The Software Abstractions Blog

Why You Should Market Your Brand on twitter - NOW!

twitter has been an emerging phenomenon for a little while now. There were some very public performance problems and outages in the beginning, but the company seems to have moved past those now. twitter usage seems to be gaining critical mass, crossing over from the technology early-adopters to non-technology leaders, companies and celebrities (imagine Stephen Colbert and Jon Stewart of Comedy Central bantering about twitter on Election night).

There has been much discussion and debate recently about whether it is appropriate and worthwhile for businesses to spend time marketing their brands on twitter. In this article, we take an in-depth look at the advantages of doing so.

Given the ongoing dramatic growth of twitter usage, and if twitter adoption has indeed crossed over to the mainstream, then it seems inevitable that brand marketing will eventually catch up with it on a large-scale; adding twitter marketing to company budgets will become an increasingly easier decision once "everyone is doing it". However there are compelling reasons why you should consider starting your twitter marketing efforts right now rather than wait until there is a herd.

So if you need to convince your boss to let you spend time on this activity - promoting your brand on twitter - here is a list of reasons to get into twitter-marketing now:

Early mover Advantage

Years ago Seth Godin's book, Permission Marketing, launched a revolution in brand-customer interaction. Imagine if you had gotten into Email Marketing at that time, when it was first getting started - it would have been so much easier to get and hold consumer attention, make your brand stand out, and establish a solid position. In contrast, getting the same level of attention today using email is almost impossible, since practically every company practices email marketing; consumers face email fatigue and get deluged by spam, and are reluctant to give out their real email addresses to companies.

For twitter marketing it's not too late, however - it is still in its early stages, and this time you do have a chance to jump on it before most of your competitors (as @Southwest Airlines, @Whole Foods, @Baskin Robbins and @Zappos have already done), gaining momentum as it becomes mainstream.

Influencing the Influencers

A common argument against the twitter marketing strategy is that many of the users of your non-technical product may not yet be twitter users, and you should always market where your users are. This seems like common sense. However, it overlooks a fundamental truth: users often tune out the direct messaging coming from a company anyway, and instead use indirect sources to help them make decisions.

In Malcolm Gladwell's influential book, The Tipping Point, he describes how word-of-mouth influences brand popularity, trends and buying decisions. If you can get some of the super-connectors and influencers to adopt and evangelize your product, then interest in your product spreads like wildfire and demand soars.

How do you reach these influencers? In today's world, it's a safe bet that the influencers are heavy users of new media methods like blogs, social networks and twitter, even if your field of interest is not particularly technical. twitter is especially effective in encouraging and responding to these highly-connected users; the medium gives you direct, instant access to even the most popular of these folks at all levels. (For example, here are the twitter accounts for publishing guru Tim O'Reilly: @timoreilly, VC Fred Wilson: @fredwilson, VoIP pioneer Jeff Pulver: @jeffpulver, and even celebrities like Shaquille O'Neal: @the_Real_Shaq and Lance Armstrong: @lancearmstrong ). By connecting with them and interacting directly, you have a much better chance of getting mentioned on blogs, in forums and discussions, and being highlighted in their media outreach.

Customer Engagement

More than any other medium, twitter allows you to connect directly with your users and engage them in a direct, immediate, two-way information exchange. You can get timely feedback: users with negative comments can be heard and their concerns addressed; users with positive comments can be encouraged to become evangelists. You can even learn of alternative ways your product is being used, or discover new markets that can be targeted.

This strategy of connecting with individual users and building a "long tail" following nicely complements the previous strategy of targeting "influencers". Some studies contradict Gladwell's conclusions, showing instead that users trust recommendations from peers and friends far more than those of a few super-connected individuals; the safest bet is to court both types.

Low Cost

In general, twitter marketing is very cheap and easy, and shouldn't have any significant impact on spending for your other Marketing programs; important, since cost is a major concern in the current challenging economic climate. Success in connecting via twitter takes time and authenticity, not a large budget!

And if your company still doesn't buy it? Create a personal account on twitter (hey, it's free) and start connecting! You can begin engaging others in your field and thought leaders in other fields - by engaging at a personal level, you can start to build your own network of followers.

Oh, and if you'd like to connect with me, you can find me as @nitink on twitter - I always follow everyone back!

For further reading, here are some great articles on twitter Marketing:

Great Examples of Corporate twitter use - Jennifer Laycock
Using Twitter for Brands or Corporate Identities - Dawn Foster
How to use Twitter as a Twool - Guy Kawasaki
Looking for Mr. Goodtweet - How to pick up followers on twitter - Guy Kawasaki
Free (but welcome) advice on the corporate use of twitter - Elliot Ng
A User's Guide to Twittering - Wall Street Journal
Professional Branding Comes to Twitter - Svetlana Gladkova
Why I Love Twitter - Tim O'Reilly

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Brett Crosby on Google Analytics

Brett Crosby has a terrific article about Web Analytics on techradar today. Billed as the Complete guide to Google Analytics, it does a nice job of describing GA's key features, recent changes and the philosophy of web analytics measurement in general.

The article is well worth a read, especially for analytics novices; it's not very long, and heavy on information and advice. Crosby is one of the original founders of Urchin software - the core analytics package that was acquired by Google and later packaged as Google Analytics - so he knows of what he speaks!

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Innovations in Online Retail - Gift Stores

Lately, I've been doing a study of online retailers who sell "gift items", looking for interesting and innovative sales practices. Specifically, as the field of E-commerce matures and Web 2.0 technology becomes more pervasive, what features are typical E-tailers in this category using to attract users and boost sales? What innovative features are some of the major retailers - such as Amazon and Target - using that are not yet mainstream?

General Impressions

My two biggest impressions after looking at 20-odd sites:

• Many of the promotional features used for increasing online sales mirror corresponding marketing ideas from the offline world. In other words, there is not yet a big push to leverage the power of the web in an innovative way, to introduce new marketing and sales models that can only be implemented online.
• In online retail, Google is everything! That may be a slight exaggeration, but most of these online retailers seem to be focusing on Google as their primary driver of traffic - both organic through SEO practices and PPC (pay-per-click).

E-Commerce Features

First, here is a set of common features, available from most of the retailers in this space:

1. AdWords/PPC:  the long tail of advertising
2. Product Catalog:  an obvious requirement for an online store
3. Product Search: still seen as optional, but increasingly becoming a necessity to keep people on the site - otherwise users will simply go back to Google
4. Email Signup (newsletter, specials):  very commonly available on E-tailer sites
5. Specialized Lists (organized by event, season or customer type):  this is essentially a set of specialized catalogs targeted for specific audiences
6. Ultra-Niche:  creating mini-sites or a laser-like focus for a very specialized offering or interest group
7. Gift Certificates:  allows existing customers to purchase for others who are potentially outside the network
8. Wish List:  allows customers to defer the buying decision, yet make an initial commitment
9. Product Categories: allows users to navigate to a product through a directory structure; this approach is rapidly getting overtaken by the search paradigm

Second, there is a host of uncommon features, implemented by only a small percentage of online retailers. I wonder if this is because these features are new and innovative, hard to implement or simply not effective.

1. Company Blog:  enables the company to truly connect with customers and engage in a dialog; it also helps SEO
2. Reminders:  a specialized form of permission marketing, it's surprising that more e-tailers don't do this
3. Rewards Club:  rewards for your most loyal customers
4. Related News:  providing a more complete service for your audience, market or niche
5. Related Information:  same as #4
6. Related-Activity Coupons:  same as #4
7. Product Customization:  this is a high-end feature, that can make the site very sticky
8. Referral Rewards:  this is an effective way to get your customers to market for you
9. Repeat Orders:  this surprisingly rare technique puts customer repeat orders on autopilot
10. Gift Registry:  tried-and-true idea from the offline retail world
11. Related Items:  a great way to increase sales through cross-selling
12. Express Checkout:  pioneered by Amazon (the "1-click checkout"), it's a convenience feature for purchasers

Online vs Offline

Most of these initiatives mirror the offline world - for example, email is the online version of the old-fashioned practice of mailing coupons to households, although the online versions can get far more sophisticated than their offline counterparts.

In the future, though, we may see retail innovations that are enabled by their online nature - i.e. those that are difficult or even impossible to implement in the physical world.

What would these online-only innovations look like? They are likely to depend on the dynamic nature of E-commerce, and the ease of online collaboration. Here are a few possibilities:

    1. Customized Retail Experience:
The configuration for a physical retail store cannot be changed easily or cheaply, so the layout is always an optimized compromise among many competing needs. Online stores, on the other hand, face no such restrictions.

Imagine a customer visiting an online shoe store looking for red shoes (to match a red dress, say). You can easily present her with a red shoes-only store, by artificially constraining the display matches using that criterion. Similarly, the store could be dynamically reconfigured for users with different goals, e.g. research-oriented vs purchase-oriented. Even the prices could be continuously changed based on current demand and available inventory, through the judicious use of dynamic discounts.

    2. Collaboration:
The affiliate model works much better in the online world than offline. Although this is not yet very common, it should be a simple matter for online stores to send customers onward to related purchases at other sites and generate a revenue stream using an affiliate model. For example, is there much doubt that "better-canoeing" classes are likely to be of interest to someone who has just purchased a brand-new canoe?

Certainly with the continuing growth of Web 2.0, we shall continue to see many more new and interesting innovations in online retailing in the future. If you have seen any others, add a comment below and let me know!

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The Online Marketing Funnel

I've been reading a lot about Online Marketing lately, and there seems to be a clear pattern: it's the standard Marketing sales funnel, specialized for the Internet - turning the sea of unqualified online users into prospects, qualifying them for your particular niche, and then focusing on converting those highly qualified prospects into customers.

One area that most of these online marketing books do not seem to address is the recent emergence of community behavior: blogs, social networks, social bookmarks and the wisdom of crowds. Updating the standard funnel by adding these elements into it gives  the following diagram.

As new technical and business models come up, they fit naturally into the various parts of the funnel; the core sales funnel model is truly timeless!

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Marketing 2.0: The Zen of Email Marketing

A few days ago, a leading software company sent me one of their regular marketing emails. This missive is full of information about them: news about their latest triumphs, a message from the company, new product features, support information and so on, interspersed with a few special discounts and items for sale. After a quick glance to look for deals that interested me, I deleted the email and moved on. As I surveyed my overflowing email Inbox, I briefly wondered whether to unsubscribe from their mailing list; perhaps next time.

This got me thinking. Like most other Americans, I now suffer from "E-newsletter fatigue". Email marketing has come a long way since Marketing guru Seth Godin first popularized it circa 1999 in a landmark book, Permission Marketing , and is far from dead, even in the face of competing new technologies like blogs and RSS feeds. Today, the MarCom department of practically every reasonable-sized business spends a significant amount of effort churning out these electronic messages, most of which are virtually indistinguishable from those of their competitors.

Perhaps the time has come to take Email Marketing to the next level!

Engaging the Reader

Ideally, a multi-email campaign is like a good blog; each communication must engage the reader. There is no reason the reader has to read your email, any more than there's a reason that the reader must read a blog post; you must attract readers with interesting and valuable content.

A good example of engaging users, albeit in the offline world, is the Trader Joe's newsletter that shows up regularly in mailboxes around the country. Although hardly cutting-edge technology, the printed version is quite entertaining - it's full of fun facts, bits of history, useful recipes and nutrition information, and of course, references to Trader Joe's offerings. The online version is authored in the same vein: the example below highlights a single product in a fun and interesting way, and provides some additional tidbits that change the whole tone far away from "hard sell".

...

Another example is the Hitwise Intelligence blog, which comments on interesting meta-trends observed in Hitwise data - such as whether the McCain web site appeals to Independents, or if Heely's are making a comeback. The media, industry observers and customers watch these reports closely and then immediately start discussing them, in public forums, conferences, blogs and around the water cooler.

Of course, trend data is Hitwise's business. But anyone can do the same thing. You can highlight information and trends of customer interest, from data that you already have. What are the latest trends in Spring fashion? Is the rising price of gas going to affect the cost of groceries? If you're a grocery chain, how do you plan to react and help keep prices down?

Or you can provide useful information that, even if it doesn't directly sell your product, helps your customers and users. But it has to be specialized information, that only you can provide; for example, informing readers that daylight-savings time starts this weekend is useful, but not particularly compelling.

If your Marketing emails are full of the cool new features you've recently implemented in your product or awards won by your company, then that's only mildly interesting to readers. For most products, only a small fraction of customers care about all the bells and whistles anyway. Let's take Microsoft Office - assuming that you use it, do you know all its features? Do you even care? What about the "advanced" features of your TV?

Most progressive companies have recognized the significance of blog marketing, which sets a new, higher standard for engaging customers in a two-way conversation. This new standard applies equally well to Email Marketing - only the transport mechanism is different. Similar to a blog, most readers will tolerate some level of self-promotion (yes, "special discounts" count as self-promotion) and even some off-topic content; but overall, the signal-to-noise ratio must be very high from the perspective of the reader, not the email sender.

The reality is that most readers are perusing the email thinking - How does this help me? What can I get out of this?

Compelling Content

So imagine the mother of three, logging in for ten minutes early in the morning, before the kids wake up; the hotshot lawyer checking her emails between appointments; the harried Executive at his son's baseball game; the teenager checking his mobile phone on-the-go; or whatever your target demographic is. In the 5 seconds that it takes the reader to scan your email: is your content compelling enough to make them want to remember it, to go back and learn more when they do have time, when they get back to the office or at home?

To take it one step further, is it an email that they're eagerly waiting for? Why not?

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Founders' Quotes from Launch:Silicon Valley 2008

Launch:Silicon Valley 2008 was an amazing event today at the Microsoft campus in Mountain View. Co-presented by SVASE, Garage Technology Ventures and Microsoft, it brought together a large number of exciting startups and top-tier VCs; each startup presenter was given 10-minutes to make a pitch.

One dimension each founder or CEO had to address during the pitch: what would make their particular idea marketable or defensible? Although the domains and business plans of the various startups varied widely, there was a great deal of similarity at a general level among the responses to this question.

Here are some pearls of wisdom from the founders' responses; this list seems to be representative of this time and place in Internet history:

• Make it very simple and easy to use
• Viral propagation! Usage of the product automatically encourages its propagation to new users
• Consistent with the current mega-trends: Mobile, Voice and Communication.  (Although surprisingly, almost no one mentioned the iPhone!)
• Target a specific audience and feed them technology; rejuvenate an old and tired industry
• Implement an initial private beta for a small set of users, and learn from them
• Create a site or company with personality!
• It's great to have a two-sided business model and multiple potential streams of income
• Find the user pain point to address
• Create a horizontal platform and then build vertical applications on top
• Go where the users are (web site widgets, customizable home pages, social networks, cell phones); the last thing users want is another place on the web to go to, another web site to check

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Enterprise 2.0: The Engineering of Marketing Online

When I was talking with my friend Shreesha Ramdas (from OuterJoin ) last week, he shared a perspective that really resonated with me. In a nutshell, he believes that the Marketing of online products and sites is rapidly becoming an Engineering function, both in terms of operational activities and measurement.

The more I think about it, the more I'm convinced that he's on to something. Marketing of online products and sites is inherently different from classical marketing. Unlike regular marketing channels, online campaigns allow marketers to proceed systematically step-by-step along a predetermined course. The results of each distinct campaign can be measured precisely, even when multiple campaigns are going on simultaneously. Most important, the market can be broken up into thousands of micro-segments, with targeted campaigns aimed at each one.

Online Marketing Activities

This technical approach can be applied to all three types of online marketing activities:

I. Site Effectiveness

A key goal is to increase the popularity of a given web destination. The popularity measure can be expressed in a variety of ways: page views, distinct users, time-on-site, user engagement, and so on; all of which must eventually translate into a conversion rate - the effectiveness with which you can get the user to take the desired action on the site, whatever that might be.

These popularization activities can eventually be boiled down to two main approaches, which are complementary: Search Marketing (PPC) and SEO (Organic results).

A large number of technical tools are available to help with both of these approaches, such as keyword tracking and keyword optimization for the long tail. Although good old-fashioned marketing techniques always help (who can resist good linkbait ?), many of the activities that lead to PPC and SEO success can be automated and enhanced using these tools.

II. Joining the Online Conversation

As the revolutionary cluetrain manifesto proclaimed, markets are conversations, and media-savvy companies today want to be a part of that conversation. Online, many of these conversations take place on blogs, social networks and content aggregators. These types of dynamic online properties also provide great SEO benefits and direct user traffic.

Here again, technical skills that enable automated submissions and social media tracking are extremely helpful in gaining traction. The upcoming OpenSocial API (coverage ) will take this to a higher level, allowing a single submission to provide content to multiple social networks.

III. Measurement and Analysis

The two leading tools for online measurement are Omniture and Google Analytics, although many others are available in this fragmented market. The advanced features and sophisticated tracking enabled by these tools can get quite complex and technical - as anyone who follows Avinash Kaushik's blog (Occam's Razor ) knows.

Impact on Traditional Marketing Departments

The level of technical sophistication needed to achieve these goals tends to overwhelm typical Marketing departments. This is likely to have a big impact on traditional marketing organizations in mid-sized and large companies. These organizations have three main options:

• Hire techies directly into Marketing
• Create an Engineering support team answerable directly to Marketing
• Create small Business Units that incorporate both Development+Marketing

Which approach will prevail in a majority of the cases? That remains to be seen ...

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WebGuild Web 2.0 Conference: Designing Search Engine Friendly Sites

SEO is one of the hottest topics currently in the world of web sites and web applications, since a high ranking in search engine results can have a tremendous impact on the amount of traffic a site receives. So it was no surprise that the session on Designing Search Engine Friendly Sites was so popular, at the WebGuild Web 2.0 Conference and Expo last week.

As a co-founder of Search Engine Marketing firm Bloofusion, moderator Andreas Mueller is no stranger to the topic of SEO; in addition to asking incisive questions, he was able to add to the discussion with the other panel members.

     

The other members of the panel were:

• Paul O'Brien, Marketing Director, Zvents   (see writeup)
• Charles DiFazio, Software Engineer, Google
• Lance Loveday, CEO, Closed Loop Marketing

Near the start of the session, Paul O'Brien outlined the most basic three items required for Findability - changes you should complete before even attempting any explicit SEO tactics:

1. Access: Crawlers from the major search engines have to be able to access your site and get at the content
2. Structure: You must organize the content on your site so that Google (or other search engine) can understand it
3. Content: The content must follow the basic requirements of SEO, such as optimizing keywords, using adwords and so on

SEO Tips

Based on the discussion at this session, I've compiled the following list of SEO tips provided by this panel of expert Marketers.

• Optimize the content that people are searching on, not search terms that you would like to rank for even if no one is searching for those terms
• Try to articulate explicitly what the expected outcome is - which terms would you like to rank highly for? Which specific page should rank high for which term?
• Think about SEO early in the web design process and throughout the life-cycle of the product or site; adding it in as an after-thought is less effective and takes a lot more resources

     

• Within a company, it is better for the SEO function to live within the Marketing department, rather than within Engineering. At the same time, you need outside validation that the company is going in the right direction.
• Create a hierarchy of web pages, optimized for both human users and search engine crawlers.
• One word: Linkbait! Create content that's unique, valuable, and most important, consistent with your brand. Optimize it for keywords that are important within your domain.
• For SEO purposes, avoid dynamic web sites that rely too heavily on Ajax or Flash; if it can't be crawled, it won't rank highly with the Search engines.
• Creating a static site that can be crawled, separate from the main dynamic web site, has the effect of diluting PageRank for those web pages.

At one point, Mueller asked a really interesting question: given that resources are finite and constrained, should you focus resources more strongly on inbound links, or on optimizing the content?

The panelists agreed that since link popularity is weighted much more strongly, focusing on getting inbound links is a top priority; optimizing the content by adding keywords in links, using meta tags, etc. remains a distant second.

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A conversation with Avinash Kaushik, Web Analytics Guru

Avinash Kaushik is a leading expert in the new field of Web Analytics. His blog, Occam's Razor, is one of the most popular blogs on this subject. He has lots of other exciting things happening: he's the Analytics Evangelist for Google, author of the book Web Analytics: An Hour A Day published by Wiley, and most recently, is a co-founder of a startup, Market Motive, focused on spreading knowledge for Internet Marketing. He was kind enough to agree to an email interview, given below.

If you are interested or involved in Web Analytics, I guarantee that his answers will give you much to think about.

Q - How did you get into Web Analytics? What is it about this field that attracted your interest?

AK - I ended up in Web Analytics by pure chance.

My former roles were in decision support systems, both on the business and technical side of the fence. The Intuit job, my foray into web analytics, was attractive more because of the people and the company.

But I had always been fascinated by the web and the job allowed me to put my experience in decision support with the fantastic piece of art that the web is.

At some level it was lucky to get into web analytics with no baggage or hang ups or having read any books, it allowed me to bring a fresh and completely different perspective to it.

Q - In your study of web site user behavior, what are some of the most surprising results you've found?

AK - I am surprised that even in 2007 given how pervasive the web is and how it is used that we continue to obsess on conversion rates, essentially solving for a minority of site traffic as if people came to our sites for just one purpose. That is so 1997.

I am frequently humbled by the lessons customers have taught me when we listen to them using surveys or multivariate tests or site visits. Cool and sexy is not always enough. Simplicity is the key. Solving for customers and bottom-line is possible. Having clear calls to action on all pages (especially on those where there is no "add to cart button") and the importance of solving for your customer personas (just look at www.newegg.com, no one will call it the prettiest site in the world and yet it consistently outranks www.apple.com and www.amazon.com when it comes to customer satisfaction!) cannot be emphasized enough.

Q - With the benefit of your deep background in this field, what do you think of the Google Analytics product: What are its strengths? Which types of companies is it most useful for? Which areas do you think need to be improved?

AK - I have just published a comprehensive review of all web analytics vendors - link: http://www.kaushik.net/avinash/2007/08/web-analytics-vendor-tools-comparison-and-one-challenge.html . Your readers might find that video helpful in understanding the industry, its challenges and what unique strength each web analytics vendor brings to the table.

In the video I mention two key strengths of Google Analytics:

1) Data Democracy: Google Analytics is a drop dead easy tool to use and presents a lot of complex web analytics data in a very easy to understand manner. Because of this it flips the traditional web analytics model were a few people in the company had access to the data and shared it with others. With GA you can give everyone access to the tool and they can help themselves.

2) Best of breed search analytics: The reports and segmentation options you'll find in Google Analytics to analyze your site's search data is really good. Perhaps it should not be surprising that a web analytics tool from a search engine is good at that. You don't have to tag your campaigns because of auto tagging which saves hassle and improves data quality. Your data is also imported and integrated and presented with some unique reports.

In terms of who GA is right for...... Google Analytics is right for any company that will benefit from the above two features. The nice thing is that unlike the past were you can rule tools in and out on paper, now you don't have to take a random person's, or a "guru's" opinion, on benefits of the tool. GA is free. Throw it on your site and try it for yourself and using your own data from your own site you can determine if it is right for you.

In terms of what needs improvement.... Currently GA provides 27 pre-built segments that you can apply to any of the 80 odd reports to get 27 times 80 sets of segmented data. But I am selfish. I would love to have even more flexibility when it comes to creating visitor segments that are most relevant to each business.

Q - Your blog, Occam's Razor is one of the most successful blogs in this field. What has blogging meant to you? Are there things you would do differently with the blog if you had to start over?

AK - My wife's opinion is that the blog is our third child. :)

When I started writing the blog a little over a year ago my hope was to have around a thousand visitors a month because that is how many people I thought were my core target audience. Yesterday the number of RSS feed subscribers were at 4,600 and there were 30,000 visitors last month. That in many ways simply astounds me.

These numbers also mean that I feel a deep sense of obligation to the people who read the blog. There is always a pressure to deliver the highest possible quality in the posts that my humble skills will allow.

The blog means the world to me because of the conversation that I can have with people from around the world (around 30% of the site traffic is international). All these wonderful people write comments and their own perspectives which I learn from and all these comments add to the conversation (on my blog visitors have written approximately as much content as I have written, word for word).

In terms of different..... I wrote a post at the end of the first month I think, I would not have written that in hindsight. But other than that I would not do anything different, the blog has managed to stay hyper focused on what my initial vision was and I think it works well.

Q - Even now, Web Analytics is seen as an afterthought in some web companies, rather than being an integral part of the business process. How do you convince these companies of its importance?

AK - I agree with you, it still exits in silos (both from organization and data perspectives).

At some level it really requires the business realizing the importance from the inside that matters. No amount of outsiders coming and pontificating can drive fundamental change.

If you are inside the company then you have an inside track to helping your company realize the value of web analytics. My advice would be to focus on two simple things in a very hard core way: 1) value the web can deliver to the bottom line and 2) value the web can deliver to your customers. The interesting thing is that the web can do both of those in an efficient and scalable manner, unlike any other channel.

And if you want to help your company do #1 and #2 you need web analytics. Start showing it in small ways (rather than trying to create a overnight revolution, those rarely succeed) and I assure you that your company will "get it". Few people can argue with profit and fewer still can argue making customers happy.

Q - You've just launched a new company, Market Motive. Can you tell us more about it? Who are your target customers? Will you be offering any free content, or is it all behind the "paid" curtain?

AK - Market Motive's mission is to focus on helping Online Professionals be massively successful through access to the latest best practices and insights from the best people in each discipline. We hope to deliver that by providing fresh and unique content that will only be available at www.marketmotive.com.

The initial areas of attention will be: SEO, PPC/SEM, Web Analytics, Conversion, Email Marketing, Online PR, and Marketing Processes. We will provide videos, podcasts that provide a unique way to learn, these will be complemented with live phone-in sessions were subscribers will be able to ask their questions and get them answered by the dream team.

The target audience is Professionals whose job it is to deliver for their companies in any / all of the above mentioned seven areas.

The content created at Market Motive will be available on an unlimited consumption basis to only the subscribers. All the faculty have blogs on which they are very active.

Q - What advice would you give to a small company that's just starting to get deeper into Web Analytics (beyond basic Page Views and Referrer URLs)?

AK - Use your web analytics tool to answer questions and not simply measure "KPI's".

Here are the three questions to answer:

1) Where are people coming from? (Referring URL's, Search Engines, Key Words, etc) This helps you infer intent and identify valuable sources of qualified traffic (by simply measuring bounce rate).

2) What do they do when they are on my site? (Content Consumption, Top Entry Pages, Top Visited Pages, Site Overlay etc) This helps you understand what people might be looking for and is it easy to find and is it what you want them to see.

3) What were the outcomes, both for you and the visitors?  (Revenue, Conversion Rate, Task Completion Rates, # of leads, Likelihood to Recommend, Customer Satisfaction etc) Your site should make a difference to their existence. Is it?

Q - What is the biggest mistake in the use of WA? What should people watch out for?

AK - Usually the weakest link is that website owners rarely sit down and define why their site exists and if that's the case then any metric will look like success. You should be able to answer in fifteen words of less "why does my site exist" and then be able to identify two metrics that help you measure if your website is delivering.

The other big mistake is that Marketers and Website Owners think that they represent their customers. This is mostly false. We, company employees, are too close to our companies to ever be able to think like our customers. If you want to know what your customers think of your website experience, ask them.

Q - What radical changes do you think we will see in Web Analytics in the next 3-5 years? Do you expect to see a big impact from the proliferation of Social Networks (like Facebook)? What about SEO and the increasing importance of search engine traffic?

AK - The web reinvents itself and that is what makes it fun. I think with all the web 2.0 buzz we are in the middle of one such transformative experience. Each such transformation like that requires the measurement methodologies to evolve as well. We are now trying to figure out how to measure ajax and flash and videos and podcasts and so on.

In the next couple of years I think web analytics will change radically. In the near term we will evolve to measure the aforementioned fluid experiences much more effectively. In the slightly longer term I am anticipating (and hoping) that web analytics will transform into business analytics. A way of life, a normal way of existence, just like other pieces of analytics that tend to have nothing special about them, and not an afterthought.

I have recently written about Web Analytics 2.0 (http://www.kaushik.net/avinash/2007/09/rethink-web-analytics-introducing-web-analytics-20.html) and how we already need to think differently to be more optimally competitive.

As regards to social networks and SEO etc I think that these types of wonderful things will never leave us (hopefully not). From a web analytics perspective we need to come up with more efficient ways to collect data, not matter which way life on the web evolves. I am optimistic that in the next few years we'll have that figured out.

 

Previous related articles:

      Top 8 Reasons to Implement Tracking and Measurement for your Web Site

      Web Design and the Scientific Method

       A conversation with Guy Kawasaki

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Dispatches from Searchnomics: Google's Avinash Kaushik on Advanced Web Analytics

[Things have been busy lately; I'm finally catching up on some older posts I've been meaning to get to ...]

I've written before (see: Google Analytics - take two , Bounce Rate ) about Avinash Kaushik - Author, Blogger and Google Evangelist. He's a recognized authority in the relatively new field of Web Analytics; his blog, Occam's Razor, is one of the highest-rated blogs on this topic. In his trademark style, Kaushik gave a highly entertaining and very informative presentation on Advanced Web Analytics at the recent Searchnomics Conference.

In his talk, he focused on Seven Tips that you can use Now! to implement and improve web analytics for your web site.

1. Join PALM! (People Against Lonely Metrics)
Kaushik began with the key point that one should never look at the data or chart for a single metric in isolation; when studying analytics data, one should always look at multiple metrics together [otherwise the metric gets lonely!]. For example, when looking at how many users viewed a single page or how many bounced - you want to look at those together, along with the site average, delta changes and indexed performance. Indexing metrics, especially, highlights the items that are working particularly well or badly. In this way, you can turn the metrics into actionable information.

2. Give your data Context
Associated with the first point, Kaushik suggested that you should look at all your data in context. You can compare any given metric or set of metrics to either the average values for your site as a whole, or to the same metrics during a prior time period. He used Google Trends as an example, showing how you can compare two companies at different points in time.

3. Segmentation Rocks!
He pointed out that a web site audience is rarely completely homogeneous; instead, it is composed of many users who can be broken down into different segments. It is important to partition the data into segments according to the type of user. For example, segments can help you compare adword results vs organic results; if the bounce rate for adwords for a given segment is high, you are effectively losing money!

Most important: web site improvement actions are always implemented for specific segments, never for aggregates.

4. Enter the Matrix: It's a Multi-Dimensional World
Since real-world marketing proceeds along multiple dimensions - not just web site traffic, but also Emails, Ad words and Campaigns - it's important to analyze the data using multiple metrics along all these dimensions, in order to optimize your spending and conversion rates.

5. Think Looong Tail. Everything.
Kaushik explained that all of these Analytics graphs - Clicks, Visitors and Budget Spend - have something in common: a large head and a long tail. Similarly, when looking at Keywords: the expensive, branded keywords are all in the large head, while keywords characterized as generic/category/"early bird" are all in the long tail.

Typically, according to Kaushik, a lot of the AdWords spend goes into the head; but if you have good SEO implemented, you should be highly-ranked in the organic results anyway, so there should be no need to bid on it. On the other hand, long tail keywords, which are usually a lot less expensive, are used by end users very early in their buying process; if you want to focus on new customer acquisition, these are precisely the users you would want to target.

A critical insight: Web Analytics should not just provide reports, it should provide solutions to business problems.

6. Web Analytics 2.0 is Qualitative
The key questions Web Analytics should be trying to answer, for each user segment, are: What is the user here to do? How easy or hard was it for her to do it? And, finally, was the user's problem solved?

The bottom line is to consider the Customer Intent, by looking at a variety of metrics. Looking at Conversion Rate alone will not be sufficient to do that.

7. Web Analytics is Testing! 
Experimentation and Testing is an integral part of Web Analytics; otherwise, decision-making degenerates to using HIPPO - the "Highest-Paid Person's Opinion". E & T is your one powerful weapon against HIPPOs: you take the best ideas everyone has, and run them through tests. Let the data show you which ones are the most effective and which ones are not.

Kaushik pointed out that Google has a Multi-Variate Testing tool called the Google Website Optimizer, which allows you to test multiple ideas at the same time without the need for any IT changes.

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Related Reading
Search meets Web Analytics at Searchnomics Conference  by Jeremiah Owyang, where Jeremiah does an excellent job of covering an equally useful Web Analytics presentation by Eric Peterson of Web Analytics Demystified.

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