Category: Marketing Analytics

In our relentless pursuit of analytic perfection, we present to you a pie chart of things Rick Astley would never do.

Find more examples of people analyzing pop culture in their free time at GraphJam.

His name? Claude Hopkins. His deal? Believed that advertising existed only to sell something. Hopkins wrote a book called “Scientific Advertising” (available here in it’s entirety) about which David Ogilvy said “Nobody should be allowed to have anything to do with advertising until he has read this book seven times. It changed the course of my life.” We tend to agree.

If you feel like you’ve been in too many conversations about brand currency and the appropriate use of logos, color palette, and the like, then this book will remind you that all marketing issues come back to this: “Will it help sell more widgets?”.

If you’re not sure a book about marketing written over 80 years ago is relevant today, just read Chapter 2. Good, good stuff.

Before you run off with the latest data results and change your marketing program, take a close look and see if the numbers actually make sense. In an article I wrote for MultichannelMerchant.com, I take the stance that human experience and intuition is necessary in the highly automated world of database sciences. A quick excerpt:

“But no amount of analytic muscle or high-tech software can guarantee that actionable insights materialize into valuable business initiatives without a great deal of human intervention. It’s here, in the hand-off between the art and science of advanced analytics and the reality of program execution, that we need to acknowledge there is a skill separate from database science that enables great marketing.”

As a project manager I don’t have a lot of time. That’s not to say that our designers or developers are brimming with free time, but we “PMs” like to get as much to fit into one day as possible. We crave efficiency. We bow to to the goddess Process (from the Latin processus “process, advance, progress” and procedere “go forward”). So if you want to make your PM, or otherwise details-at-a-glance type friend, a happy camper, here are some quick tips and tricks I picked up in my previous world of public relations:

Email Optimization

1. In Outlook, turn on color rules (eg. Blue for “sent only to me”). It makes choosing which email to read first a lot easier.
2. Proceed to send email “To” the person who should respond and Cc: all others. (more…)

Day one of the community forum has treated us to a keynote speak from Alan Weber (Co-Founding editor of Fast Company) to talks hosted by Rohit Bhargava (SVP Digital Strategy and Marketing Olgivy) to Rachael Makeel (Ebay) and Mark Williams (Apple Support Community).

This invitation only event has attracted an impressive list of representatives from Cisco, eBay, Microsoft, Consumer Reports, Apple, Yahoo amongst many others.

One exciting fact: Mikhail Gorbachev is staying at our hotel speaking about the environment in Santa Fe. I’m hoping to get a glimpse of him.

Some interesting top line points/notes from the conference:

1. Community Strategy - two fold (Business Strategy and Community Strategy)

2. Don’t think the community belongs to the organization. The community belongs to the users. This approach will help drive managing community strategy and decisions.

3. ROI - Analyze in two ways (Investment but also Time)

4. Metrics (business and user specific) - List out the community site objectives then outline a measure-able metric for each. This applies for both the organization but also driving and understanding the objectives of the users. Then providing them with visibility of their success for their own objectives can drive higher adoption and use.

5. The opportunities with communities go beyond the revenue measurement. The value of brand equity, knowledge sharing, self support etc is more difficult to measure but hold value within the community engagement.

Day Two

Future of Online Communities

1. The future of community will blur distinct communities and content to be less about features but more about “my relationships” with my constituents. Also the speaker mentioned considering the open framework (e.g. OpenID) between varying communities to allow users to weave at their own patchwork of communities around their own interests. Jenna Woodul CCO LiveWorld

2. Corporate America needs to open to have a dialogue with their customers to drive relationships, loyalty and interaction. This will drive brand engagement, product strategy and thought leadership. Stephanie Bowman - Sr. Product Manager Adobe

Wow, these messages sound familiar and part of the genetics of how SolutionSet views the impact of Brand Marketing. The leading organizations will drive and lead this methodology with creating relationships through community marketing strategies.

Comscore just recently released a study examining the effects of search and online display ads to varying conversions such as site visits and offline sales.

A few years ago while working at a previous agency, I launched a similar campaign for an established and well known helmet manufacturer based in Santa Cruz. The purpose was to run an online campaign to drive sales of their products at a large retailer. The executive team at the helmet company was skeptical about the effectiveness of online advertising. However, we were able to convince them to test a pilot campaign.

We measured the sales at retail locations in the quiet period and gather historical sales for the same period for the past two years. The reason was that seasonal purchasing behavior affects these types of products also. This served as our baseline. We then tested our campaign with PPC search only and a combination of both online ads and search. We found that there was a statistically significant list on in store sales as a result of the campaign. However, we also found that the search medium provided the heavy lifting in terms of sales when compared with online display ads. One note not reported by Comscore was that we experience a lack of about 2-3 weeks after the online campaigns launched before the in store numbers reached their lift peak.

I was excited to see that the Comscore study supported our results. However, they are reported much larger sales lifts percentages. This may be due to any number of variables.

The big take aways?

1. Online advertising significantly effects offline sales

2. Search advertising is more effective than online ads to drive sales conversions

3. Running both mediums drives a larger return on advertising then running independently

On February 25th, New York Magazine introduced an issue baring Lindsay Lohan mimicking poses from a famous photo shoot at the Bel Air Hotel in LA as Marilyn Monroe. It was photographed by the same gentleman, Bert Stern, who photographed Marilyn. There was some controversy and good taste backlash - which was probably to the benefit of the publisher.

Smartly, the publisher decided to include the photos free online via their slideshow feature that appeared in the actual magazine. The numbers are staggering…In the first TWO days after the release, which included a server outage due to traffic. They experienced 34 Million page views. It is estimated that ad sales for those two days at an estimated $15 CPM that the New York Magazine earned $500,000 on online ad sales (IN TWO DAYS without the overhead costs of paper and printing). The amazing part is that the slideshow can reside virtually forever with $$ coming in with each impression. Consider that actual magazine sales are short lived and restricted by the numbers that are printed in the run and that they get replaced with the next issue - the online medium’s ceiling is less limiting.

Anyway, granted Sex sells but this is a great example of the power of the online medium and the power of how more accessible content is online to drive such volume of viewership.

Check out our recent commentary on MediaPost’s Online Media Daily that addresses leveraging the power of community and content for reaching brand and advertising goals.

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There’s a new analytical tool out there for the web offered through Clicktale. I feel it’s a good idea to know what’s new out there and I wanted to let you know that I’m trying it out.

A fellow Project Manager sent me an email about adding recordings of how users visit a website, offered through a service, Clicktale. I ran the request by our Managing Partner who said, “go for it”.

It’s always fun to see what’s new and interesting out there as far as services go for the web. Initially, everyone seems pretty excited, but after awhile it’s good to check and see if we’re still interested in the results enough to review the data.

It’s possible that we may want to suggest the service to a client who we feel would benefit and the best way to review something is to try it out yourself.

I’ve added the code to our website, which entails adding a bit of clicktale provided javascript to the header and footer of the web pages. Once that’s done, clicktale immediately starts recording visits to the site and actually records how a visitor navigates through your website and around your pages.

Here’s a screenshot of the results for our website: www.solutionset.com

From here you can expand the results and view the recording of that visitor. It’s pretty fun, and I’ll see what I can learn from it.