Web Analytics

Helen Birch is responsible for heading up Foviance’s Google Analytics products and services, and is also in charge of the relationship with Google Analytics, as we are a certified partner with Google.

In the video interview, Helen introduces the key new features of Google Analytics and the services Foviance provide in helping you better understand conversion and user journeys on your website. We are well into the New Year and it’s a great time to carry out an Implementation Healthcheck, Helen describes some of the features and processes that will validate your customer data ensuring it is accurate and correct. Finally, the overview of our bespoke Analytics Training courses explains what benefits and learning’s your business will be able to take away and carry out on a daily basis.

The left side of our brain tends to be associated with functions that are analytical, rational, logical, and objective. The right side of our brain tends to orientate to creativity, intuition, and flexibility. In analysts, the left-hand side of the brain will tend to dominate, whereas with creatives and designers, the right-hand side will be stronger.

Optimisation using testing and experimentation technologies (such as Adobe Test and Target, Webtrends Optimize, or Google Website Optimizer) is mainstream for a lot of organisations. Companies such as Dell have built teams and processes to drive testing and experimentation through the business. Those companies have learned – and others are painfully discovering – that successful testing and experimentation is not only about implementing one of the many available technologies. It’s also about the need to harness people, resources, and processes around technology.

It’s similar to web analytics a few years ago. Back then, organisations implemented a system thinking that it would solve their measurement problems but then realised they needed analysts. Likewise, organisations must build structures and processes around testing and experimentation technologies, otherwise the business will not extract the potential from the system.

Testing and experimentation involves a lot of moving parts. Tests must be designed, assets created, technologies configured, and results analysed. Successful testing and experimentation programs require strong project and program management capabilities. Larger organisations typically have dedicated resources for program management, whereas in smaller businesses it might be part of someone’s role. In either case, a central function must identify which tests are planned and then manage them through the system. Workflows must be created to ensure that the assets to be tested are created and deployed onto the system at the right time. Tests must be monitored to ensure that any variants that are adversely impacting the experience can be dealt with.

Two Places Where Right-Brained Creatives Can Assist With Testing

All of this is predominately “left-brain” activity, i.e., managing, coordinating, analysing, testing, and experimenting also needs “right-brain” input, a more qualitative approach incorporating a user experience perspective. This right-brain input is important into two areas:

• Test program development (what to test)
• Test design (how to test)

Test programs are often built on the basis of web analytics reports showing which parts of the site might have problems. An additional input into the test program can come from understanding what’s working and what’s not working from the user experience perspective. The main sources of insight are from voice-of-the-customer survey programs and user experience testing. Many organisations have ongoing survey programs and many elicit user feedback through open-ended questions such as “How else can we improve the site?” User feedback can be a rich source of insight, but it must be mined, contextualised, and interpreted. These are right-brain attributes. This qualitative input helps to define what are the important areas of the site to improve and where to direct testing.

Second, right-brain input is needed for test design. Once a test area has been decided, the next issue is to decide what different elements will be tested. In a test, there will always be a winner even if it’s the existing version. With testing and experimentation technologies, you can cycle through many different combinations until there’s a significant improvement. But the challenge is how do you know that the variants that you’ve decided to test are the best ones? How do you know that the winner is not the best of a mediocre bunch? Optimisation specialists may know that certain things tend to work from the body of tests they’ve seen, but other inputs such as user experience expertise help to improve the quality of testing.

Good testing and experimentation is a combination of art and science, rational approaches and intuitive perspectives, and left-brain and right-brain inputs. It’s time to take a whole-brain approach to testing and experimentation.

This article was originally published by ClickZ

“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

Tobias Misera, Key Account Director at Foviance and course tutor for Web Usability, will be teaching delegates how to plan, manage and execute successful digital marketing campaigns.  The IDM 3 day Complete Digital Marketing training course will also  include: 

• Ways to monitor and control digital marketing campaigns, to enable optimal effectiveness and integration
• Understanding the digital marketing customer
• How web analytics, tracking and measurement can be used to optimise digital marketing campaigns
• Principles of effective website design

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 23/11/10 and is republished here with permission.

In my last column  I talked about some of the challenges faced by organisations in developing a stronger multi-channel customer experience strategy based on a recent report published by Foviance in association with Econsultancy. I ended the article with the comment that “Data and insight are two of the greatest enablers to developing an improved customer experience. Organisations that invest in managing data across channels will be well-placed for success.” As statements go, this one definitely falls into the “easier said than done” category. There are many challenges in creating an integrated approach to data and insight in organisations that are organisational, cultural, and technical. Read more…

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

Over here in Europe we’re having one of those periods where the spotlight is falling on issues around privacy and the use of cookies. It’s one of those topics that keeps bubbling under the surface and every now and then erupts. Read more…

By April 2011, the UK will have updated its e-privacy laws to comply with the new European directive, which among other things, concerns the use of cookies and the safeguard of privacy. This will have an operational impact on any company that uses cookies and collects personal data across its digital properties.

Data Privacy has regularly surfaced in the past decade as a consumer issue: with the increased access to technology, the appearance of geolocation tagging and social media sites such as Facebook, Foursquare and so on, the trend has become more noticeable. While many have embraced the advantages, others have raised the spectre of a quite Orwellian Big Brother – except a corporate one, and conspiracy theories regularly flare up. EPIC (a public interest research center in Washington, D.C. established in 1994 to focus public attention on emerging civil liberties issues and to protect privacy, the First Amendment, and constitutional values) describes cookies as “a mechanism that allows a web site to record your comings and goings, usually without your knowledge or consent.” Not exactly an endorsement of a tool that can, when used appropriately and with proper disclosure, actually improve user experience. Read more…