Category Archives: Web Analytics

Want Engagement? Get Desirability

Analytical Culture, Brand Management, Marketing thru Operations, Measuring Engagement, Web Analytics,

Forrester’s Marketing Forum this year covered Engagement, but not the kind of Engagement so often discussed in web analytics.

Nope, Engagement from a Marketing perspective, you know, surprise and delight leads to better customer experiences leads to better customer retention and higher profits.

The presentation came complete with some nifty offline Engagement examples, e.g. the more a patient is Engaged in their healthcare the better the result.  The improved results came from, get this, “improving doctor usability”.  And yes, there was a test on this business optimization effort with tangible results generated.

You can get a good feel for where this conversation is headed from Jeremiah Owyang’s blog by listening to the 2 Forrester keynotes, each about an hour long.  For those short on time, pick one, depending on your interest:

Strategic Level: platforms, frameworks, etc. from Brian Haven

Tactical Level: examples, “how to” etc. from Kerry Bodine

No time for a video?

For a bulleted list of the key points you need to understand in order to optimize your Marketing model, see the “Five Fundamentals of Integrated Marketing” ClickZ article here.

I’ll have more to say on why these ideas are so important in the next couple of days.  For now, I will leave you with this:

If the customer is taking control, it’s only because you’re using the wrong Marketing model, maybe one like this one.  No customer wants to have to “take control” in the first place.

The more Engaging you are, the less old-school “pray and spray” Marketing  – online or offline – you should have to do.

That’s the whole point of Engagement.

Comments on the videos or article?  Anything ring a bell for you?

Online Stat of the Year?

Marketing Research, Web Analytics, ,

Over on the Rimm-Kaufman Group blog was a report on what Forrester’s Carrie Johnson had to say at Shop.org’s Marketing Workshop. There are quite a few interesting tidbits, but here’s the pair that blew me away:

Correlation between Google Gross US Revenues to US E-Commerce Growth: .96.

Correlation with Yahoo Display Ad Sales and US E-Commerce Growth: -.04

Now, I understand that Correlation does not imply Causation but at some level when you get directional spreads like this you have to sit up and take notice.

One explanation is this: e-Commerce sites do not buy any Display to speak of, but we know that’s not true – don’t we?

Other questions:

1. Another conclusion would be Yahoo matters very little to e-commerce activity. Sure, less than Google, but to this degree? If in fact Display enhances Search performance, you would think Yahoo would have more of an effect. Perhaps folks see Display on Yahoo and then Search on Google? Wouldn’t that be a trip…

That scenario would really provide a whole new twist on the measurement of view-throughs.

2. Google gross rev’s include AdSense, of course. So we’re not really comparing PPC to Display here, though one could argue AdSense is more targeted than Display. So what we are discussing here is the relevance of ads, not PPC versus Display.

3. Does Yahoo Display include Travel ads triggered by selection of Location? Auto ads triggered by selection of Model? Etc. Etc. You could argue those ads are really “Search” if you look at it from a behavioral (customer) perspective.

Sure would like to find the source on this, and see what we are actually talking about here.

Other questions you would ask / data you need to make a judgment on this? How about wild speculations on what this data means, if anything?

Perfect Google-Click World

DataBase Marketing, Measuring Engagement, Web Analytics

So, what would a universal cookie across both Display and PPC give us?  What could we look forward to, what’s the wish list of the online “ideal marketing world” we could live in when we really understand how Display and PPC interact? 

I’ll give it a start, feel free to add to this wish list…

1.  From a macro web advertising perspective, all available Google-Click “space” is capable of being optimized for performance – whatever your definition of “performance” is.  That means an end to the idea of the space being attached to a pricing model – for any given space, you might see either a PPC ad or a Display ad. 

Hopefully, the advertiser would have some control over this allocation, deciding if / when which pricing models are used in which spaces, similar to the controls over pricing model existing in AdSense today.

I realize running Display units in Search inventory may seem counter-intuitive, but the key is pricing control.  The web desperately needs a more effective way to expose people to ideas they have never heard of in context.  Running random display units across opaque networks is not a particularly good way to do this; running targeted display units based on search history – a more advanced form of behavioral targeting – would do the trick.

Likewise, running PPC ads in tightly segmented display spaces can lead to big payoffs, as it did in the Lab Store example.

2.  A real gift would be some cookie-based sense of where the visitor is in the funnel, probably based on the search phrases they are using. 

“Level 1” would be no prior interest, “Level 2” would be “uses single word searches” on the topic, “Level 3” would be “uses multi-word phrases” on the topic, and so forth.  Visitors in the unknowing or shallow knowledge Levels would be exposed to cheap Display units – both in Search and in Display inventory.  Those expressing active interest (Engaged, if you will) would be exposed to PPC units, again, both in Search and in Display inventory.

You’d need some kind of history control on this, because the data set would probably get too huge.  Say for example, trailing 30 days interest, so you make sure the visitor is still Engaged with the topic.  As active searching on the topic dropped off, you’d kill the data off, because it’s no longer relevant.  If it starts up again, so be it, but a restart is a new profile.

Other ideas from the crowd?

Given cross-site tracking already exists for Display, do you think there will be any Privacy problems if Search History was used to target outside of Search?  People are pretty used to seeing ads based on searches in the search space…why not bring that over to Display?

Do you think Google-Click will give us a “universal cookie”, or will they keep the Display side in the dark for the sake of Brand-oriented folks who only care about impressions?