Multichannel Marketing Metrics
with Akin

When it comes to Twitter, I have been siding with the naysayers who think:

1. I don’t care what other people seem to be having for lunch nor what they type into their mobile phones when stuck at the airport
2. I am not important enough - why should anyone follow me

So I have been writing the whole Twitter thing off as a silly and increasingly annoying fad.

Granted, you can search.twitter.com to learn what the market place is interested in. You can also respond to disgruntled individuals to mend their dissatisfaction with your company.

But this post is about speaking, i.e. twittering, not listening. Why would I ever want to do that?

Two things changed my mind.

1. A few people started following my Twitter account (@AkinArikan) even though I have only ever tweeted once
2. I was listening to Charlene Li’s good advice during her presentation, yesterday, at the CMA convention in Toronto: Be humbled by social media.

As valueble as social media can be to a marketer for growing awareness and positive perception of their brand, they are really hard to get right.

Case in point: If I had something valuable to say that fits into just 140 characters, there are a bunch of highly valuable contacts (”followers”) willing to listen. But so far I am not smart enough to twitter. And I prefer to shut up if I don’t have anything useful to say, i.e. in 140 characters.

As Mark Twain is quoted:

I didn’t have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead.

Hmmm…

74 characters.

Tags: multichannel marketing by Akin
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If you liked the previous post, then you will love this.

Well, only if like me you live in the SF Bay Area, that is.

Friends of analytics are invited to some quality evening entertainment on Thursday, April 23d, at 5.30 pm. The Silicon Valley AMA is conducting a panel discussion in Santa Clara. The topic: Managing integrated marketing through analytics.

The event is generously sponsored by one of my most highly regarded competitors: Coremetrics.  And Coremetrics have been even more generous by permitting keynote speaker Andreas Ramos, co-founder of analytics agency The CCG Group, to invite me to join the panel.

As for me, I am burning of course to learn the kind of questions that the audience will ask and to learn from the experience of the other panelists.

If you are local, come and join! Register here.

Thank you to Andreas for the invitation.

Tags: Business Metrics, Web Analytics by Akin
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While it isn’t yet quite the online-offline integration that is my pet peeve, a new era of web marketing and web analytics seems to have begun. I think this will be a very exciting precursor to online-offline integration. This era deserves its own name, so I would like to propose “On-site - off-site integrated marketing”.

On-Site Off-Site integrated marketing

The ability to nit your web site, email marketing, SEM, display advertising, etc. so closely together that they work together as one intelligent organism rather than silo’d, uncoordinated online channels.

The signs that this new era is upon us are everywhere:

Behavior triggered, personalized email marketing

For the longest time email marketing has been a matter of newsletters and email blasts. If at all, emails may have been personalized based on links that a reader clicked in previous emails (by capturing the click-through with a redirect). But if the reader hated the destination page and dropped off she would still be getting more of that same content next time. (arghhh!)

Yet, innovative marketers, supported by innovative technology, are turning the old practices on their head. Examples of this can be seen with multiple web analytics vendors. For example, in the case of Unica, the web analytics user interface now allows web marketers at a travel web site to drag and drop the group of visitors who browsed Turkey vacations into a selection box. Ad hoc and lights-out email offers about relevant promotions can be sent to the individuals that fall into this group.

Not just in retail, we are hearing more and more about abandoned shop cart campaigns and behaviorally triggered emails.

Behavioral Ad Targeting

The news on behavioral ad targeting after the OMMA conference a few weeks ago will not have escaped your attention.

Behavioral targeting is now considered a standard component in almost all online display advertisers’ portfolio. And no longer is it a - hush hush - secret backdoor method to help advertisers lure visitors back on-site after they dropped off without completing a purchase. But rather, the industry says that it enables advertisers to build a relationship with their audience to refine the relevancy of ads over time. If you viewed convertible cars on my auto web site then I should be showing you ad creative with convertible cars rather than SUVs, no?

And if that wasn’t enough, who is now running the world’s biggest behavioral ad targeting network now? Yes, Google! I’d say on this news that now is a good time to buy some Google stocks if (like me) you don’t own any.

Ad server - Web Analytics integrations

Traditional online display advertising is also getting integrated more tightly with visitors’ activity on the advertiser’s web site. For the longest time, metrics from ad servers such as view-throughs were completely silo’d from web analytics metrics. But in the past months several web analytics vendors have announced initiatives in this regard. These do or will enable a sort-of reverse path analysis of visitors to report what ads they have been exposed to before arriving on the web site one day. (For instance, in the case of Unica this is possible in cooperation with certain ad servers).

In addition, first party cookie ad serving technologies are available from companies such as trueffect. This enables advertisers to carry forward the lessons from on-site activity into off-site advertising.

Search - integration

Unlike the previous three channels, Search advertising is not targeted to individuals. But even here there are signs that on-site off-site integration is happening. All web analytics vendors offer some ways of combining web analytics with bid management and search metrics. For instance, Unica’s solutions imports paid search costs, impressions, average ranks, etc. into the web analytics reports.

Even more exciting however is when search bids are adjusted automatically not just based on bid management strategies but based on an advertiser’s changing inventory of goods. For example, if Turkey vacations are on sale then the bid management function that is integrated into the business will increase bids until the available inventory has been sold. Numerous advertisers have been doing this for years already. Though, so far the only cases that I have heard of (e.g. Overstock or Sidestep) were homegrown implementations.

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In the past the location of your web business was your web site. But with on-site - off-site integration that is blurring.

Take Amazon as an example.

Whatever the innovation, Amazon is already doing it.

Amazon has been programmatically setting PPC ads for available book inventory for years already (as far as I know). If you browse books and then leave the site to go to a blog that features an Amazon widget you may find that this widget recognizes you and re-markets those books to you. Emails that you receive from Amazon are also based on your past behavior (though more purchase behavior today than search behavior, I believe).

As Anil Batra pointed out during a recent presentation, nobody minds Amazon doing all this because they are doing it extremely well. It comes over as a service, not an intrusion.

That sets the bar for the on-site - off-site integration era.

You must know how to be relevant, if you are going to make the move from traditional, inbound web marketing to outbound, off-site integration.

And that is why I think the web analyst sits at the heart of the on-site - off-site integration era. Just like customer analytics are central to online-offline integration.

Tags: Multichannel Marketing Measurement, Multichannel marketing metrics, Web Analytics, multichannel marketing by Akin
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For those about to compete on analytics - I salute you!

The reference to ACDC isn’t unfounded. After all … data rocks!

If you want to create competitive advantage for your company by using analytics more cleverly than your competitors, then the first question is:

What kind of data will you use for those analytics?

When it comes to customer data, most marketers today have many choices to to pick from. Their (unified or disparate) data marts contain everything from

• transactions
• to personal details
• to marketing contact and response history,
• and in much too few cases also the web site interaction history of individuals, i.e. web analytics at the personal level

Leaders have found ways of using some of this data to leave the competition in the dust:

• Online marketers may think of Amazon, for example, or its cousin in the Netherlands: Bol.com.
• Offline marketers may think of companies such as CapitalOne who grew rapidly thanks to clever direct marketing fueled by analytics (as documented in the book Competing on Analytics.)

Yet at many other companies the customer data unfortunately are sitting idle in the data mart, collecting dust, and are not getting leveraged as well as they could be.

With some imagination, you could visualize the idle data silos talking among themselves and scheming how to get out of their isolation and boredom.

You could say, the data are in a competition with each other to get adopted by the marketer first. For that, each data source needs to make the case that it is the best weapon for the marketer to take with her into the battle against the competition.

“Hey, pick me, I can help you more than the next data silo”

So in the hustle and bustle of the various data sources fighting it out with each other, you might catch following battle cries:

“I am the transaction data”

I come in many forms, for example, shopping baskets at retailers, call data records at Telcos, and account transactions at banks or credit card companies. Since virtually all companies study me already though, it is going to take some more ingenious analytics before you can differentiate yourself using me.

Such distinguished analytics can for example be behavioral event detection, i.e. the detection of changes in individuals’ patterns of behavior. For example, banks do this very successfully by flagging individual customers who may be ready for cross-sales or retention efforts. This may for example be the case when a customer has an unusually large deposit on their bank account relative to the individuals’ personal past deposit averages.

Companies that use me well have increased their marketing success rates 5 to 12 times. So you betcha you can compete using me!

“I am the marketing contact and response history”

Most marketers think of me as just a tactical “log” of past interactions. If at all, I am used for calculating a direct marketing campaign’s response rate.

But in today’s world of multichannel, interactive (or dialog) marketing, I have a much more strategic role to play. Namely, a marketer that doesn’t take me into account is like someone who is talking while turning a deaf ear to the conversation partners’ responses.

Therefore, I am the one who can help you go from mass marketing to interactive (or dialog) marketing. Since few marketers use me well today, you can really compete on analytics with me!

“I am demographics data”

Most companies have some form of me available.

I am often helpful for framing who is in the company’s target audience so that you don’t waste your marketing funds talking to people who won’t buy anything from you anyway.

But I have been around for such a long time, even I can’t remember how you could use me to create a competitive advantage. What can you do with me that your competition isn’t already doing?

“I am the customers’ permission and preference data”

I may seem like a bore at first — after all I represent the customer’s interests and not the marketer’s. But companies that use me well are able to continue the interactive exchange with customers while companies who ignore me lose their permission to market.

For example, leaders in email marketing offer their subscribers not just an “opt-out” but a way to manage for themselves when and how often they wish to be contacted about what. Ditto with RSS marketing. Instead of losing a prospect to an opt-out, you are given a chance to be relevant.

“I am the web analytics data”

Most web marketers package me into reports and good looking dashboards. They use me to make their web sites and advertising more successful.

But since I am used that way by almost everyone already, it is really tough for you to compete on me this way.

You have to be cleverer than that to turn me into gold!

A straight forward but rarely tapped opportunity is to make web analytics personal (download the whitepaper), i.e. to learn about each individual prospect or customers’ current interests as demonstrated by their most recent web site sessions, clicks, and keywords.

This can fuel behavioral targeting, event based marketing, or highly predictive analytics. Marketers can use me to send the right re-marketing, on-boarding, cross-sales or retention recommendation to each customer at the right time.

Companies that use me well today are the leaders in their space, e.g. Amazon, eBay, Verizon, and many others.

————————-

So, if you have so many data to choose from which should you pick?

This will depend on your business and your competition. Most likely you have many more than just a single opportunity. And just like any other marketing investment you want to forecast potential returns vs. costs of getting there.

You’d start implementing the opportunity that has the best potential. But you shouldn’t stop there. Rather, all initiatives that promise a lucrative ROI (above your hurdle rate) are worth doing and should be funded. That is the only way in which you will maximize total returns.

So, go ahead, make your business case and your CFO will get you the funds.

Yes, these days many budgets have been cut.

But just today I was hearing from a business intelligence manager at a large client of mine. She made her case for solving a long standing business problem through extremely innovative use of (web) analytics. This was a business problem that the company hadn’t been able to solve through any other means. And sure enough, three weeks ago she got the resources that she wanted.

For those about to compete on analytics, we salute you. You rock!

Tags: Business Metrics, Customer Centricity, Direct Marketing, Marketing Disciplines, Multichannel marketing metrics, Web Analytics, multichannel marketing, targeting by Akin
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