JUMP 2010 will focus on how we can make our marketing more effective by having a joined up approach.

Foviance’s Paul Blunden will be presenting research findings on the Multi-channel user experience.

• Multi-channel retail in the second decade of the 21st century – who is doing what well and what needs to be done better?
• Integration’s the key: integrating across channels to provide a seamless and consistent customer experience.
• The rise of m-commerce.
• Retail and social networking
• Retail technologies available to multi-channel retailers.
• Where next for multi-channel retail?

In my last column I reflected on 10 years in digital analytics and how far the industry had developed in decade in some ways and how there was still room to grow in others. I commented that I thought that one of the issues was that the online marketing world had been “data rich and analytically poor” and this week I want to explore some of the areas where I think there is work to be done to enhance the quality of insight that digital marketers get from their investments in data capture and reporting technologies.

For example, considering that web analytics and campaign data is often used to make resource and budget allocation decisions around online marketing spend, the continued use of the “last click attribution model” seems to me to be bizarre. I recognise that many organisations are seemingly locked into this approach through the measurement and reporting technologies that they use but it seems to me that this is an area where little “analytical” progress has been made over the years. Many businesses and their agencies know that this model is a sub-optimal solution to managing marketing spend but have limited options given the systems available to them. Some work has been done by some agencies to improve the way that campaigns are measured and optimised but it’s seemingly required large investments to get the position where the influence and impact of different channels can be tracked and measured properly. What I would like to see is the web analytics providers providing greater analytical horsepower in the area of campaign analysis by providing more flexibility in defining attribution models and windows and also the ability to look at the impact on multiple campaigns on conversion.

Another area where it would be great to see some more progress is in the development and application of econometric and predictive techniques to understand online marketing effectiveness and particularly the interaction between online and offline activity. These sort of techniques have been used for years in brand and consumer marketing to assess the impact of TV campaigns and the like and there is probably the role for these types of analytical approaches to supplement or enhance the direct measurement techniques that are most often used in the digital space. Again, some work is being done in this area by some businesses or their agencies but i feel we see to see more debate about the use of these techniques in the online space and the type of problems they can help to solve.

This leads me on to my final point and that is I would hope to see the development of more “science” in online marketing. For me marketing as blend of art and science, a combination of left-brained and right brained approaches. That’s not to say that there isn’t any science in online marketing analytics. Multi-variate testing is a good example where analytical and statistical techniques are used to predict the best probable outcome from a series of experiments. There are other examples as well in behavioural targeting. However I think that there are many other areas where there are the opportunities for a more scientific and statistical approach to understanding online behaviour in the same way that marketing scientists developed theories and models to explain such things as TV viewing behaviour, shopping behaviour and purchasing behaviour 20 to 30 years ago. One of the earliest marketing texts sitting on my bookshelf is called “Marketing Decision Making: A Model-Building Approach” and it was published in 1983! For this to happen I guess there will have to be a greater interaction between academia and commerce. I’m sure there is some really interesting research in this area being done in instructions around the world but I’m not sure about how much of it is reaching the commercial world in a consumable format. One good initiative in this area is that the Web Analytics Association has secured access to 5 leading marketing journals for its members to provide an opportunity for industry analysts to connect with the work being done by marketing academics and researchers. It’s one step along what I hope will be the road to making web analytics more analytical.

Foviance will be running alongside famous faces such as businessman and Dragon’s Den star Duncan Bannatyne, in an attempt to climb 42 floors of London’s tallest building in the city in less than 10 minutes.

Foviance team captain, Adam Hardy said “Each member of our team is fit and active, but stair climbing is notoriously gruelling and none of us know quite how our bodies will react on the day! But we’re relishing the challenge and hope that we can make a considerable contribution towards shelter’s fundraising target of £250,000.”
Sponsor Team Foviance

About Shelter

Shelter is a charity that works to alleviate the distress caused by homelessness and bad housing.
This is done by giving advice, information and advocacy to people in housing need, and by campaigning for lasting political change to end the housing crisis for good. Shelter provides confidential help to people with all kinds of housing problems, tackling the root causes of bad housing by lobbying government and local authorities for new laws and policies, and more investment, to improve the lives of homeless and badly housed people.

Influential campaigns bring aspects of bad housing to the attention of the media and the public, helping to fight for solutions. Shelter also works in conjunction with the housing sector to promote good practice, publish reports, and deliver professional training.

It’s hard at this time of year not to get a bit reflective at the year that’s gone by and to think ahead to the year that’s about to be. But it only struck me though as I sat down to write this column that I am just about to complete my first decade working in digital marketing analytics. I got started when I moved to work at an online auctions business in 2000 having spent a (large) number of years working in “offline” marketing analytics and consumer insight. I remember that when I got to this online business that the head of marketing told me to forget everything that I had learned in the offline world as this was “new media” and that “things were different” now.

Things were different for sure. There were different marketing channels to manage and to understand, there were different technologies to deal with to collect and analyse the data. Things were happening phenomenally fast and it did seem that the normal rules didn’t seem to apply. But I quickly came to the view (and one to which I still subscribe) that underneath all the noise and the excitement that the normal rules did still apply and that the core principles and marketing and marketing analytics were still valid. The methods of execution may change and the methods of analysis may be different but at the end of the day it’s just another marketing channel.

So how far has digital analytics come in the last 10 years?
In some ways it has come on incredibly well but in some areas there is still a way to go. First of all, web analytics exists as an industry in way that it didn’t at the beginning of the decade. There is an established Web Analytics Association which continues to grow and shape the industry. Soon, there will be certification which will allow analysts to have official recognition of their competence and expertise. So, in that sense the web analytics industry is displaying more of the characteristics of its older cousins such as brand (advertising) marketing and direct marketing.

There have also obviously been significant developments in the technology behind web analytics. The costs of data collection have fallen dramatically enabling more organisations to have access to data on what is happening on their website and the effect of their digital marketing campaigns. The page tag has become a universal method of collecting that data giving the potential of real time or near real time results. The reporting interfaces on web analytics systems have (on the whole) got better allowing easier access to that data and the ability to generate new or customised reports has improved.

If I have a frustration about the development of the industry over the last 10 years, it is this: I don’t think that we have got much wiser about how digital marketing works and to truly understand the dynamics of marketing across multiple channels. In this sense I wonder whether as digital marketers we’re any better off than our offline colleagues. There’s the famous saying, attributed to John Wannamaker “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half.” That was said over a hundred years ago but how many digital marketers today really believe that they are any better off today than John Wannamaker was back then, even with all the technology and data at our disposal? If so, then why is this?

One thought is that we have become the victims of the data. Because we have so much data available to us we have become paralysed by the numbers. In John Wannamaker’s time they didn’t have the data, these days a lot of offline marketing analytics is supported by data that can be expensive to collect, whereas digital data is cheap and widely available. Does this wide availability of data mean that we are not as efficient and as effective in our analysis of that data as we should be? It’s a thought that crosses my mind often. I might be wrong but having had the opportunity to work on both sides of the online/offline fence my sense is that over the past 10 years the online marketing world has been “data rich” but “analytically poor”. We still have constraints and conventions, such as last click attribution, that make it easier to report historical activity but not to measure marketing effectiveness. I have no doubt that this industry will continue to evolve, adapt and flourish. We have new challenges to address such as measuring the newer digital channels such as mobile but my hope is that we don’t get too wrapped up in the technology and that now the focus is more on the “analytics” in web analytics rather the “web”.

My best wishes for a successful, prosperous and satisfying 2010.

London, UK, 9 December 2009 – Foviance, the expert in cross-channel customer experience, carried out a survey in the autumn of 2009 and found that 44% of people don’t buy online as they want to physically see the product. In addition, a further 18% cited the cost of delivery as a barrier to online shopping.

The study, carried out to gain insight into respondents buying habits and behaviours, found that while people continue to choose the online channel to purchase their items, they often abandon at the research or checkout stage due to uncertainty and an inability to interact with the product.

The full research report entitled “Allowing customers to self-serve cross-channel” found the retail sector missing out on significant opportunities to increase their sales with many browsers reluctant to begin a purchase due to lack of trust in the product or the brand.

Clare Mitchell Crow, Lead Consultant, Foviance said: “Customers are already using multiple channels as part of their purchase process. By enhancing the cross-channel customer experience retailers can diminish the impact of the main barriers to conversion.”

The report concludes that there is a substantial opportunity for retailers to improve and differentiate.

Download the full research report

Press Coverage:

ThatsBusiness: Foviance survey reveals that 44% of people don’t buy online because they want to physically see the product
Posted by ThatsNews, December 9, 2009

This white paper provides insight from over 100 respondents, into the buying habits and behaviours in the run up to the busiest time of year for retailers.  We probed respondents to understand their motivations, the barriers they are confronted with, and examples of best and worst websites that exist.

This paper highlights that customers are already using multiple channels as part of their purchase process dependent on what it is they are buying and the information provided at the various touch points. By enhancing the cross-channel customer experience, retailers can diminish the impact of the main barriers to conversion.

Jim Sterne, the author and Chairman of Emetrics, was in London last week and I had the opportunity to catch up with him at our offices. During our conversation we talked about the way that the market is developing and what the differences were (if any) between what is happening in the digital marketing optimisation space on my side of the Atlantic compared to his. As we were talking I kept thinking back to a simple model that I developed a number of years ago to describe where organisations are in the development of their digital marketing measurement and optimisation capabilities. These days it would be fashionable to call it a “maturity model”.

My simple maturity model has three main stages:

• Performance tracking
• Process optimisation
• Customer centricity

Performance tracking

In the first stage of their development organisations are focussed on performance tracking. The challenge here is to “get the right numbers right”. This is laying the foundations for further capabilities to be developed and the main activities revolve around deifying the needs of the business, setting success criteria such as Key Performance Indicators (KPI’s) and getting the right measurement technologies in place and getting them working properly. This will involve a lot of effort with specification and configuration issues.

At this stage in the model, organisations might be wondering whether it’s all worth it. The “effort to insight” ratio is high. The amount of value being gained from the data may seem to be low compared to the amount of heavy lifting required to get it. However, it’s vitally important that this bit is got right otherwise it’s hard to move from this stage of the maturity model to the next.

Process optimisation

Once the right numbers are right, organisations can start to use the data to make better decisions. The application of insight into the business creates an opportunity to optimise processes and to begin to create some return on investment in the putting the measurement capabilities in place. So the focus shifts from tracking to optimisation of the core digital marking processes such as acquisition and conversion.

The process of optimisation is driven by the “test, learn and adjust” approach and requires more than just good data and some smart technology. It also needs the right organisational culture backed up by sounds business processes. These processes needed to be embedded into the organisation during the Performance Tracking phase and they guarantee data integrity. Nobody likes making decisions on dodgy data and you can’t optimise marketing processes without making decisions about what’s working and what’s not.

Customer centricity

During the Process Optimisation stage, organisations still tend to be quite “site centric”. They are focussed on how to optimise a series of processes, tweaking conversion rates, improving satisfaction scores and so on. The next stage in the model is moving from being “site centric” to being “customer centric”.

The main difference I think is the difference between asking what the conversion ratio was last week and asking how many new customers there were last week and what’s their expected value in the future. Customer centricity is about looking at the digital channel in the context of an organisation’s overall relationship with the customer rather than the other way around.

The main challenge here is to be able to get a multi-channel perspective on the customer. To do that you need multi-channel data, bringing together where possible data from offline systems and online systems.

The conclusion I came to from my conversation with Jim was that the difference between what is happening over here and what is happening in the US is essentially down to the distribution of where organisations are in the maturity model. There are some companies in the UK and the rest of Europe doing some really interesting stuff, it’s just that there are more of them in the US. But that’s OK, sometimes it’s best to go second, you can learn quicker that way!

Video interview with Jim Sterne

London, UK, 19 December 2008 – Foviance, the expert in customer experience, has launched a pioneering new method of measuring customer experience for ecommerce and gaming website visitors. Electroencephalography (EEG) research provides the means to gather detailed information on a user’s emotional relationship to a brand or service.

Neuropsychologists have shown that 85% of decision making happens at a subconscious level. Foviance has also tested and proven emotionally engaging websites to provide higher commercial returns.

EEG involves measuring electrical activity in different parts of the brain in response to certain stimuli. Once the preserve of the clinical lab, Foviance has pioneered the use of EEG in the assessment of user experiences. By recording reactions at different stages of interaction with a website – with emotions ranging from excitement and anticipation through to anxiety and boredom – Foviance can provide detailed and specific site design recommendations that improve customer conversion.

Foviance customers have already started to benefit from EEG. So far, Foviance has analysed the emotional responses of online poker players, measured response to imagery alternatives on a travel site and identify effective merchandising strategies for an online retailer. EEG can be used to assess emotional response to various types of stimuli and Foviance plans to apply the method to understand the multi-channel user experience. For example, it is possible to gauge people’s emotional engagement while on the phone to a call centre.

Marty Carroll, consultancy director, Foviance said: “We recognise that differentiation in user experience for many brands means moving beyond simple efficiency, performance and functionality, towards connecting with consumers emotionally. We are incredibly excited to be bringing this complex neurological science to the marketing industry for the benefit of businesses and consumers.”

EEG on PKR gaming research

PKR is an online poker playing site that uses advanced gaming technology to provide 2.25 million subscribers with personal, involving and highly entertaining poker games. Foviance and PKR used EEG to measure players’ visceral responses to different stages of gameplay and gameplay outcomes. Foviance research revealed that for the novice player, PKR offered much higher levels of emotional engagement compared to competitors’ sites. Foviance was also able to identify the peaks and troughs in concentration, the areas that cause confusion for the novice player and the importance of the tutorial stages in engaging customers. Now PKR is also aware of how high levels of concentration and focus on what is happening in some stages of the game mean that the company can optimise cross-marketing and up-selling opportunities during the game.

Simon Prodger, marketing director at PKR Technologies said: “This method of user research helps us understand the all important emotional experience that customers go through when using our site. This is very important to PKR as we aim to provide the most engaging poker experience online. Foviance’s insight has helped us identify how we can harness and develop the unique aspects of PKR’s engaging and immersive approach to online poker to ensure that our customers enjoy the highest quality experience possible.”

Foviance EEG measures factors ranging from cognitive and visual attention to emotional attraction and engagement, revealing the pattern of visceral activity during an experience. It uses an Apprehension/Excitement index to reveal how people respond to specific incidents and allows for comparison with other everyday activity benchmarks.
The service, developed in tandem with Neuroco is available immediately from Foviance.

Press Coverage

econsultancy: EEG: cracking your clients’ sub-conscious
By Marty Carroll, February 19, 2009

Easss.vox.com: Online poker firm engages in scientific inquiry in order to relaunch their site
By easses.vox.com, January 25, 2009

LobsterPoker: Using science to assess Poker player preferences
By Diana Sterling, January 18, 2009

NetImperitive: Guest Comment: Winning minds through cutting edge consumer marketing
By Marty Carroll, Foviance, January 12, 2009

GamblingReview: PKR.com Researhes Brain Reactions To Provide Better Service
By Gambling Review, January 9, 2009

UsabilityNews: Online poker company uses Science to assess Player Preferences
By Joanna Bawa, January 8, 2009

DigitalResponseMedia: EEG research ‘could aid internet marketing’
By Digita Response Media, January 8, 2009

ZeroStrategy: New advance in brand relationship
By Zero Strategy, January 7, 2009

SwissPoker: PKR Getting Inside Your Head
By Richard Honegger, January 7, 2009

Online-Casinos.com: Getting inside your head
By Online-Casinos, January 6, 2009

GlobalGold: Foviance: Understanding decisions improves business
By: Global Gold, January 6, 2009

BCS: New Method ‘finds brand emotional relationship’
By BCS, January 6, 2009

4flush.com:  Mind-Blowing To Brain Scannin; What’s PKR Poker Up To Now?
By 4 Flush, January 6, 2009

RecentPoker.com: Online poker company uses science to assess player preferences
By RecentPoker.com,  January 6, 2009

RuffPoker.com: Online poker company used science to assess players
By RuffPoker, January 6, 2009

GamingIntelligence: PKR Turns to Neurology to Understand Player Preferences
By Gaming Intelligence, December 23, 2008

DealerSupport Customers’ emotions to be analysed
By Dealer Support, December 23, 2008

NewMediaAge PKR taps into user emotions with Foviance
By Charlotte McEleny, December 18, 2008

For further information:
Melanie Hesketh / Becky Cheers
Prompt Communications for Foviance
+44 208 996 1638 / +44 208 996 1636
foviance@prompt-communications.com