Posts Tagged ‘Web Marketing’

Web Analytics Solutions list

Wednesday, November 10th, 2010

We’ve decided to start a new category of blog posts – listings and reviews of various web design, development and online marketing tools we use and recommend for our clients. It’s no surprise the first list of tools we are publishing is web analytics solutions. After all, measurement and analysis of what happens on your website should be the cornerstone of your web strategy. Without that information you are left out in the dark not knowing what works and what does not. With that information, you can do more with less. Here’s just a small list of things modern well-implemented web analytics tools can help you know:

  • Sources of traffic to your website including search engines, keywords searched, links from other sites, e-mail campaigns, banner advertising, offline advertising that let to web visits and more
  • Activities of your website visitors including pages viewed, time spent on each page and your site in general, actions they took like form submissions, registrations, purchases, video plays and other engagement metrics
  • Profiles and behaviors of your website visitors including geographic regions up to city, demographic and psycho-graphic characteristics of your website visitors, their affinity with other websites and brands
  • Track sales and any other conversions (desired actions) of your website visitors and attribute them to the traffic source (how the came to your website), campaigns, etc.

In other words the beauty of web analytics is – if you can think of it, it can almost always be measured, with some exceptions. Web analytics is a beast however – a technical beast, and if you don’t have  a great deal of expertise in it it can quickly get really confusing. We know of a a marketing VP in a good-size company that became a laughing stock of the board becasue he kept referring to his website “HITS” growth.

Here are a few web analytics tools we use and recommend, along with additional web analytics solutions we are aware of, but may not necessarily have experience with, or like using. If you are in the market for a web analytics tool this list should help you do the shopping.*

Google Analytics

URL: www.google.com/analytics
Model: Hosted (software as service)
Costs: FREE, the only downside is Google also gets your data. But hey, they get it anyway, whether you like it or not :) and they only use it in a limited fashion  (see their usage terms).

Urchin from Google

URL: www.google.com/urchin/
Model: Installed solution
Cost: Urchin according to their site is free to try and costs roughly $10K to purchase.

Adobe® SiteCatalyst®

(formerly Omniture SiteCatalyst®)

URL: www.omniture.com/en/products/online_analytics/sitecatalyst
Model: Hosted (software as service)
Cost: according to my information cost varies depending on the size of your website, traffic, and reporting requirements, but starts in the tens of thousands if not hundred thousands. The basic model they use is set up fee plus ongoing fees based on server call volume – the more your traffic your website gets, the more you pay.

Webtrends™

URL: www.webtrends.com
Model: Hosted (software as service) and Installed solutions are available as of me writing this.
Cost: according to my information, as with SiteCatalyst® cost varies depending on the size of your website, traffic, and reporting requirements, and starts in the tens of thousands if not hundred thousands. The basic model they use is set up fee plus ongoing fees based on server call volume – the more your traffic your website gets, the more you pay.

Other web analytics tools:

  • Coremetrics® from IBM – www.coremetrics.com (from our short impressions seems to be an excellent solution for e-commerce sites)
  • Unica® WebIsight – www.unica.com/products/enterprise-web-analytics.htm (Unica was just bought by IBM so it remains to be seen how they deal with two web analytics products)
  • Sawmill – www.sawmill.net (quite technical interface, great for your IT guys but probably going to be useless for your marketing folks)

My Pick

It is hard to recommend a web analytics solution not knowing the specific requirements of your organization. In my experience if you are medium-size or a small-size company, Google Analytics, or Urchin might be one of the best choices you can make. These solutions give the power of knowledge right our of the box and can be acquired and deployed in no time and on a budget. If your organization is large, you probably already have a tool that your IT and Marketing departments have picked. My advice to you here is to learn more about web analytics, make a list of needs, things you really want to know, and then go back to your vendor and other vendors with that list and ask if their solutions can provide this information to you. Sure, they’ll do a demo and show you a whole new set of features you did not know were available, but to really win in this game you need to know what ACTIONABLE DATA you need to have to run your business successfully. Otherwise it’s like picking a new cell-phone for features, various bells and whistles you are never going to use.

Shameless plug for Visual Harbor: If you need help in deciding which web analytics solution to go with, or help in making sense of your existing web reports, were are eager to work with you. We’ve helped organizations large, with millions of web visitors and small, with just a few hundreds to pick, deploy and configure actionable web reporting tools.

*Disclaimer: Information provided is post such as prices, features and benefits of various web analytics solutions, may or may not be accurate. We tried to provide the most adequate information to the best of our knowledge, however we are not responsible for its accuracy. Please contact the companies we listed here for more complete and accurate information.

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Rethinking traditional marketing (Part 2)

Wednesday, January 13th, 2010

This is a second post in several that I’d promised to devote to rethinking traditional way of doing marketing (See previous post). WARNING: the post below is loaded with “strategery” and requires some time and thinking on your part. If you are looking for some quick fix or 10 Dos and Don’ts, skip this.

With that disclaimer out of the way let’s continue. Remember I asked you to make a list of all the touch points you company has with its prospective and current clients? I provided a cheat-sheet which had things like TV, website, press, social networking sites. This is what we need it for – we are going to draw a diagram of your company’s (or brand’s) interaction with the outside world (customers, prospective customers, customers of your competitors, etc.) Think of it as a map of your marketing universe that will help you navigate through the minds of your current and future customers.

Large whiteboard and several dry-erase markers with different colors are best because you are going to erase and move things around. Draw your company in the center, draw your audience/s segments around the perimeter, and then fill in the space around your company with all the touch points/communication channels that you’ve listed.

In the end you might draw a diagram like this one
(note my outstanding graphic abilities):

Marketing Universe Map - touch points between your company and your audience

Marketing Universe Map - touch points between your company and your audience

Notice a few things in the example above. Smiley faces are the customers or prospects, that are connected to your company via various communication channels.  Double-headed arrows indicate that the information or interaction goes both ways (for instance website can be used to both communicate and listen to your audience). Other channels only allow you to broadcast but not listen, thus the arrows go only in one direction.

Use knowledge of your current situation to map everything out. For instance, if your company has a blog you might have to draw two types of blogs, one – your “Corporate blog” that is connected from your company to the audience and another – call it “Other blogs” and only connect it from the bloggers to the audience.

Note that I had used different color above to indicate level of control you exercise on these various touch points or communications channels. The ones that you have relative control over are shown in blue; the ones that you have only indirect control or no control at all are red.

Once you get the diagram as detailed as possible, step aside and take a moment to ponder.  What does it mean for your business? A picture is worth a thousand words.

I guarantee you will start understanding your customers and prospects a little better. This is the universe they live in. These are the different channels they get thousands of messages through every minute of every day.

Finally if you feels like trying to get into their shoes even more, draw other touch points / communication channels, that you think your audience spends time with or pays attention to, even though you might not be actively using them. For instance if they watch TV and you don’t have any TV campaigns, still draw TV on the diagram. If they read e-mail (personal, promotional and newsletters) and you do neither of that still write it down.

Review your beautiful work again. We will pause here as I think this is plenty for one post and I want to give you time to complete this exercise at least as a sketch, before moving to the next step.

BTW: A quick plug, if you want to invite me to facilitate this marketing universe mapping session for your company, I’d be happy to do that and much more..

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Rethinking traditional marketing (Part1)

Sunday, November 15th, 2009

I want to start this blog series “Rethinking traditional marketing” with one topic that I see as a huge problem these days. It’s the traditional marketing struggling to adjust and make sense of this new world where consumers are elusive; the economy is going down the pipe and everyone is talking about web 2.0 (I think it’s 3.0 now or whatever the latest buzz word is) but few have the slightest idea what that is or how to apply it to your business.

Look from the inside:

If you worked in a large or mid size company’s marketing department you know what I am talking about. You typically hear from your senior management phrases like:

“Direct mail has always worked for us.”

“Web is only X% of our revenues, it’s growing, but it’ll be a while before it makes as much money as our call center.”

“Sure, web is very important to us, we’ve just redesigned the website.”

The problem is very obvious: with an average Chief Marketing Officer staying with one company for less than one year these days, senior management wants to play it safe. A new marketing executive comes on board, but he or she does not have neither the time nor the data and the metrics to assess what has worked in the past and what has not, and especially what has worked but is no longer working.

Most ad agencies you work with don’t make it any easier either. They want you to do TV, print advertising, billboards or even redesign your website, but rarely will anyone say, let’s do a comprehensive review of the past campaigns and performance and figure out the bigger strategy for your future marketing.

On top of that, you may have several departments that don’t talk to each other. Everyone operates in their silos: direct mail, TV, call center, customer support center, and web – which is often controlled by your IT department. And even if the head of each department knows how much they spent on a campaign, they rarely will share this information, and forget about measuring the return.

In other companies Marketing VP or CMO has full control over all marketing. But in he or she typically has a preferred marketing channel (TV, print or whatever) usually because its familiar, it has worked for their previous company, etc. The efforts are focused around that channel and all other channels are usually treated like stepchildren.

What customers see:

Here is how it looks from the outside to the customer. Unaware of these “Washington politics” inside your company, users come to your website and can’t figure out why there’s no single word about that special offer the TV commercial talked about. They get annoyed when you send them credit card offers for the card they already have. They recognize your direct mail and put it straight into trash. They see newly redesigned website. Maybe at first they are impressed with the modern look and flash animation, but then they start cursing at the usability of this thing, trying to either locate your phone number, or find out your store hours or the “Buy” button.

So, if you are a marketing executive or a mid-level marketing manager, what do you do to start fixing this mess?

In the next few posts I will try to provide some small practical steps you can take to rethink you marketing and slowly transform it into a more meaningful way to communicate from your company to the world. I don’t claim to be a super expert, I just have a few practical things that I want to share from my experience in working with multiple industries and companies.

Before my next post, here’s the first step I suggest you take:

Make a list of all the touch points your company has with its prospective and current clients. Some of them will be under your control like TV commercials or print materials; others will be external, like press your company receives. Make a fairly detailed list, and if there are distinct campaigns that take place throughout the year, note each one separately. For some ideas on what to include, see my cheat sheet below. I’ll talk about what to do with this list in the next post one week from now.

Touch points list

  • TV
  • Radio
  • Magazines and Newspapers
  • Outdoor (billboards, company vehicles, buses and trucks, outdoor signs)
  • Brochures, business cards, catalogs
  • Direct mail
  • Email
  • Phone numbers and departments that interact with the customers
  • Office locations
  • PR
  • Events, trade shows and exhibitions
  • Your website
  • Blogs
  • Social Networking sites
  • Other websites (Search for your company name, or brand and go to websites that show up on the first page of results)

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