Testing

This post originally appeared on Applied Insights’ blog. Foviance acquired Applied Insights in November 2008, with Neil Mason joining us as Director of Analytical Consulting. As part of this acquisition, we’ve incorporated Applied Insights’ blog into our own.

For this week’s blogchat I caught up with Brian Clifton who is Head of Web Analytics in EMEA for Google. In that role Brian is responsible for the development of Google Analytics in Europe and I was interested in his thoughts about the effect that Google Analytics had had on the web analytics market and also on that thorny issue of data privacy.

Here’s what he had to say…

Brian, how would you assess the impact that Google Analytics has had on the market here in the UK and the rest of Europe as well?

The biggest change has been the huge growth in adoption. Web analytics has gone from a relatively small niche industry to something that is now almost integral with online marketing. The analytics industry is now at least 10 times bigger today than it was a year ago. What’s encouraging for my team is that the growth in adoption matches that seen in North America. Having been in the industry for many years, it really is fantastic to see how much benefit companies are getting from understanding more about web analytics.

Do you see any differences between the various markets in Europe that you operate in?

Measuring success is a key part of search engine marketing and search in general and this is the case in all European markets. As you can imagine there are always differences between markets but what is exciting is that across the board growth is strong. It shows there is great demand for such products and we will continue to work hard to analyse individual market requirements.

How do you address the data privacy issues that have been raised about Google Analytics? Do you find that it is a barrier to adoption by some potential users or in particular markets?

As you know, Google takes user privacy extremely seriously and it’s worth setting out how we approach the issue. At Google we build privacy protections into our products from the ground up, and none of our products use any personal data unless that use is fully disclosed in a privacy policy.

We always ask people to actively opt-in to services that use sensitive data, we allow people to use most of our services anonymously, and we even tell them how they can disable our cookies that they have been sent. Moreover, we think it’s important to be clear about what our position is, so we write our privacy policies in clear, simple language so that users can easily understand them – they are not the usual legal jargon.

Of course, for advertisers we also wish to provide accountability and transparency for our advertiser solutions (Adwords, Adsense etc). Hence Google Analytics is a trust building tool. Google will never do anything to harm that trust relationship as that would severely damage our business.

One of the latest announcements has been the entry of Google into the testing market through the launch of Google Website Optimizer. What was the rationale for that development?

Google Analytics is a great tool for web site owners to understand how visitors interact with their web site. It tells you what has happened, but it cannot tell you what to do next. That requires intelligent people to analyse and interpret the data then test for improvements. The WSO tool is the testing platform to do this – completing the loop of Measure, Analyse, Act.

How do you see the web analytics landscape developing over the next couple of years? What are some of the big issues that need to be addressed?

Although analytics is becoming mainstream for pro-active online marketers, there are still companies that have not yet really touched the potential online medium for marketing and how it can radically improve their return on investment. Part of our work is to show the opportunities that online marketing can offer. It wouldn’t be right to pick out one sector or another as there are opportunities for companies across them all to better reach their customers. Analytics is a crucial part of this equation and it’s a fantastic moment for the industry as we are seeing companies understanding better how their customers interact with them, which is good for us all.

With such huge adoption numbers, I feel training and education is the next opportunity for development. The Web Analytics Association is making great progress in that regard and I look forward to more education and training initiatives in the future. I also believe the industry’s terminology will simplify along with the products in terms of setup and User Interface. Once this happens we will see the integration of web analytics data into the heart of organisations. No longer a separate tool for the web, web analytics data will be a part of every day business intelligence metrics.

How will Google be addressing those issues?

We are always keen to do what we can to work with marketers to make tools useful to them – that’s why we value feedback from our users. We will continue to develop innovative ways to help people and we’re currently working on adding a GA course in addition to the regular Google University series that runs at conferences and exhibitions, such as Search Engine Strategies. And that’s not all – as you know, we just announced the new Website Optimizer multivariate testing platform and that Google Checkout now works with Google Analytics.

Without giving specifics, I think there are other integrations that make sense for Google Analytics, but you’ll have to stay tuned to hear what those are. We have hired some of the best minds in the industry and have partnered with many of the top analysis companies to provide professional services.

Finally, what keeps you busy in your spare time – assuming that Google lets you have any?

Well I still get chance to go down to the gym, though my judo black belt seems to be a long way away. Golf is what I am currently using to relax me, though it is strangely addictive!

Thanks Brian.

This post originally appeared on Applied Insights’ blog. Foviance acquired Applied Insights in November 2008, with Neil Mason joining us as Director of Analytical Consulting. As part of this acquisition, we’ve incorporated Applied Insights’ blog into our own.

Here in Washington, Google have just announced the launch of a new multi-variate testing service, Website Optimizer. It’s a beta launch at the moment and will only be open to a few advertisers. The service is free and will obviously mean that one of the concerns I have had about the cost/benefit balance of testing programmes here is the UK has largely gone away. No doubt more details soon.

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

Last week I attended Search Engine Strategies in New York. I was taking part in the ClickZ track on Multichannel Metrics with fellow columnist Jason Burby and web analytics author Eric Peterson. The session covered areas such as building an overall metrics framework, integrating multiple data sources and building out your KPIs. Themes which come up regularly in mine and Jason’s columns here on ClickZ.

Having done my bit, I was able to take in the rest of the conference for a couple of days. It was difficult to decide which session to attend given the breadth of choice. Since I’m more into analysis than the technicalities of SEO, I headed over to sessions on the Stats and Research Track to see what the state of play is in the search market and what the latest thinking is on the way that people actually use search engines.

After listening to presentations from companies such as Comscore, Nielsen NetRatings and Hitwise, the dominance of Google in the search market was evident. Various statistics were thrown about in the session but they all pointed to the clear position Google has as market leader. Not only do more people use Google but they also use it more often, something we used to call the “double whammy” effect in consumer packaged goods marketing.

However, the Hitwise data also showed that there are some demographic differences between users of the various search engines:

• Yahoo! Users tend to be slightly younger
• MSN users tend to be slightly older
• Google users tend to be slightly more affluent

These differences also can lead to different types of sites being searched for on each of the main engines. MSN sends relatively more of its traffic to Business and Finance sites than the other two, whereas Google sends more of its traffic to Education sites than the others. So, there are differences between the users of these different engines and where there are differences, there are opportunities.

The presentations also highlighted the complexity of user behaviour, particularly looking beyond the initial visit. A lot of search campaign response evaluation is based upon a direct response model, ie a click-through resulting in a conversion. A case study from Comscore on the US travel market showed that 80% of all transactions occur after the first clickthrough visit. In other words, only 20% of people convert on the initial search visit and they are likely to come back later to complete the transaction, predominantly using a direct entry approach like typing in the URL or using a bookmark. So, the argument is that in some markets like travel and other high-consideration products, analysis based purely on a direct response model is underestimating the true effect of search campaigns.

A great session I attended was on landing page optimisation. This deal with subjects such as A/B and multivariate testing. This is a huge growth area in the US at the moment and given some of the case study results; it’s easy to see why. Speakers from vendors and their clients were pointing to increases in conversions of 60% based upon the optimisation of a single landing page, such as the home page. Obviously these sorts of gains are not sustainable over the longer term but it does show that there is a lot of low hanging fruit to be picked from engaging in a systematic program of landing page optimisation.

One of the interesting things to emerge from the presentations was that in some cases the best landing page might be different depending where the searcher came from. The best type of copy, graphics or call to action could be different depending on whether it was a referral from Google or from MSN. For me, this tied in with the point about different search engines having different user profiles and this is obviously impacts on their behaviour when they reach a site. So, it’s important to differentiate between where the searchers are coming from and possibly treat them differently.

So, what were my key aways from the sessions I attended at the conference?

• Search is maturing and Google is dominant, but that doesn’t mean that you don’t need to pay attention to the other engines.
• The different engines have different profiles and this will result in different user behaviour on your site.
• So, it’s important to treat the visitors from the different engines as different segments. Understand their behaviour and develop your campaigns appropriately.
• Different landing pages for traffic from different search engines may be the way to go.
• Landing page optimisation and testing is definitely the way to go.
• Campaign analysis based on direct response may be underestimating the true value of your search marketing activity. A longer term perspective might be needed. Easy to say but harder to do. One way is to think about where someone came from the first time they visited your site before they converted rather than the last which is often the case.

Till next time…