Data

Over the last few months we’ve seen the new Google Analytics platform (v5) build momentum with a string of new feature releases, and last week it was the turn of real-time reporting to be included as the latest addition to the family.

In my previous role with an analytics vendor, I would often have clients come to me with “Real-time data” on their list of requirements but in reality very few were in a position to be able make actionable decisions based on the data that quickly; to a greater extent that is still the case today. As analysts we struggle already to make the best use of the vast quantities of data we already have. Would increasing that with real-time reports across the system only exasperate that?

In certain situations real-time data can be a very powerful tool in the analyst’s kitbag. I’ve been testing the real-time reports for a few weeks now and whilst there is still room for improvement, I’ve been able to help a client find out some great insights on events that have been occurring which otherwise would have been a lot harder to discover.

Here’s 5 practical examples of how you can use the new reports which I think help to demonstrate when real-time analysis can be beneficial. One of the key uses for me is being able to give marketers greater visibility on how events external to your site such as Social, TV and advertising campaigns influence your website audience, in order to optimise performance and prove ROI.

1. Measuring the impact of social media

You’ve just sent a tweet out or blogged a new post and want to see how many people are interested and picking up on your content. Use the content report to see live stats of how many people are coming to your article and the referral report to see how many people have come from these sources.

Real-Time Traffic Sources report showing referrals in Google Analytics

2. Understanding the response to  TV advertising

It’s 6pm and your new advertising campaign is due to be broadcast on TV. You want to see what the impact is to your brand during and after the commercial.  Use the overview report to see how overall traffic to your site is increasing and view the activity timelines by the second and minute as your advert plays to monitor change.

Real-Time overview report showing activity timeline

Drilldown into the Traffic Sources report to view increases in traffic from direct channel and brand search terms and use the locations report to view which geographic regions people are visiting from.

3.  Assessing the interest in breaking stories

You’re a publisher with dynamic content and news stories which change frequently throughout the day. Use the content report to see which stories are generating the most interest and use this information to help optimise the content you promote elsewhere on the site.

Real-Time Content report showing page level activity

4. Measuring the performance of product campaigns

You’ve launched a new product and are running a paid search campaign to promote this. Use the Traffic Sources report to see how many people are responding to your marketing. Drill down into the traffic cpc medium to see which keywords people are responding to help optimise your campaigns. Secondly when any new campaigns go live get peace of mind that these are being tagged up correctly by using the reports to verify data is being captured by Google Analytics.

5.  Verifying tag code is working correctly on new pages

You’ve just put new pages live on your site and want to be certain that the tag code is working and Google Analytics is capturing data.  Now there is no need to have to wait, simply view the content report and search for your page and watch as you test the page out on the live site.

And if that’s not enough to convince you there’s always the novelty fun factor. Aside from the fascination of sitting watching visitors as they arrive on your site, big brother style, Google Earth has been integrated into the location report so you can zoom around travelling the world with your visitors. Now that’s just plain cool!

I’d love to hear your ideas on how you think these new real-time reports could help your business.

“The world has gone social; it’s just that we don’t know how to measure the value of that yet.” That was one of the messages coming out of the Adobe Omniture Summit here in London. Thirteen hundred people from 500 companies from 30 countries came together last week for two days to learn, share, network, have fun, and digest the views of various speakers on the issues of the day. The other message was that the world’s going mobile – “the eyeballs are moving from fixed web to mobile web” – and there’s loads of challenges to measuring that too.

From the keynotes from the likes of Christian Hernandez of Facebook and Brian Solis at Altimeter, the emphasis is that businesses and organisations need to focus on people and to understand the social consumer. Hernandez talked about “putting people at the centre” and the power of understanding how enabling social interaction can bring disruption to different industry sectors. First of all, there was photo sharing, then there was gaming, next in Facebook’s sights is commerce; social commerce. According to Hernandez, the classical shopping funnel is dead and the shopping funnel is in fact a circle from awareness to interest, to decision, to action, to recommendation, and back to awareness. If that’s true, then it’s going to play hell with those pretty funnel reports in your web analytics tool. But Hernandez said that the future of social marketing was all around measurement and data.

However, Solis reminded us that “we cannot measure what it is that we do not know how to value” and therein lies the rub. What is the value of a social media marketing strategy? Solis’ advice was to make it actionable. Social marketing is about actions, reactions, and transactions. If it’s about actions and transactions, then it’s more measurable. But at the heart of it Solis tells us that organisations need to understand the socially-connected consumer. What is it that makes them tick? What do they need or what is it that they want from you? To do this, it’s going to be important to start to segment out your social customers from everyone else and look for those differences in patterns of behavior and attitudes from everyone else. The trick is also not to treat “social” as one big lump but to also look at the different channels within social media such as Facebook vs. Twitter, because, as some of the case studies shown demonstrated, there can be interesting patterns between what people do when using the different social channels. In fact, different types of people might be using different channels to do different things, so you can’t take a one-size-fits-all approach. Segmentation is key.

Once you understand the social customer, then Solis says to introduce a social marketing program that works for both of you, and to do that you have to think like a connected customer and give them something to talk about. Often what the social customer wants (i.e., a special offer) is different from what the organisation wants (i.e., a relationship), so you’ve got to find those things that are going to work for both of you. The key thing though is to make sure that you create outcomes; a “click to action” as Solis calls it. If you have outcomes, then at least you have something to measure against.

Of course, I know that these things are easier said than done. Organisations have been struggling for years to define “what good looks like” for their web channel strategies, let alone their social channel strategies, but defining the expected value is the critical starting point to building a social media measurement strategy. By defining the value, you’ll be able to better understand the metrics that will tell you whether that value is being obtained, and therefore the technologies can give you those metrics.

This article was orignially published by Clickz

You may have noticed the digital world panicking a little in the last month. On May 25th a new piece of EU legislation is coming into force which will limit the way websites collect data about their visitors and will restrict some industries in how they monetise that information. In particular the legislation is focused around website cookies.

Cookies are small snippets of code that sit on your computer and identify you to a particular website or advertising network. Currently cookies are used in a huge variety of ways from remembering what you just put in your shopping basket so that the product is still there when you checkout, through to targeting specific adverts to you based on your previous browsing habits. The new legislation says that website owners should be getting explicit consent from visitors for their data to be collected in this way, used at a later date or even sold on. In effect visitors have to say they are happy for cookies to be dropped on to their computers by websites.

The legislation has its origin in considering how brands and advertisers should be allowed to use data they collect about us consumers as we browse the web. Should brands remember information about the products we browse, news items we read, how we prefer to personalise websites? Should they be able to use that data to sell us other products and services? Should they be able to sell that data to third parties? What is private and how much of our browsing history should remain private?

 Behavioural targeting

The EU legislation is not designed to ruin the user experience of surfers, nor to impact businesses with waffly laws. Simply the EU is trying to get the digital world to be on a similar footing to the rest of commerce, advertising and marketing. The direct marketing industry has been coping well with data privacy issues for many decades and the digital industry needs to be able to say in a similar way that it is responsive around individual’s privacy and reactive to their needs with regards to any data collected about them. The impact of the web on our lives has meant we are much more connected than before but consequently those connections mean we are leaving a trail of activity in a huge variety and number of places. It is this paper trail that the legislation is trying to get to grips with.

The average consumer is happy to have cookies that support their user experience, e.g. remembering that I live in Stoke Newington and providing me with local news and weather. This type of cookie isn’t going to be impacted by the legislation because it can be argued they are required to deliver a specifically requested service. But when cookies are used for behavioural targeting it can be a bit more off-putting for the average person and this is where the legislation will really affect our industry.

Recently I’ve been ‘stalked’ by Clarkes and John Lewis adverts wherever I have been on the internet. This is because when visiting their site some weeks ago they dropped a cookie on my computer and shared that data with a third party advertising network. The network now uses that information to recognise me and fires me adverts for the same products I looked at last month. If these type of cookies are not going to be used it could mean the death of some new digital industries that were expected to drive the development of online advertising. Could this be the end for whole industries such as re-targeting, behavioural targeting or multivariate testing?
 

How did the legislation develop?

During the last 12 months a number of industry insiders have been working with the government to help define how the legislation should be implemented. The government has stated that not all cookies will be subject to the legislation. If they were then it would mean that we would need to be served with a pop-up window asking for cookie consent nearly every time we clicked to a new web page.

This usability nightmare scenario was squashed by the government but with a rather broad statement that the legislation does not apply to cookies that are ‘strictly necessary’ to provide an explicitly requested service. This generated a lot of argument that have not yet been satisfactory resolved debating if automatic settings in your browser would be enough or if sites whose existence that depended solely on advertising could be exempt.

What next?

The upshot is a rather sensible wait-and-see policy from the UK government. They have been working with advertising bodies like the IAB, EASE, ASA to review current uses of cookies and support moves by industries such as behavioural targeting to educate consumers and move to an industry standard for behavioural ads. By 2012 expect to see a small icon in any behavioural ad to show that it has used cookie data to target you.

But with the legislation coming into effect in a month what should you do next? Large brands need to get an idea of how pervasive cookies are on their sites and also how third parties which may be advertising on their site are collecting data and subsequently using it. If your advertising or media agencies aren’t able to give a confident response on how they are proposing to react to the legislation then it is probably time to look for another agency.

Since the autumn of 2010 at Foviance we have been researching what impact this legislation is going to have on brands and also how consumer attitudes to data privacy are likely to develop in the next few years. With the legislation in mind we developed a tool that grabs cookies from a website visit, analysing the type of data being collected by the cookie and rating this data in relation to how likely the legislation will impact it.

It has been fascinating and eye-opening to see the huge number of cookies that a typical website uses and the wide array of uses of these cookies. Using this approach we’ve been able to help our clients understand how the new law is likely to impact them across different types of cookies they use such as advertising, functionality and social media. I think it is fair to say that the impact of the legislation on large brands is going to be huge.

What about consumers? Most people think the internet is free and don’t understand that website owners need to generate revenue to support the delivery of content. Consumers also need to be educated in how data is collected, otherwise distrust will set in and people will never be happy to share their data. If that happens then slowly the amount of data and quality of that data that is collected through cookie technology will decrease dramatically. So, time for the digital industry to proactively engage and lead in the privacy debate.

For more about Foviance’s Data Privacy Audit

This article was originally published at My.Customer.com

This article, written by Neil Mason, was originally published on Clickz.com on 03/01/11 and is republished here with permission.

A year ago I reflected on the end of my first digital decade. I commented on how things had moved on in that time with respect to analytics and how in some areas there was a way still to go. Another year on and we’re still on the journey, so what are some of the things that I would like to see more of or less of in 2011? Read more…

This article, written by Neil Mason, was originally published on Clickz.com on 07/12/10 and is republished here with permission.

“Insight”. It’s a word that most of us probably use every day. Client companies demand “insight”, agencies and consultancies strive to deliver it. But what is it and how do you know when you’ve got it? Or have created it? Is it one of those words these days that we use glibly like “analytics” when we really mean “reporting” because it sounds better or more sophisticated? Read more…

These days we live in an experience economy. Many organisations look to compete through some kind of service or product differentiated strategy rather than purely on price. But it’s a complex landscape – organisations have to work across multiple channels and deliver a joined up experience – across the web, the call centre, stores and other touch points. Consumers are no longer tolerant of organisations that don’t.

So how are businesses coping with the need to deliver a multi-channel, integrated customer experience? Well the evidence from a recent report conducted by Foviance in association with Econsultancy here in the UK, suggests that whilst organisations recognise that is something they need to do, they are a long way from delivering on that need.

The report is based on a survey of over 500 businesses. It conforms that the majority of organisations do recognise the link between business performance and customer experience but are struggling to develop a strategy for multi-channel customer experience management and then delivering on that strategy…

A more in-depth version of this article has  been republished with permission by ClickZ on the Foviance website if you’d like to read more. Also, please download your own copy of the Multi-channel Customer Experience Report today.

This article was written as part of the Foviance December 2010 newsletter

“Tell me something I don’t know” was once a brief I got from a client. It was also the title of the presentation I gave at the eMetrics Marketing Optimisation Conference  in Washington DC  in early October. The presentation covered an overview of data mining and predictive analytics and included a couple of case studies showing how these techniques can be used in the digital analytics space. Fortunately Daniel Waisberg and his team from Online Behaviour filmed a number of presentations from the conference including mine. The presentation can be viewed in three parts. Read more…

This article, written by Neil Mason, was originally published on Clickz.com on 09/11/10 and is republished here with permission.

These days we live in an experience economy. Many organisations look to compete through some kind of service or product differentiated strategy rather than purely compete on price. But these days it’s a complex landscape, organisations have to work across multiple channels and deliver a joined up experience, across the web, the call centre, stores and other touch points. Consumers are no longer tolerant of organisations that don’t recognise them across these various touch points and are better equipped than ever before to drop something about it when things aren’t right. Read more…