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.

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

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

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?

More case studies

I get to go to a number of conferences on both sides of the Atlantic both to speak and also to listen. At conferences like eMetrics I get a chance to hear what’s going on on my industry and to find out more about some of the best thinking in the field. At the last eMetrics in October there were some great presentations from companies like Dell and eBay talking about what it really takes to drive a business through analytics whether that be the people, the processes or the technology. I’d like to see more companies coming forward to tell their story because its only through those stories being shared that its possible for practitioners to build up the business cases for ongoing strategic investment in digital optimisation. We definitely need to hear more often what it takes to become analytically agile and to move from a reporting mentality to an optimisation mentality.

I particularly what to hear more case studies around the challenges and benefits of multi-channel analytics, combining our web data with other customer contact data from call centers, stores, branches or other touch points. I guess great case studies like the one from USAA that I talked about recently are going to be few and far between as its takes time to build up that kind of capability, but once again its important that the industry can show case its capabilities and show what can be done.

Better marketing mix analytics

One of the areas that I think we struggle with as an industry is the understanding how well our marketing budget is working for us. Its over a hundred years since John Wanamaker famously said “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half” and you could argue that nothing much has changed even in the digital world. We still have real problems determining which media are working and which aren’t and often have to cling to the simplistic and naive last click attribution view of the world.

Progress is being made in this area and we are seeing new technologies evolving to deal with this problem, however I think that one of the best things to happen would be if Google added some improved attribution functionality to Google Analytics. I don’t think it needs to be analytically complex as one of the great things about Google Analytics is that it can make analysis relatively easy but i do think that “under the hood” they could incorporate some improved ways of looking at all marketing touch points in the path to conversion.

Less data, more stories

Finally, I think it would be great if we saw less data in 2011! I know that might seem like a strange thing for someone like me to say but as digital analytics becomes more mainstream in the business, it also needs to become more user friendly. I feel that in order to do that we need to show less data around the business and tell more stories. This is to some extent about challenging analysts (both in companies and in agencies) to generate more “insights” and to do that by showing fewer numbers. Real insights are often simple stories that are told well, in a way that the business can do something about it. This isn’t easy to do as it requires time (and to some extent different skill sets) but hopefully in 2011 we will see more emphasis on turning our vast amounts of data into powerful and compelling stories.

With that may I wish you all a prosperous and successful year ahead. What would you like to see happen in 2011? Please comment below.

“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?

It’s interesting how the vernacular and language of the marketing research and information services business has changed over the years. When I started out (sometime in the previous century) at the end of the data presentation we would present a “summary”, then we started to present our “conclusions” which was a shift from a statement of the key facts to an opinion as to their significance. We then strove to deliver “more value” by providing “recommendations” as well, which was an additional opinion as to what we believed the client should do about our conclusions. The trouble was that the recommendations as such were not often very well informed ones as you were often only addressing at a problem with a single set of data and therefore only looking at it through a particular lens.

Round about the turn of this century the word “insight” suddenly burst onto the scene. Everyone got really excited about and started to change the name of their departments and their jobs. Market Research Departments became Customer Insight departments but apart from that nothing else much changed. The same job was being done, pretty much in the same way. So what exactly is insight, particularly when we are talking about marketing or customer insight?

The standard definitions of insight talk about the ability to discern the true nature of a situation or to understand a complex problem. I think we think that there’s more to it than that though. For me these definitions don’t pass the “so what?” test. The “so what?” test is one that I coach my analysts and clients to use. When faced with a piece of data as yourself “so what?”. If you can’t answer the question, then the data isn’t telling you anything useful. The test can also be used to understand the ability to turn information into action. When faced with a request for information, ask: “So if I tell this information, what are you going to do about it?” No answer means no value.

We all inherently believe that insight is powerful and potentially game changing. Insight is more active than passive and is more than just a really interesting finding from a piece of analysis that no one ever knew before. It might be really interesting; it might be new but…so what? Unless something is done with it or about it, then it’s nothing more than an interesting fact.

This view of insight was reinforced to me a couple of weeks ago when attending a meeting set up by a client with all their research agencies and consultancies. The head of the marketing services function spent 40 minutes talking about “insight”. He talked about what insight was in his opinion and why it was hard to deliver. He talked about insight as being “contextualised information that changes behaviour”.

That definition rang true for me as I’ve often talked about “analysis without action is not insight”. Real insight leads to change either in the way that a company or its customers behave and that’s why clients demand it and that why it’s hard to deliver. It’s hard to deliver because information that changes behaviour I think rarely comes from a single source. Insight is the compound effect of the analysis and interpretation of multiple sources of data. That’s why our recommendations all those years ago were pretty facile most of the time; it was because we didn’t have enough of the facts. If you think about it in the digital marketing industry, how much “insight” comes from a web analytics system? Probably not a lot but when combined with other data from voice of the customer programmes, customer databases, user testing and so on, the cumulative impact can lead to insights that change behaviour.

I’m not advocating that we should stop using the word “insight” and start using something else instead. I do think it’s worth stopping every now and then and asking ourselves “Well if that’s insight, what’s going to change as a result?”

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

In the first part I introduce the concepts of data mining and predictive analytics and present an overview of the data mining process.

Data Discovery: Tell Me Something I Don’t Know by Neil Mason – Part I

In the second part, I talk through some of the challenges in extracting and transforming web data into datasets that are suitable for data mining and predictive analytics techniques. I also introduce some of the applications of these techniques including the use of data mining approaches for understanding visitor segmentation using integrated web analytics, survey and customer data.

Data Discovery: Tell Me Something I Don’t Know by Neil Mason – Part II

In the final part of the presentation I show how these segmentation techniques can be used to identify the most valuable users of websites and how they can be used to build compelling personas. I also look at the use of techniques such as propensity modelling to understand the factors that drive different types of multi-channel buying behaviour.

Data Discovery: Tell Me Something I Don’t Know by Neil Mason – Part III

Hopefully from the presentation you get a sense of some of the opportunities to get real insight from your digital data by applying some of these analytical techniques. The process is not without its challenges so if you would like some further details, do get in touch.

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.

So how are businesses coping with the need to deliver a multi-channel, integrated customer experience? Well the evidence from a recent report from 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 based on a survey of over 500 businesses highlighted 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. One of the key issues is that nobody owns the problem, with many organisations lacking an individual or a department to take responsibility for the customer experience within the business. Everyone is too busy focused on doing their own thing.

The sheer complexity of managing a cross-channel customer experience is also a major problem but that complexity is often exacerbated by the fact that there is no clear strategy. Over two thirds of the organisations that took part in the survey said that they were just in the process of beginning to develop their strategy for managing the customer experience across channels. This included some pretty big organisations.

One of the key factors that was cited in the survey that was getting in the way of organisations from improving their multi-channel customer experience was the difficulty in tying together the various difference sources of customer data. About a third of companies said that this lack of the single customer view was a major barrier preventing them from making progress in this area. Developing a joined up customer experience requires joined up data and one of the biggest challenges facing many organisations today is finding ways off connecting their online and their offline data.

In many cases companies now have their web data almost under control and the next phase of their analytical development is to combine that data with other data they hold in the organisation. This is not a trivial issues and it’s important that organisations develop a coherent data strategy to take them to the next level. This strategy needs to address questions such as “How can I track the customer experience across multiple touchpoints?”, “What data do I need to collect?” ,“What technology do I need” and perhaps one of the most important questions is “What resources and skills do I need?”

Having continuous feedback through customer feedback and surveys was seen as being vitally important. This was seen as being one of the key ways to generate quality customer insight and to help them improve their service levels. At the same time, the trouble is that a lot of businesses don’t have in place the right kind of structures to derive actionable insight. Often I’ve seen examples of rich data being left to wither on the vine because no one had the time or the responsibility to look at what their data was telling them and therefore what they should do about it.

Data and insight is one of greatest enablers to developing an improved customer experience. Organisations that invest in managing this across channels will be well placed for success.

Download a free copy of the report

Fragmentation, optimisation and integration. Those were the themes that stood out for me at last week’s Emetrics Marketing Optimization Summit in Washington DC. First of all I was reminded that “web analytics” is not was it used to be, it’s an increasingly complex space. Secondly, I was shown some great evidence about what’s really required to be an optimisation orientated organisation and finally we’re beginning to see some case studies from organisations that have made the investment in multi-channel data and the benefits they’re accruing from that.

A strong theme from the conference was the search to understand the value of social media. I got the impression that, if you were a speaker on track then you were in trouble if someone else had the words “social media” in the title of their presentation. Social media analytics is now definitely part of the landscape but its’ hard to define what it really is. Everybody is coming at social media from a somewhat different angle; online brand reputation management, fostering innovation or customer service, so it’s inevitable there is a disparity of thinking about how to measure its impact. So it was useful to see people like John Lovett from Web Analytics Demystified talking about the framework that have put out there with Altimeter. I think Lovett would agree that the framework itself is not rocket science as it’s essentially about linking metrics back to objectives but I think it’s exactly what’s needed at the moment in the space at the moment to take some of the “mystery” and “fluff” out of social media analytics. As one of my colleagues would say “at the end of the day, it’s just data”.

Optimisation has been another hot topic for a number of years now. Before we used to be treated to presentations that espoused the benefits of using approaches like A/B and multi-variate testing and the kinds of uplifts that could be achieved. What we saw this time from the likes of Dell and eBay was what’s actually required from an organisational and technological perspective to actually implement an optimisation culture in a business. Ed Wu and the team from Dell demonstrated the size and scale of the investment that’s required. They doubled the size of the testing team, bringing on an additional 10 hires in a 2 month period. They described the challenge in finding enough of the right kind of talent. In addition they established a project management office to help facilitate the execution of tests and introduced project management tools to manage the whole process. The Dell story just underlined that analytical success is as much, if not more, about people and processes than it is about technology.

That’s not to say that technology isn’t important and Bob Page from eBay outlined the type of investment that they’ve been making in getting their data architecture right to support the various analyst communities in the business. Initiatives included getting rid of the various datamarts that had sprung up around the company and creating centralised virtual datamarts that were able to flex and meet the shifting demands of different analytical groups across the course of the day. Technology is also used to connect different analytical groups together. A networking site joins together the various analytic communities together where initiatives can be shared, knowledge can be captured and best practices can be developed.

Finally, we began to see some of the benefits that accrue from data integration strategies. Adam Greco from Salesfroce.com outlined how web analytics data and CRM data can be used together to improve the effectiveness of the lead generation process. Lead data given to sales people can be enhanced with not just what’s on the contact form but also with the prospects previous browsing behaviour on the site, highlighting the products and services that the prospect might be interested in and scoring them in term of their levels of interest and stage in the sales cycle.

This type of data integration requires planning and for data from different sources to be matched together. Allen Crane from USAA showed how they had been doing this integration across multiple channels. Over a two year period they have been bringing data from the different channel into their centralised warehouse and analytics tool. They created a data schema that focussed around the customer and built out around that. In what I think was probably one of the best case studies around multi-channel data integration I have seen in a conference, Crane showed how they had developed the notion of a “conversation” to encapsulate the interactions between USAA and a member across multiple channels around a single event like taking out a personal loan. That conversation might start online but end up offline, or indeed end up online again. Their data integration allows them to track these conversations and to understand the true costs associated against these different events. It allowed them to develop new metrics like ‘containment rate’ (the amount of the conversations that happen online) that enables them to prioritise their site and channel optimisation efforts. For me this is where web analytics is heading. It’s about taking that data, adding the multi-channel perspective, and then deploying the right people and processes to change the way the business does things.

Given my interest in football, advertising and data I often think about the numbers behind the game. Sometime that is match statistics, sometimes it is financial data. At half-time on Wednesday night I was thinking about the amount spent by brands to associate themselves with the Champions League and how they hope TV advertising will impact online behaviour. Of the 14 companies advertising at half-time during the Arsenal game, 3 have products you can only buy online and I wondered how much of that advertising spend will have the desired impact. ITV will have taken something in the region of £2.5 million pounds in advertising revenue during the Arsenal game and yet studies* estimate that around 60% of advertising spend is wasted and has no effect on consumers purchasing choices. That equates to £1.5 million that was wasted on Wednesday night. Add that up across the whole of the Champions League season and we are probably talking something like £30m poured down the drain by advertisers in the UK alone trying to influence football fans. These numbers keep on multiplying upwards when you consider all the other advertising associated with the competition.

So is there a way to reduce this wasted spend and ensure that the impact of offline advertising on online channels is understood? I know from experience that by analysing data we are able to understand which adverts impact consumer choices and therefore help brands target consumers more accurately. But I also know that getting hold of the right type of data to do this successfully can be a massive headache. To understand how offline channels like TV impacts online sales you need data that reflects consumer behaviour across both channels and have the ability to marry that information together. That includes, but isn’t limited to, Media Planning data, Web Analytics behavioural data, Market research and Sales transactions.

Clients generally build teams in silos and one of the main problems is the inability of us analysts to get access to all the people who hold the data we need. That includes working with other Agencies to analyse the data they collect on behalf of clients. Only when we get all the data we need can we analyse the complexities of the online and offline worlds. The actual mathematical analysis doesn’t have to be that complex to make headway on this problem but without a full view of how a consumer behaves us analysts won’t be able to help optimise the millions of pounds that brands are willing to spend – and currently waste – on advertising. Clearly advertising around sporting events is only one example of this problem but come the Champions League final in May I wonder how many of the brands that have pumped money into the competition through advertising will have a clear idea of the impact of their investment.

*2009 advertising tracking study by Fournaise