Category: Marketing Analytics

We’re firm believers in the power of utilizing behavioral data to solve business problems. With the availability of reliable quantitative data, goals like marketing optimization and efficiency become a reality. Under the old database marketing paradigm, life was straightforward: Every marketing dollar was tracked against resulting customer-specific, transactional metrics. Inquiries, registrations, purchases, and profit could all be tied to addressable prospects and customers, and the cost of soliciting those actions could be calculated with precision. What we learned about consumer behavior informed our efforts, and the outcome was, in most cases, measurable improvement in our marketing efficiency over time.

But recently, the avalanche of new online data has threatened to derail us, cluttering our minds and our marketing dashboards with an ever-expanding array of disparate tables and graphs. A significant amount of time and effort is invested in compiling and reporting on these new metrics. But are all of them really advancing us toward our goal? Impressions, clicks, page views—where did the customers and sales go?

Author and business consultant Eric Ries wrote a post for the Harvard Business Review titled Entrepreneurs Beware of Vanity Metrics that really gets to the heart of the matter.  In it, he presents a discussion about Actionable metrics and their nemesis: Vanity metrics.  Whether you are a Start-up or Big Company, we think his observations apply to the multichannel marketing arena.  We agree with him that metrics should be:

Actionable—If you don’t believe it or you can’t repeat it, you can’t be confident in your decisions.
Accessible—To support effective business decision-making, reports must be understandable, available, and timely.
Auditable—Metrics must be credible, with no loss of integrity between the individual customers and atomic activities that roll up into summary numbers that appear in reports.

The Web brings us a lot of instant gratification and a mountain of data. As Mr. Ries accurately points out, people have a tendency to believe (and take credit for) positive metrics while they excuse (and deflect responsibility for) negative ones.  The most successful organizations will be those with the objectivity to discriminate between the actionable and the feel-good data. In other words, let’s be picky about what we measure and separate metrics that capture the essence of consumer behavior from metrics that reflect our own marketing department’s output.  If we maintain our focus and believe in our metrics—positive and negative—our business decision-making will be cheaper, clearer, and better.

We’ve been spending some time on Pat LaPointe’s Marketing Measurement Today blog. There’s one post in particular that struck a cord: Making The “Best” Case For Marketing Investments. It’s worth a read if you find yourself in this list below:

•  Using aggressive, moderate, and conservative labels on business case scenarios to show how even the most conservative view provides a strong potential return, and anything beyond that is gravy?

• Identifying the always-low break-even point at which expenses are recaptured fully, and showing how this point occurs even below the conservative outcome scenario?
• Taking a “haircut” in assumptions to show how, “even if you cut the number in half, the result is still positive.”

 Mr. LaPointe can help you understand the effects of this behavior and how to correct it.You know you want to; none of us has ever felt good uttering the line “even in f you cut the number in half…”

We’re well into the second week of the new year. Enough time has passed to have made resolutions, tried them on and then abandoned them. We can’t sit by and watch this happen! The opportunity for self improvement is passing you by!

To get you back on track, we offer up this gem, which we found out about from this gem.

It is perfect for helping you achieve your resolution to become a more analytic marketer, one who makes decisions based on data, one who can find “the proverbial needle of insight in the haystack of data”.  That’s a quote from Avinash Kaushik at Occam’s Razor.

(Yes, our Avinash blog crush continues in 2010)

If you’re a regular reader of our blog, then you know that we love Google’s Insights for Search product.

Yes it’s good for supporting all kinds of marketing-related decision making because it shows search volume patterns across regions, categories, and time periods to name a few. This can help you find your customers, gauge seasonality, and determine which product or service category your customers put you into.

But you if you really want to have fun with analytics (and who doesn’t?!), there’s lots of potential with Insights for Search. For example, we were wondering where in the world we would hide out if we were Tiger Woods. Insights for Search to the rescue. Turns out a whole bunch of places aren’t that interested in him in the last 30 days, or for the entire year of 2009, so lots of safe places. Note to Tiger: avoid most of North America, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa.

And while we’re at it, what’s up with Santa Claus in KY, WV and Indiana? And really, people in Montana, North Dakota and Wyoming aren’t all that interested in Netbooks? Okay this could go on forever. Now go have some analytics fun yourself! 

In yesterday’s Forrester newsletter, they referenced one of their research studies, “Profiling The Multichannel Consumer”. On its own, this sounds like a rich study, with one of the big conclusions is that some online shoppers are simply “window shopping”. Implication being: growth potential lies in converting these window shoppers using techniques and offers specifically aimed at lowering the barriers to purchasing amongst this segment.

But wait, there’s more!  Listed within the related research documents, there is another little gem: “Coordinated MultiChannel Campaigns”. The executive summary for this report states that less than half of online advertisers coordinate web design and search with their advertising creative. 

One of the reasons we brought all of our companies together under one umbrella called SolutionSet is to answer this challenge for Multichannel marketers. We’re calling for an end to silos, of disconnected marketing efforts, of disparate strategies and fragmented executions. These pitfalls only serve to confuse the intended recipient of your marketing, and ultimately supress sales. In this economic environment, we marketers must do everything we can to strip away barriers to purchase.  Sometimes that begins at the top  - with unification of strategy, messaging, creative, execution and measurement across all channels in order to cause a focused, consistent message that drives transactions.  

Some nuggets from a retail analyst appeared in an otherwise grim New York Times article covering back-to-school results. Retailers who are succeeding in this tough climate are doing so by coming up with innovative and fun promotions, like the Zumiez “5 for $85” deal. From the source:

John D. Morris, a retailing analyst with BMO Capital Markets, said more mall stores, like Gap and Aéropostale, offered buy-one-get-one-free sales. Others offered breaks on bundled merchandise, Mr. Morris said. He said that the teenage apparel chain Zumiez rolled out a “five for $85” promotion — three T-shirts and two pairs of jeans for $85.

“That deal started at $80 and it went to $85,” Mr. Morris said. “That tells you it worked. That tells you it is registering with the consumer.”

At Gymboree, customers could take 30 percent off whatever merchandise they managed to stuff into a Gymboree bag.

“The retailer is learning the native tongue of the new consumer,” Mr. Morris said. “It’s not only that you need to dangle value in the face of the consumer. It also tells you that the consumer is bored with the same old promotions. The smarter companies are going in and changing the marketing message.”

This made us think about the endless me-too promotions that are crossing our desk from direct marketers—Free Shipping! 20% Off! Buy One, Get One!—blah blah blah.

Direct marketers have a great ability to tailor their promotion to specific groups or even individuals. Far too few do anything with that power. So, since we are all going to be forced to promote this Holiday, why not use that promotion power to manage the customer life cycle?

How about getting some cross-category purchasing going by offering our apparel-only buyers, “Buy anything in our homewares section, and take 40% off first item”? How about offering our new customers a no-conditions $20 coupon for making their second purchase? How about acknowledging our best buyers and offering them concierge level treatment, lifetime unconditional returns and the like?  Wouldn’t we like to come out of this recession with more multiple buyers and fewer lost best customers? Since you’ll have to promote to stay aloft, try to do it creatively and strategically.

Raise your hand if you think analyzing response data to measure the effectiveness of online advertising (or any DM channel) is a new idea.

Nobody?

That’s what we thought.

Now raise your hand if you think this idea has been around in some shape or form since, well, let’s just call it A REALLY LONG TIME.

There we go, all of our loyal readers, with their hands raised high.

This article, titled “Put Ad on Web. Count Clicks. Revise”, was published just a few days ago in the New York Times (yes, we double checked, ‘cos we too thought maybe it had been written ten years ago) posits that advertisers and their agencies are only just now “putting numbers to an industry that’s never had numbers before.” That is an actual quote from Darren Herman, president of Varick Media Management located in Manhattan.

More on that topic, from the article:

Mr. Herman had run 27 ads on the Web for his client Vespa, the scooter company. Some were rectangular, some square. And the text varied: One tagline said, “Smart looks. Smarter purchase,” and displayed a $0 down, 0 percent interest offer. Another read, “Pure fun. And function,” and promoted a new T-Shirt.

While we all know that this is called a test plan, where one tests formats, offers, headlines, etc., we are astonished that this concept is considered new to anyone in marketing.

By the way, we don’t want to pick on Mr. Herman, or his clients, just because they had the misfortune of being quoted in this article, so please if you’re reading this, don’t take it personally.

The article leaves us with this thought:

Don’t assume that your clients, your colleagues, your research partners and vendors, your boss, or your direct reports are familiar with the age-old concept of measuring marketing effectiveness. Assume that it is your job to be the analytics evangelist! Whether you are an account executive, a creative, or a strategist your first question should be “how are we going to measure the success of the marketing?”

If you want some inspiration, please visit the excellent site of web analyst extraordinaire Avinash Kaushik. You will not only get fired up, you will also understand why I have a web-crush on him.

Don’t take our word for it, check out this article by Sharon Goldman on DMNews. An excerpt:

The fact is, data is the new sexy in the world of marketing. Everyone wants it. Everyone needs it. Everyone wants more of it.

Phew Sharon, you’re making us kinda hot and bothered.

Maybe it’s taken the recession to bring others around to our way of thinking. But no matter how you got here, welcome! We believe the more people who operate in a data-driven decision making process, the better.

With unemployment rates reported at 8.5% in March (the highest it’s been since 1983), it’s a sobering time for business and a back-to-basics time for marketing. Everywhere I turn, experts are touting a return to simplicity in order to weather the recession-storm.

Several months ago, when some of us may have still somewhat been in denial about whether we were even actually in a recession, I came across a great banner ad for JELL-O on a consumer magazine website. The ad messaging made no bones about times being tough:

Even when you’re on a budget
You can still feel rich
and chocolatey too.

While consumers are watching their food budgets and heading back to basics (NPR reports that cooking lessons are on the rise, with more people trying to prepare meals at home), businesses also need to spend smarter by focusing on fundamentals like ROI. And there’s no better way to watch the numbers than to focus marketing dollars on digital, where click-throughs, test pages, and conversions are clearly quantifiable.

It’s true that necessity breeds ingenuity, and SolutionSet has the right blend of digital marketing experience and creative design to do a lot with a little. It’s what the Haggin Marketing family calls “BrandActional.”

One of our clients wanted to update their site in an effort to drive more conversions, but needed to justify the cost of making site enhancements. We engaged with them and installed user tracking software (ClickTale) to be able to quickly (and at low-cost to the client) track and understand how users were interacting with their site. This exploration coupled with reviewing and analyzing their site analytics allowed us to come forth with recommendations that were based on data and user behavior, making it easy for our client to prove the need for these optimizations. The end result was that we were able to suggest straightforward site enhancements that would lead to the client’s end goal of more conversions and ultimately positively impacting the bottom line.

[Thanks to Paige Kobert for providing the above ClickTale success story.]

It’s a rare day in the ad business when one is both humbled and truly excited to see another’s work.
As a preparer, presenter, and audience member of too many quantitative presentations to recall, I thought I knew what comprised a great presentation of data. In fact, I thought I was a master.

No more.

Professor of Global Health Hans Rosling shames all of us marketers in this stunning talk you can view on ted.com.

Visualization and animation combine to make what might be a dry discussion on developments in world health into a stunningly informing and entertaining talk. After viewing this, I now am committed to working ever harder with the data we present…and I bet you will as well.

(FYI: The information you see in this is not that hard to produce. The “kids” who do it for Dr. Rosling are accustomed to getting new information from him the night before a lecture, and creating this magic overnight.)