Digging in to Web analytics a low priority...

Apparently 458 B2B marketers were surveyed about a wide range of web analytics and it turns out that only 6% report that they were effectively measuring online activities. (see b2bonline.com) Excluding eCommerce players, I'd say this is pretty much in line with my experience.

As the report further suggests, this is often due to staffing constraints. There are a lot of things to do, and devoting a staff member to finding issues that are not easily resolved is... well, not a priority.

Yet I have a couple of clients who I assist with their analytics on a consultative basis. It's been very helpful to them to understand the types of content and information that engage their visitors, how they navigate to the site, and when and why they leave. Being skilled at making actionable recommendations and integrating analytics into the overall marketing plan ensures that my efforts are of high value.

I do think that having a full time person pulling analytics from a marketing-centric site all the time seems unnecessary. But quarterly or annually? A necessity.

The Internet's Latest Victim -- The Traditional Marketing Department

I was reading the most recent edition of B2B Magazine on the plane yesterday and one article caught my eye. Apparently Forrester surveyed over 250 B2B interactive marketing executive last year and discovered that there is a need to realign marketing organizations to really capitalize on the interactive opportunity. Forrester is calling their recommendations CORE -- Customer branding, Optimized technology, Responsive engagement, and Empowered staff.

Combining their thoughts with what I've seen over the past 15 years in the online strategy space working extensively with corporate marketing functions, I'm developing a full white paper and calling my recommendations MPG -- Message, Platform, and Governance. MPG, ROI, so similar, no?

Message

Fundamentally, what are we trying to communicate, and to whom?

The entire online space has exposed a major flaw in many marketing departments: there are not enough skilled resources to craft meaningful content across the many platforms that need regular care and feeding. In the old offline world, a marketing group only needed to put out brochures from time to time, and maybe assist their agency in developing TV or a print ad that would have a paragraph or two of content if that.

Now, though, someone has to create multiple web pages about each major product or service, be interesting on Facebook, respond appropriately on Twitter, write emails.... etc.

Platform

In another era, there were only a handful of platforms, most of them not requiring much from a marketing group:

• The actual production of brochures were done by a printer
• An agency took care of the TV, print, and radio media, asset creation, and distribution.
• Another agency did all aspects of direct mail.

While the marketing organization directed and coordinated all of these activities, they didn't have many true production roles.

Now there are quite a few aspects of online that require marketers to possess production skills -- web content management, email, twitter, Facebook postings, blogs, message boards.... The list is pretty long.

Governance

The Internet has forced organizations to definitively show one face to their customers, and has also made marketing and IT discover each other's worlds. These two factors have created a broad range of ownership and responsibility issues.

I'm working on blowing this out to a full white paper. Stay tuned.

Content Marketing: The Next Big Thing

Apparently this is the year of “Content”. Conferences, articles, books, white papers, entire special editions of trade rags… all about the vital role of CONTENT in the online space. And more than a few of the items read as though they were explaining the dark side of the moon. My personal favorites are the ones that start with explaining what “content” is… now, there’s some remedial content.

I’ve been working to develop sites and eCRM programs that broadly meet the needs of desired participants since 2001. Looking back on many of these efforts, it’s true that there has been a real issue with providing information that users were seeking on sites, or interested in reading in email campaigns. Target users consistently request and value in-depth information about products and services, yet marketers struggle to develop content beyond three paragraph descriptions filled with positioning statements.

How did we get to this strange place?

You’d think that the opportunity to provide strong introductory copy, good differentiating information, and increasingly detailed product facts would be just a standard practice. That’s far from the truth. Early on in the online space there was a strong desire to replicate traditional advertising and sales models in a digital manner. Consumer sites pretty rapidly formed as either “brand experiences” or eCommerce, while B2B sites were little more than well organized brochures.

Over the years I’ve had to be an evangelist for content on quite a few occasions. And true to form, evangelists can end up being martyrs, too…

In late 2005 our agency got one of the largest consumer battery brands as a client. I was assigned to lead a discovery project that would drive a full site redesign. I immediately reviewed the site analytics and fielded an online survey to discover that people actually came to the site to learn about the product – especially more specialty products like hearing aid batteries and the like. Sadly, the site was almost entirely geared at the iconic nature of their brand advertising. And the marketers couldn’t part with their advertising-centric low-interest site.

Not long after that I worked on the largest athletic drink brand. I was excited when they decided to move all of their sweepstakes registrations online as they would be gathering over a million brand loyalists emails a year! Imagine my shock when I met with the CMO to discuss the amazing CRM opportunity that this afforded… to be told that really, they didn’t have any desire to engage in an ongoing dialog with consumers because she believed they didn’t really have enough content or desire to create more.

B2B marketers haven’t been much better. Another of my clients was a large B2B eCommerce player who wanted to be seen as providing business solutions, not just product from a catalog. They were also ceasing production on an established print magazine they had done for a number of years. So it seemed like a perfect opportunity to create an eZine that would focus on the needs of their core customers and also position some of their products. The development was incredibly difficult as their site didn’t really allow for content modules and we had to go with a microsite. They had tremendous traffic and interest, yet there was a concern that it didn’t tie directly enough to commerce. Okay, okay, at least they did build and maintain the content.

Why the sudden interest then?

Four factors seem to have come together to finally push content development to the forefront:

• Proven demand – as marketers become aware of specifically how their site is being used from site analytics, they’ve come to realize that information about products / services is nearly always the top area of focus, yet rarely very engaging


• Email marketing – the desire to link email campaigns in to a broader conversation has always required content, but has not often been a fully realized opportunity


• Search engine optimization – a major spark, SEO experts have consistently lobbied for more and deeper content to improve keyword rankings


• Social marketing – ongoing interaction and dialog has both created much better understanding of customer interests, as well as heightened the need for content

Although some of these drivers are as old as the Internet, it’s the recent push to social marketing that seems to have really created the storm of interest.

My next few blogs will expand on a process to identify and develop high impact content. Watch for them!

Completed your 2010 Website Benchmark yet?

Happy New Year!

Sorry I haven’t posted in a while. 2010 ended with a BIG project helping a major small business software company rethink their online strategy.

One aspect of the discovery phase was to review their site metrics to better understand current site usage patterns. This wasn’t a months-long project so I asked to see their current quarterly or annual benchmark reports only to discover that they don’t do standard reporting of traffic, engagement patterns, content viewed, etc.

I thought that this just was the exception that proved ‘everyone does benchmark reporting’ until I had a couple of beers with an old friend who’s run digital agencies and now works for a very large digital media company. When I mentioned that I did ‘annual benchmark studies’ for a variety of clients, he was interested in what I considered standard.

So… here we go!

Why complete an annual web metrics benchmark study?

If you’ve just been told to do one, or your organization does one by rote, feel free to skip ahead. If you’re wanting or needing some great reasons to complete an annual benchmark study, read on.

From my experience, benchmark studies are completed to:

• Monitor site successes with an eye toward improving various metrics
• Identify aspects of the site that could be improved, and prioritize those improvements
• Determine how information and functionality on the site is used, and the affects of usage

What does an annual web metrics benchmark study include?

A full benchmark study includes a detailed analysis of five primary aspects of the site:

• Visits . These data elements provide top line information about initial user interaction with your site, and include:

o Daily visits – to see changes through the year and identify causes for spikes and valleys

o Page views, by day – will also show trends and spikes

• Visitors. Information about visitors shows whether we have a loyal, regular audience, or if users come periodically based on their immediate needs.

o Visitors, by day – shows peaks and valleys, may differ significantly from ‘visits’ on sites where some users may come more than once a day

o Visitor loyalty – frequency distribution to show return patterns

o Geographical distribution – most interesting for international sites, but may have relevance for US sites as well

• Sources of Traffic. A key aspect of the analysis is what seems to drive users to come… are they seeking information on a search engine? Referred from other sites? Or do they know us and type in our URL or link from an email we sent?

• Site Usage. After learning about who uses the site and why they appear to be coming, it’s important to study what they do while on the site.

o Pages viewed per visit – allows you to judge whether users are engaging with site

o Time spent on site -- also shows engagement levels

o Content areas accessed – as a summary measurement, you should determine the percentage of pages viewed for your primary content areas

o Primary pages – the top 10 or 20 pages should be analyzed in some detail to understand navigation patterns, usage patterns, bounces and exits

• Goals achieved. For an ecommerce site, goals are fairly straight-forward… sales. Examining the achievement of goals across the sales funnel provides the greatest detail, as does a study of the achievement patterns across the year. Other sites should have goals identified such as leads generated, videos viewed in full, clicks to ‘contact us’, etc.

What should we do after the benchmark?

After studying the results in depth and drawing initial conclusions, more detailed analyses of various aspects will probably be needed.