Erm, what do you mean it's wrong?

It's frustrating, isn't it. You have just spent the last 12months planning for the launch of a swanky new web site, invested tons of time and money in ensuring the insight datapoints are tagged up correctly, selected/chosen and signed with new affiliate partners to help promote your new swanky site and a whole bunch more and then suddenly it all comes crashing down; you've noticed something is wrong... the account ID being used in the page is for the development platform - bummer!

That means ALL your visitor behaviour insight is going to go into a black hole where no one other than you has access which now means you will be spending roughly 30mins a day, extracting those reports and placing them into an Excel sheet to distribute manually, distracting you for doing your day job.
OK, but that's not too bad - we've all had to do that before, and it's only for 4-6weeks...! BUT, what about next month, when the powers-above have brought onboard this hot new tech company that is going to drive our traffic and more importantly, our sales through the roof! More tags. More time. Being lost = More Pain!

privacy widget goes in here...

What to do - your budget has been halved, there are code freezes coming up due to the Christmas rush and the ink hasn't even dried yet on the contract your Director just signed. Heart rate, blood pressure, stress - all increasing. Job on the line? Doubtful, but your patience? Likely being tested!

Well, this is the first giveaway sign that a company such as this one needs a platform which can be remotely controlled outside of the company when it comes to placing/replacing technology vendor tags on the web site. Do you need one? Well, consider the options. How many times has the scenario above presented itself to you and/or your company? I would guess it happens monthly, maybe even weekly (dare I say daily)? How often do changes to the web site take to get started, let alone completed; weeks, months (never?)? And how much does that translate into lost insight/missed opportunity? I would guess the financial pain is a figure that already has five 0's in it already... and growing!

The good news is such technology to help ease the pain exists today and the shortlist is somewhat 'short'. With the ever increasing burdens being placed on visibility, availability and actionability, today, companies need to be so much more dynamic in the electronic media world and this is where tag management platforms can help.
Such platforms are yielding massive ROI's for their customers, making companies like yours innovative/dynamic and helping to make the lives of analysts 'easier'. You are no longer hired as an Analyst who needs to also know JS/HTML inside and out because it is you making the site change recommendations and developers are leaning on you. Once you start using a Tag Management System (TMS), you will notice you start to do on a daily basis what you were initially hired to do, Analyse and spot trends/make recommendations; you will also get more of a life, drink less wine, smoke less and generally lead a happier life.
Maybe it is time you considered a TMS for your company, after all. If you are still reading this rather lengthy blog post, the chances are you are someone who is suffering and can relate to all my points above. Need I say anymore?

End of message.

Individual insight - now more important than ever!

It seems 2012 is the year for digital Individual Insight. Everyone is asking for it, but why should you consider it? That, is what I hope to clear up in this post today.

First of all, what is 'Individual' and what does it mean to me and my business?

Individual is exactly that, a single instance of a person and anything/everything that person says or does.

Why should I care about knowing what an individual says or does?

Knowing someone has been on the web site, failed to complete a process and then left means your business is failing to convince an individual to do something online (that translates into lost opportunity)! When that individual calls into the call centre and completes their transaction offline, understanding why and what the outcome was will help you better tailor your efforts in channels they are less effective.

Take a scenario, someone has just been on Facebook and told their 100+ friends how bad a particular service your company offers, is. Think about the potential impact that might bring to your business - those 100+ friends also have 100+ friends each, taking the total level of exposure of something good or bad to well in excess of 10,000 people! If one in those 10,000 people were about to buy from the same company (or maybe the same product or service), but now don't due to a 'Friends' update, think about the impact that now brings to your business - now consider what if 10 or 100 of those 10,000 people were about to buy from you?

So, knowing the 'individual' activity is highly important, and that is only in the Social world - have you considered your own web site? Imagine the opportunity that awaits you in your own online shop; you know what every individual does that comes to your web site; you know what products they always look at but never buy; you know they like discount items - so next time you run your Sales email marketing campaign, send them a personalised and relevant email.

It may all seem like a no-brainer - after all, why wouldn't you want to get to the level of the 'individual' activity?! They have the ability to give you so much input into what is and isn't working for your business. The reality is no one has really considered or thought about this level of detail, mainly due to not realising such technology actually exists to help them achieve it.

Well, it does exist and I urge any organisation that wants to better target individuals

What can I expect to achieve if I adopt a platform that gives me 'individual' insight?

That promotion you have always wanted? It could happen, if you help shift the mindset of a business to think more laterally. Individual insight will help your business go from good to great, how can it not? Individual insight is now about aggregated views of data; individual insight gives a business the power to know, the power to change, the power to deliver - look at the success Unica and Bluesheep have had over the years, mostly derived from non-online individual insight. Imagine the value your business would get if it were possible to replicate the level of detail known about an individual from the online world in the same way the offline technologies have done so in previous years?

Still not convinced? Individual insight has demonstrated to businesses how they can save £250,000 per annum in adword campaigns, without impacting sales.

It has demonstrated uplift in excess of £1M in incremental revenue every time a Sale email marketing campaign is sent.

It has helped save in excess of £1M in online fraudulent transactions taking place on a web site with multiple credit cards, or shipping to known fraudulent hot-spots, OR individuals getting insurance quotes who chop and change their personal and historical circumstances to achieve a better price...

Individual insight just works! It can bring huge benefits to any organisation, you just have to try it for yourself to appreciate the value it brings.

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!!

Is Customer Intelligence Delivering Results?

I have just read a very interesting blog posting by George Hollister, (someone who I value, listen to and enjoy following on Twitter) where a recent study, "CI Teams: Blocking and Tackling is Not Enough" carried out by Forrester suggested businesses were failing to get valuable insight from the Customer Insight (CI) team as they were focusing on Data Integration rather than gleaning insights from the platform. It is a message I heard all the time in my Web Analytics days...

The blog (and study) goes on to suggest Web Analytics is a platform being used to glean such insights, and to me at least, there in lies the problem! Web Analytics platforms are not CI focused, typically run as a SaaS model and are therefore a) costly to export, b) time consuming to extract data into a EDW whereby analysts can really use it, c) it is aggregated!


The blog (and Forrester study) goes on to suggest the problem does not lie with the CI team themselves, or Data Integration but in fact an it is an Organisational Integration problem. Yet again, disparate data silos is the problem! Data that is needed in one silo is 'unavailable', causing delays in being able to glean insight, making it difficult for the marketing analytics or CI team (who are usually located in another business unit, building, city, country...) to include the data, resulting in reduced insights from increasing efforts - all in all, producing far from eye watering results!

To fully empower the CI team, businesses need a platform that delivers insight in a contextualised manner and at a non-aggregated level into an EDW within seconds of the event occurring. Preferably with a platform that is tag-free too! (who needs or wants the pain, time delays and cost of identifying and deploying tags to then build charts and graphs from?). As I understand it, most Web Analytics platforms struggle to populate EDW's in less than 72 hours... Hardly 'realtime'...

I know customers who have done just this and with a CI team to hand have experienced significant benefits in doing so (have shifted them to be a leader in their game in online commerce).

Realtime delivers results; not just in promoting the right message at the right time to the right prospect, but also in getting valuable insights delivered to analysts in all business units, in all departments, in all office buildings and in all cities/countries to glean actionable and relevant insights from to achieve (and most often exceed) their primary (and often secondary) business goals in a very short space of time.

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?).

Can you bend technology too far?

I hear it all the time. I need this tool to deliver this, that tool to deliver that then a year or few later, they retire to the fact that the technology will never be capable of delivering on a 'false promise'. It didn't stop the vendor selling the software and happily taking Mr Customers money though, did it!

So, perhaps we are now living in an era where there really is no-one platform that is capable of providing a definitive business platform. After all, I'm sure (like me) you have worked on projects where horrendous amounts of time have been spent (as well as money!!) to deliver on 'false-promises'. Add up the amount of money spent, then work out the ROI on that spent cash! I bet its not as good as you were hoping for, huh?

I find myself speaking more and more to businesses that can and do provide a solution to address the modern day business pains, but it's not by using one business reporting platform. Businesses need to consider what it is they need/want to deliver and then work out what they need to deliver it.

For example (and speaking from an Analysts point of view), I might need full, rich data from every data silo, including the search platform, telephone/ivr platform, email platform, web platform, marketing attribution platform and more. In fact, the more data I have, the better an Analyst I can be and the better the insight I can provide! I need BigData then! Problem with 'BigData' is it can sometimes be too much!
So, I need a Business Intelligence platform that can handle BigData; one that is with me at all times, not just restricted to the desktop and one which is scale-able and quick to deploy (and one which won't hurt the budget!!).

So, which vendors make claims to be able to do all this today? I know a few and I also know a few end-users who have a lot to say about a vendors inability to deliver on the promise, now known to me as the 'false-promise'. And that's after a VERY EXTENSIVE tagging discussion, time consuming and detailed documentation and testing processes... I really believe businesses are tired of tagging everything they want insight on. There are alternatives, Atomic Labs with their PION platform or Celebrus Technologies spring to mind - both working very differently but neither requiring 'tags'.

Disparate data needs to come together, I appreciate that. If you think back a few years ago, this was a big problem with such badly fragmented data, however now platforms exist which can 'power customer data hubs' and I can speak from 15 years experience, that these platforms ARE delivering a step change within organisations, are winning awards and and delivering on the promise (with customers shouting about their successes - how many have done that before?!).

Perhaps now then businesses need to step back a bit and take a look at their infrastructure, where they want to be, how they plan to get there and the value to the business on getting there sooner. Cloud based storage is now cheap enough, fast enough, efficient and secure enough to become a possible hosting platform for most types of business, business platforms can feed into 'the cloud', tag-free platforms exist, cost effective BI exists, individual visitor level tracking exists, real-time communication exists... Need I go on?

Do telcommunication companies realize how much they are losing out?

Today I'm a happy customer who is happily using your mobile phone network on my Smartphone. Happily watching YouTube clips, texting friends, calling friends, surfing, checking email, facebook, twitter and more.
As a BIG multi-international mobile phone provider, you are most likely racking the cash in (and rightly so)!

Or are you...

What happens when I'm unhappy with my phone and/or network provider? Do you know who I am, where I am, how to reach me? Do you care that I'm having a bad time?

How about another scenario. I signed up to an 18month contract, £30pm, and now I'm 15months into the contract when I re-visit your web site. Did you know I had visited you on the 18th July, 2011? Did you track what I did, where I went? Ask me why was I here?

You should have, and here is why:

Too many businesses (that includes your competitors!) these days are so interested on making 'sales' that their customer retention's team is working over-time. Yet if only the business brought the 'retention' program forward and put it onto the web site, that way when I visit the web site to look at ways to contact your company about a problem I have, you could identify me and assist me there and then. Why wait for me to call?
Alternatively (and this is highly common and most likely happening to your business today), I've come to your web site to compare a price I have got from another network who wants my high value custom and is charming me more than yourselves...

Of course, no one wants to lose a high value customer... So, why should you?

Complex Event Processing (otherwise known as CEP) systems can and will help your business identify a prospect when they are exhibiting any of the above scenarios and plenty more. When handed complete Individual Visitor Data, they can help identify when a fraudulent transaction is taking place by assessing exposure and risk during the visit based around behavior; they can model and spot when a visitor is exhibiting possible churn like behavior - if you know this in advance, why not communicate with them in an appropriate way, therefore reducing defection and saving a bundle of cash in re-marketing costs.

Come to think of it, there are very few reasons not to have a CEP but there are plenty of reasons why you won't have one today!
The likely reasons you are not using CEP systems today - 1) they are new (technology wise they have been around for some time, but not really used in anger in the commercial world... yet; 2) they are not cheap! but combined with a Customer Insight platform, the potential ROI for a business can be huge!

Too many aggregated, post reaction, online optimization platforms exist in the market place today and they are not able to handle the vast amounts of individual customer level detail that is available to collect when a visitor arrives to your online digital home. Businesses need a non-aggregated platform, one which does not require tagging to get the right level of insight required.

The good news is that technology exists today and tomorrow you could literally be saving your business millions of pounds/dollars/euros...

So, now do you know how much you are losing out? Put into monetary terms, if you have 10,000 visitors a month exhibiting churn behavior and 6,000 churn - on a £30pm contract, that equates to £180k/month! Now multiply that number by the length of a renewal contract, £3,240,000! Now, how about working out the cost of fraudulent transactions occurring on the web site and the loss of revenue - £3M again a good number?

So, using an Individual Visitor/Customer Insight platform and a CEP system, your business 'could' save around £6M over a 12-18month period...

Individual Visitor/Customer Insight platforms and CEP systems do not cost anywhere near the potential loss of earnings articulated above.

So, now do you know how much you are losing out?

Are We Missing The Point?

Whilst we all panic about the new legislation which was brought into power during May this year, perhaps there are some bits we are missing when it comes to getting a visitors 'buy-in'.

First of all, lets clear up what the directive actually means because it is a little fuzzy. As of May 2012, all web sites which contain tracking technologies which are capable of personally identifying an individual and use cookie based technology to do so, will need to present each and every visitor with an opt-in process. Meaning, Big Brother will not be able to track you and your web site experience unless you explicitly say so. Failure to do so will cost £500k, although today no one knows whether that is an annual 'subscription' fee or a per case basis fee.

So, you could argue that most digital marketing technologies today have a significant problem on their hands. With the law on side with the visitor and everyone being automatically set to opt-out when they arrive, if presented with an opportunity to opt-in so digital marketing platforms can personally identify you to provide better web site marketing insight and reports, most visitors would most likely remain opted-out - after all, why would you want to opt-in? What's in it for you?

Or would they - consider this; how do web sites offer better experiences today? How can they serve better experiences to you, me and the person opposite you if they don't know what it is you like, who you are, what you want, what you have bought/not bought and so on. This, of course, is all done through the diligent use of cookies. But the new ICO EU Directive stipulates one cannot use cookies without a visitors consent - so, give them a reason to provide you with consent. Make it painfully obvious that you care about your visitors/customers and give them a reason/offer they cannot refuse.

For example, this 'model', for better a word, would work beautifully for Telecommunication, Utilities and Financial Services companies. It is all in the wording, of course (what isn't these days!), but by paraphrasing something from this: "By allowing me to track and serve you with cookie data, I can give you 'Mr Smith' a far better visiting experience which will ultimately turn you into a huge advocate for my organisation due to the better experience you will have", you could have something which works to your companies advantage and actually not only helps your organisation out with the current dilemma around the new 'Cookie Law' but also serves a better visitor experience to the people you care most about, your visitors/prospects and/or customers.

So, all round then, this is an opportunity for your business to strive! So why not take it?

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.

What Do Your Reports Look Like?

Too many businesses buy an analytics tool because of it's the market presence and the eye-candy the reports bring.
Having previously been a data and web analyst for many years, data is typically always extracted and placed into everyone's ever so familiar, favorite reporting platform, MS Excel. So why use the charts and graphs provided by an aggregated data platform in the first place? I know many analysts and businesses who would agree with me and say they don't use them (possibly even the analyst(s) in your organisation right now).

It takes a brave person to make a purchasing decision based around the above two key mentioned areas. I can testify (by speaking from experience) just how many businesses adopt this 'strategy', having worked over many years with a lot of organisations across multiple business sectors, including financial services, travel, retail, utilities and telecommunications. Just because the few charts/graphs you have look good doesn't mean the data in the report(s) it provides to the business are with any insight which is actionable. The charts/graphs need to be interactive!

Most of us have MS Excel on our desktop machines. It doesn't take a semi experienced MS Excel user long to build a dashboard from scratch. The hardest job with any dashboard build is the collation and consistency of the data.

One of the most recent dashboards I have built in MS Excel can be seen below. This incorporates non-aggregated visitor data covering all marketing touchpoints (not just first and last click, but all clicks inbetween) which have been weighted to provide a true picture on what channels, promotions, activities, placements, offers, partners and so on actually are working to influence a prospect to engage and convert with a web site.

Additionally, if you have a Business Intelligence platform such as SAP Business Objects, Crystal Xcelsius, Microstrategy, Qlikview, SAS and so on, you can do even better things with the charts/graphs. All with interactive controls and functions, enabling you to get to the lowest level required (which in my case is often the visitor level - their phone number, email address, social security number and so on).

So in reality, if you wanted, your Business Intelligence dashboard could actually look like the screenshot below. Most Business Intelligence platforms today are appreciating Mobile BI is the future by empowering analysts to influence, make decisions and provide real-time insight whilst on the move. The example below is taken from the Microstrategy blog but it shows Mobile BI at its best and certainly provides much better 'eye-candy' than any other online analytics and optimization tool I have used before.

What I love best about interactive dashboards is the involvement of data from more than one channel (typically the web). In the above example, data is being collated in a Customer Data Hub (more about what defines a CDH later), but for a business to see how all channels are performing, volumes of calls, revenue attributed when compared with other channels, trends compared to last year and so on, this insight is like 'Gold Dust'. BUT, what makes this all the more appealing, is the ability to go down to Visitor/Customer/Prospect level and then actually do something with the data extracted; perhaps send a list of possible fraudulent applications to the anti-fraud team by email to investigate, or abandoned insurance purchases to the call center for a follow-up phone call. These are only a few of the actions very few businesses are actually doing today with their marketing insight platform, whilst others so desperately want to be able to do the same.

Without any shadow of a doubt, aggregated data and the charts and graphs associated with them, have limited shelf life. Yes, they are good for spotting trends and identifying upcoming demands, but they are not good enough to give businesses today what they really want. The good news is this, what businesses want from their online/offline marketing channels can be achieved today. But, the right platform needs to be in place. So, the question to ask is: 'Does your marketing insight platform have a Customer data model? (have you seen it? does it address/meet your analyst/business requirements?). Does it provide aggregated or non-aggregated visitor level insight? Can you slice and dice the data quickly, repeatedly, over time, integrate other channel sources and so on? Do you have a Business Intelligence platform in place already? If not, would MS Excel cut the mustard for you?

Done correctly, Customer Insight can be very powerful. The most surprising bit though is the cost to achieve it - it's not as much as you might imagine.

Campaign Attribution - Why Do It, Value From Doing It, Who Can Do It?

Today, a large portion of any organisations marketing budget is typically used to drive visitors to corporate websites. Why? Well, according to a survey conducted by IBM in 2010, today, 70 percent of a consumer’s first interaction with a product or service takes place online. Understanding what those individual visitors did and which campaigns are driving the valuable visitors is challenging. 28% of Web site decision-makers dismiss the opportunity, because they believe attribution will never be precise, and therefore is not worth measuring (Forrester Research).

Results from IBM's 2010 CEO Study also in 2010 showed however, that 88 percent of CEOs will focus on getting closer to their customers in next five years and 82 percent of CEOs want to better understand customer needs.

With challenging economic times ahead and to support the stated CEO’s aim to get closer to customers and understand their needs, attribution is now receiving renewed interest. Accurate metrics derived from a sound attribution framework can deliver informed decisions on critical marketing expenditures.  Having this data empowers Marketers to demand more productive campaigns based on key business requirements.

The Challenge

Many believe Campaign Attribution to be purely based on measuring the performance of marketing communications by means of placing ‘tracking codes’ on inbound marketing campaigns, from which charts and graphs can be produced to show effectiveness and provide the return of investment (ROI) proof for partners, creative’s, placements, marketing programs etc. Without additional information, it is difficult for organisations to contest the value and ROI.

Indeed,  perhaps one of the ‘best kept secrets’ in the world of marketing (and particularly online marketing) is that most data models used by analytical platforms are in fact wholly inappropriate. 

An example is the widespread use of cookies as a tracking mechanism on the assumption that “one cookie = one visitor”. This could be misleading, for example:

• One cookie, many visitors - Many people share the same device such as a home or work PC

• One visitor many cookies - A unique visitor uses different devices such as a PC, a Smartphone and a tablet to access the same site

• One cookie , many accounts - The same person accesses different brands or accounts belonging to the same organisation  from a single device

Another common barrier to accurate attribution is a lack of complete and timely data.  The widespread use of traditional web analytics platforms means data may be:

• Aggregated / summarised, by its very nature, aggregating or summarising data means sacrificing individuality and detail. 

• Short lifecycle, possibly  only 30 days or less data is available meaning key events and  complete visitor history are not available 

• Extended latency – Data is processed by a 3rd party and can take over 24 hrs to be available.

• Non transparent – Data may be provided by 3rd parties and not provide the level of detail required

These make it very difficult to measure the effectiveness of online behaviour and thus correctly attribute value to campaigns. Add to this the growth of specialising digital marketing agencies, the increasing variety of analytical measurement platforms and the ever more complex Multi-Channel ‘conversational’ landscape, accurate attribution becomes a real challenge.

Why Change?

Today, agencies across the world are being used by companies of all sizes to manage their marketing communications, whether that is affiliate sites, partner sites, paid search, social networks, television, radio, print and more. The success of a particular marketing campaign is typically measured against key performance indicators (KPI’s) such as revenue, downloads or conversions. Yet no one really measures the success of the campaigns leading up to conversion. Instead decisions are based on first or last click methodology. In many cases, the campaign touch-points leading up to conversion are direct influencers and are significant in aiding and persuading a visitor to take action or make a decision whether or not to ‘convert’ with a brand, site or product.

For true value based Campaign Attribution, it is important and necessary to have a detailed dataset of visitor insight available and at an individual visit level. Lack of ‘business’ data (not click stream or raw data) is a primary reason many organisations are unable to perform such analysis today. 

Web Analytics platforms for example, are widely used to measure the effectiveness of online visit performance but are based on aggregated sets of data. This means the individual journey(s) made by a visitor over time i.e. the customer lifecycle, are lost as most systems summarise on visit level and use first or last visit/click campaign methodology. However, there can be many visits and referrals made by an individual leading up to conversion. Using traditional reporting platforms, only the first or last visit would be available, other potentially influential campaign clicks and the subsequent behavior and experiential data might be lost. This of course leads to an incomplete understanding of the true value of campaigns and visitors and therefore contributes to potentially incorrect and costly attribution.

A Value Based Approach

However, by taking an approach to maintain a consolidated record of every visit by every visitor (Non-aggregated Data), full campaign attribution at an individual visitor level, based on scoring and weighting of goals achieved in current and previous browser sessions, can be applied, calculated and quantified. This opens up the endless possibilities of measuring effectiveness of many things related to online marketing (both on and offsite). Enabling businesses to work out the effectiveness of their marketing campaigns on the lead up to conversion, as well as establish the quality of inbound visitors from various channels and campaigns. Now with complete and accurate data, it is relatively simple to provide summarised and trended ‘dashboard’ views of campaign performance based on visitor lifetime value. With the added benefit of drilldown to more detail.

How Do We Measure Value?

Performance weighting and scoring calculated on goals achieved whilst a visitor is on the web site can be used to gauge the effectiveness of marketing activities in attracting the most valuable visitors. 

For example:

A click-through from an affiliate site might be worth 5 points, arriving on a landing page might be worth 1 point, viewing a detail page might be worth 10 points and watching a video/picture might be worth 15 points.  So, on this occasion, the visitor has attributed 31 points but did not convert. However, the product set is such that it requires research prior to purchase. So, this visit was of value as it demonstrated a propensity to purchase and it’s highly likely the visitor will bookmark and purchase at a later date. Even beyond 30 days

Another visitor clicks through from a paid search link (which by the way, cost £3.20!) The visitor arrives on a landing page worth 1 point, views a product details page worth 10 points then leaves. This visitor generated 11 points but cost £3.20 to acquire.

If the above example were representative of a large amount of site traffic, you would very quickly be able to establish that the paid search marketing campaign has a high acquisition cost associated to it but very low quality of visitor based on their lack of engagement with site content. With this level of insight, businesses may well decide paid search is in fact yielding low value traffic which is depreciating the marketing spend. Therefore it might make sense to drop the particular paid search keywords and invest in the affiliate campaigns driving the ‘valuable’ visitors.

Another consideration when implementing attribution models based on less sophisticated  first and/or last click models is the possibility of significant duplication both in traffic reporting and payments to affiliates and agencies. It is not unusual to have in excess of 20% of budget wasted on duplicate payments for the same clicks/conversions. To prevent this and provide for fair attribution, a simple formula can be applied where no more than 100% of traffic and marketing budget will be allocated (de-duplication). There is a fixed percentage for the initiating click and the converting click, and the remainder is split over visits and weighted depending on the behaviour of the visit (for example, if someone hits just a landing page but then bounces, they will score differently to a visitor who hits the landing page, views target products, adds to basket and starts a checkout process).

How To Implement Such a Solution

For campaign attribution, weighting and scoring for events that occur during any and all marketing channel sessions need to be defined. Definitions for such events will vary greatly depending on the type of business concerned. For example, an Insurance business will have different weight scorings for hitting a landing page, viewing a product, beginning an application through to quote and then on to saving a quote/purchase. Compared to a travel company where a visitor may hit a landing page, search for a destination/route, start a checkout and go through the purchase process and so on. In retail there may be differences dependant on the value of products, higher value electronics will be researched more than say clothing, therefore comparing multiple products and reading reviews might be scored highly.

Once weight scores have been established, these are applied to non-aggregated visitor data. This is not something that can be retrospectively added to summarised/aggregated results typical of traditional Web Analytics platforms so the platforms capable of doing this today are very small indeed, but they do exist!

Thanks for reading.

What Does 'Data' Look Like?

I often get asked the question 'What does data look like'?

So I show them. The problem with showing data (especially if you are a company in the Big Data space), is you can extract very detailed insights from such platforms. That then causes its own problems because then the question 'what do your charts and graphs look like'? At this point, you start to wonder whether this person is an 'aggregated data' fan or a 'non-aggregated data' fan.

As a former data and web analyst, I get data and I get it in a BIG way! I admit, looking at rows and rows of data in tables upon tables does get a little confusing at times (especially if you are only used to extracting insights from charts and graphs), but this is your moment to spot something that no one has spotted before. You can set the trends, spot the opportunities for improvement, impress your boss with the endless amount of insight you are now able to provide from all this 'Big Data'.

I have worked with many web analytics platforms from which many businesses across all industry verticals have asked me to build dashboards in MS Excel. I don't mind doing this. Being creative with data is something I enjoy, bringing insights from the backroom to the boardroom (what's the point in doing analysis if a business isn't going to listen).

But there in lies the problem. Almost all the web analytics platforms produce aggregated datasets from which gleaming any detailed insight into what caused what, when, where and why becomes challenging. For those that are analysts reading this post, I'm sure you have encountered the situation where endless requests to dig deeper into the data have come forward; 'why did we see a decline in sales', 'who saw out of stock items', 'who are my most valuable customers', 'who is exhibiting suspect churn behaviour'. With aggregated data, these questions (and trust me, there are millions more) cannot be answered for two main reasons; 1) it was never tagged in the first place or 2) because it is aggregated data, you will never know.

So, in summary - data may not look pretty but data is actionable. It can be used to gleam far greater insights which are otherwise not possible today (or likely to ever be possible) in web analytics platforms. Businesses need to move to a platform which can provide 'Big Data' from the online channel and leave the 'charts and graphs' to Business Intelligence platforms such as MicroStrategy, SAP Business Objects, Oracle BI or even MS Excel (the BI platform we all have on our machines today).