If you are a company with a sizeable email marketing budget and list you will be interested in increasing sales or increasing leads. But what should you key performance indicators be?
Some choices for a ecommerce-driven business are:

Sales (total sales, sales by campaign/type/segment/cell, per e-mail delivered)
Profit/margin per e-mail sent and campaign level
List growth/churn (size of database, growth month over month, churn rate month/aggregate)

Some companies are more about lead generation than pure sales. They want to get a lead into the hands of a partner or call centre or salesperson–so they are about efficiencies, rather than sales and/or profit margin. There choice could be:

1. Cost per lead
2. Funnel movement (how leads migrate through the funnel stages)
3. Total reach (how much of the prospect database can be reached at any given time). This includes churn metrics as well.

Notice that the primary KPIs for the two instances above are not about click-through rate or open rate.

When the real focus of the program is purely branding, the metrics seem simpler, but with a deeper definition:

1. Response rate (both open and click). Brand marketers are increasingly looking at the total reach of their base and less at campaign-over-campaign results. They want to count how many eyeballs were exposed to the brand each month, the resulting interactions and incremental Web exposures.
2. Site visits and site journeys. Site traffic statistics driven from e-mail are becoming increasingly valuable to see what content and interests are driven from each campaign/program and business division. Depth of site exploration… List growth. See how email traffic performs against searches made, types of products bought so you can define your personas against email marketing.

All brands place increased value on the size and relative growth of the database since it represents a potential share of market and voice. It is essentially the lifeline to reach a mass of customers in an efficient manner. This, combined with qualitative feedback, is quite useful in measuring brand attitude, awareness and level of involvement with the brand.
So also for example in this context thinking about how to encourage higher subscription rates to an email newsletter via personalised call to actions based on site activity or cookie id to move more people from your bottom left to top right (great customers).
Here are some standard KPIs but obviously every company’s KPIs will be different and will need to evolve over time as well.

E-mail KPIs:

E-mail sent/delivered
Campaign over campaign impressions/opens (total/unique/% rate)
Campaign over campaign clicks (aggregate/unique /% rate)
Click to open (% who open the message and click through)
Churn rate (% unsubscribe/opt out/undeliverable)
Send to a friend (viral rate)
ISP domain response (open/clicks)

Commerce-Driven Program KPIs:

Total sales (campaign, month, quarter, segment)
Profit/margin per e-mail sent / source
Sales per e-mail sent
Cost per e-mail sent
Average Order Value (AOV)
Number of orders
Conversion rate (to open/click through)
Number of site visits (page rank)

Demand Generation

Number of leads (by product/client type)
Number of downloads
Site visits
Page Rank
Cost per lead
Conversion rate
Membership/subscription/database growth

Web Focused

Cost per visitor
Number of leads by entry page
Heavy user share
Average page views
Stacking effect
Length of site visit by source

What do you think? Have I missed some that you think glaringly obvious…
Thanks so much for reading

With my web analytics association social media hat on, this week I was at the Virtual Worlds Conference, there was much talk of what brands are doing in these worlds such as Second life, Habbo Hotel and There.com. These worlds are constantly and quickly adapting given the competitive landscape, the nature of the internet and other services competing for visitor time.

 Virtual worlds can be as completely similar or dissimilar to the real world as we want.

The CEO of Habbo Hotels Timo Soininen when asked what’s new in Habbo Hotel, didn’t talk about new features, star appearances or new contests. His main point was monthly consumer updates to Habbo Hotel based on what’s going on, metrics and user feedback. Their main focus is to make the user experience as easy as possible and make it as easy as possible to get into the world.

“We’ve moved into a Scrum development process and agile development,” Soininen explained. “We like to think we know where we’re heading and sort of the big picture, but the road map really is only up to four months. We look at what’s going on and the metrics and the user feedback that we get and sort of go in monthly consumer update. We release something to the world, back end changes, navigation changes, item updates, on a monthly basis. We’re able to respond quickly.”

“We used to have a really traditional approach where you sit at a drawing board and spec it out and then hopefully after a few months, what you predicted back then is still valid,” he continued. “Given the nature of the Internet and the whole competitive landscape and other services competing for kids time, you have to do (a faster development process). I think you get much more meaningful results.”

The one plan Soininen could lay out for 6-8 months from now was a goal to dramatically simplify the website for Habbo Hotel. There will be some changes to the world itself planned in, but the majority of changes will apparently be to the Web interface to make it easier to actually get into the world.

“Basically what we’re going to do, in the spirit of simplicity is to make sure the first user experience is as pleasant as possible so that when the user enters the world, he or she has as easy a time as possible finding like-minded people,” Soininen said. “I think the really important thing for these casual worlds is to make the joining as casual as possible and not to go into a cumbersome registration process. We’re looking at that, but really focusing on the virtual world. And also giving users a sort of dashboard about their status in the virtual world. So the next time they come in, they see automatically what’s going on and what’s happened.”

Mike Wilson, found of Makena Technologies, creator or 3D virtual world There.com, mentioned about the successful engagements they have created for brands on their world. They built a special area for Capitol Music Group artists such as Beastie Boys, Korn and Lily Allen to make live appearances, for the entire record brand, not just one band. They are having success with brands because their world is PG-13, so brands don’t have to worry about dubious content appearing alongside them. Also, There.com can take the brand and put them where the highest traffic is, rather than being on their own private island.

Second Life founder, Philip Rosendale, waxed lyrically about the ability for virtual worlds to involve customers and have them join in the creative experience within a social context. For exmaple Toyota Scion and Pontiac offere fully customisable cars in Second Life. Similarly, for a CSI episode filmed in Second Life where visitors can solve their own murder mystery in Second Life. The episode went live this week to the total potential audience of CSI and can handle 20,000 players. See the CSI Second Life episode on the CBS website for a demo here.

To conclude, interesting and engaging things are happening in virtual worlds (have you designed your avatar yet?). Worlds like Habbo Hotel are admitting to using metrics and user feedback to create fast one month turn arounds on consumer updates of the world (virtual worlds analytics). Others spoke of the how virtual worlds allow audience and fanbase to go to the next level of immersion with the brand, so that they can step into the brand and become part of it. Brand immersion has been undervalued in the last five years. We see it as moving on the engagement from conversation to an actual relationship with the consumer, hence the interesting brand experiences such as CSI, Toyota, Renault Formula One and other stories.

Consumer Generated Media (“CGM”) is the term that encompasses all social media content on the Internet authored by consumers. This content ranges from blogs, to social networks, consumer review sites, message boards, and videos.

Social networking and connecting with customers is all the buzz, for example yesterday Forrester Research did a webcast on “Know your Customers’ Social Technographics and Craft the Right Social Marketing Strategy” with Charlene Li from Forrester. She shared her insights on understanding ones target audience attitudes and behaviors towards social technologies in order to craft the right social marketing strategy. These are great calls for marketers to learn more about getting their arms around social media, listening to the voice of the customer and engagement with consumers in social media.

Jeremiah, a fellow web analytics association social media committee member, is a social media stategist and gives us outlines of how to approach positioning one’s company in the wider social media ecosystem. From a web analytics perspective, how does one even begin to gauge the influence of these conversations on one’s brand?

Social media technographics report by Forrester research. 

Some other stats, from Pew Internet and Jupiter research:

One blog is created every minute
27% (32M) read blogs
22% (27M) post reviews/ comments
44% (53m) are content creators(running own blogs/sites, posting messages).

There are more than 1.5 billion comments per day, the collective voice of the consumer to influence brands and buying strategy has never been stronger and will continue to be strong.

There have recently appeared in the market, applications, such as Visible Technologies TruCast that enable companies to monitor social media conversations, gain valuable insights, and even engage with consumers in order to better allow companies to manage their brands online on social media sites. For companies, these online conversations represent a new opportunity and challenge for brand monitoring, reputation management, word-of-mouth marketing, and consumer engagement.

This is pretty powerful stuff, the ability to segment one’s potential customers by feeling and tone and message from the enormous pool of social media sites.

I wonder how scalable this tool or any tool is, because eventually with the increase of the blogosphere appearing to be exponential how much data will their databases be able to handle?
But assuming all social media data on the Internet, posts and comments are collected in a database with multi-tiered querying - there would be some pretty powerful information.

Influence engagement metrics and advanced analytics:
Identifies the most influential consumers for a particular topic or issue
Determines the sub-topics of conversations
Interactive dashboard allows clients to determine specific sites and authors wielding the most influence in conversations.

What are they talking about (sentiment) scores:
For example, their intelligent sentiment technology evaluates the positive and negative sentiment and tone of conversations. Users establish sentiment criteria by scoring a sample of data, and TruCast automatically scores the rest. I’d like to put this to the test.

There are others such as Pythia which give trended social media data for free, so even for SMEs there are tools which can help.

I personally think the idea of engagement metrics within the context of the broader social media ecosystem and putting it to use to be able to positively impact on managing one’s company’s brand, social media reputation management, is something that we will all be doing in the not too distant future.

Any thoughts or questions or disagreements, please let the web analytics princess know.

This is a different type of post from normal because there will be lots of graphics instead of words. I am also ill at the moment which is really annoying. The question being, which online marketing banner is more effective, from a web analyst’s perspective of course, and which other bits of data or charts would you have liked to have had?

Bubble charts key (I like bubble charts because you can compare 3 datasets at the same time):

Size of bubble determines number of visits in (000s) driven to website.
Bounce rate is the number of visitors who leave site after less than 10 seconds and only visit 1 page in the site.
Conversion rate is total number of conversions (eg items sold) divided by total unique visits to the site.
Message effectiveness chart where each different coloured bubble represents a completely distinct marketing message and design on logo.
CTR (click through rate) is the total number of clicks on the banners divided by total number of impressions on media/publications/other websites where banners were placed.
Cost represents the total ad spend in (000s) with the various publications.

As usual, I very much welcome your feedback and thoughts and please do let me know which online banner you think is more effective and why and which other charts or data would you would have used?

Last weekend I went to the inaugural Podcamp UK and co-presented a session with Lucie Follett on the monetisation of podcasting and podcasting measurement using engagement metrics, in the auspicious surrounding of Birmingham’s NTI (new technology institute). It was fast paced and innovative. You may be able to spot us in one of the photos? There were a whole bunch of people there including all the top UK podcasters, Twitter guys (I twitter, do you?), bloggers, journalists and new media folk in general.

In the social media ecosystem, in which I would include podcasting, there is so much potential for businesses to use podcasting to generate brand awareness and interest in their product or service from a niche audience. At the same time, there is an increased awareness of the potential monetisation of podcasting, if it is done effectively. I am still a big believer in “Content is King” - ie create podcasts that genuinely interest and compel your target audience. And have seen examples where “view movie” (ie watch podcast) with the right kind of engaging content has resulted in a tripling of lead generation on a particular car company’s website, such as brochure requests. So podcasting can and does work for business when done in the right way - you need a good story, and definitely not my boss told me to do a podcast!

However, how do you begin to measure a podcast’s effectiveness?

Due to the nature of downloadable media, there are a number of difficulties when it comes to getting accurate metrics from podcasting and issues to consider which impede the efficient implementation of big marketing or advertising campaigns across multiple website.

-How many podcast downloads are there - if the podcast is embedded in the website, is it still considered to e a podcast?
-How many viewers actually watch or listen to the podcast once it is downloaded?
-What degree of the podcast is listened to, for example if you have ad in the podcast towards the end, how many people actually listen to it?
-What true influence or buzz is actually generated by the podcast, because link content (popularity) does not equate to influence.

The key things is to look at podcasting in the same way one does other social media.

Engagement metrics are key. Things to consider include (and please feel free to add any more via comments):
1. Visitor reviews of your podcast (for example on itunes).
2. Visitor comments - where a podcast:comment ratio is the most helpful one as it strips it down to pure engagement on a podcast, by podcast basis.
3. Social capital/Visitor influence - if an established reviewer ie top podcaster or specialist within the industry writes a review/comment etc, this will have a lot more influence than if Sam from Dunkirk did (sorry Sam).
4. Ranking on established podcasting platforms, such as podcasting news top 25 or podcast alley top 10.
5. Wisdom from the rest of the web, such as the reaction on the blogosphere, twitter-sphere, facebook-sphere, general search engine results etc.

The monetisation of podcasting, is not about corporates trying to strangle the life out of a vibrant, independent podcasting community - which will definitely continue to thrive, but a marketing journey where businesses who understand social media will use it to their advantage. Businesses that podcast will be able to measure those tangible or intangible (hence engagement metrics) benefits to their business, and where eventually marketers and advertisers will be able to efficiently implement advertising across multiple podcasts, similar principle (but very different at the same time) to the way google adwords has their content network advertising - where you can run campaigns on a keyword/sector basis, having illustrated the value of advertising on podcasts or websites running podcasts.

Thanks so much for reading and do let me know if you have any thoughts or ideas, or if you completely disagree.