Social networks online, such as Facebook and Myspace are becoming more and more important. Increasingly, marketing through these online social networks will become ever more prevalent. For example, web apps / application onto Facebook’s open API (which means external programmers can add programs and applications to facebook - not just facebook employees). Another example might be someone with a lot of social capital (ie contacts and influence online), in turn influencing their friends, contacts and others exponentially in theory due to the fluid nature of a social network to buy a product or service. Related to this but slightly different, Blogvertise is a service which pays bloggers to promote a product or service related to the blogger’s field of expertise.

Onanalytica does online buzz monitoring. Measurement of influence is key!
Influence is the “weight” of each voice. Alternatives: Treat all voices equally, use gut-feeling or equate popularity and influence – all are really bad. Onanalytica’s methodology has been used in the academic community for more than 30 years to measure the influence of academic journals and is a huge mathematical challenge known as an input-output model in econometrics.

You get the gist. This is all seriously fascinating marketing.

The 2 things that absolutely fascinate me are:

1. The major challenge facing marketing strategists in how to increase the effectiveness of social network based marketing strategies.
2. The future marrying of web analytics and social network analysis and resulting improved marketing effectiveness and business intelligence.

Measuring the influence of myspace visitors
MIT Media Lab / Social Media Lab designed a flexible tool for the content driven exploration and visualization of a social network. Building upon a traditional force-directed network layout consisting of nodes (profiles) and ties (friend-links), the system shows the activity and the information exchange (postings in the comment box) between nodes, taking the sequence and age of the messages into account.

In the myspace service network-only visualization methods are no longer sufficient to meaningfully represent the community structure. Numerous commercial profiles, fake/spam/celebrity profiles and tools such as automated friend adders result in a huge numbers of connections, many of which carry little information about a person’s actual social ties and behavior. The average myspace user has more than 130 friends, but there are also profiles with over a million “friends”. By going beyond the “skeleton” of network connectivity and looking at the flow of information between the individual actors, the authors hope to create a far more accurate portrait of online social life.

What is social networking analysis:
Social network analysis has emerged as a key technique over the last century in modern sociology, anthropology (good thing I am a qualified anthropologist), sociolinguistics, geography, social psychology, information science to measure what individuals do and the many types of relationships between one another. And now social network analysis becomes important in web analytics. Social network analysis sees social relationships in terms of nodes and ties. Nodes are the individuals (visitors) within the networks, and ties are the many types of relationships between the individuals.

Two Social networking analysis metrics (an introduction merely):
Read Judah’s thought provoking post for more social networking analysis metrics and opinions.
Betweenness:
Degree an individual lies between other individuals in the network i.e it’s the number of people who a person is connected to indirectly through their direct links.
Centrality Closeness:
The degree an individual is near all other individuals in a network (directly or indirectly). It reflects the ability to access information through the “grapevine” of network members. Thus, closeness is the inverse of the sum of the shortest distances between each individual and every other person in the network.

Marketing in social networks
Jason Ethier has written a good paper on social networks. He tells us that the main questions for researchers in social network theory are which types of social networks can be used as a basis for marketing strategy, how to identify and measure social networks, how to mobilise and manage social networks, and which marketing decisions can benefit the most from social network concepts and methods? Researchers have found that consumer networks that are not under the control of a corporation work best for marketing purposes which is why networks such as facebook and myspace are so successful. Corporations identify and measure social networks by collecting information from their customers. One method of doing this is by distributing loyalty/discount cards (large retailers do this) in exchange for customer information.

To conclude:
Social network theory and analysis and their marrying with web analytics is certain to become ever more prevalent as more companies learn of the marketing potential of social networks. And hopefully will become more mainstreamed into web analytics as a whole and into the web analytics solutions themselves. (hopefully anyway)
I welcome your feedback, thoughts or complete disagreement - so please share your thoughts and most importantly, THANKS FOR READING!

Index tools goes free - I had the pleasure of using indextools on a couple of websites last year - and can honestly say that it does favourably compete with other much more expensive tools. So, going free with Yahoo is very good news for business (and for Dennis Mortensen - congrats). Lots of talk of whether indextools (yahoo) analytics will provide serious competition for google, depends on how seriously yahoo take their new web analytics solution.

The founder of venture capitalism in America,Georges Doriot (aged 21, Doriot sailed by steamship to the US from his native France and went on to become a brigadier general in the second world war, one of the most influential professors at Harvard Business School and founder of Insead, Europe’s first business school. But his main achievement was to pioneer the US venture capital industry in 1946 by setting up American Research & Development (ARD), which backed one of the first blockbuster technology start-ups, Digital Equipment Corporation).

George Doriot famously said, his strategy relied on backing talent, not technology.

“An average idea in the hands of an able man is worth much more than an outstanding idea in the possession of a person with only average ability,” he said.Not that google analytics or index tools are average, as there is alot of vested interest, and subtle bad PR in this industry, in fact in the hands of a good web analyst, there are both powerful tools - Brian Clifton’s new book on advanced web metrics with google analytics is an example (I am going to his book launch party tonight so I am sure, I will see lots of googlers.) So we will how this one pans out over time, I imagine (with Dennis at the helm, I am sure Yahoo analytics will be a big success). The point being it is the people, the team behind the product that make it or break it (apologies for the cliche).

In the interest of web analytics and my passion for it, I am always, vendor neutral. My passion is in better understanding and improving online behaviour.

Thanks so much for reading and apologies for my recent (infrequent) blog posts, which I very much intend to change.

Segmentation and personas are areas of interest to traditional marketing departments. But now with web analytics, consumer segments can be set up and analysed real time and/or historically with many of the standard web analytics tools such as Google Analytics, Omniture’s Site Catalyst or Discover, Clicktracks or Webtrends.

If you look at the average conversion rate for your whole website, on it’s own although useful, would considerably more insightful if you could filter the effectiveness of different segments / people / campaigns - see the conversion rate of .
What do I mean by a consumer segment?

It could be PPC (pay per click) campaign traffic, or seo traffic, or email campaign traffic. Or a segment where people clicked on a banner or landing page on the website.

You can then easily compare the average conversion rates of these different segments and also bear in mind actual amount of traffic from each segment. For example, email campaigns might have a conversion rate of 4.2% compared to PPC traffic with a 2.6% but there might be significantly more PPC traffic than email traffic in which case, better to spend one’s time and efforts optimising PPC than email campaigns.

I’ll post some more on segmentation later this week. Thanks so much for reading!

Today is Web Analytics Wednesday (WAW) in London, on a Monday and Eric Petersen, the original founder of WAW will be talking about the future of web analytics.

Today at econsultancy’s digital cream, digital marketers, social media - ites, search - ites, and web analytics ites thronged together and debated. It was actually fascinating and informative so a big thank you to econsultancy for organising it and to all the staff for being so helpful. ( I just got back from just over two weeks holiday in Playacar and in the yucatan in Mexico - the photo is Tulum).

I went to the web analytics roundtable in the morning and the social media roundtable in the afternoon. At each, there were 7 senior marketers and a moderator all talking out their strategy, sharing ideas and revealing what they want to do. To the extent that competitors were even opening up and talking quite honestly about plans and site features that hadn’t even been launched yet.

As web analytics continues to shift into marketing optimisation, the big solutions like omniture and web trends differentiate by offering integrated multi-variate testing, behavioural targeting and integration in and out with external email solutions or databases so you only need one place to your fully integrated picture of what’s going on with your company,
Buy a web analytics tool first or hire the skilled web analytics person? Better to hire the right person first and use a free tool than spend the money on the tool without having the right person to get the analysis and insights out of it.

Social media is so fast moving. Yet for many companies there is still caution and worries about security, brand awareness and even how to measure it’s impact.

I know I’ve missed things out so get in touch if you have any thoughts about the event.

A little bit techy today. I know. But really useful stuff.

With Google Analytics, you have the ability to track how many products are bought on your website, with it’s ecommerce tracking. You can also use this for your website, even if you don’t actually sell products but to categorise your lead generation, pdf downloads or whatever the call to actions are on your website.

On your product bought / lead confirmation page, you will need your programmers to add some code to the page, after the main google analytics tracking tag.

For example, I can track what type of property, the country, the postcode, the specific ID, the number of bedrooms in the property, a fictional value of £10/$10 for each lead, the price that each property is on the market for, - all by getting the programmers to use a “get” for each bit of information I am retrieving from the website. But it could any important information about either your product sales or leads.

Category is really useful because that’s how you sort your products / leads into different buckets.
Product name and Product Sku are where two different fields where you can specify what details about your product or lead you want to be able to see in google analytics as your product details type information.
The others, like price etc, are pretty self-explanatory.

In this instance, I don’t use shipping and tax - because I am using the ecommerce tracking for tracking leads generated.
This is my sample code which goes on the product bought/lead confirmation webpage code:

pageTracker._addTrans(
“$property.getCountryCode() $property.getBranch().getID()”, //Order Id
“10″, //Total
“”, //Tax
“”, //Shipping
);
pageTracker._addItem(
“$property.getCountryCode() $property.getBranch().getID()”, // Order Id
“$property.getPostcode().getArea() $property.getPropertySubTypeName()”, //’SKU’
“$property.getPropertySubTypeName() $property.getBedrooms() beds”, // Product Name
“$selectedTab”, // Category
“$property.getPrice()”, // Price
“1″ // Quantity
);
pageTracker._trackTrans();

And this is what ecommerce categories ends up looking like within the google analytics interface, eg renting:

And here are product details eg 3 bed house.

This is extremely easy to set up, 20 minutes of a programmer’s time, and once done, gives a huge benefit and understanding of either ecommerce usage or leads generated in exactly the way that makes sense to you.

Have you tried it out yet?

I have been unbelievably, ridiculously busy. Being a career mother, with a two year old toddler, in a big old city like London, makes for very challenging time management.

Anyway, excuses aside. I have been doing some fun and intense web analytic - ey type things recently.

Recently when doing some multi-variate testing, I noticed that there was a much higher conversion rate on exactly the same form page but for different types of property market. For example, when people were looking to rent, they converted at a significantly higher rate, perhaps a 20% increase in click through rate (CTR) from the property details page to contact the agent form page compared to people looking to buy a house.

So, I went into tealeaf to replay sessions for buying versus renting, conversions and non-conversions.

It was fascinating, because everytime there was a graphic displaying energy efficiency on buying, just above the call to action button, people weren’t clicking on the call to action button. So in other words, a product feature that only sometimes appeared for some products, was distracting attention from the call to action.

This is how I find people’s journeys - I either pick the url within the date I am looking at or free text (or many other search options).

Then I am able to watch, just like a video, exactly what happened on the website.

It’s quite amazing when you begin looking at internal site search.

Recently I started investigating the capabilities of google analytics’ site search and it really has a easy to set up approach with alot of useful metrics that you can define against it.

As long your website uses a url parameter before your internal site search keywords and additionally url parameters in the url to define the categories of internal site search, you can track your site search.
For example, the url parameters of a website might be www.companywebsite.com/searchpage?
search-alias=DVD;field-keywords=harry+potter
where search alias defines the category and field keywords defines the words that were typed into the search box.

You click on your profile, choose Do track site search, add your url parameter that comes up with the keywords that people type into the search box and then the url parameters that define the category on your website, that could be a product type (eg DVD) or a channel (eg rental) or whatever categories apply to your particular website.

Then within a few hours you can begin to what percentage of your visitors use site search, how long they spent looking at the site after a search, what percentage do more that one search (% search refinements), what categories they searched for the most, how did visitor behaviour differ from those that didn’t search.

In essence, there are many ways of really seeing how people are using site search on your site, and this can all be set up in a matter of minutes.

Whether you use tableau, business objects, excel or something else all together, visualisation of data and in essence ideas, is a huge part of web analytics. It is much easier to understand a good graphic than a thousand words and in fact they can be a beautiful and persuasive call to action.

I was inspired by a recent article in the Economist about the best charts ever dating back 200 years, long before the computers and tools that we take for granted today. And these visualisations, so elegant yet functional and powerful, were earthshattering at the time, influencing politics, policy and spend on a nation level.

“Three of history’s best” include… 

1. Florence Nightingale, remembered as the mother of modern nursing, was also a keen statistician (and first female member of the Royal Statistical Society) and her graphic illustrating the key causes of mortality during war contributed towards the improvement in military hospitals as it shows at a glance how many soldiers died from preventable causes ie infections and disease as opposed to infections.

2. Charles Joseph Mindard’s very famous 1861 graphic depicting the Russian campaign of 1812 - has been called the “the best statistical graphic ever drawn” as it illustrates numbers of soldiers by width of the bar, against falling temperature, against distance there and back (very few returned).

3. William Playfair’s (a bit of a swindler admittedly) 1821 chart comparing the “weekly wages of a good mechanic” and the “price of a quarter of wheat” over time attempts to illustrate a decline in buying power for example, which for it’s time was again revolutionary. 

 

8 conversion rate tactics below to help increase conversion rates on your website.
1. People Click On What They Want

People navigate the web by “scent”, Byran Eisenberg, conversion guru and persuasion architect, tells us. Scent was first described by Xerox PARC to describe the parallels between a human’s information-gathering techniques on the Web and an animal’s food-gathering techniques in the wild. People seek information through the “scent” given off by their trigger words.

According to research performed by usability guru Jared Spool, when visitors found their trigger words on a landing page, they were successful at completing their task 72% of the time; if the trigger word wasn’t on the page, they were only successful 6% of the time. The scent of the keywords kept them on the right path; lacking that scent, they stopped searching that particular “trail”. One tip to make sure you have your visitors’ trigger words covered is to make sure each major button or link:

completes this sentence: “I want to _____”.
includes trigger words / strong scent

2. Start Using Persuasive Call To Action Words

Impotent call to action hyperlinks like “read more” and “submit” sometimes make me feel embarrassed for website owners. They should know better.

Persuasive call to action hyperlinks should include an imperative verb and a benefit. For example, which hyperlink is more persuasive: A or B?

George found an investment secret that changed his life. Read More
George found an investment secret that changed his life. See how George doubled his income in one year.

You can see from this comparison why the second example is more likely to induce action.

3. Better Product Images Are Worth A Thousand Calls to Action

Having better-looking product images than other sellers will do wonders. If research is any indication, product images are a major factor in converting visitors. In fact, 83 percent of eBay shoppers skip listings without images, while sites with galleries get 15% more activity and those with so-called super-size photos show a 24 percent spike in sales. The better photo wins every time. Many people skimp on the quality of their product images and use manufacturer-supplied images which is a mistake.

4. B2B Products or Services Need Merchandising, Too

The same holds true if you are in B2B: Better product images are worth a thousand calls to action. Many B2B sites offer downloads of whitepapers or demos in exchange for completing a form, but fail to make the most basic of efforts to persuade visitors to do so. Don’t just tell them about your whitepaper… merchandise it. Show a cover, show them how easy it is to read with all your pretty charts. Test to see which pieces matter the most.

5. Headlines Must be Made to Stick

Most headlines (and copy for that matter) suffer from what Chip and Dan Heath refer to in their book Made to Stick as a curse of knowledge: Once you know something, it’s difficult to imagine what it is like to not know it. The headline on your page is the one thing that about 80% of your visitors will read. But while headlines are often crafted for their persuasive abilities, they often assume too much prior knowledge on the part of the reader. Make sure that everybody understands what your headline is about, even if they have no reference to understand it. Then invest as much time as possible testing your headline’s abilities to both (1) gather attention and (2) entice visitors to invest the next 30 seconds on your page by explaining what’s in it for them — in language they can understand!

6. Always be Testing

Doing A/B or multivariate testing used to require some in-house programming expertise or expensive third-party software. Thankfully, Google has provided us with a free alternative in the form of Google Website Optimizer. While it may not offer every feature some of the other solutions provide, it is quite an elegant solution and getting better all the time. I actually prefer that people don’t spend their money on a tool, but focus those resources on better copy and imagery instead. There are no more excuses for not testing regularly. Remember what Claude Hopkins wisely said in 1923: “Almost any question can be answered cheaply, quickly and finally, by a test campaign. And that’s the way to answer them – not by arguments around a table. Go to the court of last resort – buyers of your products.”

7. Should we be testing hundreds of thousands of variations?

This question illustrates the market’s misunderstanding of testing. For the vast majority of businesses, this is more like random testing. You can test thousands of combinations in a multivariate test, but being able to doesn’t mean you should. Let’s focus on this example. I’ve kept the numbers simple for clarity’s sake, but let’s assume:

Example I (not recommended):

1,000 = Test combinations (the number of page sections and variations in the test)
10,000 = Page views per day
100% = Visitors in experiment (we’ll run the experiment with all our traffic)
2.4% = Current conversion rate (average conversion rate)
20% = Expected improvement
The duration for this test: 34.9 days. (More than a month!)

Example II (recommended):

20 = Test combinations (focused on key drivers)
10,000 = Page Views per day
100% = Visitors in experiment
2.4% = Current conversion rate
20% = Expected improvement (focus on key drivers in the hierarchy of optimization rather than just random elements, and your expectations should be higher)
The duration for this test: 0.698 days. (Under a day!)

Under the guise of being “scientific”, the companies that originally offered these tools charged on a monthly basis. While they had plenty of experience in managing their software, they had little experience in identifying valuable tests. Plus, they had zero incentive to get quick results while customers paid a monthly fee.

Multivariate testing for the sake of conversion rate optimization should be scientific. However, testing is about improving your business results, not scientific experimentation. Unless you’re running a lab, you’re testing for profit. (No offense, non-profits… yes, you should be testing too.) Testing only what matters is how to recover opportunity cost. Time is money. Don’t waste it by testing which variables matter; rather, invest your time in improving those variables and your understanding of them. Fix the things that hurt your conversions as fast as possible, and make more money today.

8. Read the Reviews on Conversion

Reviews have been all the buzz the past couple of years. If you recently purchased something online, has a review influenced your purchase decision?

New research further illustrates the value of reviews:

77% of online shoppers use reviews and ratings when purchasing (Jupiter Research, August 2006)
63% of consumers indicate they are more likely to purchase from a site if it has product ratings and reviews. (CompUSA & iPerceptions study)
86.9% of respondents said they would trust a friend’s recommendation over a review by a critic, while 83.8% said they would trust user reviews over a critic. (MarketingSherpa)
Most people don’t seem to focus on all the factors involved in implementing reviews to enhance conversion. It’s important that you test and optimize for conversion and persuasion by focusing on the following areas:

Placement for Visibility
Above the fold
Size
Stars or other graphic
Near point of attention or action
Review Interaction

Ease of reading
Sorting
Rating Distribution
Use across the site
Single Dimension versus Multi-Dimension Reviews

What are the key attributes across different categories
Can review content influence purchase decision
Credibility Factors

Negative and positive reviews
Review approval policy
Reviewer characteristics
What Does a Review Mean

Number of reviews
What questions are you asking
Qualitative versus quantitative
Reviews are just one example of the market trend demanding more authenticity and transparency, and they are key factors in getting your visitors to take action. Any time you have a choice between opening up more or less, always opt for giving your customers more.

What do you think? Do you have any ideas on how to make your website perform better?