Multichannel Metrics - SES San Jose

San Jose SES Multichannel Metrics
Moderator:  Rebecca Lieb, ClickZ

LeeAnn Prescott, Director of Research, Hitwise

Search as indicator of consumer interest

Examples of how search can complement:

Example:  Dove

SuperBowl Campaign for Real Beauty ad successful at driving visits to www.campaignforrealbeauty.com and www.dovenight.com

Searches for Dove versus Dove Night and Dove Calming Night

SERP as advertising medium

On MSN, paid ad:  Free Dove Samples
On Google, organic listing:
Dove Calming Night organic/natural listing SERP for "dove night" on Google

Snippet has javascript errors/issues due to Flash website, which Google is picking up.

Example:  Pottery Barn

Catalog drop in April 2006 with quilts on cover

Pottery Barn became #6 receiving traffic from "quilts", up from 38th popular site for "quilts"
Greater brand association with bedding
Became most popular generic term driving traffic to website, separate from "furniture"

Public Relations Example - Ford

Recall of 1.2 million vehicles due to faulty cruise control switch; notifying owners

Google search for "Ford Recall"

1st organic search result (SERP) for "Ford recall" is Ford’s site
Paid search all goes to personal injury lawyers
Last September, had similar problem - recalled 3.8 million vehicles

Where did searchers on recall go?

34% to Ford site
15% went to legal sites
15% - news sites

Vehicle-injuries.com, autosite.com, alldata.com received top traffic on "ford recall" search.
This may indicate "organic SEO" is not enough, Ford may need to invest in paid search to offset traffic going mostly to personal injury lawyer sites.

Example: Diet Coke & Mentos User Generated Content

Eepybird.com - Site shot up to rank of 24 in multimedia category
Lots of publicity, article in Wall Street Journal
PR valued at $10 million

Searches for both products skyrocketed
Mentos embraces Eepybird, posts video on website
Coca-cola says not appropriate for brand

Now, people are searching on Pepsi and Mentos - interesting to note Mentos does not react with Pepsi, only with Coke.

Mentos site received lift, none for Dietcoke.com

Have sales of 2-liter bottles of Diet Coke increased?

Summary:

Offline advertising can drive searches
SERP as channel to display brand marketing & new product messages

Direct Mail:

Search can help monitor impact of direct mail, affect brand association

PR

Search term analysis indicator of type of interest
Use search to manage negative publicity
Consider using both paid and organic

Rebecca said there were over 8,000 people imitators of the Diet Coke and Mentos phenom viral video.  So, if 8,000 people bought this to try to be like the guys from Eepybird.com, surely that increased sales. 

I know one of our employees, Chris Foley, also bought Diet Coke & Mentos, to try it out.

Jason Burby, Zaaz.com

Behavioral, attitudinal, and competitive data
Use competitive data to find out what you need to change on your website

Create KPI Scorecards

All analytics tools have scorecards - measure organization, website, site section, web team/agency and individual performance in relation to business goals.  Share the scorecard throughout the organization.

Are people accountable?

Map to both group and individual goals

Tools of the trade: 

Behavioral - WebTrends, Omniture, Google, Websidestory, Visual Sciences, Coremetrics

Optimization:  Offermatica, Optimost

Competitive: Hitwise, comScore, Nielsen NetRatings

Attitudianal: Foresee, datstat illume

Biggest problem with web analytics:

How do we act on the data?

Identify opportunities
Monetize opportunities - interesting to see that delaying optimization by three months would cost x amount of dollars -
Prioritize opportunities -

Impact of optimization - what was the increased order, customer acquisition, as result of optimization

Jason Burby writes for ClickZ.

Eric Peterson, Visual Sciences
Introduction to Key Performance Indicators

Web Analytics Demystified Weblog - visit www.webanalyticsdemystified.com

KPIs - response to the overwhelming volume of data web analytics applications produce
KPIs designed to translate web data into meaningful interpretation that executives understand and are able to act on.

KPIs are crucial as to what are the goals of the project - what do we hope to accomplish with this optimization project - and then are we meeting those goals.

Web analytics is integrated into website decisions, search marketing, and many other decisions by the best companies including Dell and eBay - there is a formal process - hardly ad hoc like most other companies.

Eric said that people who track hits are Idiots who track success by hits.

KPIs are key indicators of what business people are looking at and trying to therefore effect. 

Page views are not a critical component, nor a key performance indicator.

KPIs set expectations - the expectation to establish targets for improvement.  Highlight changes for easy identification - presentation is important to point out and call attention to the problems in your KPIs.

Action - direct additional study and identify areas of the Web site that need work.

KPIs are Hierarchical

Different levels of business managers/owners need different sets of KPIs

Don’t send every single report to all managers at all levels

Senior strategist - get two-five KPIs
Mid-tier get 10-15 KPIs
Tactical get it all

KPIs:

Landing Page Stickiness
Average Page Views per visit
Average Visits per visitor
Percent New & Returning Visitors
Process Conversion Rate
Average Order Value

Sample KPI Dashboard for Visual Sciences - unfortunately this was hard to read, so I can’t identify key components

Bryan Eisenberg, FutureNow Inc

Persuasion Architecture

Customers are trying to get through our funnels - they don’t take the linear path we hope they will.  They bounce around, take a long time to make a decision - so how do we track the entire customer scenario?

Does it matter at the end how the customer got there?

If we can’t help the customer get through the funnel, then we don’t succeed.

WebEx Case Study - Applying Persuasion Architecture(TM)

Most of the presentation had technical problems - I’ll see if I can get a copy of Bryan’s presentation and make more key points later.

Very funny picture - crackvertising - people can’t focus on the right end of the problem

Most people try to figure out to drive more traffic, how to afford it - why aren’t they focusing on increasing their conversion rates????

Read "Waiting for Your Cat to Bark?" - book will be given away tomorrow, sponsored by ClickZ.

Q&A:

What’s the first thing we should do?

Define desired behaviors, KPIs - first - by Jason Burby, Zaaz

Look at the customer experience first, what’s the persona, then model that, and use analytics tool to measure change and performance