Category Archives: Measuring Engagement

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 →

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.

NCDM 08: What was Hot?

DataBase Marketing, Measuring Engagement, Web Analytics

With two very intense days of 5-track sessions going at NCDM 08, it was difficult to pay attention to everything that was going on.  Still, by picking up handouts from sessions I did not go to, I could get a sense of what the hot topics were this year:

1.  Web Plays Data Friendly – Almost every session had a web component in it, the BI folks are getting it done.  The data is coming off the web / out of web analytics and into the data warehouse so everybody knows what is really going on. 

Much of this work is being done by the big service bureaus, not the companies themselves, as far as I could tell.  Web Intelligence, baby.

2.  Media Mix Models – which typically show online Display advertising as a poor choice for allocating marketing budget to when you are also running offline media; the yield is quite poor versus almost every other media.  Search, as you might expect, Rocks on Productivity, though TV still rules for Productivity and moving the needle.

The implication here is you’d be much better off running TV to generate / amplify Search behavior than running Display to do the same.  Offline for Awareness, Online for Intent / Desire. 

3.  Contact Optimization – I’ve written before about what ultimately happens when you don’t have a Contact Strategy.  At some point, BI will measure the bottom line impact of every division in the company pounding customers with the division’s own contact strategy (Hint: you are driving your customers crazy).  Then, move all customer contact to a centralized model which controls contact by source of new customer and value generated, measured through controlled testing.

This movement should not be surprising, given the whole “customer in control” and “social” movements which onliners give so much lip service to but never take action on.  Well, not never, but rarely.

4.  Measuring Engagement – yes, Engagement.  OFFLINE, as well as online.  The overwhelming message was this: it does not make any sense, and actually costs you money, to keep pounding your customers with any kind of communication when they don’t respond / interact.  You can measure dis-Engagement, and when you see it, you should stop communicating – online or offline. 

And these folks proved it, over and over, with real math.  See related #3 above.  If you’d like to see a detailed e-mail example of this concept, check out this case study.

And of course:  Models and more models.  Like Hierarchical Bayesian and Disaggregate Discrete Choice.

Boy, I love it when you talk like that.