Archive for the ‘analytics’ Category
Correcting Myself
Posted by Jamie Hutson | Filed under Life, Start Ups, analytics, marketing, measurement
Ok, anyone who knows me knows I can get pretty fired up. And sometimes in the privacy of my computer I can get a little overzealous about my thoughts/feelings, especially related to recent experiences. I am also pretty good at acknowledging these blights, and when necessary correcting them. In the past few weeks, I think I may have transmitted some of these blights into this blog, so I’d like to address them.
I have of late been very hard on the financial markets and the coverage of them RE: their view on the internet. And in fairness, I live alot of my life on the internet, I run an internet company and I know a few people who do as well. However, coming across a few data points (particularly this one from Greg Sterling) about E-Commerce having basically flat growth and a few fairly average earnings reports, I think I was getting a bit ahead of myself. I know a good bit about the markets, I know alot more about the internet, but the internet is still a small piece of the economy, and as a whole of our nation, only the early adopters are really savvy to its power and potential. I guess I just never really considered myself and early adopter.
On a second point, I recently remarked on a meeting I had a few weeks ago and used the term “don’t get it.” After reading this post from Mark Cuban, I realized that in some way I was being lazy when discussing the potential project. I didn’t drill “it” down enough for them. Although I never actually used this term with them, nor would I (it is rather insulting), it hit me that in many ways I’ve rationalized deals that never happened or meetings that didn’t go well as them “just not getting it.” The important part of this is that it made me a little better, and now I realize I have alot more work to do to get to a level I didn’t realize I wasn’t already on. If that makes any sense.
You can’t manage what you don’t measure, or something like that.
Magical Live Analytics
Posted by Jamie Hutson | Filed under Search Marketing, analytics, measurement, web 2.0
Thanks to Darren for bringing my attention to this great new tool. Woopra is the latest analytical tool I’ve seen. And its wicked cool.
It has a really nice interface that allows you to see, in real time, who is on your website, how they got there, what they are looking at and where they go from here. On top of this exceptionally interesting data, compiled live and as it happens, it has an exciting feature - chat. You are able to have a conversation with the person who is visiting your website, in real time.
This really got me fired up. I was done with “work” and home with my girlfriend, and I got the invite from Woopra, set it up and as soon as I was up and running I was “wowing” every few seconds. Watching visitors come to our site, how they got there, what they were looking at and for how long, and where they went from there. It’s very interesting data, and very exciting to see happening live!
The implications from this (at least to me) are nothing new, but the fact that this is live for FREE is a great. I’m not sure what their revenue model is going to be (assuming s Freemium model of some sort), but I can see alot of value in the site. Imagine if advertisers were able to monitor this data in real time, and engage in a conversation with my visitor (yes the big guys have similar chat features…), or if I was a smaller site who could see a potential customer on our site, be able to track where they came from and what they looked at and most importantly what call to action was most, or least, effective.
Its a very fun interface to use, and its exciting to see how visitors interact with the web, in real time. It makes typical analytics look like SportsCenter compared to a live game.
A review of NewsCred
Posted by Jamie Hutson | Filed under Life, Start Ups, Syndication, analytics, sharing applications, social media, web 2.0
After posting about the growing amount of information and its consequential devaluation, I received a chance to use and review a new service - NewsCred - All the world’s credible news, in one place, a new aggregator that allows registered users to vote on articles and choose to “Credit” the author or article, or “Discredit” the author or article. It is actually similar to my iGoogle homepage in that I can select the news sources and blogs that I want to follow, and track the creditability of. They are out to filter the “Signal to Noise” ratio…
One of the really cool things about the service is that they allow anyone to rank the credibility of an article, an author, or a source (newpaper, blog, etc) based on credibility, quality, transparency and accuracy. The voting process is compiled using their “credibility waterfall algorithm” which although, I don’t like the name (is that a technical term), is a neat concept. It allows the creditability ranking of a specific article to affect the creditability ranking of the author, which in turn affects the creditability ranking of the article’s source. Overall this will theoretically serve you the highest quality and credible news from all across the web. It seems to do a pretty good job of that.
One thing I feel the site needs to really become successful is the proliferation of a “digg” style badge. The relatively new plethora of sharing sites across the internet need a way to tout their creditability, and if the NewsCred “Creditability” ranking badge could furnish this demand, then NewsCred could truly have something remarkable on their hands.
The two largest threats I see for the site are one, reaching a critical mass where they have enough users to rank and “credit” articles which I might read or be interested in; and second, someone else doing that sooner. If the site never really catches on, I don’t really see it becoming anything special, that may go without saying, but here is another 2.0 player in need of user volume.
Its definitely a cool site, one worth checking out. They clearly have a good vision of where they want to be, and how they want to do it and I think it can be successful.
Thanks to the guys at NewsCred for working on something that might actually improve the quality of news out there.
IAC earnings, Todays Online Economy
Posted by Jamie Hutson | Filed under Small Businesses, advertising, analytics, marketing, measurement, revenue models, web 2.0
IAC reported its first quarter earnings today, with revenue up 22% and income up 15%, you could say that they had a very good quarter considering the gloomy shadow over the economy in that period. Most of this is due to their Media & Advertising division which saw a 192% increase in income. The Media & Advertising division consists of ask.com, CitySearch and Evite along with their other online properties (exluding Match.com). This substantial growth can be contributed to a few things, but most notably I would point out this shows that the online advertising space is positioned to grow very nicely, particularly in the current economic climate.
The fiasco resulting from comScore’s under reporting of Google’s clicks was a good representation of how the internet is still new to many big players. ComScore, regarded as the primo player in online measurement published a report that tanked Google stock, sent online agencies and publishers into a panic and threw a shroud of false gloom over the entire industry.
While our company has seen a cutback in spending from some of our advertisers, and hesitancy from new clients to invest their marketing in a new space, for the most part we have seen healthy earnings growth, an expanding customer base and a large increase in traffic. A good friend of mine running a leading e-tailer of health products and services saw revenues up 38% yr/yr in Q1 of ‘08. Our company doubled revenues over first quarter 2007. Online is up and its good.
Today the US economy reported a modest .6% growth. “NOT TECHNICALLY A RECESSION”, “THE US ECONOMY SLUMPS THROUGH 1ST QUARTER”, “INVESTORS SEE RECESSION, WALL STREET DEPRESSION” - those were the various headlines across the internet. I did a quick search and found that every major news outlet had some sort of dreary publishing of this not so bad news. The Dow is up .9%, the NASDAQ is up .4% but everyone is running around declaring the bad news.
People are smarter than this (some people anyway) but its hard to ignore the warnings. I see people making smart decisions with their marketing money, which is basically me saying “I see people spending their marketing money online.” The yellow pages are dead, and even the YPs are building their online presence. Google’s huge numbers are back in peoples mind and small businesses want to be a part of that success. Money is being spent, and thus money is being made - online. Thats where the people are going and thats where the budgets are beginning to gravitate.
I saw a segment from Lewis Black last night where he was mocking the younger generations for spending hours online each day. I like Lewis Black, but he went on a rant that just was not funny to me. He sounded like someone from the Prohibition era talking about how young people spend all their time in bars, drinking. Well Lewis, its not just young people, and we aren’t just making fake friends on MySpace. We (meaning people who use the internet) are finding information, researching purchasing decisions, exploring entertainment (music, video, even TV) and building our network of contacts. I find it ironic that you can watch Lewis Black on YouTube, talking about how people waste their time on YouTube. Hey Lewis, how would you feel if I told you that 30% of the people who watch you speak, are watching you online??
Lewis Black has nothing to do with what I’m talking about, but everything. The online economy is heating up, profits are up, more people are online and more transactions are being made and researched online then ever before. The majority of these companies are seeing great profits and surging business opportunities. The old market is not what it used to be - The World is Flat and we can’t just keep measuring things they way we used to, otherwise everything will look all messed up.
Kind of like when the economy shows a better than expected growth rate, and thats a bad thing… what if we excluded all these online and new media companies from that number - how bad would it be then?
Engagement! (ooh buzz word)
Posted by Jamie Hutson | Filed under analytics, marketing, measurement, sharing applications, social media, web 2.0
The term engagement is flying around pretty freely these days. How do we measure engagement? Can we measure engagement? What exactly is engagement? Well, if none of these people know, then how do we go about defining it, measuring it and building a model to capitalize on engagement?
My take on engagement falls similarly to what Lester Wunderman wrote about engagement. I would define engagement as: Choosing to interact or involve yourself in something. That something can be a website, a brand, a store, a blog, or a television station. The interaction or involvement can be a comment on a blog, a post in a forum, a complaint or experience card in a restaurant, changing the TV chanel, speaking with a floor salesperson at Target. Engagement is interaction with a brand or service by choice.
The web, especially 2.0, as brought the world the ultimate (to this point) platform for engagement. People spend hours a day online, engaging themselves with different brands, different sites and people from all over the world. Search engines allow us to target our engagement even further - they bring us a higher degree of engagement, we make a conscious decision to search for a topic, and then choose to visit one site over the other and spend our time engaging that site.
I believe this engagement will soon be the best measure of an advertisers campaign online. I’m not quite sure how it will work, but measuring engagement is a great way to get a sense of if and how people are interacting with your online campaign.
Here is a “For instance”, if Coca Cola creates a virtual world, and they measure engagement by counting how many people create an avatar, and then compare that to how many of those people come back and use that avatar again, Coca Cola could then measure engagement as a function of ‘# of avatars, frequency of use, and abandonment.’ (Lets say: 1000 avatars created; 600 came back 2 or more times; 200 never came back; your level of engagement could be 600/(1000-200) or .75.) This can be interpreted however you want (in this world of spin we live in - who knows..) perhaps you could use this to say that 75% of the people who responded to your promotion where “relevantly engaged” and 20% were not. I don’t know if this makes any sense to marketers and I’m sorry if I lost you…
Or you could measure engagement by counting interactions purchases, perhaps a redemption of a coupon.
I found myself using engagement in a pitch to an advertiser today, he asked me what I meant by engagement. I said “a website visitor choosing to interact with the site or to take an action that wasn’t necessarily related to why they found themselves on this site.” (I was referring to user submissions as engaging).
After all this I think that maybe engagement is just a different way of saying Web 2.0.
Targeted Traffic, Bounces and Your Dollars
Posted by Jamie Hutson | Filed under Local Search, advertising, analytics, marketing, measurement
Today’s post comes after a hectic week, many miles of travel and a post by Seth Godin (Silly Traffic).
His post talks about a 75% bounce rate and the value of doing the best you can with the other 25% of the people who actually stay on your site. While I agree that maximizing conversions with the bulk of your traffic is important, a believe that in this day of niche and segmentation you shouldn’t be operating (and probably won’t be for long) a website that turns away 3 quarters of your potential traffic.
We run online city guides. Naturally we target our SEO and our paid links to reach people searching for what our content is all about. For the keyword “Restaurants in Providence, RI” our bounce rate for organic clicks is 8.3% (according to Google Analytics) and our PPC bounce rate for that keyword is even lower - 4.4%. I know those are really good numbers, and we do have entry keywords that bounce 40-50% of potential traffic (sitewide the bounce rate is 38%), but our top 20 keywords all have bounce rates under 12%.
My explanation of this is targeting. While some websites might have hundreds of thousands of pages and millions of products - tons of information, our sites have specific, segmented content that is designed to reach people searching for exactly what we offer. I don’t think any lightbulbs are going off in anyone’s head here, and I’m certainly not the first person/website to target specific traffic, but what are people doing with a website that turns away 75% of your traffic?!?
If you have a site about golden retrievers, and you target your SEO keywords and placement towards anyone searching for dogs, you are missing out on your core audience - golden retriever lovers. I feel like this is right up Seth’s alley, and was I very surprised to read his last post. He brings up excellent points in the second half of his post, but he seemed to contradict himself a bit.
75% of all unfocused visitors leave within 3 seconds.
He then says that “unfocused” could mean a digg link or even a Google search, but that 75% is ok.
The beautiful thing I’ve found about the internet is that you can get people to your site, targeted, focused people, by optimizing your site for certain keywords - in other words, focused traffic. Well I’m quite sure that more than 75% of people searching for “Siberian Buddhist Colonies” would bounce if they came across my site, but why would they come across my site looking for that.
They most likely wouldn’t and if our team is doing our job, they won’t. We want targeted traffic on our sites. People searching for the information our advertisers are paying to have found. So perhaps Godin’s point is overall correct, that you need focused traffic to succeed, but suggesting that it is wise not to worry about a 75% bounce rate is contradicting the whole point of search engines - to find what we are looking for.
We have succeed by building targeted and focused traffic on our sites, and by keeping our visitors on our site longer to maximize potential exposure to our advertisers. Ultimately in our space (my thoughts), you need to build a website that gets focused traffic, maintains a low bounce rate (<20%) and retains these visitors for an extended visit session with quality related content.
Our advertisers’ success is driven around our ability to provide them with targeted leads, and focused traffic. But if 75% of our traffic left in 3 seconds, our advertisers would not be far behind.
Analytics, Where did you get these?
Posted by Jamie Hutson | Filed under Life, advertising, analytics, measurement
In a recent fit of analytic interpretation, I really started digging down into our different analytical programs. Google Analytics is the most comprehensive we have, we use two different programs based on log files, and several script based tools.
Going back a ways to a post by Darren Herman, Numbers Don’t Lie, Except When They Do, he touches on a very important point in the measurement of visitors, which set of data is accurate. While there have been recent reports on deleted cookies increasing measured visits, there have been opposite accounts of under reporting.
My recent experience here evolved from a conflict that was directly affecting my advertising budget - Adwords was not agreeing with Analytics. In the process of tracking which Adwords keywords were resulting in the deepest visits into my site, I discovered that while Adwords was sending X amount of clicks per day, analytics was reporting fewer. In one keyword, Adwords charged us for 57 clicks, while Analytics was only reporting 43. Now that is a major discrepancy. While the value of this is not huge (at $.17 CPC) but at a percentage of difference this is major. For one particular campaign Analytics reports 1,049 visits from that keyword over the course of March, Adwords is reporting 1,246. These aren’t showing up as bounces, or repeats, these are just clicks from Adwords. If I was dealing with 5700 versus 4300, now we are talking major dollars, and major pains.
So then I head over to my AdSense account, and of course page impressions are different again. Google has responded with a fairly ambiguous explanation of log files versus scripts and varying reporting methods, but nothing on their own methods and why they disagree, conveniently to my disadvantage. I am certain that if they noticed my Adsense account was receiving more clicks than it actually was, they would fix it.
But back to the issue at hand, how are advertisers and agencies supposed to gather the correct data. One of my sites gets about 250k page views a month. According to Google Analytics - 60k. That discrepancy does not compute. Deleted cookies might inflate my unique visitor count, but how does that account for 45 GB of data transfer. And thats not email solely traffic to our website.
In December our sites crashed due to a server overload. What happened, did the 145 visitors that Google Analytics reported cause that? I doubt it. Quantcast, Alexa, SiteMeter… they are all way off. How do these all work. It is a learning curve for me, although I’ve been learning for a year and a half now, I still don’t get it.
Log files reported 120k visits to my network in March with over 750k page views. QuantCast reported 16k with 80k page views. Who am I to believe? Perhaps more importantly, who are my prospects going to believe?
The 5% rule
Posted by Jamie Hutson | Filed under Life, advertising, analytics, measurement, revenue models
I’m not sure that there is much scientific data to back this up across the board, but in my experience this theory/rule works. There is alot of click-through data, and conversion ratios that would support this as well.
My 5% theory is that ultimately about 5% of your efforts are ultimately going to succeed. Whether it is converting a lead in sales or converting a purchase on your website. And sometimes 5% is very good. The best online stores convert <5% of their visitors into a purchase, 3 - 4% is often considered excellent.
Now, this theory has alot to do with a lack of focus that many people, and most businesses have and is a by product of the long build up of the mass market. As the internet has grown in influence and instant communications have flattened and shrunken the world, the mass market is largely disappearing in favor of small, segmented niche markets. These markets are allowing niche businesses to succeed wildly by focusing on people who want, need and have a strong desire for their products or services.
My self learned lesson (recently and thanks to a little inspiration from Seth Godin), is that in business and in life, it is tempting to throw cast the wide net and see who we can catch. However, it is often quite to your advantage to focus on what you do best.
On the other hand, not every product has a tiny niche market that you are able to reach. There are many factors that might prevent you from reaching that market (technology, scale, personnel, etc), and sometimes you are better off going after a larger piece of the pie.
What I am essentially getting at is that in life and in business you need to focus on that 5%. Whether you choose to narrow your focus on a 5% niche, or you choose to take the 5% conversion rate you have and focus on increasing that. Instead of casting a larger net, focus on landing a high percentage of your casts. Maybe you narrow your business, or maybe you get better at it. Either way, the rest of the world operates at 5%, and you (and me) need to find a way to make that 5% more valuable.
So take a look at what you do, and see if you can do it better, grow that 5% into 98% or to 8% one way or another, the 5% rule will make sense in what you do.
