed and powerful insight, fast!
If you agree/disagree with my take on Business Analytics, please let me know. It is a new'ish area and it will be much more useful to all of us if we share our experiences/thoughts moving forward.
Web Analytics is is a very reactive medium to measuring web site
performance. What businesses need to start doing is measuring their
Business Analytics; this requires more data than just that of the web.
Business Analytics sees the introduction of disparate data silos,
consolidated and tied together in an easy to view place.
Dashboards incorporating online/offline data enable businesses to make
informed decisions. Consider this scenario:
Read More
The world's largest search engine is branching out. Google has spent the last year building up its display advertising products. Considering how thoroughly Google dominates search advertising, its recent obsession with digital advertising's less profitable arm has perplexed many.
But Google thinks the $20 billion that comprises the display ad market is just a penny in the well of what it could be. Today at Google's Real Time Bidding journalist lunch, some of Google's top executives gathered to explain just why the company is investing so aggressively in display.
Google made its name (and billions) by streamlining the search advertising process and increasing revenues. And that's exactly what they want to do with display advertising now.
Neal Mohan, vice president of product management explains that the display market has reached a point where it's ready to start delivering real revenues. As he says:
"Display advertising is at a tipping point."
The market currently brings in $20 billion in annual revenue. According to Mohan, "Google is excited because we think it can be substantially bigger."
How will that do that? By making the "overall display buying and selling process that much more effective."
Display can certainly benefit from increased efficiency. According to Google, 28% of a media dollar gets eaten up by friction (administrative costs) in the display ad market. If that sounds high, consider this. Mohan points out that the old school method purchasing TV advertising only wastes 2% of a dollar.
In addition to increased efficiency, Google is excited about the swaths of content moving online. As video and mobile products become more advanced and more media creators are working on content for the digital world, the advertising opportunities are expanding.
Not to mention Google's in-house advancements and key acquisitions. The company says its updated display system has 4,000 times more data than the previous platform. And because more media is going online, ad creatives are finally starting to take display advertising more seriously.
Google is in a key position to take advantage of that shift. Google says that its new ad platform on average helps publishers bring in 30% more revenue when they use individual ad networks.
According to Henrique De Castro, Google's vice president of Global media and platforms, the search giant already has a worldwide sales that can target publishers and advertisers anywhere:
"Because of the scale of our business, we can be in every single market."
De Castro notes that smaller media companies (like MySpace, for instance) are hobbled by the limits of their in-house sales teams when they try to break into new markets. Google is able to use resources it already funds to help get a running start in new display ad offerings.
Not to mention the scale of properties like YouTube. Google's video site surpassed Yahoo in the summer of 2008 as the world's second most popular search engine. Over the last year, the number of display advertisers running ads on YouTube has increased 10 times. In North America alone, 50 million impressions are served on YouTube's homepage each day. Which means inventory on the homepage is often sold out.
Today at Google's New York headquarters, the company wanted to reiterate that selling display advertising is not an experiment for the company. According to Barry Salzman, managing director of media and platforms in the Americas, display advertising is "a major part of Google's business."
"We're bringing search together with display," he says. The company is able to combine their media power with an impressive technology offering. "That's the power of Google display."
According to DeCastro, Google and other display advertising sellers can grow the market from $20 billion to $40 billion over the next four years. As he says:
"Google tends to do long term bets, and this is one."
The travel industry using social media as a marketing channel makes complete sense and for the most part, travel organisations can be commended on their social media activity.
However, in lieu of the Econsultancy/Turkish Airlines Social Media and the Travel Sector Trends briefing, it seems that sometimes things can turn sour. Here are a few examples...
BlogsA few months ago, Tourism Australia’s new $150m advertising campaign launched. Using the slogan, “There’s nothing like Australia”, Aussie nationals were crowdsourced in an effort to create compelling verbal and visual snapshots of the country. Yet, within a matter of hours, the campaign had been hijacked, with a spoof blog emerging.
Although this in itself could be potentially crippling to any campaign, what makes this partly worse is the lack of digital execution by Tourism Australia, namely by not registering the variation URLs of their website. Only holding the .com address ensured that nothinglikeaustralia.net was able to be registered by, some suspect, New Zealand’s own tourism board.
BookmarksAnything negative that's floating around the internet isn’t usually great. However, it’s often exacerbated through social sharing and bookmarking, as this allows online content to spread quickly - and can even effect natural search rankings. Virgin found itself as an unlikely piece of viral content in this way, following what many people are referring to as the funniest-ever passenger complaint letter.
The Telegraph’s article has been “Dugg” nearly 6,500 times alone:
“You open the present and it’s not in there. It’s your hamster Richard. It’s your hamster in the box and it’s not breathing. That’s how I felt when I peeled back the foil and saw this...”
Online videoGenerating more than three million views in less than a week on YouTube alone, United Breaks Guitars is a video that everyone’s heard of. The destruction of Dave Carroll’s instrument by United Airlines , followed by their complete lack of customer care, ensured that an unknown Canadian country and western singer would cause a bit of a social media headache for the airline operator, especially when it was picked up by the mainstream media.
Social networks Returning again to Virgin, the airline infamously fired a number of staff, following insulting messages towards passengers on Facebook and jokes about faulty plane engines.
Equally, a Facebook group of BA Gatwick staff caused a stir after they attacked passengers online, following the opening of terminal 5 at Heathrow. Both cases are now often used as case studies to highlight the importance of establishing corporate social media guidelines for staff, both inside and outside of work.
Microblogging The speed and reach of the channel can be a bit problematic for organisations, especially when combined with the influence that some individuals have within the sphere. Focusing especially on Twitter, there a number of instances where individuals have created issues for travel companies.
One of the most recent is that of Kevin Smith vs. Southwest, where Smith, a film director, was told to leave a flight, as the crew thought he was too heavy to be sat in a single seat. Smith quickly began unleashing an attack on the company via Twitter and was joined by many of his 1.6m followers.
Although various issues within this instance can be heavily debated, the frantic backpedalling from Southwest and the subsequent media frenzy arguably gave some the company a considerable amount of negative press.
Predictive analytics is playing a significant role in recognising at-risk and valuable customers to develop customer retention strategies. Customer retention analytics has become a widespread application for business intelligence tools and solutions.
Companies have been looking at gaining an understanding of the variables that influence customer lapse. Specialists highlight that retention starts with the first customer contact and continues throughout the entire lifetime of a relationship.
One of the most useful applications of business intelligence is developing effective customer retention solutions and reducing costs by identifying the greatest number of customers likely to churn within a small percentage of a customer base.
ApproachQuite often the discussion and the point of contention happens to be the churn rate. Churn is a critical issue as it can be quite difficult to replace old customers with new ones especially if the industry is witnessing saturation. There are a couple of ways to modelling churn. This includes approaching churn as a binary outcome, and predicting which customers will stay and which ones would leave. The other approach is to evaluate the remaining lifetime.
Should one get away from modelling churn solely as a binary outcome “will they quit or not” question?
Michael Berry, founder & principal, Data-Minerscertainly believes so.
Berry says this is the traditional approach, but it is a bit simplistic.
According to him, if we ask “will the customer still be here tomorrow?”, the answer is nearly certainly yes. If we ask “will the customer still be here in 10 years?”, the answer is almost certainly no.
“So we set some arbitrary length of time and say “will the customer still be here at that arbitrary time?”. The reason the problem is posed this way is that binary outcome problems are easy to model with logistic regression or decision trees. A more interesting question is “How long will the customer last?”. We can approach this question using survival analysis,” said Berry, who is scheduled to speak at the forthcoming Business Analytics Summit to be held in San Jose (November 12-13).
Predictive analysisPredictive analytics is about extracting information from data and using it to anticipate future trends and behaviour patterns. This is based on a variety of techniques from statistics and data mining. According to a specialist like Rosella, customer tendencies are captured using predictive models from past historical data. They are measured as customer metrics.
Predictive customer metrics are then used for determining business strategies and actions to take. For each business task, a set of business strategies are developed. Predictive rule-based reasoning determines customer-centric strategies. Based on the selections of strategies, actions are taken automatically or manually. The core lies in capturing relationships between explanatory variables and the predicted variables from the past occurrences and exploiting this information to predict future outcomes.
FunctioningSuch analytics offers actionable projections and this form of business modelling predicts the individual behaviour of existing or prospective customers under certain conditions. The central element of predictive analytics is the predictor, a variable that can be measured for an individual or other entity to foresee future behaviour. Multiple predictors are combined into a predictive model which, when subjected to analysis, can be used to forecast future probabilities with an acceptable level of reliability.
This may seem like a reliable solution but one can still face several hurdles.
According to Duncan Houldsworth, global head of marketing analytics at Hall & Partners, the biggest challenges are usually always around data and data integration.
Houldsworth says even in today’s technologically advanced business environment, it is still a tussle to firstly access all the data sources needed to gather a holistic view of the customer and then to combine the data in a meaningful way for either data mining or predictive analytics.
“Advances in database technology have helped significantly, but this is definitely a work in progress and requires continued attention,” added Houldsworth.
He said one should ensure that database architects (and database administrators) are integral members of the task force alongside predictive modelers and data miners.
“Just like building a house, all the specialists need to be part of the team to overcome the challenges,” recommended Houldsworth.
Maturity levelHouldsworth says modelling and predicting customer satisfaction is still a challenge, but it is progressing significantly well in some sectors and markets.
Predictive analytics is being used in retail, telecom, insurance, financial services and the pharmaceutical industry.
“I believe that the opportunity is to start viewing customer satisfaction measurement not as a means to an end in itself or a standalone piece of analysis, but a fully integrated part of the assessment to determine how well your marketing mix is functioning in attracting, retaining and maximising customer interactions with your business,” he said.
In this context, he says, the maturity level is quite low with customer satisfaction being kept separate from business intelligence activity around marketing and sales effectiveness.
Canada’s Edmonton Police Service is relying on business analytics technology to reduce crime, improve force effectiveness and increase public safety.
It has been highlighted that the initiative is paying off. By quickly comparing new information with data from previous years, the police service was able to ascertain that the trend was likely to increase from March to July. Police efforts were ultimately successful in nearly eliminating arsons in that particular area during this period.
The police departments, which are working with IBM, are looking at critical information and based on that they inform police officers so that they can prevent criminal activities.
Significantly, according to IBM, the law enforcement agencies like Edmonton are using analytics technology to act even before a crime may have been committed. The focus is on identifying crime hot spots and reduce crime rates. In case of Edmonton Police Services, which primarily focuses on preventing and reducing crime by providing public safety services in Western Canada, it chose technology to spot crime trends and link performance goals from the executive to the constables on the street.
Users are able to see data in near real time. They put crime information directly into the hands of front-line patrol officers so they can use it to quickly identify problems, associated trends and locations of crimes to determine their response and problem-solving solutions. The police service has also been able to look at the components of response times -- such as dispatch delays and travel time -- to identify the issues that play a role in overall response time.
In the future, the force hopes to take advantage of mobile devices to directly disseminate relevant information to officers, regardless of location. source: businessanalyticsnews.com
eLearningCurve’s Dave Wells says initiatives need to be taken to re-establish credibility and belief in the value of analytics-driven business management.
Are managers trying to use analytics suited for the past to manage into a very different future?
Dave Wells, director of education , eLearningCurve, certainly believes so.
Wells, who is scheduled to chair the forthcoming Business Analytics Summit to be held in San Jose (November 12-13), spoke to Business Analytics News about the current trends in business analytics. Excerpts:
Corporations are capitalising on business analytics to achieve new breakthroughs in process performance. What according to you have been critical breakthroughs in data mining and text mining over the past few months?
Dave Wells: I believe that the most significant breakthroughs have been in the area of sentiment analysis which goes beyond mining of facts to develop inferences from those facts. Customer sentiment is probably the most wide-spread application today and it is not as widely adopted as it might be. I'd say that the maturity of the technology is ahead of the mainstream corporate world today -- not to say that the technology doesn't have room to grow, but that most companies aren't ready to fully embrace what is available today.
Do you think the emergence of sophisticated analytical tools have automated the processes of pattern recognition and prediction? How do you assess the role of statistical regression and time series methods, and machine learning techniques in pushing this sector forward?
Dave Wells: There is no doubt that the field has advanced, and that the integration of statistical methods and time-series analysis are significant contributors. I think machine-learning lags a step or two behind statistical and time-series methods but has an important role to play.
But I think the big inhibitor - the bridge yet to be crossed - is making this level of analytics available to the masses. Most of the people who do business analysis aren't trained statistical modelers. They're business managers who perform analysis out of necessity. They need easy, intuitive desktop tools with the models embedded, the statistical methods hidden, and connectivity to enterprise data from the desktop as a prominent feature.
How do you assess the advancements in tools used for discovering and extracting knowledge from text documents and overall converting unstructured content to structured content?
Dave Wells: I think there has been a lot of progress in the direction of extracting meaning from unstructured data -- really extracting the hidden structure from what is coming to be known as semi-structured data. The implication there is that the data has a combination of structure and noise, and that separating the structure from the noise is the key to finding meaning. The basic capabilities of the tools have come a long way.
The next big step is in contextual frameworks for finding structure and meaning -- taxonomic, semantic, and lexicological frameworks that vary both geographically, by industry, by profession, and so on.
Earlier this year you had mentioned that many of today’s business managers rely on the same analytics – the same metrics, scorecards and dashboards – as used in the past. Considering that relevance, usefulness and value of yesterday’s analytics have diminished severely, why do you think this is happening? Does it highlight the fact that business analytics is yet to gain acceptance in organisations across various industries in a big way?
Dave Wells: BI had gained pretty wide acceptance when the economy was healthy and managing business was fun and rewarding. Now it is stressful and a lot of hard work only to be followed by new problems to be solved.
At the time when analytics are most needed, the resources - both people and dollars - to pursue them are limited. So many managers are trying to use analytics suited for the past to manage into a very different future. That's not going well, and it is certain to cause some disillusionment with BI. I think there is some work to be done to re-establish credibility and belief in the value of analytics-driven business management.
It is highlighted that the most common issue relative to analytical information and technology is having too much of it scattered about. Companies have multiple BI software packages installed in different functions and they have multiple data warehouses. Also, firms lack overall technology architecture both complete and flexible enough to organise and manage information. How do you assess the situation?
Dave Wells: I think it will always be a reality that we struggle to get at the right information, in the right ways, and to do it quickly. We'll never succeed at fully integrating all of the data and all of the technology in any enterprise. We continue to push the leading edge of technology (and we must do so to keep up) but we rarely take time to pull forward the trailing edge. As the gap between leading and trailing continues to get wider, the challenges of technical integration become more complex. Now add in the dimension of mergers and acquisitions and you further compound the problem. Maybe integration isn't the Holy Grail. Maybe its time to embrace a combination of mashup, federation, and agile methods instead.
Considering the current economic environment, how do you think the metrics need to be benchmarked in a different manner? Can you elaborate on this please?
Dave Wells: The basic difference between old-economy and new-economy metrics has to do with the questions that they answer. The old metrics are designed to answer questions of: What happened? How much happened? Why did it happen? Those are all retrospective questions, and the new economy calls for prospective questions.
Instead of concentrating on the past we need to look to the future, answering questions like: What is the best that can happen? What is the worst that can happen? What is probable? The challenge of new metrics is that they still have to be based upon the data, and the data is all about the past. Therefore, the change is not in what data we use to produce metrics, but in how we interpret that data. With a seismic shift such as deep recession the data of the past is no longer a reliable predictor of the future. To make the shift from looking backward to looking ahead calls for a few fundamental changes in how we approach metrics -- less focus on monitoring, and more focus on simulation; less reliance on data alone, and more blending of data, human knowledge, and feedback systems; less concern about insight, and more attention to foresight. source: businessanalyticsnews.com
I had an interesting testing experience with one of my clients recently. After looking closely at the data, I formed my hypothesis, and made a recommendation for a variation to test…and it underperformed the original version! I was WRONG!
Now, I don’t expect to be right with every test (in fact, that’s WHY testing is so important), but my hypotheses are based on real data with a strong analysis behind them…and I have never been THIS wrong. Was I losing my edge?! Nope. I just didn’t consider that the change would be outside the online “comfort zone” of the visitors.
The site was geared toward an older demographic, and while much of the site might be considered out of date, even messy, by someone who is proficient using the internet, the change I had proposed was too drastic to be tolerated by this specific site’s targeted group of visitors. In short, I wasn’t speaking their language.
When I first started practicing conversion optimisation, I heard an experienced analyst say to a client, “I know optimisation, but you know your clients, so always feel free to speak up!” Now I truly understand what he was saying.
Technology, online expectations, and even optimization are constantly evolving. We’re always looking for inventive ways to persuade visitors to convert, new tools to use, and fresh techniques to share with our clients. So, it’s easy to get wrapped up in the new and advanced.
But, this test taught me that the newest, most effective tool doesn’t necessarily translate into big wins for all sites and all audiences. Understanding your visitors, and the language they use, is the first step in optimization. For example, a technology company who is marketing itself to other businesses may find success using web copy for persuasion that would severely hurt the conversion on a retail site for at-home diabetes testing supplies.
There are many ways to understand who your visitors are, and some of them don’t even involve a computer. When’s the last time you spoke with the folks in your customer service department? If you can’t remember the last time, head on down for a chat. Better yet, listen in on a few calls.
There is a reason why customer service and sales agents are the first places we start when we do discovery for persona creation. Visitors will often call when they want to make a purchase/get a quote/take an action, and are unsure how to proceed. Figure out where visitors are having the most difficulty on your site, and then note the language they use to describe their struggle or their goal. Does that same language appear anywhere on your trouble pages?
Here’s a straightforward exercise you can do to design a fruitful test. We call it the “Three Questions Exercise.” Pick a page you’d like to improve, then follow these steps:
Question 1: Who is on this page? Use the data collected from talking to sales and customer service agents, listening to calls, reading transcripts, etc.. What are your target customers thinking and feeling when they view this page?
Question 2: What action do you want the visitor to take? What is a realistic conversion (or smaller step; a “micro-conversion”) you’d like the visitor to take? Don’t expect a new visitor to “buy now” straight from your homepage…pick an achievable goal.
Question 3: What does this visitor need from the site to feel comfortable and confident taking the action I want them to take? This is the hardest of the three questions. But, put yourself in the visitor’s shoes, and it will be easier.
Once you’ve answered the three questions, form a hypothesis about what kind of language might better persuade the visitor to take the desired action. Again, use the data you gathered to make educated guesses about what might make the difference between taking the action, and taking an un-desired action like clicking a back button or leaving the site. Speak their language. How can you re-phrase something (e.g. a headline, a link, a call to action button) using their language instead of yours? Test this new language idea to see if it persuades more visitors to take the action you want them to take. And most importantly, even if the test results are not what you’d expect, remember that taking the time to ask, “Why did that happen?” can make the test valuable. source: alltop.com
Tomorrow, we will be holding yet another Business Intelligence Tuesday! Based on the excellent turnout from previous BIT meetings, this is your chance to come to us in a neutral location to discuss your challenges and woes when it comes to performing and gaining business intelligence insight within your organisation. As we have only recently had a chance to play with the Anametrix new reporting platform InstaVista, we will also be more than happy to share with you why this is a revolutionary new reporting platform when it comes to performing Business Analytics within the workplace. Very few tools on the market today excite us as much as this product has!
Read More
Yesterday Iain Murphy stepped up to the challenge of becoming the latest owner and organizer of the MeetUp.com group for London Search Engine and Internet Marketing. In a few words, Iain set out his plans for the coming times ahead:
Read More
Let's face it, we all want due credit for our work. That's why marketers so eagerly embraced the death of the presumptive "last click." That mythology forced a paradigm of clear winners (the content that ultimately converted) versus losers (everything else). Today, we know that's patently untrue. In fact, Microsoft's Atlas Institute estimates that between 93% to 95% of audience engagements with online advertising receive no credit at all when advertisers review campaign ROI.
Read More
New WAA Web Analyst Certification Program Offered at eMetrics Summit in London
Wednesday, May 19th, 12:10 to 2:10 p.m.
Being a top web analyst means demonstrating your mastery of the industry and continually enhancing your skills. The Web Analytics Association (WAA) has been working with subject matter experts throughout the world during the past two years to develop a premier certification program for web analysts. The program is designed to elevate professional standards and recognize practitioners who have demonstrated their knowledge of the web analytics industry and best practices for turning data into business insights.
This first exam sessions for this new certification will be held at the eMetrics Summits in San Jose and London. The certification is open to all web analytics professionals, including both the IT professionals who use web analytics tools and the marketing professionals who apply web analytics data to business operations. To become certified, individuals must demonstrate their knowledge and expertise in the areas of web analytics for site optimization, measuring marketing campaigns online and creating and managing an analytics business culture. The certification exam is designed to identify not only analysts with broad domain knowledge, but also, and more importantly, analysts demonstrating a high level of analytical and problem solving ability across the entire web business spectrum.
Please visit WAA's web site for details on the benefits and features of this new program or to submit an application to take the certification exam at eMetrics.
THE COMPLAINT Hello, my name is Wendy. And I am a Facebook addict. Or should I say, I was a Facebook addict until last week when, with no warning and for no reason that I could discern, the shadowy Orwellian cabal that sits in judgment over the site took umbrage with something I did and kicked me off.
What makes the whole thing so galling is that my use of the site is almost embarrassingly vanilla. I don’t spam people. I don’t trawl though the site looking for ‘hotties’ to add and then virtually frotte with uninvited pokes. Call me old-fashioned, but all my friends (a paltry 200 or so) are actual friends, or at least people I know socially.
But as a freelance film journalist working from home in a room that resembles aTurkish jail cell from Midnight Express, Facebook became my social support network. It was my virtual office. I could shout a joke across the ether and get a punchline from Berlin or New York, Reykjavik or Rio. It was the place where I swapped movie industry gossip and snark, congratulations or commiserations.
It’s fair to say that my enforced estrangement from my Facebook community has been a wrench. It feels a bit like when all the kids in the playground suddenly decide you smell of wee. Or being excommunicated from the Catholic Church – except to be excommunicated you have to have done something pretty grave, whereas Facebook apparently boots its users out more or less arbitrarily.
Try and get your Facebook page reinstated however, and you face a Kafkaesque nightmare of bureaucratic indifference. Every e-mail from the polite ("Terribly sorry, think you may have made a mistake") to the primal howl of despair ("FOR THE LOVE OF GOD, TELL ME WHAT I DID!") was met with a stony silence. The Facebook policy, it seems, is not to tell you what your crime was.
This leads to something akin to the self-criticisms of Mao-era China – I hereby denounce myself for occasional profanity and posting a slightly risqué picture of me with a stripper wearing nipple tassels. Given that comparing the company to a repressive communist regime is unlikely to have helped my case with Facebook, I’m left with a quandary. Do I take a stand, gather up the shreds of my dignity and break the addiction? Or do I scuttle back, tail between legs, and start a new account. And if I do, will I ever dare swear in my status updates again?
WHAT HAPPENED NEXT We contacted Facebook on Wendy's behalf.
The company's representative replied swiftly. "We have looked into this and your account was disabled as it had nude photos posted on it. This breaches our Statement of Rights and Responsibilities – you can read all the things we do and don’t allow on the site but as a summary photo content that you upload can't contain drug use, nudity, or graphic or sexually suggestive content, nor are photos that depict violence or that attack an individual or group allowed.
"In order to prevent this from happening in the future, please refrain from posting photos of this kind and remove any that still exist on the site. For more information on conduct prohibited by Facebook, please read our Statement of Rights and Responsibilities, which can be accessed by clicking on the link above or 'Terms' link at the bottom of any Facebook page."
THE OUTCOME Wendy's Facebook account is working again, but without the picture with former stripper of the year Chiqui, taken at the London Film Festival party for the film Shortbus. We suspect that it was the hint of pubic hair that upset someone somewhere, even though the picture has been on Wendy's Facebook page for three years. source: timesonline.co.uk
Google will attempt to change the way people use their television sets by developing a new platform to bring the best of the internet to TV screens, according to reports.
The search giant is believed to be working with Sony and Intel to develop a system called “Google TV”, and has built a prototype set-top box in an effort to provide a better way for people to surf the web through their televisions.
In recent years, other companies, notably Apple, have tried to develop systems to allow people to access the internet through their televisions in order to do things such as download movies and television shows.
A report in the New York Times today suggests that Google's new device could also be built into TVs and other devices such as Blu-ray players. The machine would allow people to watch their TV channels but also have better access to the internet, search, social networking sites, YouTube videos and online games.
The project has been in development for several months, but none of the companies involved will comment publicly. "Google wants to be everywhere the Internet is so they can put ads there," a person “with knowledge of the project” was quoted as saying. Google now has businesses in many different industries, such as telecommunications and publishing, but the vast majority of its revenue still comes from search-related advertising.
The new system is thought to run on Android, Google's open-source mobile phone operating system, and use Intel's Atom chips. It has been reported that Google has begun testing the set-top box technology though Dish Network, a satellite TV provider.
It is unclear whether any such system would be launched worldwide, or as with some of Google’s products, be designed for release in the United States only.
source: timesonline.co.uk
Whilst with a client today, we had an interesting discussion about Web Analytics being 'easy' and the future of Online Television (TV OnDemand) or IPTV. First of all, it would appear that a certain large Web Analytics organisation is going around saying Google Analytics is a little rubbish... We soon put that persons doubts about Google Analytics right! We all know Google Analytics can do Segmentation, Custom Reporting, Benchmarking, Alerting; you now find me another Vendor that does all of this for 'free' and in an 'easy to use' tool?
Read More
Tags: Marketing, General, Gadgets
is a new, exciting and revolutionary way to present beautiful data visualisations that depict human feelings and moods harvested from a large number of blogs! The automated mechanisms search the world's newly posted blog entries for occurences of the phrases "I feel" and "I am feeling", with which it then records the full sentence and identifies the "feeling" expressed in that sentence (i.e. sad, happy, depressed etc).
The different data visualisations available consist of a self-organising particle system, whereby each particle represents a single feeling posted by a single individual. The particless properties (size, opacity, shape, and colour) indicate the nature of the feeling inside, and any particle can be clicked to reveal the full sentence or photograph it contains. The particles move erratically around the screen until asked to self-organise along any nuymber of axes, expressing various human emotions.
More information around this new visualisation method can be found at wefeelfine.org
Finally, it appears to have dawned on businesses that online advertising is more tangible and more cost effective than any other!
It has been reported that the US online ad spend will outstrip print for the first time this year, according to research.
Outsell (a Californian based publishing research company), predicts that US advertisers will spend $119.6bn (£80bn) on digital advertising compared with $111.5bn (£74.6bn) on print in 2010 because of the cost effectiveness of the channel.
It said of US brands’ collective $368bn (£246bn) 2010 ad budget, 32.8% will be spent online compared with 30.3% in print.
Tags: Marketing
- Page 1 of 2
- << Start < Prev 1 2 Next > End >>
|
Analytics Blog
