Digital Analytics When Your Website Isn't "Top Dog"

Editor's Notes

• #3: So, to start with, a little about me. I’m a Partner at Web Analytics Demystified, focused on our analysis and analyst mentoring practice. This means I not only help our clients with hands-on analysis, but I also work with them on how to succeed at analysis as an organisation, from building the right team to providing the right education and training to growing their people and their practice. I’m originally from Geelong, not that you can tell from my accent. I maybe have a slight Twitter problem. (Fun fact: At a previous job, one of the highest EVER campaigns driving traffic to our blog was driven by a Google Analytics campaign tagged “MicheleTweetsTooMuch”) And I’m a pretty big fan of puppies and kittens. Because let’s face it, who isn’t.
• #5: At Web Analytics Demystified, we are lucky enough to get to work with awesome clients doing some really awesome things. Remember the puppies and the kittens? Well, part of my job involves playing with Facebook and Twitter and Pinterest and Instagram, looking at pictures of kittens. Lately I’m noticing a lot of clients facing similar challenges - how do we understand the success of our marketing campaigns when they span a number of digital properties, and purchase isn’t easily tied to digital? I want to start by thinking back just *a few* years ...
• #6: Friends was still on. Harry Potter was only on the fifth book. Jessica Simpson wasn’t divorced yet. Seriously... What’s more important than what was going on is what WASN’T around yet.
• #7: Sites that dominate today hadn’t even been created! (And that’s not to mention the Pinterests and Instagrams and Paths and fourteen other social networks that will launch before we hit lunchtime!) What DID exist back then?
• #8: Remember them? Yeah, dimly.... But brands weren’t really exploring these. Not the way that they are social media today. Now, it’s a lot more complicated....
• #9: From a marketing and measurement perspective, 2013 really is a new world.
• #10: So, what does this world look like? Well, it’s complicated.
• #11: Today, brands still have a website presence. But they’re surrounded by an entire digital ecosystem - sometimes more important than the website itself. After all - The website may not necessarily be the primary destination, the hub, nor the conversion point. In fact, consumers may successfully engage with brands without once seeing their website. (And that is okay!) A brand may have Facebook ... and YouTube ... and Twitter ... and Pinterest ... and iPad apps ... and iPhone apps .... It’s easy for the website to start to feel “thiiiiiiiiiis big”!
• #12: After all, what would you rather see? (And what is more likely to engage consumers?) This? (Hint: I’m not alone. The entire internet just loves cats.)
• #13: Or this?
• #14: That’s not to say that there isn’t a place for websites, and their content. And it’s not to say there can’t be great content. But brands need to understand there’s only so much a consumer will look at your site. (After all Kraft, how much research do you think I really need to do to choose a mayonnaise?) So if there are more engaging channels, why wouldn’t you leverage them?
• #15: It’s tempting for brands to try to force consumers to their website. How many times do you see brands trying to create their own “internal social network” or want engagement, but with a really poor website experience? It’s tempting because...
• #16: Bringing consumers to your wholly owned properties absolutely gives you more control than sending them to a third party social network, even if it’s “your page”. (After all, how many times a week does Facebook randomly change it’s algorithms and suddenly no one sees your posts?) Measurement is certainly easier - you want to event tag the hell out of your site? Sure. You want to track behaviour within YouTube. Ha! Have fun with that. It also gives the brand control over the responses they get from consumers. After all, nobody wants this to happen to their brand ...
• #17: We can name dozens of brands who have been burned in social media. Tesco sent a tweet talking about how they were “hitting the hay” during a horsemeat fiasco. Kenneth Cole decided to make light of the Cairo uproar to promote their new line. One of Chrysler’s agencies had an employee mix up their personal account with Chrysler, and tweet about how people in Detroit couldn’t “[bleeping] drive” (Honestly, I’m starting to think that a major social media blunder is a rite of passage in modern marketing.)
• #18: After all, there are over a billion Facebook users, and more than half of those are active DAILY. Facebook users spend an average of seven hours a month on the site. There are over 500 million Twitter users and 1 billion tweets sent every 5 days. There are 100 million Instagram users, 50 million Pinterest users, and over 6 billion hours of YouTube videos viewed per month. So do you want to work WITH that, or against it?
• #19: So let’s say you embrace the challenge of integrated cross-channel marketing and measurement. (I think that’s BINGO! for anyone out there playing “Buzzword Bingo”) What does that look like? A hint: It gets really complicated.
• #20: There are a myriad of measurement solutions out there. And the above isn’t even the half of them. This, really, is our measurement challenge - tons of disparate sources: Website data Mobile data CRM data Social data Consumer feedback data Optimisation and testing data Offline purchase data TV ratings data (and more)
• #21: Things do remain (a little) simpler in ecommerce. After all, even if an ecommerce business is heavily leveraging social channels, they ultimately still drive to a digital conversion, which is inherently easier to track.
• #22: In an offline purchase world, however, not only are brands utilising alternative channels to their website, but measurement through to purchase is even more challenging. Keep in mind, it’s challenging enough for a combined “brick and mortar” and digital business to tie together their digital marketing and in-store purchase behaviour. How does Myer know that I’m the same person who saw their display ads, their TV ads, their social page and then purchased in-store? It just adds yet another layer of complexity when you add third party retailers into the mix!
• #24: DON’T think about metrics. I know, ironic for analytics person to be saying this. But that’s because your metrics have to be fueled by something, and we need to start there. Metrics for metrics’ sake are worthless. What are the business goals? What are the campaign goals? What do you WANT? And how will you know if you got it? (I call this the Fired or Promoted test. What results would have you running scared if called into your boss’ office? And what results would have you calling the BMW dealership?) It is critical this happen AT THE START. This isn’t a last minute “after all the results are in” - this is core to planning the campaign itself. So, it’s important to think ahead and define ...
• #25: This is a business question. At this point, you don’t care about whether you’ll use a custom variable or an event or when you expire an eVar. This is about business success. Try not to get bogged down (yet) in the technical details.
• #26: Defining what’s important is more work up front, but gives you a measuring stick to use after the campaign. It’s definitely time-consuming to think through what success means, and it’s even more time-consuming to try to put some actual target numbers behind that. After all, how do you set a goal for something you’ve never done before? But the truth is, thinking through that stuff will actually help you.
• #28: They are called KEY Performance Indicators for a reason. Hint: If you have 85 of them, I can bet you they are no longer “key” These need to be CRITICAL “pop the champagne” or “uh-oh I hope I have a job on Monday” metrics. This isn’t a list of “every metric we can think of to put on a report” or “every metric I can pull out of Facebook Insights” These critical metrics will be used to determine success. They define what you want out of the campaign. So how do these work in practice?
• #29: A client of mine was working to build an audience for some fun, lightly-branded videos. These weren’t intended as a hard-core sell, but something to entertain consumers and associate their brand with entertainment. The goal was to see if they could build an audience for this kind of content.
• #30: Brands who have ever built a loyalty program will know it’s hard work. So how do you get started? A client of mine started by first approaching their program in phases. Obviously a loyalty program isn’t worth much if you don’t have a loyal audience built, so rather than focus on EVERYTHING from the beginning, they focused on building the audience first. Some sample KPIs might be... Keep in mind - it’s hard to do this for things you’ve never done before! But you don’t have to do it alone. In this example, we were working with a vendor who built thousands of loyalty programs for customers, and we leveraged their data to help us understand what some reasonable targets for our KPIs were.
• #31: Another campaign wanted to engage consumers in sharing photos of how the brand was a part of their every day life. They really had two focuses - one was Participation in the campaign, the other was Engagement with the content the campaign created. ... Now, the previous examples were looking to measure things like the audience built, or digital engagement. That stuff is a little easier. But what if what you want to measure is in that difficult “offline” world?
• #32: Why do I say “the perfect world” and “the real world”?
• #33: ... As our newest partner, Tim Wilson, says: “Analytics can’t violate the laws of physics.” If it’s not possible to get the data, it’s not possible to get the data.
• #34: Leading indicators are things you CAN measure that hint that the actual KPI of interest will likely have been fulfilled. For example, in the B2B world, Lead Submits are often used to measure digital performance, even though a Lead isn’t necessarily a sale.
• #36: A client of mine had a pretty wide range of products, and a loyal customer base. But they found that not all customers tried all products, and there are always (of course) new customers to acquire. So they set out to promote and encourage trial of their products by new customers, but also product trial by current customers who might not purchase that particular product line currently. While we couldn’t understand actual purchase data, coupons can be offered and use as a leading indicator of offline purchase. So what were they looking at? Coupon prints, of course. But depending on your vendor, you may also be able to understand coupon redemption - which is as close to purchase as you may be able to get. If, however, you want to spread the message about your brand, sharing coupons can also be a great way to drive further prints and redemptions, so this was considered a secondary KPI.
• #37: Another client was launching a new product. There’s always a need to grow awareness of the product, but that’s a typical “fuzzy” concept that is hard to pinpoint into concrete numbers. They also wanted users to trial the product, but in this case, weren’t leveraging coupons.
• #38: Yes, historically most of the metrics we’ve dealt with have been website metrics. Visits, bounce rate, pathing, fall out. Don’t be afraid to put them aside if they’re not appropriate! If the goal of the campaign isn’t to drive to the website, forget the website. Just because you HAVE the metrics doesn’t mean you should use them. More numbers never helped anyone if they don’t answer more questions. Don’t prioritise the “easy” stuff, because...
• #39: Digital measurement wasn’t easy five years ago, when we were just looking at our brand websites. But it’s grown much more difficult with the proliferation of new channels such as social and mobile, and often times, the reliance on third parties to even give you insight into how you’re performing. What you don’t want to do is just throw out a few meaningless measures and pretend they are going to help you truly gauge success.
• #41: What matters is whether consumers take ACTION. Passive metrics like time passing or impressions are far less valuable than understanding that someone actually performed a behaviour.
• #42: There are a ridiculous number of toolsets out there. And unfortunately, marketers are forced to rely on these. After all, you can’t get much insight into Facebook without some participation on their behalf. Often these tools may not truly give us what we want to know, or hide behind proprietary algorithms. But it’s our job to exploit their insights to the fullest extent that we can. So how do you do that?
• #43: Your marketers and analysts should be exploring new channels and analytics solutions. (And you should have hired people nerdy enough that they are jazzed to geek out on new stuff.) Even if you don’t have a use for it yet, play with social measurement tools for your own personal accounts, or sign up for demos of new products just to keep an eye on the market. When you do need them, you’ll need it like SIX MONTHS AGO, so this will help you be at least half a step ahead.
• #44: You have to plan ahead! If you are leveraging a new channel, allow yourself time in the planning process to explore what data is available to you to measure it. DON’T LAUNCH AN INSTAGRAM CAMPAIGN IF YOU HAVEN’T EVEN BOTHERED LOOKING INTO WHAT YOU CAN MEASURE FROM IT! There is nothing worse than realising at the end of a campaign that you can’t even get results from it. Do you research. Identify your objectives, your goals, your KPIs. Then see if the data EXISTS. And last... once you’ve got your goals, your KPIs, your target numbers, your data...
• #45: Bring it all together. A client of mine leverages a number of different agencies, and conducts some pretty big cross-channel campaigns. This means at the end of the campaign, they get a deck from every agency involved in the campaign, detailing every nuance of every campaign. There’s a paid search report, an organic search report, a display report, a TV report, a PR report, a paid social media report, an organic social media report, a mobile report, a mobile Facebook report ... the list is endless. And at the end of this, what do they get? A 160 slide deck that never once answers the question of “What did we set out to do, and did we achieve it?” Your post-campaign analysis should focus on bringing together cross-channel metrics relevant to your specific KPIs, not be separate by-channel reports, or huge mounds of data. It’s okay to have further insights and details about each channel, but make sure you’ve rolled it all up to answer “How did we do?”
• #46: THAT is why this process is so important. By determining at the beginning what you are trying to achieve, and having that available for a “yes, no, yes, yes, no and here’s why” analysis at the end, you make it REALLY easy to judge your success. Which at the end of the day, is what marketers want.
• #47: Questions?