Don't work harder, get Smarter!

So you're boss has just told you that you need to cut your marketing spend for 2012 by 50% - ouch!

What do you do? All the data you need to gather/analyse/predictive modelling and so on... So much to do now!
The old adage that "one half of the marketing budget will be working for your business, but which half?" springs to mind!
Sure, you could look at your usual reports for the information, look at your PPC keywords, attribute revenue and performance to each search engine/keyword and try to work out what is and isn't working for your business - but just take a moment to consider just how many keywords you have? It won't be a few (or even a few hundred), more like thousands!

So, how can you possibly identify the performance of each Paid Keyword? Just because a keyword is or isn't taking most revenue for your business, does that make it a poor performer? What about the touchpoints by each individual on the build up to conversion, have you considered those?

What you need is an automatic bid-management platform; one which looks at the performance of onsite engagement/conversion and feeds what it knows from the web site back into bidding for a better price with the search engine promoting your keywords.

Such a platform (and one I have personal experience with) is Optimine. Who else can make such a bold claim during these difficult economic times as Optimine with quotes like this one: "Improve your paid search returns by 25 percent or more – guaranteed, with OptiMine bid management software".

But looking at the performance of keywords alone is really like looking at the weather forecast wishing you could change it and make it better (such as snow on Christmas day please!!). Ponder for a moment, what would make a bid management platform better?
I can tell you - a Customer Insight platform that looks at the individual level but empowers the business to weight individual activity based on 'Goals' that have been achieved - such as viewed landing page (1pt), viewed product detail page (5pts), added product to basket (7pts), checkout started (9pts) and so on. By feeding information such as this back into the PPC Bid Management platform, I can not only look at the performance of each keyword from a revenue recognition point of view but also ALL the keywords which played a part in the build-up to conversion.

So, when your boss asks you to cut your marketing budget by 50%, now you have a good idea with PPC which keywords you can safely 'bin' without affecting your online business but you can also find golden nuggets of information which help your business boom beyond 25% - how about 250%? A keyword is outperforming expectations today - pay more for the keyword to increase demographic or geographic exposure! You just can't do this sort of thing with traditional web metric platforms - and if you were to try, don't forget to tag everything up!!

Tags! Why All The Bother?

Tag it! That's what I always hear - put a tag in that page, on that button, in that search box (in fact, make it x25!).

I kid you not. I recently thought I'd check just how many 'tags' are on a retail focused web site who uses a traditional marketing analytics platform - on one page, I found x25 tags! I then proceeded to look at three other pages and guess what, found more tags! In total, across three pages, I counted 57 tags! Who do you think has to manage those? Deploy them? Report on and Analyse them? Developers/"Analysts"!.

I put Analysts in quotes above because invariably "Analysts" are hired to perform analysis on the insight collected from the online channel, yet increasingly it is in fact the Analysts that must build the "tagging doc" that the business will deploy to deliver the insight required for the latest Business case.
 
How much does that Developer/Analyst cost our business again? How much time are they spending not developing or analysing the insight collected but building tagging documents and configuring non-retrospective (providing insight from only today onwards) reports?

Using a single insert file, one which removes the need for 'Tags', will not only save the business significant benefits when it comes to Time to Data, free up the Analysts time to perform Analysis, but also remove the human factor when it comes to tags being deployed incorrectly or not at all. All of which stack up to a business not performing at its full potential and losing out to the competition.

Don't keep up with the 'Joneses', just because your nearest competitor is using a platform from 'X' vendor (and you believe them to be successful with using it - trust me, some have taken 18months+ to fully deploy, which is such a long time!!!).
Take the opportunity to get ahead and adopt a platform which will provide increased visibility of online successes (and opportunities) whilst at the same time freeing up your team of experts to do what they do best, providing Insight that will deliver business and commercial advantages and value!

Heard it all before...

Again, I have read another article which suggests traditional visitor insight platforms are capable of providing detailed and actionable insight on the behaviors exhibited by people like you and I on their web site(s). They articulate it in a way that fools you into believing they can actually do it - I challenge anyone to show me a working example?

I hate to say it, but it's all tosh! They cannot get to the low level of visitor insight and I can vouch for that having used most of the leading platforms in the business today. IF (and that's a BIG IF) they can/could get to low level visitor insight, what can they do with it in realtime? Surely, any organisation that wants low level visitor insight wants it to do something with it other than build pretty charts and graphs?
What if you could promote complementary/cross-sell products based on a previous purchase? Or, perhaps proactively let someone know via SMS that their car MOT is due for renewal (before it expires!)? Or, maybe deliver to them a personalised message/offer based around their sentiment on posts in Facebook or Twitter? Perhaps they dislike your prices (and they are a high value, existing customer?) so they have told the world about a deal they got with a competitor? Surely you don't want to lose low risk, high value customers? If you didn't know, it costs approximately 6-7 times more money to re-market a lost customer than it does a brand new customer...

When we live and talk about making cost cuts, why do we never really consider where we can make significant savings on the web rather than throw our money at prospects who will never buy, unlikely to buy or as in the home utilities markets (such as Electricity, Gas or Water suppliers) have bought in to a story/vision but then had such a bad experience they left? We need to know who these people are, in advance and preferably before they leave without buying or have bought and don't buy again through poor performance on 'our part'? The problem, from my own experience, is these companies factor 'defective traits' into their business models. What if, for once, they didn't and it was increasingly important to every energy company to keep hold of an existing customer. What might that mean to wholesale energy prices? What would that mean in fiscal terms to our household bills?

At the end of the day, to do any of the above you need low level, realtime visitor insight. Such platforms exist today but they are not your traditional insight platforms. You might also be surprised to learn the time to data and insight using such platforms is VERY short - a few weeks versus a few months/years/never?

In my humble experience (15years+), I'm yet to see a traditional insight platform deliver such insight to an organisation which yields such significant insights, revenue, customer retention, increase loyalty and more.

I will happily 'eat my hat' if I'm proven wrong (so please show me what I'm missing, if anything?).

The Pain Of Tagging - No More!

Over the years I have used them all; Webtrends, Omniture, Coremetrics, Google Analytics et al and the one thing they all share in common is? Tagging!

I've since discovered that there are systems beyond even the most humble Web Analytics platform that also requires tagging. Those include (but are no means limited to) Personalisation Engines and Complex Event Processing Systems.

So, it would seem that if you want anything online to be successful, you and your IT team must embrace the endless fun and joys of 'Tagging' everything up, paying through the nose for it with consultancy engagements and generally missing out on fast time to data and valuable insights during the specification, planning and delivery documents being drawn up - oh, and that is before the actual delivery of reports takes place, from which you must then extract those valuable insights from yourself - and be sure not to mis-interpret along the way.

But don't panic. There are alternatives. Alternatives that require no tagging, can collect every event occurrence from within the page, can model data in real-time and deliver the actions to internal or external platforms, from which your business suddenly becomes significantly more 'pro-active' than the typical 're-active' existence experienced today.

Check out my video blog posting from a couple of days back called 'Tag Free Data Collection'. It can be found on YouTube.com also if more convenient.

Visitor level insight should not be difficult! It should be the easiest part - discovering the truth about what is and is not working for your visitors and business is the hardest part to sometimes accept.