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.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=WWdlHP9SHfI

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

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

• 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

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.

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.

In many organisations there are discrete boundaries between the various channels. When it comes to data and insight it’s common to see in later organisations separate teams working in the online channels and the offline channels. This may or may not be a good thing and I think there are arguments on both sides of the case. Online research and analytics teams are generally serving internal clients that are themselves focussed on the online channel. They have a distinct set of analytical tools in their toolbox such as web analytics data, voice of the customer systems and user testing approaches. The way that online data is collected, managed and analysed is often quite different to more traditional ‘offline’ data. However, organisations are becoming more joined up and so data and insight teams probably need to become more joined up or at least have a greater understanding of what each other is doing or is capable of.

I’m occasionally asked whether businesses should pull at their analytical and insight teams together into one function. I think that is a case for that but it would need to be managed carefully. For example, I have seen cases where, as a result of some reorganisation or something, web analysts are made part of the main insight team. The challenge has been that the people running the insight team have little understanding of what’s happening in the online and aren’t able to develop the function. The web analysts feel isolated both from their colleagues in the insight team and also from the internal client that they serve in the online channel. So I think that integrating insights teams should follow the integration of the marketing or business teams rather than lead it. There are enough challenges at the moment within a single channel.

Even within the online channel there are cultural challenges around joining up data and insight and these challenges are around the differences between quantitative and qualitative data. When it comes to understanding online business performance the quantitative data tells you what happened and when it happened. Qualitative data tells you who did it and importantly why they did it, or didn’t do it. Quantitative data like web analytics data generally comes in large volumes and requires complex systems to collect and manage the data. Analysis is generally a question of finding patterns in data and interpreting the facts. Qualitative data is generally sparser and analysis is about finding the threads in that sparse data. Interpretation is perhaps more intuitive and instinctive. These are often quite different skill sets from each other and often they are found in different teams, even within the online channel.

Customer experience measurement requires an integration of both quantitative measures and qualitative measures but web analytics teams are often separate from user experience teams and this presents cultural challenges in bringing these data sources together. In a recent project with a client they wanted to work with us because we had the skills across the quantitative and qualitative spectrum. However in terms of sourcing the data to work with it felt like we were working with two different clients, one in charge of the web data and another looking after the user experience requirements. I don’t claim this is easy to do. On a recent project I was leading we were pulling together web analytics data, online survey data and results from user experience testing to make recommendations around a particular site. I was working with analysts and researchers from each discipline who each approached the problem from their particular perspective. Pulling those perspectives into a single view was not easy but when it does come together the result is incredibly powerful. Organisations should do more to bring their quantitative and qualitative skill sets together, either through formal structures or by encouraging  joint working or by creating multi-disciplinary project teams.

The final challenge to data and insight integration is the technical one. Online and offline data can look very different from each other. When it comes to quantitative data in the online world we generally have a relatively small amount of data on a lot of people (everyone who visits the website). In the offline world we might have a lot of data on a relatively small amount of people (our actual customers). Bringing these two things together is not often easy but again that may be as much an organisational problem as a technical one. Web analytics data is generally in the preserve of the web analytics team and the customer data is often managed by a Business Intelligence or CRM function and if they don’t talk to each other its hardly surprising that the data don’t talk to each other. Each needs something different to complete their view of the world and so the data should probably flow both ways. Some customer data into the web analytics system will help with segmentation and understanding different customer journeys. Some web analytics data into the customer database will help to complete the 360 degree view that the business needs.

Integrating data and insight across sources and across channels is not easy to do. It requires businesses to look at how they organise and manage both their human and technical assets across the organisation. But as I said last time, I believe that organisations that start facing up to the challenges will be best placed for success.

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.

Although I’m not a privacy expert or a lawyer there have been occasion back in 2008 and 2006 where I’ve felt sufficiently compelled to tread (somewhat gingerly) into this sensitive debate.

On this side of the Atlantic the heat is being turned up and it’s not clear to me to what extent the digital marketing industry is aware of what’s going on or reacting. At the heart of the matter is an amendment to the European E-Privacy Directive that was passed into European law about a year ago. Amongst other things the new amendment includes new regulations on the use of cookies and the actual text states that “Member States shall ensure that the storing of information, or the gaining of access to information already stored, in the terminal equipment of a subscriber or user is only allowed on condition that the subscriber or user concerned has given his or her consent, having been provided with clear and comprehensive information…”. The way that this is being interpreted in a number of places is that users will have to give their explicit consent to a cookie being dropped on their device. There is provision for cookies that are fundamental to the delivery of the service to be expected but this leaves tracking cookies of all kinds vulnerable to how this amendment is actually interpreted.

At the time this new amendment didn’t receive much attention. However, all 27 member states of the European Union have to embody this amendment into local law by April 2011, which is not that far away. In the case of the UK it’s not entirely clear how this amendment will be implemented into UK law and the government is currently consulting on it. I assume that other European countries are doing likewise and it’s inevitable that each country’s interpretation will be different from the other depending on their cultural attitudes towards issues such as privacy and data protection. Germany, for example, is a market where these issues are very sensitive and as a result we see things like federal courts trying to get Google Analytics banned or people demands that their houses are blurred out in Google StreetView .

At this stage there are probably more questions than answers about exactly what this directive will mean for the European and US digital marketing industries. How will the directive be interpreted? What is meant by giving consent? How explicit will that consent need to be? For example, if someone visits a website for the first time and the site uses tracking cookies, will they somehow have to “opt in?” Or will there be a default assumption of an opt-in unless someone explicitly opts-out? The answers are not clear and there’s always the danger that the law will be implemented in such a way that will cause massive problems with organisations’ ability to track the effectiveness of their online marketing spends.

At the very least organisations need to understand the scale of the scope of the potential problem. Many larger organisations have a number of different digital properties operating over multiple digital channels. Multiple cookies may exist on each property and in each channel creating a complex landscape that first of all needs to be understood and then potentially managed. So European companies need to start to prepare for what might be the fast implementation of new practices. They should start by understanding their cookie landscape and then that can be evaluated against the new legal requirements as they emerge. The additional benefits are that this kind of stimulus can provide an opportunity for brands to communicate more effectively what their policies are and that may help to build trust.

What might be the impact for American organisations? This is again not clear at the moment but it would seem likely to me that any company doing business online in Europe would need to conform to the new directive and potentially this might mean doing it 27 different ways. It’s an issue worth putting on your radar.

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.

In this environment, it matters what a business’ policy with regards to data collection is – what you collect and what you do with it. In 2010, a number of class-action lawsuits in the US have been filed against large media companies (Fox Entertainment, NBC Universal) and technology companies (Clearspring Technologies and Quantcast) who are accused of violating users’ privacy by tracking users online activities after they had disabled the options in their settings (through using Flash cookies). This is an issue of trust, which participates in the creation of a good user experience. However, it is also about to become a legal issue across Europe.

Why does it matter?

In October 2009 the European Parliament voted an amendment to the E-Privacy Directive, which covers data protection and privacy in the digital age. It has to be enacted into local law in every member state by April 2011.

This amendment includes:

• mandatory notification for personal data breaches applicable to electronic communication services providers (e.g., telecom providers and ISPs)
• new regulations on cookies (all users must have given consent before a cookie can be stored on their computer)
• enhancement of the right of actions against spam
• clarification of the scope of the e-privacy Directive

This could have significant impact on many businesses, in particular ISPs, telcos and online advertisers who rely on 3rd party cookies for targeting. While there is an on-going debate surrounding the question of formal “consent” (opt-in or opt-out), it is worth remembering that companies not complying with the new rules may face penalties of up to £500,000, as since April 2010, the UK’s Information Commission Organisation has the power to enforce them.

As a consumer-facing business, auditing your use of cookies so you can tell consumers immediately what cookies you use is not only best practice in terms of this impending legislation, it is also socially responsible – and provides an opportunity to communicate about it and clarify your policies, which helps to develop users’ trust in your brands.

Foviance’s Cookie recipe:

Clearly the potential business impact of this new directive is huge, and while it is not yet entirely clear how this will be implemented into UK law (the BIS is currently consulting on the matter), preparing the grounds for a fast implementation of new practices is a good way to manage the risks going forward.

Foviance has therefore developed a “Cookie recipe”, to help companies prepare. A thorough audit of current cookie practices is carried out and the findings analysed. This knowledge of cookie collection, storage and sharing across digital can then be evaluated against the new legal requirements. From this gap analysis, Foviance develops a roadmap for evolving your company’s privacy-related governance and processes in compliance of the new legislation.

The process starts with Requirements Analysis: broadly speaking, there are 4 categories of cookies (1st and 3rd party): Marketing related, Advertising related cookies, Analytics or tracking related and Application or site specific cookies. Foviance will first develop a solid understanding of the business requirements through meetings with stakeholders, and review the new legislation requirements in light of these.

Foviance will also review the current policies for obtaining consent across the digital properties, and assess technologies used for collection and storage in order to assess risk of data breach)

We then extract cookie information and build a database which audits, analyses and rates the use of cookies across client’s media properties. One way Foviance ensures thoroughness of the audit is by developing a tailored, automated tool to aid the tracking of actual cookie usage across all sites, and record the type of data currently being captured. Foviance can analyse cookie collection across flash media, checkout process, emails, banner ads, and so on.

What you get:

The following are the deliverables for a Foviance cookie audit:

- Cookie usage audit report

- Advice on compliance with the new rules

- Roadmap for managing cookie processes

- Assistance with implementation

To discuss your own cookie issues, please call a Foviance consultant on 0845 054 6500.

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.

So what you may ask? Does any of that affect me? Well an example would be how I do my weekly shop. Being a fan of all things online (plus a little bit lazy!) it should come as no surprise that I use Tesco.com for my groceries. I took some time to read their Privacy Policy to understand how any loss of cookie functionality would impact me. Tesco use cookies to simplify the log in process by remembering your email address, to enable traffic monitoring, analyse the effectiveness of their online advertising, manage their relationship with affiliate sites and provide mechanisms for online shopping. It is thought, but not confirmed, that site functionality may be excluded from the cookie directive but traffic monitoring and ad management will not. So, as a user the impact would likely be minimal with only some site preference information lost. However for Web Analytics, Affiliate Marketing and Targeted Advertising Networks there are far reaching implications as they won’t be able to analyse or target consumer behaviour as well they do now.

So the focus is less on the consumer and more on how online sites run their businesses. How the legislation is going to be enforced is still largely unknown. Originally it was believed that users were giving consent when setting their browser preferences. Though, EU Article 29 Working Party has published that this is not sufficient. So what options does this leave us between now and April 2011?

When local regulatory bodies look to implement this legislation it was hoped that they would come to their senses and see the potential harm this could cause to consumers and businesses alike. Although this week the Business Innovation and Skills (BIS) passed on this opportunity as discussed in this article The A Register.

With cookie use varying extensively between brands and industries now is the time for organisations to audit their use and develop plans to respond to the way the EU enforces the legislation. Companies need to get an idea of any functionality that their sites will not support if cookie data is stripped out and also of the implications of not being able to analyse their customer’s behaviour in such detail. They can then be best prepared for the new legislation and invest in fresh technologies which may need to be developed to replace cookie tracking.