Continuing the question what digital analytics are vs. web analytics, here are 10 things that hopefully don’t describe you or your company.

1. You think improving business success with mobile and social channels is not part of the digital/web analyst’s job
2. You think visitors are trying to accomplish the same thing with your site regardless of whether they are visiting by using their PC, their tablet, or their Smartphone
3. You operate without benchmarks and competitive intelligence that would tell you where you are vs. your peers so you know where you could be
4. You operate without voice of customer surveys that would show why customers did what they did
5. You think your job is just to measure, test, and improve content and ad spend using data … when you could also be thinking about decisions and actions that digital data can drive (e.g. by identifying changes in demand, willingness to pay, or individual customer intent)
6. You think the value with analytics is just in KPIs, reports and tables … not in the underlying data warehouse of customer insight
7. You think you are just one silo’d channel that your company is running … when digital is increasingly intertwined with every next move customers are thinking about taking with your company’s offerings
8. You think visitors’ behavior in one session says much of anything … when today the number of sessions between transactions are becoming more frequent (6.8x on average) and shorter and more surgical. The real beef is in identifying what experiences increase customers’ future looking lifetime value
9. You think of your website as your only digital home and see the rest of the Internet as incoming channels of traffic. Yet, digital marketers increasingly orchestrate off-site interactions as continuations of previous on-site experiences, e.g. via targeted advertising and email that is not only targeted but dynamic (e.g. displays coupons or recommendations that are current at time of opening)
10. You think customers’ interactions with your digital channels are unrelated to the customer context, i.e. where they are (e.g. using their Smartphone in your store), who they are (e.g. at risk of leaving), and your past history  of interactions (e.g. an email or call center interaction during which customer was pitched a particular cross-sell product)

The WAA renamed itself to DAA (which was announced at eMetrics in San Francisco last Monday) to reflect the reality of how the profession/industry has grown since its website centric origins. That brings up the question what Digital Analytics should stand for?

No doubt,  every vendor (including me) and consultant will bellow now that digital analytics are exactly what he/she said all along that companies should be doing with analytics. And it is of course exactly what his/her/my company happens to be offering.

We’ll also see the more mundane proposition that Digital Analytics is the combination of web, mobile, and social analytics and also includes VOC, benchmarking, email analytics, search analytics, performance, replay, etc.

Nothing wrong with the above.

It’s just that I think Digital Analytics has greater potential than all that.

Namely, as the digital and physical worlds are increasingly intertwined, digital analytics are becoming a key intelligence for business decisions and CRM, not just channel optimization or making page content/layout better.

For example, already in 2009 Macy’s CEO went on record saying that every dollar spent on Macys.com led to $5.77 influenced in stores within the next 10 days. This reflects the well known “research shopper” phenomenon. Since then, Smartphone ownership in the US has crossed 30% of cell phone users and 4 out of 10 have said in surveys they used their phone to get more information on items while in a store.

Likewise, 33% of retailers said in a survey that equipping their store staff with mobile POS capabilities is a key investment coming now. So both buyers and sellers are going to be even more digitally intertwined than they have been in past years.

As a result we should see that an increasing portion of data used in data warehouses, business intelligence, and CRM is digital data.

To be more specific, we are talking about behavioral data and customer , not just transactional data because the latter has been integrated some time ago already.

New cycle of continuous improvement

To bring this to the point, until here the profession of web analytics has often been identified with a continuous cycle of improvement as seen below. We set goals, measure where we stand, test/experiment with alternative content, pick the best design, rinse and repeat.

As all interactions with a business are becoming increasingly intertwined with digital, it is time to embrace the more strategic potential of digital analytics by moving to the cycle below. Here the insights are used either for business decisions or to identify the next most relevant content or product/service/promo offer for each customer based on their current interests.

For example, at emetrics Steve Petitpas from Microsoft shared their analysis that led to the decision to discontinue the Cash incentives program for Bing. Or in Eric Peterson’s whitepaper Dashboards are not a Strategy, the work of The North Face’s Mike Mayfield is described where Mike identified demand for certain products via digital behavioral data and worked with their merchandise buyers to match supply to that demand. Or Freshdirect is using analytics to identify customers’ willingness to pay for different kinds of their 4-minute meals so that they can provide the right price for the market.

Additional analytics skills

More analytical skills are needed than page and ad and conversion optimizers will have employed in our daily work. Good examples would be:

• Kevin Hillstrom’s forensics method for forecasting the long term contribution of any channel or product or “thing”
• Jim Novo’s method for forecasting the level of engagement of an individual in order to optimize e.g. who receives a retargeting incentive vs. who doesn’t
• Gary Angel’s data mining based customer segmentation method to identify different groups of customers that pose different opportunities
• Predictive analytics skills for marketers to score, value, rank, profile interests / risks

Yay, lots to do and learn.

Analytics is fun again!

15 authors, 15 articles. Free, yet with priceless insights.

Learn from marketing thought leaders how to engage with customers and create value for stakeholders in a complex digital world. Covers digital channels, marketing techniques, accountability and technology. Truly a must-read resource for every CMO!

One-click Download from CustomerThink.com (no registration required)

With many thanks to our producer, publisher, and my co-editor, Bob Thompson at DigitalMarketingOne.com and CustomerThink.com

And, of course, all my gratitude to our 15 authors, bloggers, consultants whose insights into digital marketing strategy make up this ebook.

• Digital channels
  • Edward Boyd
  • Eric Enge
  • Alan See
  • Kim Dushinski
  • Jim Sterne
• Digital marketing techniques
  • Ardath Albee
  • Robert Lesser
  • Chris Ryan
  • Steve Woods
  • Naras Eechambadi
• Digital marketing optimization
  • Jim Lenskold
  • Laura Patterson
  • Tom Manning
  • David Raab
• and myself for the digital strategy framework

Together, we set out to puzzle together the silo’d niches of digital marketing into one coherent strategic roadmap. The resulting strategy advice could maybe be summarized as follows (and I hope I am doing justice to all my co-authors):

1. Derive digital strategy from your overall marketing mission and the role that you want digital to play in it
2. Pay attention to the special nuances of each digital channel but also fuse the channels together into a cross-channel approach
3. Do the opportunity with digital marketing justice by making appropriate use of its biggest strength: intelligent interactivity
4. Consider the additional contribution that digital channels and analytics can have on your online-offline customer sales and marketing programs
5. Get more of what you want (e.g. revenue, budget, etc.) by investing in marketing accountability and ROI optimization
6. Derive technology strategy from your overall digital strategy

The following is cross-posted from the original at the IBM Unica blog.

—-

Exciting news for our IBM Unica NetInsight OnDemand customers and really all marketers: IBM today announced the new IBM Digital Marketing Optimization Suite which accomplishes three great “coming-togethers”. Namely, the following:

1. Combines the Best of IBM Coremetrics and IBM Unica NetInsight OnDemand

Since IBM’s acquisition of Coremetrics and Unica our web analytics teams have been merged together like a deck of cards to make the best use of the combined development and best practices expertise. Our combined team now takes care of both IBM’s on demand and on-premises offerings and customers for web analytics.

And as previous competitors, it was much to my surprise that we had been very like minded in the decade leading up to this merger. Both Unica and Coremetrics had been working in parallel to make sure web analytics delivered not just reports for optimization but also provided individual customer insights for refining relevancy of marketing messages.

2. Fuses together: Customer Profiles, Analytics, and Digital Marketing Execution

The next great coming together I see for our customers in the IBM Coremetrics Digital Marketing Optimization Suite is the tight integration between LIVE Profiles, Web Analytics, and the IBM Coremetrics Digital Marketing Applications such as IBM Coremetrics LIVEmail and IBM Coremetrics Intelligent Offer. This tight integration is the secret sauce that enables our users to execute more relevant digital marketing campaigns driven by analytics. The IBM Coremetrics suite inherits this product design from the Coremetrics side where this combo had been available for years while other vendors were merely talking about it in Powerpoint presentations.

3. Adds a More Flexible and Open Data Architecture for Multichannel Analytics

Now, like D’Artagnan teaming up with the three musketeers, the new IBM Coremetrics Suite adds increased flexibility and openness to the trio of LIVE Profiles, analytics, and digital marketing applications. This is being achieved thanks to experience and technology assets coming from Unica NetInsight OnDemand. And it is a true 1+1 = 3 situation. Not only can marketers extend their analytical lens by combining online and offline insights (using the new IBM Coremetrics Multichannel Analytics add-on), but now they can also target digital marketing execution programs, e.g. through IBM Coremetrics LIVEmail, using the cross-channel picture of an individual’s interests.

The Result: Two Great Growth Paths for our Customers

All marketers have web metrics available to them. Competing on analytics requires us to be cleverer with our use of analytics than the next marketer.

Technology needs to be our “power arm” that helps get things done quickly that would be very tedious, expensive, and time consuming otherwise. The new IBM Coremetrics Digital Marketing Optimization Suite provides IBM customers with a “power arm” that helps them go beyond commodity web metrics and move towards digital analytics where discovering new opportunities with segments or individual prospects and customers means more strategic opportunities.

Our customers also have another growth path to go from analytics to digital marketing execution, and from there to integrations with their enterprise (e.g. to their Netezza data warehouse or their IBM Unica Enterprise Marketing Management system), and with the rest of their digital marketing eco-system, e.g. through the eco-systems of IBM Coremetrics LIVEmail (i.e. Email service providers), and IBM Coremetrics AdTarget (i.e. display ad networks).

Now the ball is in your court. How are you going to put all these multichannel analytics and digital marketing opportunities into the race for beating out your competition?

For Our Customers …

Existing NetInsight OnDemand and Coremetrics customers, please keep your eyes peeled for further information by email. Please register for the upcoming customer-only launch webinars. There is no requirement to move to the combined solution immediately. IBM plans on continuing support of the existing Unica NetInsight OnDemand and Coremetrics versions into the future, accompanied by the same industry leading service and support you have come to expect. IBM believes there are compelling components in the combined release that are meaningful and important to your business. In the launch webinars, you will learn about all the great business benefits that our Unica NetInsight OnDemand customers that upgrade will have available. For example, all customers can use their current and new release in parallel during their upgrade process.

For More Information …

Please keep an eye on Unica.com and Coremetrics.com as we will progressively publish more details in the next 10 days of about the new capabilities that our customers can expect. For now, see:

• The press release
• Summary of the IBM Coremetrics Digital Marketing Optimization Suite

And now to the last article with which our Digital Marketing Strategy series for the CMO will come to closure.

David Raab’s article on technology strategy to align with your digital marketing strategy is a gem and highly quotable throughout.

“There are warning signs that your company’s core marketing technology may itself need replacement. These include fragmented data, uncoordinated responses to customer needs, and difficulty in making changes to keep up with new business requirements.”

Now, if David’s recommendation was for companies to fix such a situation by dashing off to buy more marketing software, I’d be happy (as a vendor guy) but the article would have been crappy.

Far from such short sighted silliness, David however writes:

“[But ...: ] The appropriate response to these symptoms will depend on your company’s technology strategy.”

Huh, technology strategy?

If you are in the situation of buying technology, I don’t envy you. You face tough choices for technology selection.

• Are you going with a best of breed approach by buying separate systems for each channel?
• Or are you going with a suite approach to drive to a common or integrated system across channels?

Similarly are you going for the cloud or in-house systems?

The article doesn’t provide an exhaustive answer as to what will be the best fit for you. But it is a good place to start mapping your options and putting them into context.

The business case

As vendors we all work hard to document the successes that our customers are achieving with the technology we serve them with, as far as clients are willing to share publicly.

But David sets the bar higher vs. typical vendor case study quotes and asks you to think through the business case further for your company.

“For example, a $500,000 marketing mix optimization project might result in a 20% improvement in advertising efficiency – but whether that’s worthwhile depends on the advertising budget: on a $1million budget, that $500,000 returns just $200,000, for a $300,000 loss; but on a $10 million budget, it returns $2 million, for a $1.5 million profit.”

No wonder the article got as many reads as it did.

David Raab is, by the way, a consultant specializing in marketing technology and analysis. Check out for example his B2B Marketing Automation Vendor Selection Tool and many archived articles (from DM Reviews, etc.) on his site: www.archive.raabassociatesinc.com.

Earlier on this blog I referenced an article by Steve Woods  from Eloqua on RPM, Revenue Performance Management. RPM is a relatively new term in the area of demand marketing optimization. Will it stick? As I was writing earlier, there seem to be so many terms already that describe B2B marketing automation. Why another one?

Lauren Carlson wrote a post on that topic is a good read.

So will it stick?

I like of course the idea of scientific, analytics driven, revenue optimization.

But I fear that the term is at risk because it is so broad.

Not marketing optimization

not customer optimization

but total revenue optimization.

So everybody is responsible for RPM, and if everybody is responsible the danger is that nobody takes responsibility.

Following the recent series on articles for ROI measurement and optimization, I was struck by Bob Thompson’s advice on measuring the customer experience.

To quote from Bob’s writing:

With the classic “funnel” thinking, only a small fraction of those entering the top of the funnel are likely to become customers. But ALL prospects will form an impression! Why not take the opportunity to turn everyone into an advocate for your business, even if they are not the right fit at this point in time?

Strictly speaking, this isn’t counter to traditional ROI measurement and optimization. After all,ROI does in theory include all future long term effects that an initiative should be credited with.

But in practice, probably few ROI analysis projects ever get as far as to correctly assess the value of non-buyers who however influence future buyers.

So, therefore I find Bob’s recommendation thought provoking to take the perspective of the prospect for a change and score and optimize their experience.

By the way, Bob Thompson, is CEO of CustomerThink, a research and publishing firm focused on customer-centric business management. He is also Founder/Editor-in-Chief of CustomerThink.com, the community dedicated to customer-centric business. Recently CustomerThink.com has had many offshoots such as DigitalMarketingOne.com and SocialBusinessOne.com

Our mini series at Digital Marketing One on marketing performance measurement and accountability continues with a contribution by Tom Manning on management techniques.

Very noteworthy is the following take on measuring returns with new media:

“progressive marketers rely on ROI directed funding for traditional channels and media, and they rely on return on objectives (ROO) for non-traditional, “new territory” funding (ex. parity in search ad exposure)”, from Tom Manning’s article

I think what we have here is another reminder that returns in the short term aren’t always financial but can be strategic. Eventually, though the financial returns have to start shaping up (assuming a for-profit business) so that the initiative can be called successful.

Tom is a partner with Ninah Consulting, who specialize in quantifying and helping increase marketing effectiveness and profitable business growth. They do this with analytical rigor and by producing models that lead to actionable recommendations.

This concludes our mini series on accountability and performance measurement from following authors:

• Laura Patterson, 5 steps for better marketing accountability
• Jim Lenskold, ROI measurement
• Tom Manning, guiding digital marketing spend.

“I often describe the value of brand awareness as the equivalent of half of a $100 bill. Unless you know where to find the other half, there really is no value.”, Jim Lenskold on CustomerThink

Something rarely seen appears in Jim’s article on five key principles for improving marketing ROI within the Digital Marketing One series for CMOs.

Namely, an ROI calculator for ROI measurement. Click the image and see the “Measurement ROI” tab on this calculator by the Lenskold Group.

I have been loving how the authors in our Digital Marketing One series have packed pearls of wisdom from long years of front lines experience into tight paragraphs. Almost taking for granted the hard work that has to happen in order to follow the best practice recommendation.

Nothing comes easy.

Two gems in Jim’s article I’d like to quote. Here comes the first:

“measurements must be prioritized based on the expected improvement to effectiveness, the strategic benefit of gaining insights that can influence many marketing initiatives, and the cost.”

In other words a metrics based approach to metrics!

Here one more gem:

“Key measurements to improve digital marketing include: … Capturing incremental sales conversions and customer value to optimize the digital marketing spend. …”

Advice like this tends to be written out in long, long blog posts or entire books when us web analytics people try to write about it.

Notice the little word “incremental”. Don’t care whether you use first touch or last touch or hold out groups. But the key to useful measurement is to get to that incremental contribution. Otherwise we are just wasting time on numbers games.

Easier said than done, of course.

So Jim article’s hsa advice on five best practices.

Jim is the author of Marketing ROI and an international speaker on the topic. At his firm, Lenskold Group,  his team produces and publishes many articles and research on the topics of marketing ROI, marketing strategies and business growth strategies.

See Lenksold.com for additional free ROI measurement resources.