Analytics Moves to the Enterprise

In a strong showing of support for the enterprise market, the team at Google Analytics announced yesterday a new feature set for Google Analytics that will certainly change the perception of this fantastic product. I've worked with the team since back in the Urchin days in the early 2000's and have seen this product evolve from a log-file analysis software program to a full-scale enterprise application.

This launch could not have come at a better time. As businesses get shaken and stirred due to the global financial crisis, there is no better time for enterprise organizations to invest in analytics, and not the software, but the people.

Mark my words — if marketers don't start embracing analytics to measure their advertising and website initiatives, they will be out of a job in less than 2 years. Executives are not going to tolerate gunslinging marketers who manage advertising campaigns based on their emotions, ego and experience. It is time that these multi-million dollar campaigns be analyzed like a financial investment to gauge the true brand reach and ROI.

I advocate for marketers to start reporting their results to the CFO, controller or other financial oriented leadership positions with an organization. Ten years ago one could argue that the tools were not available to properly measure an advertising campaign — with marketers relying on post-research studies, sales results or other indirect metrics. Google has changed this paradigm and now provides marketers with a complete suite of tools to measure the effectiveness of their advertising campaigns and website performance, however, it is now up to marketers to invest in the people to utilize these tools.

Looping back to the Google Analytics announcement, the new Enterprise Class Feature set will provide marketers and analysts with a powerful set of tools all for free; truly amazing. The advanced segmentation will allow for more detailed analysis by slicing data up real time; motion charts is for uber-analysts that need to look at multi-dimensional data and look at how metrics interact over time; the API is a massive move for Google Analytics and will lead to new breed of applications that integrate with GA; Custom Reporting is a nice feature for those who need to prepare reports for colleagues or bosses; and the AdSense integration is a must-have for Publishers.

EpikOne is ahead of the curve again and has experience working with all these features. We've launched the first Google Analytics application, AnalyticsView, which offers custom reporting for agencies adding in features such as white-labeling, scheduling, third-party data integration and more.

Get ready enterprises, Analytics is coming whether you are ready or not!

Analytics in 2009 - Quick Thought

I prepared this statement for an analyst looking to gauge the health of the analytics space in 2009 and how it will impact vendors --- from software to services.

"We have seen marketing budgets slightly cut for 2009, however, we are seeing online grow by way of reducing offline. To our benefit, we are seeing a renewed interest in marketers focusing on analytics and optimization efforts as they are pressured to justify their existing budgets. We've been competing with other web analytics platforms and winning with large enterprise clients by leveraging the savings from Google Analytics which gives companies more resources for people to perform analysis and testing. So for 2009 we predict a much greater emphasis on making "analytics actionable" and less focus on investing in deep product features that may not get used and diminsh the overall return on their analytics investment. Testing most likely will gain momentum as marketers work to squeze every last dollar out of their budget. I believe the areas of online advertising that will face downtimes is social media, ad networks and other areas that are not providing a direct / measureable return."

Pillar 1 | Online Strategy

Online Strategy
Data Driven Insights

New Opportunities and Insightful Ideas
Growing your business online requires progressive marketing skills, technical savvy and most importantly a blend of strategic insight and diligent analysis that are nimble enough to meet shifting consumer and business demands. Whether you are selling online, finding prospects, or providing information it is imperative to define a strategic approach and then measure website interactions and marketing activities to gauge the effectiveness of the efforts. By establishing an initial baseline and then tracking the progress of each strategic initiative you can continuously evaluate the key metrics that will determine brand awareness, visitor engagement or conversion successes.

Ensuring positive online experiences for your website audience is achieved by following these fundamental strategic guidelines. As a business leader, senior marketer or small business owner, these key principals all apply to you and should be disseminated through your organization:

Define the Core Business Goals
Don't get caught up in the online hype that swirls around our industry and leads many to believe that by launching a website your existing business will flourish with new sales or a new business venture will spark overnight. Whether you are moving your business online to expand new revenue lines or launching a new business online, many of the age old business principals apply. So before you (re)launch a new site, take a step back and ask yourself and your team, "Why are we planning to do with this website?" Once you answer this overarching question, you can then move onto the micro aspects such as what are the success factors of the website. Will it be sales, leads, visibility or just a place for customers to learn more about your business. As you dive deeper into your online strategy, every single metric you measure should be tied back to your core business goals, which typically are revenue and profits. Make sure you map out these goals and get buy in from your President/CEO, Controller/CFO and others from marketing, operations and IT. By aligning all parties with consistent business goals and getting them all involved in the success of your online ventures, accountability will be clear and success will be more closely measured and achievable.

Define Your Online Audience
Whether keyword, demographic or site targeted advertising campaigns, your objective is to decrease cost-per-acquisition and increase return on ad spend. In order to achieve this, you need to ensure you understand who your target customer is first, then identify the online acquisition channels where you will find this customer, and then then launch campaigns that are closely monitored with analytics to gauge if they are successful or not. Some make the mistake by assuming their online customer base will be a replication of their offline customer base. Not true, especially for old business models. I can think of many consumer DM oriented organizations that had massive customer lists and then when launching online thinking those same customers would follow. This is also true of two other industries, banking and newspaper, where both had aging customer bases that tip-toed into the online world while the emerging customer base of tweens and gen x'ers never walked into a bank branch or read a newspaper. The motto here is that an online strategy can not be "one-size-fits-all". You need to consider how each customer segment will interact online and create experiences for each segment.

Awareness + Accountability with Analytics
The problem with most marketers is they never had the level of accountability that a President or Controller had in an organization. However, they never needed to because as long as the organization was doing well and the brand "looked good" then there wasn't an issue. To a marketers defense (and I'm one of them), if the organization wasn't doing well, they were the first to blame, even though it could have been a poor executive strategy that was flawed, a lackluster sales staff, or just a poor product/service to begin with. Analytics to the resue. Web analytics is where marketing and accounting intersect. The combination of creativity and accountability. See, in accounting, although there is certainly creative ways to work with the numbers and reporting, for the most part all aspects are measured and accountable . There is little grey area, at least not these days post Enron scandal. Plus much of accounting is rigid and structured. As an entrepreneur and CEO, I am always immersed in analytics in business as it revolves around an Income Statement, Balance Sheet and Cash Flow Statement. So for us executives that have a flavor for marketing, analytics is nothing new. However, for much of the web industry and traditional marketers, the ideas of numbers driving strategies and the concept of being "measured" is relatively new. I am in no way proposing that marketers shed their creative skills and ambitions, rather balance them with analytics to create accountability to ensure you are measuring what is working and what is not.

Balance Design and Function
There is a wealth of customer data that is too often ignored. It is free and it if you listen you can hear your customers telling you exactly what they are looking for. So with this, the world of web design needs to further evolve to involve more function with the aesthetics. I personally love great design, strong branding and integrated identity systems. But, they need to work. What I propose is a separate between the core brand design and the functional design application. What does that mean? In no way should an analyst be telling a marketer that they need to change their logo, swap their identify system from black and white to pink and purple or to scrap the custom font their design team created. What needs to happen though is more integration of user experience best practices for navigation, search results landing pages and overall content layout. This area of strategy could go on for pages, because you need to also include consideration for SEO best practices, like scrapping the pretty headline tag that is an image for a clean H1 title tag that will be indexed better by search engines. The point is to involve analysts and user experience professionals in the website design process, advertising creation and overall design strategy to ensure your design is not only inline with your brand/identity system, but is also working to function for the users that will be interacting with your brand.

Initiate New Ideas
Never stop evolving. The web moves so fast sometimes my team at EpikOne thinks I'm insane because we evolve our business model so often. What sometimes they don't understand is that I need to in order to stay competitive. Although we are an online consultancy and deeply embroiled in this space, it does not mean companies like us should be the only ones consistently initiating new ideas online. I'll sway this to the B2B industry, but it could apply to B2C as well. Having a website is no longer enough. You need to have a more holistic online strategy that engages your customers, retains them and makes them love your brand. An e-commerce retailer can no longer just be a "commerce" company, but also a "content" company. This is something I've preached for years, better alignment of commerce and content. Customers don't want to come back and shop every day, but you could be publishing content every day to keep them coming back. For B2B, having your services, company bio, key leaders and contact information is no different than having a brochure splattered online. Here is what we've done at EpikOne to retain customers online, add value to our customers, expand our reach and visibility and position ourselves as thought leaders.

Tools/Applications:
SiteScan - www.sitescanga.com
AnalyticsView - www.analyticsview.com

Content:
AnalyticsExperts - www.analyticsexperts.com
Analytics Talk - www.epikone.com/blog

We've also launched a free Google Analytics Setup Guide, a free Regular Expression Tester and many other tools and articles to strenghthen our community. It takes time and commitment but it will pay off in the end by increasing your volume of leads and visibility within your industry. Point is, don't be content with a single website; expand your web presence and constantly initiate new ideas in your organization to stay ahead of the competition. Especially in times like this, where being in a recession requires you to work harder to keep your edge.

Why Do Marketers Ignore the Bounce Rate Metric?

Such a simple metric — Bounce Rate. However, even with industry evangelists like Avinash working to shift our focus to this website metric by naming Bounce Rate "The sexiest metric ever...", marketers are still ignoring this simple metric. Visitors bouncing off of your site at first sight should be a startling reality of your "first impression". Imagine operating a bricks and mortar store and 75% of potential customers left the store within 10 seconds — basically they walk in, take a quick look and walk right back out. In the "real world" we would take immediate attention to fix this major issue. In the "online world" we have a quantifiable metric updated every few minutes and people simply ignore this metric.

I believe Google Analytics should send you SMS or RSS alerts if your bounce rate increases more than 10% at any given time. Because if it does increase by 10%, you are losing potentially qualified customers because of that fancy design element you put up!

If you are ahead of the crowd and passionately focused on this one simple metric, Bounce Rate, then lets look at what you can do to make it better. First you need to establish What is a Good Bounce Rate? The new benchmarking service from Google Analytics will provide you good insight into what is the "norm" amongst similar sites in your industry. If not, I believe a 20% bounce rate is fantastic, 40% average and acceptable and above 50% should be improved up...oh and if you have above 80% you better get your act together and stop losing 8 out of 10 potential conversions before they have a chance to hear your message.

So once you've established what your bounce rate is and if it is good or not, start thinking about your segments. I'm not talking about demographics or anything like that (not a big fan of demo), I'm talking first-time and repeat visitor segments, which indicate attitudes. A first time visitor needs to understand if they want to take the time to explore your website and if it will lead value in their time (time is money). A return visitor however most likely understands what to expect but now they may need to find something new. It is likely that both their intentions are the same — came to find information, make a purchase, get contact information, etc. — but their attitudes are different.

Ideally when you segment this metric you'll find your bounce rate for return visitors is lower and for new visitors it is higher. Once you've established your bounce rates you have to consider if you want to invest in improving (lowering) your bounce rate for a particular segment and what impact it will have.

This is one of many posts to come on how to Optimizer Your Bounce Rates...stay tuned.

A New Version of Google Analytics...and it's Amazing!

Yes, you heard right. Google Analytics has launched a new version and it is quite an evolution. The new interface improves the usability and adds many useful features such as automated scheduling of reports to e-mail and a calendar view that is second to none. I'm going to be brief here but rest assured EpikOne has quite an arsenal of information and tools coming to make the transition as smooth as possible. We've been working with the application for some time now so let us know of any questions and keep posted for new announcements!

Dave @ EpikOne

How is Your Agency Performing?

A recent article on MediaPost.com caught the attention of both specialized digital shops and traditional ad agency's. The article highlighted that traditional agencies are slow to embrace the new marketing paradigm and are marketers "...seek fresh approaches from digital shops..." They went on to mention how shops like Agency.com are now winning traditional work. Wow, what a wake up call for Madison Avenue and the rest of the agency world.

Take a look at the article here.

Analytics Resource Planning

One of the fundamental issues with making Web Analytics integral in an organization is the lack of resource planning. For instance, will Analytics function as a department similar to Accounting and Marketing or will Analytics be integrated into many departments?

After meeting with a client recently we realized that there was no clear plan as to who would be accessing Google Analytics for reporting and how the information would be disseminated throughout the organization for decision making purposes.

This is an important phase and can open up new opportunities for making Analytics move to the "frontal-lobe" of key executives and directors who may have previously not been exposed to the value of this information. For instance, how many PR Directors are mining through top referrer reports to find out what kind of visbility their press releases are generating. My guess is not many. I believe the old days of "press clippings" will be pushed to the back by the ability to generate a top referrer report in Google Analytics in less than 1 minute from logging in. Some may say, well what if the media source didn't publish the press online and you can only get it in print. Well, I guess that media source is a good candidate for a course in "Why the Web is Important" - which most businesses took back in the 90's when they started moving their business online.

My point is, that without proper planning for integrating Analytics into the organization the valuable reporting will be nothing more than the Employee Handbook gathering dust on the shelf. So before you go an allocate six-figures on a fancy new web analytics application you may want to consider giving Google Analytics a try and spending that six-figures (or five, four or three figures!) on Analytics Resource Planning and then Analysis and Optimization. This will most likely get you a better ROI on your Analytics and then the Analytics will get you a better ROI on those Marketing Campaigns.