Biznology Blog: October 2006

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October 18, 2006

Seven Recommendations for Web Analytics Success

Avinash Kaushik, whose blog Occam's Razor is a must-read, had a lot to say at the Emetrics Summit this week. I tried to write it down for those not lucky enough to attend.

Avinash made seven recommendations:

• Go for the bottom line. If you find out how to increase revenue, cut costs, raise customer satisfaction, or whatever the execs at your company want, you'll be listened to. "People love their paychecks," Avinash advised, so appeal to what they care about to increase or safeguard their personal paychecks.


• Reporting is not analysis. Both reporting and analysis can consume all of your time, but analysis is far more valuable. Avinash cleverly called reporting the art of finding three errors in 1000 numbers and analysis the art of knowing that the three errors don't matter.


• Depersonalize decision making. Avinash described the phenomena of the "Highest Paid Person's Opinion" (HiPPO) making every decision—"HiPPOS rule the world," as he succinctly put it. But he said that you can turn this culture around into a data-driven culture by being a slave to what customers are telling you with the data. He says it is the rare HiPPO who will look at your data about customers and say "Screw them."


• Proactive insights rather than reactive. If you think about what a CEO thinks about and get in front of his thinking, you'll be listened to. "20% of your time should be spent on analysis no one asked for" Avinash told us.


• Empower your analysts. "Senior analysts should spend 80% of their time on analysis and just 20% on reporting," Avinash recommended. "Hire an intern for reporting," he went on to say. He encourages risk-taking and critical thinking among his team.


• Solve for the Trinity. Avinash reminded us that click streams are only one of the critical measurements, what he called "the what"—customer behavior. We also need to research "the why" and track outcomes ("the how much") of orders, leads or other conversions.


• Got Process? "Report scheduling and publishing is not a process," warned Avinash. He called decision making a journey, not a destination. You must decide what roles are involved in your process (business user, analyst, designer, etc.) and hold each role to its part of the process. You must assign ownership for actions and track them so that the metrics drive the projects which then drive the collection of new metrics. That's process.

Avinash implored this audience of metrics analysts to understand the limitations of what metrics can tell you. Pointing to fellow blogger Marshall Sponder in the front row, he exclaimed, "If Marshall comes back to my site again and again, is he engaged or frustrated?" The metrics don't tell you. If no other example told you how important analysis is over reporting, that should do it.

Posted by MikeMoran at 11:32 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

October 17, 2006

Metrics-Based Web Search

I have thoroughly enjoyed my time here at Jim Sterne's Emetrics Summit—it's one of the few conferences I go to where I learn something from the conference speakers. (I always learn a lot from talking to the attendees.) Today I presented a quick run-through of the basics of search metrics, so I posted the presentation for download.

Posted by MikeMoran at 3:36 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

October 16, 2006

Jim Sterne Shows Us the Big Picture

I am speaking this week at Jim Sterne's Emetrics Summit, which gives me the opportunity of hearing the terrific lineup of speakers Jim has assembled at this conference, including Jim himself. Jim led off the proceedings with his keynote speech, where he explains to the attendees how to see "The Big Picture." Jim is always entertaining, but more importantly, his insights help all of us to see where we should be focusing our efforts.

Jim got the conference off to a great start by compiling a list of what it's not about, juxtaposing these common misconceptions with what we really need to think about. Here's Jim's great list:

• It's Not All or Nothing. Sometimes you need just one piece of data to convince your execs that they must invest in metrics, but there's a bare minimum you usually need to effectively run your business by the numbers. If you want to get attention for your products, educate potential customers, sell them, and offer your customers help after purchase, then you need to measure traffic (clickthroughs), page views, revenue, and customer satisfaction (at minimum).


• It's Not a Web Site. It's a series of customer processes and actions. Stop thinking about your company and start thinking about your customer. Jim said, "Think about just one customer and what that customer wants to accomplish—think about the buying process, not the selling process."


• It's Not Just E-Commerce. "A conversion is not only a sale," Jim told us, which my readers know how much I agree with, with the writings I've done over the years on identifying your Web site's goals and measuring our customer's success in reaching them. Jim called every click a "micronegotiation" between you and your customer, whether it is leading to an e-Commerce sales or a different outcome.


• It's Not Accurate. Jim's best quote of the day was, "Web Analytics is nor precise, but it's true." He advised that anyone obsessed with accuracy should "get over it" and that we need to look at the differences in the numbers, rather than the raw numbers themselves. The trends are accurate.


• It's Not About Clicks. It's about people. No one should care about a click—they should care about the fact that a person made that click, which shows you something about what they want to do and what they care about. And it's about whether your Web site provides return on your investment. Jim said that he is concentrating on segmenting customers into small groups and measuring the sales per segment and the cost per segment, so that he can see his new favorite metric, profit per segment.


• It's Not Web Analytics. It's bigger than that. It's about returning value to the company by measuring what your Web site does. Jim wants to know what we should call what we do. Web Value Optimization? Web Equity Expansion? If you have a good name, he wants to know.


• It's Not Happening Without the Right People. Jim identified four kinds of people that are required for your metrics team, the technical guru, the Web designer, the statistician, and the business decisionmaker. Without those skills, your team can't collect the right information, analyze it properly, and take the right actions in response.


• It's Not Easy. The Web provides enormous amounts of data to collect and you need to make decisions as to what to collect and what to analyze. And it's hard to find analysts with the statistical backgrounds that can separate news from noise. But the hardest part is in deciding what to do. Jim cited designers (and in my experience, business decisionmakers also) as people who struggle with Web metrics, because their decisions were never open to question before. Designers selected the shade of teal to use and that was that. Now, metrics challenge designers to design a test, rather than the site itself, by selecting the 27 shades of teal that we will test with users to select the right one.

Jim closed by describing how difficult an adjustment marketers face if they don't have a background in direct marketing. He told a story of a CEO who called in the head of marketing and asked, "How will you spend the money if I increase your budget 10%?" The marketer replied, "I will increase everything 10% across the board." The CEO bristled, answering "Oh, so you don't know where to spend the money. OK, I will cut your budget 10% instead."

Jim reminded us that in the Web metrics business, we have all the answers. Whatever information we need is in there somewhere. What we need is the right questions. Jim advised hiring someone with insatiable curiosity.

Posted by MikeMoran at 1:24 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

October 13, 2006

The Sixth Printing is Here

Many of you know by now that Bill and I update our book, Search Engine Marketing, Inc, with each printing. Well, the sixth printing, which we completed in August, is now available and it is our most extensive revision yet.

Big changes have affected the paid search industry, with MSN Search moving away from the use of Yahoo!'s paid placement facility in favor of its own, the growth of personalization in results, and the increasing use of hybrid auctions.

If you've already bought our book, thank you. You can review the full list of updates that we've made in each printing so you can keep your knowledge up-to-date. In the next few weeks, I will cover some of these changes in more depth in separate blog entries.

Posted by MikeMoran at 10:38 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

October 11, 2006

New Use for Dayparting

When Bill Hunt and I wrote about dayparting, we expected people to use it to optimize their conversion rates—different days of the week and different times of the day probably yield different conversion rates. If you track which times are most lucrative for you, you can bid higher or lower (or not at all) to make your budget go farther.

But we really didn't think about using dayparting to combat click fraud. Here's a very interesting story courtesy of Andy Beal for his SEO Scholarship contest that shows a new way of thinking about using dayparting. Maybe others knew this already, but is was new to me.

Posted by MikeMoran at 8:05 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

October 1, 2006

Search by the Numbers

How do you know if your search marketing campaign is working? Metrics, that's how. But, too often people are looking at the wrong metrics. It's not enough to be #1—what are the metrics you should really be looking for?

Whether you use organic or paid search, or both, you need to measure your results just as you would with any business function. Too often, organic search marketers want the #1 search result for a keyword, but they aren't measuring whether anyone clicks on that result to come to their site. Or paid search marketers keep raising their bids to hold onto that top spot with their ad, but do they know if they are selling anything?

If you're not sure what you should be measuring for your search marketing program, come to the Emetrics Summit near Washington D.C. this month and attend my session on search marketing measurements. We'll talk about how to identify the Web conversions on your site and track how many searchers actually convert. We'll talk about how to raise your rankings, yes, but also how to boost your clickthroughs and conversions.

I hope to see you there.

Posted by MikeMoran at 10:04 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Web Marketing "Gets Real"

Shut off the hype machine—that's what your customers are telling you. The old days of overheated prose are over. On the Web, you must be authentic and fact-based, or no one will listen. See how Web Marketing "Gets Real" in October's Biznology newsletter.

Posted by MikeMoran at 9:56 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack