Actionable Web Analytics: Using Data to Make Smart Business Decisions - Softcover

Burby, Jason

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0470124741 ISBN 13: 9780470124741

Publisher: Sybex, 2007

Synopsis

As a marketer it is important to understand how our customers and prospects are interacting with your brand, especially in the digital space. This book is about the why, not just the how, of digital analytics and beyond. It is intended to help marketers understand how to better leverage insights and shift their teams to focus on digital success, not just the masses of data. Often this means shifting process, attitudes and people to create a "culture of analysis" inside your organization. 'Actionable Web Analytics' shares the proven framework for making that shift in thinking for digital teams.

About this title

About the Author

Shane Atchison
Global CEO
POSSIBLE

As CEO of POSSIBLE, Shane leads the company's long-term strategic vision of working with leading financial service organizations, consumer brands, start-ups, nonprofits, and community-based organizations, helping each realize the potential of the Internet and its impact on their business. He continues his advocacy for creating meaningful, effective visitor-centric digital strategies.

Shane speaks frequently at events around the world and is a LinkedIn Influencer where he writes, interviews and shares his opinions

Follow him on Twitter @ShanePOSSIBLE


Jason Burby
President, Americas
POSSIBLE
As President of the Americas Regions for the digital agency POSSIBLE, Jason is responsible for leading the long-term stability and growth of the region. Jason has 20+ years experience in digital strategy. He is a long-time advocate of using data to inform digital strategies to help clients attract, convert and retain customers. Jason supports our clients and employees in driving new engagements and delivering great work that works.

Jason speaks frequently about helping marketers take advantage of data to make smarter business decisions and improve the success of their organizations. 
 

Follow him on Twitter @JasonBurby

From the Back Cover

Getting ROI from the Web Is Everyone's JobRight now someone is clicking on your website, and knowing everything you can about those clicks and the people that make them is a business imperative. That's the first of a set of compelling business lessons distilled from the authors' decade of experience with the world's most powerful online brands. These lessons help executives, marketers, web managers, designers, and developers take action based on the actual behavior of site visitors.

This book is about the why, not just the how, of web analytics and the rules for developing a "culture of analysis" inside your organization. Why you should collect various types of data. Why you need a strategy. Why it must remain flexible. Why your data must generate meaningful action. Inside you'll learn to demonstrate real ROI from your website.

• Learn to use web analytics data to help make strategic decisions and set corporate goals
• Ask the right questions when planning your website
• Recognize how your data reflects the perceptions of your customers, information on your competitors, and your marketing costs
• Develop criteria for choosing an agency to help you interpret your data
• Discover how successful your marketing efforts have been
• Create a culture of analysis within your organization

"Relationship marketing continues to evolve in new and exciting ways, and Actionable Web Analytics provides a clear and concise guidebook for the marketing executive. Burby and Atchison have captured the essence of creating relationships online, which lead to meaningful customer dialogues, and then measuring the success of those efforts."
--Lester Wunderman, Founder and Chairman Emeritus, Wunderman

"We have been fortunate enough during the past decade to see our business grow in parallel with and in partnership with the team at ZAAZ. As true thought leaders in the web analytics and marketing space, Burby and Atchison have captured the important issues facing marketers and business people every day and explained them eloquently in Actionable Web Analytics."
--Josh James, Co-Founder, Omniture & Domo

"Burby and Atchison have spent close to a decade helping a wide variety of companies optimize their advertising spend, supersize their website value, and maximize their online marketing ROI. These guys are in an amazing position to help you figure out all of the above. But that's just the half of it. While their position is nice, their scary IQ, their awesome curiosity, and their uncanny ability to drill down to bona fide business value make this book a must read."
--Jim Sterne, President of the Web Analytics Association and Producer of Emetrics Summit

From the Inside Flap

Getting ROI from the Web Is Everyone's Job

Right now someone is clicking on your website, and knowing everything you can about those clicks and the people that make them is a business imperative. That's the first of a set of compelling business lessons distilled from the authors' decade of experience with the world's most powerful online brands. These lessons help executives, marketers, web managers, designers, and developers take action based on the actual behavior of site visitors.

This book is about the why, not just the how, of web analytics and the rules for developing a culture of analysis inside your organization. Why you should collect various types of data. Why you need a strategy. Why it must remain flexible. Why your data must generate meaningful action. Inside you'll learn to demonstrate real ROI from your website.

• Learn to use web analytics data to help make strategic decisions and set corporate goals

• Ask the right questions when planning your website

• Recognize how your data reflects the perceptions of your customers, information on your competitors, and your marketing costs

• Develop criteria for choosing an agency to help you interpret your data

• Discover how successful your marketing efforts have been

• Create a culture of analysis within your organization

Relationship marketing continues to evolve in new and exciting ways, and Actionable Web Analytics provides a clear and concise guidebook for the marketing executive. Burby and Atchison have captured the essence of creating relationships online, which lead to meaningful customer dialogues, and then measuring the success of those efforts.
--Lester Wunderman, Founder and Chairman Emeritus, Wunderman

We have been fortunate enough during the past decade to see our business grow in parallel with and in partnership with the team at ZAAZ. As true thought leaders in the web analytics and marketing space, Burby and Atchison have captured the important issues facing marketers and business people every day and explained them eloquently in Actionable Web Analytics.
--Josh James, CEO and Co-Founder, Omniture

Burby and Atchison have spent close to a decade helping a wide variety of companies optimize their advertising spend, supersize their website value, and maximize their online marketing ROI. These guys are in an amazing position to help you figure out all of the above. But that's just the half of it. While their position is nice, their scary IQ, their awesome curiosity, and their uncanny ability to drill down to bona fide business value make this book a must read.
--Jim Sterne, President of the Web Analytics Association and Producer of Emetrics Summit

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Actionable Web Analytics

Using Data to Make Smart Business DecisionsBy Jason Burby Shane Atchison Jim Sterne

John Wiley & Sons

Copyright © 2007 Jason Burby
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-470-12474-1

Chapter One

The Big Picture

The Web has become one of the most powerful vehicles for marketing and communication ever created. It allows fast and easy communication with millions of customers in a timely fashion. It has transformed the speed at which companies and their brands can be created and grow. The Web has also created new opportunities for marketers to become better at their discipline. This chapter provides an overview of the changes in marketing that have resulted from the Web's existence and then a discussion of the key guiding principles you should remember for the rest of this book.

New Marketing Trends

"Because its purpose is to create a customer, the business has two-and only two-functions: marketing and innovation. Marketing and innovation create value; all the rest are costs." -Peter Drucker, 1977

According to Fortune magazine, the five largest American corporations in 1977 were Exxon, General Motors, Ford Motor, Texaco, and Mobil; Microsoft was a two-year-old startup venture, and the Internet had not even been invented. Yet, Peter Drucker saw the future clearly. He realized then something that is even truer now: Businesses must create customers, and the best way to do that is through marketing and innovation. The nature of "marketing" and "innovation" in 1977 were markedly different than they are today (or at least than they appear to be today), and the connections between business and customer were orderly, predictable, and easily managed.

The contemporary marketing executive faces unprecedented challenges and limitless opportunities. The distance between the business and the customer, both physically and emotionally, has been shortened to the duration of a single click. Those clicks, perhaps the most over-examined phenomenon of the last decade, are the staccato sound of a new engine of commerce and of the near instantaneous decisions made by customers to buy or not to buy. The marketer hears the clicks as a fanfare for success or a funereal march of doom. It may sound overly dramatic, but looking at the success of companies like Amazon, eBay, and Google shows that reality may be even more dramatic still.

The challenges inherent in navigating the world of business today are daunting, but the resources available are far more sophisticated than ever. The tools and tactics available now are probably an order of magnitude more powerful and more useful than they were five years ago. In the world of online commerce, marketing has become innovation. Innovation brings with it a new level of complexity as well as confusion, and marketers have to work harder and harder to stay ahead of their competitors and their customers.

Tools and tactics are essential, but strategy wins the war. Marketing leaders know that perspective and vision help create and drive a strategy. In the online world, it's often easy to become consumed with minutiae and forget the overarching business goals. Being able to show improvement in how many new clicks your site gets isn't useful if you can't show how much you invested to get those additional clicks and you have no baseline data for comparisons. Strategy dictates that metrics are grounded in historical context, and return on investment (ROI) is predicted before and reviewed after any program is implemented. Strategy must also lead to action, and action is the governing principle behind this book.

Marketing in the twenty-first century is about change and innovation. Change is no longer driven solely by the ideas of big companies ("let's introduce a diet version of that drink and see what happens") and their competitors. Now it's also driven by customer demands (and customer revolt). Information on good and bad products used to take months or years to become general knowledge. Today, new products are often discussed and dissected before they're even released. Change has come, and customers are doing innovation as fast as companies.

All of this change and innovation generates data-lots and lots of data. Data is the click made real. Data is the transformation of customer needs and buying decisions into marketing and innovation. Data is also the endless wave that threatens to overrun every marketing department in the world. Data is in danger of becoming the enemy of progress instead of the foundation of success. Throughout this book, we'll return to data and the specific actions you need to take to make that data valuable.

Before becoming completely consumed with data (and this book will show you exactly how not to be consumed by data), it's important to examine some of the larger trends that are driving the data onslaught. These trends are as follows:

The consumer revolution

The shift from offline to online marketing

Instant brand building (and destruction)

Rich media and infinite variety

We'll look at each one briefly and weave together the larger pattern of what marketing and innovation will look like in the near future. From that pattern, we'll set the stage for the "Analysis Mandate" and a plan for using the rest of Actionable Web Analytics. First, we go into the hearts and minds of the consumers.

The Consumer Revolution

Among the more than 100 million websites online (according to netcraft.com) and the billions of pages that form those sites is just the page you want. If you can find it, you'll click it. If you click it, you'll receive the satisfaction you so richly deserve. Welcome to infinite choice, Mr. and Ms. Consumer.

Most of us are familiar with the Industrial Revolution as part of a broad historical tableau that saw manual labor slowly replaced by automated labor and the manufacture of machines to power that automation. It was a significant revolution for businesses because productivity soared and costs dropped. For the worker, it was a time when their livelihood was often threatened by machinery; but they benefited from the cheaper and more readily available goods created by those machines. The revolution continued for many decades as each change produced a series of other changes, such as railways producing an infrastructure for wider distribution of manufactured goods and then allowing goods to be centrally manufactured as raw materials were transported. In many ways, the Industrial Revolution solidified the role of the consumer in the economy. Someone had to buy all the output from efficient and automated production, and thus the consumer class was born.

From the time of the Industrial Revolution in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries until the beginning of the twenty-first century, the role of the consumer was pretty fixed. Consumers consumed the goods and services produced and distributed by industry. This was a sweeping and broad statement of how markets worked, and everyone accepted it as true. Consumers were, at least for the most part, passive participants in the ecosystem.

The Internet changed all that completely. The full extent of this change is still being observed and documented.

Consumer-Driven Choice

One of the authors recalls purchasing new stereo equipment in the late 1980s. Once the right receiver was chosen based on a review in a magazine, finding it involved a lot of driving around and making phone calls to stereo shops. The magazines gave something called a "suggested retail price" for an item; the actual price was something secretly determined by stereo salespeople (or so it was rumored among aficionados). Having finally purchased the equipment, the author then wanted to show it off. He even recalls making a photocopy of the instruction manual cover page to display to friends.

Consumers had the choices presented to them back then. If you walked into a store and there were only red shirts, you couldn't get black. If you bought something and found it defective, you could bring it back for a refund, but that didn't help the next guy who bought the same thing. If you loved a book or movie, you would go out of your way to tell some friends about it, and they would tell some friends, and you hoped all your friends would know about it before it left the theater (and remember when the only place to see movie trailers was in the theater?).

As a marketing manager in 1985, you would have had a fairly straightforward job (not an easy job, but still straightforward): Identify a market segment for your product, and then place some ads, do some promotions, and ensure that the target audience knew about the existence of the product. Then, wait for the sales data to come trickling in. Review all the data, and determine if something needed to change about the product or campaign. Make the changes, and start waiting all over again.

You can quickly see how different the situation is today. In 10 minutes, you can sit at your computer and find information about the latest receivers, compare prices, read reviews by hundreds of other buyers, check out the technology blogs to determine if a new model is coming out soon, and purchase your equipment for delivery the next day if you want. Not only that, but you may find that if you ask a question about the product on a discussion site, the marketing manager located across the globe responds to you in real time (and it's definitely way after working hours for them). They may send you a discount code so you can get the receiver at 10% off at a preferred online retailer.

The Internet shifted the power of choice from manufacturers, suppliers, advertising agencies, and stores to the single most important element of the system: the consumer. The flow of data has changed from trickle-down to a wide-open river, with the consumer being able to drink when and where they choose. The tools of communication make everyone equal (recall the classic New Yorker cartoon with the caption "On the Internet nobody knows you're a dog").

Marketing managers everywhere have had to make a radical shift in how they view their markets and their customers. There is little value in trying to hide information about your product or spread misinformation about your competitors-the Internet is a self-correcting ecosystem that almost always lets the truth shine through. The power of millions of consumers is always stronger than the power of a single company. Transparency is the only strong strategic move left when marketing.

But savvy marketers have a weapon at their disposal that consumers don't have. That weapon, as you'll see again and again in this book, is the data. The ability to engage in web analysis lets you harness the power of consumer choices and use it to predict and direct future behavior. As in any good system, there are always ways to find order amidst the chaos.

What Time Does the Store Open?

It may seem trite to write about shopping in your pajamas, but not that long ago it was a cutting-edge concept. For decades, the general rhythm of shopping was aligned with the rhythm of most jobs and most schools: Stores opened in the morning and closed in the evening. Unless you were a shift worker, your schedule was the same as everyone else's schedule. The only people shopping in their pajamas were doing so from a mail-order catalog or watching the Home Shopping Network. Impulsive desires ("I must have a pair of yellow pants now!") were rarely satisfied and usually forgotten by morning.

Professional marketers never gave much thought to the "when" of a purchase. From books to clothes to electronics, it was all about the customer being in the store to purchase the product. Making sure the channel was full of inventory was the key to success. If there was a run on a product, you usually saw it coming with plenty of time to spare. Likewise, if a product was going to be a flop, it took some time for the data to filter back to you. Price adjustments were done in a well-considered fashion.

On a typical day in the twenty-first century, the average consumer spends far more time browsing and buying online in a week than they would normally do in person in a month. The consumer chooses when to shop, where to shop, and what they buy based on their priorities, not the marketers. Living online is an empowering state for the consumer and should be equally empowering for the smart marketer.

Here are examples of some of the questions businesses now face. Did you know that more red sweaters sell between the hours of 7:00 AM and 10:00 AM with a 10% off coupon than with a $5 off coupon, but that the reverse is true between 8:00 PM and 11:00 PM? Will you run more ads at nighttime for your romance novels and more in the daytime for your business books? How are you connecting the reality of your stores closing at 10:00 PM with your online discounts decreasing at the same time?

The power of the always-on consumer is also the power of the data-smart marketer. As the shift toward more time online continues, having a strategy driven by the data of consumer behavior across time and across channels is the way in which companies will succeed. Chapter 5 of this book goes into considerable detail about making your marketing decisions using data.

The Shift from Offline to Online Marketing

Advertising used to be a simple game, or so it seemed. Print, TV, radio, outdoor, sponsorships, and direct were the channels, and it was a matter of determining how much you spent on each. The big money usually went to TV, because that was where you could get the big returns. It was all about the number of viewers-the impressions-you could get for your ad. Marketing strategy often meant advertising strategy, because that was the predominant way in which companies could connect with their audience.

The Interactive Advertising Bureau reported in November 2006 that Internet advertising revenue for Q3 of that year surpassed $4 billion. A decade earlier, the revenue was under $250 million. Just a few years earlier, the revenue was nothing. All that money had to come from somewhere.

The statistics across all forms of marketing spending are clear: The money is shifting from offline to online. There are two key reasons for this: The audience is spending their time online; and measuring marketing success online is orders of magnitude more accurate and informative than for any other medium. It's a data game now, and the team that knows how to analyze the data best wins.

Note: It isn't having the most data that wins; it's being able to do the best analysis. If we examine the migration from offline to online more closely, we see a natural evolution of the relationship marketing rigor and methodology pioneered by Lester Wunderman decades ago. Online allows marketing messages to be precisely targeted and often ensures that the audience is receptive to receiving those messages. Online also gives nearly infinite flexibility to test variations of a message or campaign in near real time. Imagine being able to run a slightly different TV commercial in 10 major cities at the same time and then knowing which was most effective at conversion before the hour was done. What is impossible offline has become routine online.

Many businesses are pursuing a marketing strategy online that means spending money on ads and buying keywords. Some companies dedicate vast resources to this effort and have detailed quantitative analyses of how each ad performs and which keywords are doing well on each of the major search engines. Marketing departments and advertising agencies have come to a point where they believe they know how to make online marketing work successfully.

Have you ever clicked a banner ad that promised something specific (such as "Click here to get 20% off our latest release") and ended up on the home page of a site with no information about that 20% discount to be seen anywhere? Perhaps you did a search and clicked one of the ads for your keyword (such as "wool socks") and found yourself on a site that sold everything from wool blankets to wool sweaters and wool socks. But you were still two or more clicks away from what your heart desired. (Continues...)

Excerpted from Actionable Web Analyticsby Jason Burby Shane Atchison Jim Sterne Copyright © 2007 by Jason Burby . Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

Edition details

• Publisher: Sybex
• Publication date: 2007
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0470124741
• ISBN 13: 9780470124741
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 288