Multichannel Marketing Metrics
with Akin

In the two years since publishing the Multichannel Metrics book, the face of marketing has changed drastically.

We are entering a critical crossroads in 2010.

By 2013, will we look back and find that this was the year when marketers from online and other marketing teams first realized how similar their goals have become and took steps towards integration across camps?

Or will we look back and find that the camps remained ignorant of each other and instead set in stone silo’d technologies making integration more difficult than ever? 

What do you mean, web and direct marketers’ goals are aligned now?

Marketers have had no choice.

Greatness has been thrust upon them!

Direct marketers

1. Have seen marketing dollars beginning to shift from offline to online
2. Finally see clearly that a large portion of interactions with their customers has moved online. For example, according to anecdotal feedback from several older European banks, 25% to 50% of their clients use online banking now. Some financial institutes acquire the majority, if not all, customers online.

Online marketers

1. Have had to abandon their silo’d, website-centric thinking because their websites are now only one component of their total web presence. Other presences include social media, mobile sites, behaviorally targeted ads and personalized emails.
2. They may continue to treat the offline as a step child for another couple years. Yet, they are already adopting multi-online-channel marketing practices for the purpose of integrating all these web presences.
3. The latter has required them to move from their traditional focus on aggregate level metrics and dashboards to looking at data about individuals across website, mobile, social, and advertising. This experience with individual level data will also make it easier for them to integrate their customers’ offline interactions down the road.

As a result, both online and direct marketers are now pursuing multi-channel data integration at the level of individual prospects and customers. Both camps do this for the purposes of

1. behavioral targeting,
2. better understanding of marketing ROI.

The technology gap is closing

While all vendors talked the talk for 360 degree views, the reality was different. Web analytics data was far removed from a direct marketers’ access.

• After all, the data are owned by the web team who couldn’t care less about individual level data at that time.
• The data are also hosted remotely at SaaS based web analytics vendors that prioritized reporting and good looking charts over granular data. As a result, data feeds (while available) would come with no SLAs. A feed might or might not arrive at the agreed time of night. That made it too unreliable for driving interactive (let alone real time) marketing programs.

Meanwhile, web marketers could integrate analytics based targeting into email marketing only by bridging the gap between several vendors and paying for integration services.

These technology gaps are now increasingly closing.

• Omniture is positioning its online marketing suite along with integrations with ESP partners through its Genesis program.
• Unica is positioning both
  • Its eMessage and Interact products for email and web personalization integrated with Unica’s web analytics and campaign management products for enterprise clients
  • Its recently launched Interactive Marketing OnDemand product where SaaS based customers use web analytics, email, and web personalization within a single application and UI.

The crossroads

This alignment of methods, goals, and technology represents our arrival at a crossroads.

(note added on March 12th): Maybe the word alignment is too much said.  But methods, goals, and technology are now more parallel and similar than ever.

But will we leave these crossroads into an integrated future or will we set in stone two silo’d multichannel worlds between online and direct marketing teams?

That is the big question.

—

In part 2 we will look at direct marketers vs. digital. Then in part 3 we will review where multichannel web marketing stands in 2010.

Tags: Business Metrics, Direct Marketing, Multichannel Marketing Measurement, Multichannel marketing metrics, Web Analytics, multichannel marketing by Akin
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I have to say, I am growing increasingly annoyed with the silo’d nature of the discussion that seems to still be dominating our web analytics industry.

We have been so silo’d that, for example, even something as adjacent to web analytics as audience measurement and its vendors (i.e. the comScore, Hitwise, Compete of the world) seem to appear more like second class citizens in our discussions. Meanwhile, 90% of the chatter among web analytics vendors, consultants, and bloggers seems to focus only on core web analytics topics and vendors.

A symptom that should give us pause is that most of our guru authors and bloggers - who are such rock stars to us web analytics people - are utterly unknown outside our little niche. Forget offline marketers, not even other online marketers know them!

Surely that isn’t because “the others” are all stupid and don’t understand performance optimization.

Honestly, I don’t know exactly why we seem to be such a silo’d breed. It is probably just a function of specialization in the workplace. Web analysts handle web analytics tools, multivariate testing, voice of customer, and maybe participate in behavioral targeting. But

• Who owns audience measurement / competitive intelligence? Probably a shared function with marketing/PR?
• Who owns social media monitoring? More often the “social media manager” or PR rather than the web analyst?
• Who owns search optimization tools? SEO and PPC teams, of course. (And they too can be separated from each other in larger organizations)
• Who owns email marketing? The direct or customer marketing functions.
• Who owns ad servers and behavioral targeting networks? The online marketing or media team
• Who owns site performance? IT
• Who owns the replay stuff? Web developers?

If there is any way out of this strange situation it is probably to be found in embracing the different aspects of web marketing in a more balanced fashion instead of losing ourselves in increasingly nuanced web analytics details that seem esoteric and boring to people outside our niche.

Might we find bigger gains in 2010 by looking more for a breadth-first approach vs. continuing our deep dive?

Take search marketing as an example

The diagram below shows the search marketing funnel starting from potential visitors, i.e. users of the search engines (or their content networks). The search marketer aims to acquire them on site and then lure them deeper into the funnel to engage, persuade, and convert.

The diagram then lists the different categories of marketing tactics and technologies that are involved in moving prospects through the funnel. Let’s take a deeper look at each category.

1. Audience measurement and influence

This category includes more items than one might think at first glance, namely the following.

2. Search marketing

This category includes the most obvious items associated with search marketing optimization:

3. Landing page management, and 4. site management

These categories include similar items that I shall list together here. But it makes sense to keep them as two categories because the vendors/tools for landing page management are sometimes not the same ones as those used for managing content on the rest of the site.

Not to even mention product recommendations, product reviews, etc.

Is that all?

No, there is much more that is critical. Search visitors will often not convert on their first visit. So re-marketing is essential.

More importantly, maybe, the customer life cycle doesn’t end with the first purchase. That is in fact when the work of the customer marketer only begins and the life cycle continues with on-boarding, growing lifetime value, attrition risk detection, and win back. Some additional tactics and technologies that are involved on the online channels include the following:

5. Interactive Marketing

Do we really need all of that … stuff … to optimize search marketing?

If your goal is merely to improve search marketing, e.g. PPC, you need nothing more than a Google AdWords account while paying attention to the built-in couple of metrics. But if you are after optimization, then the above are truly all part of the funnel or chain. Each of these pieces are truly needed and will pay for themselves.

And we are supposed to integrate that with web analytics?

As a supporting function and nerve center, web analytics has the potential to glue most of these elements together. When done right this could make your web analytics people some of the best known employees across all of these teams.

But you would be forgiven if you are thinking that integrating all of these functions with web analytics could be too big of an effort and cost. That is precisely why vendors such as Omniture and Unica are building out online marketing suites.

Today, not all of the above are available (and integrated) within one vendor’s suite. But that day will come because there is a real need by marketers.

Tags: Multichannel Marketing Measurement, Multichannel marketing metrics, Search marketing optimization, Web Analytics by Akin
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Search marketing optimization might appear like a single dimensional affair to an outsider, i.e.

• optimize ranks for SEO
• optimize bids for PPC

What could be so hard about that?

But insiders know that search is quite a multi-dimensional problem. It requires them to weigh

• keywords
• ads
• budgets
• bids
• currencies
• targeting across multiple dimensions
• landing pages
• offers
• their audience
• their competitors
• and much more, for example catching the rebound when the visitor doesn’t become a customer initially

So, while a techy like me can describe the complete space of options to tweek and analyze (see my SEO and PPC wizards), an experienced SEM practitioners can hopefully use their judgement and more quickly identify the most important subset of aspects to pay attention to.

The difference might be a little similar to a computer chess algorithm (that searches through the space of possible moves) vs. a Kasparov.

That is why I greatly look forward to this Thursday’s (Feb 18th) webcast at the Web Analytics Association (access the recording of the event here) where Unica’s customer Kristin Philbin at Marcel Media will share her tips and tricks for search marketing in 2010. Kristin has rich experience working with Marcel Media’s enterprise clients. But even an experienced search marketer needs to keep pace with the unstoppable innovation at the search engines.

Unica’s Penny Coupland and I will join Kristin to discuss the top 5 changes with search marketing and the related analytics in 2010.

Access the recording of the event here.

Tags: Search marketing optimization, Web Analytics by Akin
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If you are optimizing SEO for your websites you will benefit from checking out following valuable comment that Greg Moore added to the SEO Optimization wizard this week.

Greg, optimizes SEO, PPC campaigns, and website conversion rates for a living. He is located in the San Francisco area and is clearly as passionate about analytics as anyone you will ever meet in our little industry.

You can see his full comment on the SEO wizard’s page for identifying the keywords that should be prioritized for SEO through analytics (will need to scroll down).  Below is an excerpt to hint the direction in which his recommendation is going:

“Further, if a page from our site appears in the middle of page two of the search results, and later due to some great SEO work it moves up two positions, that is not going to increase the number of visits very much.”

Therefore, some ‘SEO feasibility’ analysis step needs to be part of the effort of picking the keywords on which you will bet. And Greg also says the following based on his insider knowledge of the SEO profession:

“Most SEO folks know about the importance of getting links to your web pages, and they have lots of clever ideas about how to get them. The key is web analytics. We want SEO work focused on a handful of search phrases where we will get the best results.”

Thanks Greg!

Tags: Search marketing optimization, Web Analytics by Akin
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So much has been written about our little world of web analytics, that it is getting increasingly difficult to come up with useful new contributions.

But the Beyond Web Analytics trio, Adam Greco, James Dutton, and Rudi Shumpert, managed to do just that. Their series of podcasts featured past guests such as Gary Angel, Jim Sterne, John Lovett, Josh Manion, Greg Dowling, and others.

So, I was honored to be next as their guest. In the podcast that Rudi published today, we discussed many recipes for web analysis ranging from the web analytics wizards, to the desire for ever smarter web analytics tools, and more.

I must admit, I feel a bit tickled like Elmo to see podcasts on our nerdy subject show up within cool places such as iTunes.

Listen online here.

Tags: Web Analytics, targeting by Akin
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