Monthly Archives: January 2009

Visitor Retention Mapping

DataBase Marketing, Driller Q & A, Measuring Engagement, Newsletters, Web Analytics

Jim answers questions from fellow Drillers
(More questions with answers here, Work Overview here, Index of concepts here)

Q: The research folks in my company are trying to convince me that measuring sessions and Page Views per Session is more effective than using Recency and Sessions, as you advocate in your book, for a retention metric.

A: For a content site, the Page Views / Session measure can be used as a measure of visitor quality and appropriate marketing to the right audience – a customer acquisition idea – not retention. And it really needs to be broken out by Source – the average has little actionable meaning. You want to know the Visitor Sources, and then look at this metric by Source. This is still Frequency though – what about visitors who don’t come back?

Q: I am having some difficulty in making a decision regarding this. They want to give me a matrix with Page Views per Session on the Y axis and Total Sessions on the X axis as the “customer retention map”.

Continue reading Visitor Retention Mapping →

SEO for Cable TV

Customer Experience, DataBase Marketing, Marketing thru Operations

Riffing off a great post by George on marketing measurement, here’s a very specific example of how Marketers have to think differently when they are dealing with interactive environments, from my days at HSN.

We spent about 5 years and $100 million dollars trying to prove offline media would drive new customer acquisition and sales.  We tried everything.  Billboards.  TV.  Radio.  Newspapers.  TV Guides – local, national, and cable.  Flyers,  Shoppers, FSI’s.  Spot cable.  All of it, in just about every combination you can think of.

Each time we did these tests, we set up control markets and looked for Incremental sales in the media markets versus those with no media, based on revenue per household.  We found incremental sales in just about every case. 

The problem was this: even though the media created incremental sales, these sales were never enough to pay back the media on a net basis, meaning (roughly) (Gross Margin – Campaign Cost) – Variable Overhead was negative – even when you took into account the LifeTime Value of a new customer.  Even when you looked at the test markets versus control 3 months, 6 months, and 12 months later, for those who might be thinking about “Brand” or “Awareness”.

If you’re thinking perhaps the campaigns were weak or light on exposure, I offer you this: when the campaigns included coupons, the redemptions were absolutely huge.  That’s good, right?

Continue reading SEO for Cable TV →

From Audience to the Individual

Analytical Culture, DataBase Marketing, Measuring Engagement, Web Analytics

Prompted by Avinash’s post on Recency (if this topic interests you, there is much more here), I have to return to an idea that keeps running through my head:

Why do so many Marketing people fail to understand the basic underlying dynamics of Interactive / Online Marketing?  Relative to the Comments on Avinash’s post, why would Marketers not be interested in the Recency metric?  If the Marketers are not aware of it, why would Analysts not push it to them, show them the power of it?

The more I think about this issue, as I have been for several years now, the more confident I become the answer is quite simple: Nobody ever taught most Marketers how to communicate properly to Individuals.  Their training, their experiences, their peers, their conferences, all of it is about Marketing to Audiences.  The nameless, faceless hordes represented by GRP’s.

They simply don’t know how to do it any other way. 

And as a result, neither does whoever they report to. 

Which means any Marketing Accountability or Productivity Metrics, if they exist, are about Audiences, not Individuals.

So, all the Marketers care about are Audiences, these one-off blips on the screen, as opposed to Individuals, who carry longer-term, Potential Value to the Company that can be measured with Recency.

That’s why they allow the blasting of e-mails, they buy untargeted impressions.  They repeat what they know from offline, online.

Sad, really.  A one-way thought process in a two-way world.

What can we do about it? 

I’m going to talk about these concepts with a few Marketers during the AMA’s Digital Marketing Lab at M.planet next week.

I’ll let you know how it goes…

Update: I should probably skip Marketing, go straight to the CFO.