It’s a New Year which means… resolutions!  I’m trying to skip the meaningless, aspirational goals that I usually dream up.  Instead, I’m digging down into the things that I can really commit to.  I’m making 8 resolutions for Digital Alex and ClickEquations.com (which I’m responsible for).

1. I will integrate my data.  People come to my site.  Then, they become leads, customers and retained customers.  I really want to make decisions about where to spend my money based on who is the most valuable.  That means I have to connect the clicks to the customers with extra site and campaign tagging.
2. I will QA my data at least once a month.  I’m going to totally level with you here.  I’m guilty of some web analytics sloth.  Sometimes I’ll QA data once, make the fixes and only deal with spot issues.  We all know data is dirty and I just can’t assume it’s right.  Bad data happens!  This is especially true on B2B sites (see above).  I resolve to do a more thorough review at least monthly and act swiftly.
3. I won’t have an ego about my website. In the face of mounting evidence to the contrary, I concede that I do not know everything.  That’s why it’s probably better for me to rely on what customers care about what the data says.  Multivariate testing and voice of customer, here I come!
4. I will prioritize speed over perfection.  I’ve been accused of a “shoot first, aim later” style and, frankly, I’ll embrace the label.  In my opinion, it’s better to ask forgiveness instead of permission.  To me, it’s all about speed.  The same is true in online marketing, design and analytics.  It’s easy to obsess to the point of inaction.  I’m not saying to be sloppy, but I am say that something launched at 80% is better than nothing launched at 95%.  Speed has a tremendous value.  I will analyze until the answers are good enough and then correct.
5. I will grow my website’s traffic and my business. “So what?” is the best and most common analytics question.  We analyze to act.  We act to improve results and grow the business.  To do that, I need more outcomes, more conversion rate and more traffic.  More, more, more!  My analysis won’t be inside of the bubble of my tool.  It will include the data I need to say “And here’s how we act on that to make more money…”
   
   
6. I will find out what my customers want and give it to them.  Citing resolution #3, I’m going make sure that my analysis focuses on the question “What do my customers need that I can deliver that helps me make more money?”  I will use tools like 4Q and secondary research to help me improve all the aspects of my site – UX, design, copy, persuasion, SEO, etc.  In my opinion, we all need to educate ourselves about other disciplines to be able to make real, actionable recommendations to improve customer satisfaction.
7. I will plug the leaks in my website. Exit pages, leaky conversion funnels and bounces (single page visits).  Some of them are natural byproducts of the way people interact with websites.  I care about the unnatural ones.  I care about the missed opportunities.  I’m going to examine each of these 3 areas and ask myself “Is this due to natural behavior (such as different visit intent), attracting the wrong audience or bad site design?”  I’m going to focus on the last one first to improve results.
8. I won’t rely just on my website analytics package.  Repeat after me: no analytics package is perfect.  I can’t get all of the data I want out of Google Analytics (ex: it fails paid search marketers).  Instead, I’m going to bring in other data for thing like SEO (Google Webmaster Central) or paid search (ClickEquations).  I’ll incorporate context from the market (Google Trends) and competition when it makes sense (SpyFu).

We’ll see how long I can stay on the wagon.  What’s 1 resolution you really care about?

Miracle Website Diet! 8 Web Analytics Resolutions

I’m spending the holiday with my family, but much of my time is spend with my digital family — the folks who keep me informed online.  I’m creating a Twitter Wreath — a ring of links to some great people I follow on Twitter with the hopes that they’ll share their favorite Tweeters (twits?) as well.

I’ve listed some of the savvy professionals whose updates I track through Twitter. Am I missing you or someone good?  Please comment with a link to your/their Twitter profile!  Better yet, make your own Twitter Wreath.

Happy Holidays,

-Alex (aka @digitalalex)

• @clickequations – http://twitter.com/clickequations | www.clickequations.com/blog
• @kintecap – http://twitter.com/kineticap
• @johnleeclark – http://twitter.com/jonleeclark | http://www.ppcforhire.com/
• @eelco_van_kuik – http://twitter.com/eelco_van_kuik
• @kittygux – http://twitter.com/kittygux
• @ppchero – http://twitter.com/ppchero | http://www.ppchero.com/
• @dylanlewis – http://twitter.com/dylanlewis
• @webmetricsguru – http://twitter.com/webmetricsguru | http://www.webmetricsguru.com/
• @bobpage – http://twitter.com/bobpage | http://bobpage.net/
• @tealeaf – http://twitter.com/tealeaf | http://tealeaf.com/
• @semoe – http://twitter.com/SEMOE | http://www.semoe.com/
• @avinashkaushik – http://twitter.com/avinashkaushik | http://kaushik.net/avinash
• @ivinay – http://twitter.com/iVinay | http://www.juretic.com/
• @lucindadh - http://twitter.com/LucindaDH | www.clickequations.com 
• @billysblog - http://twitter.com/billysblog | http://testingblog.widemile.com/
• @dennismortensen - http://twitter.com/DennisMortensen | http://visualrevenue.com/blog
• @TheGrok - http://twitter.com/TheGrok | http://www.grokdotcom.com/
• @randfish - http://twitter.com/randfish | http://www.seomoz.org/
• @erictpeterson - http://twitter.com/erictpeterson | http://www.webanalyticsdemystified.com/
• @greggorio - http://twitter.com/greggorio | http://www.semgeek.com/
• @cgrantski - http://twitter.com/cgrantski
• @jdersh - http://twitter.com/jdersh | http://june.typepad.com/
• @jenniferlaycock - http://twitter.com/JenniferLaycock | http://www.searchengineguide.com/
• @dannysullivan - http://twitter.com/dannysullivan | http://daggle.com/
• @skellie - http://twitter.com/skellie | http://skelliewag.org/
• @mjasra - http://twitter.com/mjasra | http://www.webanalyticsworld.net/
• @storyspinner - http://twitter.com/storyspinner | http://www.searchmarketinggurus.com/
• @jimsterne - http://twitter.com/jimsterne | http://www.emetrics.org/

Twitter Wreath: Who I Follow on Twitter

Every year, I go back to Villanova University to give a presentaiton at the same class I taught.  This year, I gave a web analytics presentation titled “Web Analytics 101″.  It’s an extremely basic introduction to web analytics with a heavy emphasis on how to break into the industry.  The presentation is available on this page after the “read more…” link (to keep load time down) and on Slideshare.

web analytics presentation

I recommend a few web analytics websites and resources in the tool, which I’ll list here too :-)

• Books
  • Web Analytics: An Hour a Day
  • Website Measurement Hacks
  • The Big Book of KPIs
• Starting a Web Analytics Blog
  • WordPress
  • Typepad
  • Blogger
• Web Analytics Community
  • Yahoo Web Analytics Forum
  • Occam’s Razor
  • Web Analytics Demystified
  • ClickEquations Paid Search Blog
  • GrokDotCom by FutureNow
  • Digital Alex
• Networking with Web Analysts
  • Web Analytics Wednesday
  • Philadelphia Interactive Marketing Association
• Web Analytics Training
  • Web Analytics Association
  • WAA Basecamp
  • Vendors like Omniture and WebTrends
  • Web Analytics Videos on YouTube
  • Articles by Marketing Sherpa and training by Market Motive
  • UBC Web Analytics Certificate
• Web Analytics Recruiters
  • Aquent
  • IQ Workforce
• Web Analytics Job Sites
  • Indeed
  • Web Analytics Demystified
  • WAA Job Board
• Philadelphia Area Internet Marketing Jobs
  • Commerce360 / ClickEquations
  • Razorfish
  • Comcast Interactive Media
  • G2
  • EmpathyLab
  • Cadient
  • Digitas Health
  • GSI Commerce
  • TMX Interactive
  • Red Tettemer
  • Ascentive
  • NetPlus

Full presentation after the link!

Web Analytics 101 + Career Advice (Presentation)

As part of the worldwide series of Global Entrepreneurship Week events, I presented at Princeton University to a room of entrepreneurs and small business owners.

My presentation, “Fast + Furious: How to Use Internet Marketing to Launch Your Business” highlighted how internet marketing, specifically paid search advertising, web analytics and website testing, can save startup time and money.  Take a look:

princeton university entrepreneurship

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: web analytics)

Here a list of the free tools I highlighted at the end of the presentation.  Please feel free to download and share!

Global Entrepreneurship – My Presentation at Princeton

I’m here in San Francisco for X Change, the practitioner’s web analytics conference. It’s an intimate gathering of measurement professionals to share stories, brainstorm and talk shop.

You can get live updates from the ClickEquations twitter account. I may have a few on my twitter account as well.

Also, check out the X Change tweme, marked as #xchange.

Joining me at the conference are:

• Craig Danuloff, ClickEquations
• Jacques Warren, WAO Analytics
• Eric Peterson, Web Analytics Demystified
• Jim Sterne, eMetrics
• Gary Angel, SEMPhonic
• June Dershewitz, SEMPhonic
• Marshall Sponder, WebMetricsGuru
• Judah Phillips, Reed Business
• Bob Page, Yahoo!
• Aaron Gray, WebTrends
• Bill Gassman, Gartner Analyst

Those are just a few of the people at the conference. Leave a comment if you’re there and I missed you.

Live Web Analytics News from X Change

Search Engine Optimizers do it.

Paid search managers do it.

So, why aren’t you doing it?

I’m talking about looking at search query volume, of course. As you plot out your search marketing strategy, you’re looking for the intersection of high volume, low competition and strong user intent.

Getting at the volume part of that estimate can be tricky business. Typically, this involves using any number of keyword discovery tools, such as Trellian. 3rd party tools pull from an amalgamation of sources and the absolute number you get is dubious at best. Relationships, however, still hold true.

Better Search Query Volume Estimates

Now, Google’s AdWords Keyword Tool has finally pulled back the curtain and included search query volume in their reports (it used to be a graphical scale). Take a look at this example for web analytics phrases.

Just a couple quick things to keep in mind:

1. You can change your match type. I used exact in that image.
2. Hide and unhide the columns you need. I think the search trends is really great for understanding seasonality:

Ideas for Using the Data

From a paid search marketing perspective, more exact volume data will help you plan budgets and campaigns better (especially for larger projects where volume can be tricky within constraints).

SEO’s now have another sources of search query (aka keyword) volume data. I’m sure there are weaknesses associated with these data as well, but it does come straight from the source. It’s also much more granular than Google Trends.

For the web analysts in the audience, this will help you:

1. Gauge your search query/keyword share for targeted terms
2. Analyze whether trends in search results are due to seasonality
3. Complement your web analytics and internal site search data to help see how well your site users your customers’ language.

Which tools do you prefer?

Finally, Better Search Volume Data!

Okay, we’ve talked about return policies, shipping policies, landing pages, improving your sales copy, and getting rid of registration pages.

By now, you might be thinking about changes, maybe even a redesign. It’s important, however, to use all the tools at your disposal to make sure your changes are right for your customer and business.

I was reading June’s Twitter feed to follow her coverage of eMetrics. I was struck by her Tweet that eBay uses qualitative data to plan a redesign and quantitative to confirm.

That got me thinking about…

Ecommerce Tip #6 – Test Your Redesigns

In a magical marketing world, we’d have all the info about what our customers want/need to purchase and ego would never be a part of the design process.

In reality, insight is imperfect and sporadic. Creative, marketing and the Highest Paid Person’s Opinion (HiPPO) often cloud the process and lead to sub-optimal sites. Instead, I’d like to propose a new way to plan your website redesign.

I’m breaking this into 4 parts:

1. Assess
2. Listen
3. Redesign
4. Experiment

1. Assess Your Current Website

Knowing where to redesign starts with assessing your current website for weaknesses. Often, this begins with web analytics and business outcomes.

Business outcomes are straightforward: are you meeting your goals or not? If your forecasting and planning are reasonable (and that’s a big if), you can get a quick read of whether you need to reallocate budget among tactics or squeeze more performance out of your site.

Assuming you’ve already audited your acquisition tactics for areas to improve, then the gap could be in the persuasive ability of your site. Traditional web analytics can help you see, among many other things:

• Where people are dropping out in the conversion process
• How far people explore after landing pages (if at all)
• Pages with above and below average contribution to sale, lead, etc.

The goal here is to start to identify some of the major barriers in your site. That will allow you to identify key goals for the redesign.

2. Listen To Your Customers

Assessing your website will help you prioritize the areas you need to redesign, i.e. the “what”. To dig deeper into the source of the trouble, you’ll need some qualitative data. With VOC, you can help uncover the “why” behind barriers to sale. This should help you plan smarter redesigns.

Getting at this data takes time and resources. You can work from readily available local knowledge to more resource intensive external information.

There are 3 good sources of information:

1. Marketing Input
2. Best Practices
3. Custom Qualitative Data

1. Marketing Input

Depending on how large your company is, the marketing team might have access to demographic and pyschographic data about your target customers. Any primary research, such as focus groups, can help you get into the minds of your consumer. Competitive insight, which sites are winning and why, and positioning make it easier to map out where your site is strong and weak.

2. Best Practices

If you’re short on budget and time (and who isn’t?) or your site is small, then you can often get a lot of great ideas from external best practices. Marketing Sherpa regularly publishes guides and emails newsletters with specfic examples. I also subscribe to Ad Age Digital, iMedia Connection, Harvard Business School’s newsletter, and MarketingNPV among others.

Conferences like eMetrics, ad:tech, and Search Engine Strategies can be a good crash course in a particular channel. They are, however, more time and resource consuming. For snippets of advice on a more timely basis, stock your reader with blogs (subscribe to Digital Alex). If you’re looking for recs for a specific blog on a particular topic, leave me a comment and I’ll get back to you.

3. Custom Qualitative Data

For those willing to invest a bit more time and/or money, the sky’s the limit. You can do custom usability research on your site (read this first). Site surveys can help you get at the “why” of visitors. Avinash and iPerceptions put together 4Q, a free tool worth checking out.

You might already have qualitative data at the ready. If you have call centers or regularly collect customer satisfaction data, check for website comments. It’s not always the most respresentative sample, but one complainer is probably equivalent to 5 people who were upset, but didn’t complain.

3. Redesign Your Website

Now for the fun part! Not being a creative guy, I have no tips for redesign mastery. I will say this: egos are bound to flare, opinions will differ and someone will have to make the call.

The ultimate judge of what matters is the customer, naturally. If you have different concepts or assets for particular pages, don’t kill them during the redesign process. Instead, use the qualitative data about your customers to prioritize the best ideas.

Bake your key ideas and questions into the design process. Start thinking now about the different forms, treatments, images and copy that can fuel your test. Crystallize your key questions and assumptions.

4. Launch an Experiment!

Sadly, most experimentation is conducted well after a site has launched. Webmasters start optimizing when the dust settles and all of the acquisition tactics are moving along. But, how much money could you be leaving on the table with a sub-optimal site? Isn’t it better to fail and learn faster?

A/B and multivariate testing now accessible to everyone with the free Google Website Optimizer. Granted, it has plenty of limitations. It’s better to start early and grow into more sophisticated tools.

There are some obvious pages to test:

• Checkout process
• Any registration page, such as email signu
• Promotion deals – shipping, % off, etc.
• Landing pages (focus on the channels that cost the most money)

And that’s it! Now you’re on the path to better site design focused on customers. What are your favorite tips for site redesign? Any lessons learned?

PS: Sorry for the delay in this ecommerce tip. Hopefully the clip art eases the pain :-)

Ecommerce Tip #6 – Test Your Redesigns

If you believe the research, targeted email advertising is hot:

83% of surveyed marketing executives worldwide used email, ahead of display ads, paid search and online video. – The McKinsey Quarterly (2007)

80% of Marketers Report Email Is Strongest Performing Media Buy Ahead of Search and Display. – Datran Media, “Marketing & Media Survey” (2008)

If you want to get the biggest bang for your email advertising bucks, you have to avoid the pitfalls.

If you want to make the most of your email marketing, here’s a simple checklist of ways to boost your results. It covers:

• Rendering
• Landing Pages
• Tracking
• Creative/Merchandising
• Deliverability/Sender Reputation Management
• User Experience
• Testing

Each section is designed you can print it out or bookmark this page and review it before you send out an email.

Checklist for Better Email Marketing

Rendering

If people can’t see or read what you’re trying to say, you’re emails will be ineffective.  Popular email programs like Hotmail and Gmail turn off images by default.   Even if images render, they may appear distorted in one program vs. another.

__ Renders properly in different programs – Outlook 2003, Outlook 2007, Thunderbird, etc.

__ Images render as expected in different providers – AOL, Hotmail, etc.

__ Copy is visible without images

__ Calls to action appear in text

__ Includes a link to view the email online, e.g. “Can see this email?  Click here to view it online.”

Landing pages

Make the email to website transition seamless.  It seems like an obvious recommendation, but by verifying that what people see when they get to your site is what they expect, you can avoid careless mistakes.

__ All product image and text links go to product pages

__ “Click here to see…” links go to relevant category and subcategory pages

__ Header and other navigational links function (ex: Men’s Tops, etc.)

__ Theme or landing pages work as expected and match the look and feel of the email.

Tracking

Double check to make sure you’re setup to track all of the results you need to draw actionable conclusions.

__ Enable and test open tracking through your email service provider

__ All links include site side analytics tags in the destination URLs

__ Links are tagged individually, so you can distinguish popularity and influence of individual email content

__ All special offers in the email, such as coupon codes, are unique

Creative\Merchandising

Every brand’s look and feel is different, but there are some universal rules.

__ Ensure key messages and calls to action appear “above the fold”

__ Use strong and specific calls-to-action

__ Verify that featured items are available to order

__ Make sure it’s obvious what’s clickable (e.g. use a button or blue underlined link)

__ Check that all links function properly

Deliverability/Sender Reputation Management

We live in a spam world and you don’t want to be labeled a spammer.  The CAN-SPAM law spells out your legal obligations, but these pointers should get you far enough in not annoying your customers:

__ Offer a simple, one click way to unsubscribe

__ Send emails from a recognized and trusted email address.  Avoid changing it.

__ Request to add email@yoursitenamehere.com to their “Safe Senders” list (this will also help with rendering)

__ Include a physical address

__ Run the email through a tool’s spam review and any internal spam filters; edit accordingly

__ Link to your privacy policy

__ Scrub your email list of unsubscribes and hard bounces regularly

User Experience

Relevance rules the day.  If you want users to keep giving your their permission to email them, make them want to open your emails.

__ Segment the email list to make the email more relevant, when possible.  For example, sending different emails to people who have only purchased Men’s clothes vs. only purchased Women’s clothes.

__ Ensure that users haven’t received too many emails in one month

__ Match email to user preferences expressed during signup (requires an email signup page)

__ Personalize your email if you have the available data, e.g. “Dear Alex, …”

__ Include a link that says “If you have trouble viewing the newsletter below, click here” at the top of each email. It should take you to a properly rendered, online version of the email

Testing

If you plan to run a test, please keep these things in mind.  While there are sophisticated tools out there that let you do more advanced A/B and multivariate email testing, most retailers are probably using a simpler email provider.  In which case, you’ll want to keep these tips in mind:

__ Test only 1 element at a time, holding all other elements (such as time of day) the same

__ Have both a control and test version

__ Ensure your sample sizes meet statistical minimums (dependent up on the metric measured and anticipated response rate)

That’s not everything you need to do for targeted email advertising, but it’s a start.  You can address many of these points with a good seed list – a list of internal customers who preview your email before it’s sent out.  How do you improve your email marketing?

If you like this post, consider saving it to delicious or StumbleUpon.

A Checklist for Targeted Email Advertising

I got an email from an entrepreneur contact of mine. He’s smack in the middle of the process of due diligence for the acquisition of an internet marketing property.

He wanted to include a web analytics as part of his due diligence questionnaire and asked if I had a checklist.

Having not gone through the process, I wrote up a few quick bullet points that I thought I’d share with you.

3 Web Analytics Questions to Ask Before Buying a Company

1.) What tool(s) are you using to measure and optimize your site? What process and personnel are you dedicating to use data to grow your business?

The goal here is to understand their relative dedication or lack thereof to continuous improvement.

There is a range of 7 possible responses here:

1. The analytics ignorant won’t have or know what tool they’re using. Be afraid, be very afraid.
2. The vendor-dependent might simply have reports from their partners, but not invest in site-side tools. That’s can be a problem when you switch vendors or consider campaign attribution.
3. Some might be relying on something in-house or what’s baked into their ecommerce platform or content management system. Tread lightly here, as these will vary wildly in sophistication.
4. An internet unsavvy organization might have slapped up one of the free or inexpensive, but have done little to act on the data.
5. A business with an average level of sophistication will have one or more tools and 1 person for whom part of their job is to use web analytics data.
6. More sophisticated marketers will actually dedicate 0.5+ full-time employees to analysis and likely be using a suite of tools, including one core web analytics package.
7. The most advanced will have great talent, good tools and a process for regularly analyzing and optimizing their site and marketing.

2.) Please provide a monthly breakdown for the past 2 years of traffic (unique visitors and visits), conversions (business outcomes) and value (revenue, if applicable) for all major categories of traffic: direct/typed in, organic (natural) search, paid search, email, affiliates, referring sites, etc.

The goal here is to understand where their traffic is coming from and how it’s growing. You may find they are lacking in an area of opportunity.

Not all business are or should pursue every channel. Strategically, you should be where your customers and prospects are, especially if your competition isn’t.

Competitive intelligence tools can give you a sense of how a site stacks up against the competition, but only the business own analytics will give you a fine level of detail.

It’s important to understand recent trends and ROI (or lack thereof) of their different acquisition and retention investments. It’s like buying a house: you could be getting a bargain or be sitting on a rotting foundation.

Caveat: if they’ve done a poor job of configuring their web analytics, these data could be useless. You can tailor this question to their business model.

3.) Are you using qualitative data (surveys, voice of the customer), user experience testing, a/b testing, multi-variate testing, on-site behavioral targeting or other systems to optimize your site? If so, describe the projects and results.

The goal here is to probe into how well your target acquisition has used all of the possible tools to boost results.

That’s not to say that you you need to have used all of them to be a good internet marketer. At the very least, they should have an awareness of these options. It’s even better if they’ve used one or more of them and can show a history of data-based optimization and improvement.

Of course, you could look at it on the flip side: an established, but unoptimized site could mean immediate boosts by addressing quick wins in the first 3-6 months.

Beyond that, I’d want to know about the cost-effectiveness (ROI) of each of their major initiatives for the past year and plans for the upcoming year.

If you were buying a company, what web analytics questions would you ask as part of your marketing due diligence?

3 Web Analytics Questions to Ask Before Buying a Company