Recently in Online Strategies Category

Customer satisfaction influences how consumers will purchase from your store again. Their satisfaction could influence their future behavior to purchase online, offline, recommend website, return to website, commit to a brand, and general retail satisfaction.

In this article, I would like to focus on tactics to increase KPIs relating to return visitors or loyalty customers. The common metrics in web analytics tools to measure loyal visitors are return visitors, loyalty metrics like frequency and recency, or number of advocates.

It is very common that conversions for eCommerce are likely to be higher for returning visitors to the site. That is because consumers are researching online and may visit the site again later to finalize their shopping. According to Foresee's research, "Compared to shoppers who are dissatisfied with an online experience, shoppers who are highly satisfied with a retail website are 65% more likely to purchase online and 44% more likely to return to the website than those who are dissatisfied."

That is a very convincing statement to support why you should focus on converting your customers from new to return and make them loyal to your service and brand. Obviously, your customer has to be satisfied to be loyal, but let's focus on the web analytics and the tactics and strategies to improve the KPIs.

Let's layout some KPIs, and discuss some example tactics and strategies to improve it. Return visitors, frequency, recency, conversion rate, revenue distribution, new and return visitors distribution.

These are common measures you can acquire from the web analytics tool out there in 2010. It is typically based on site visitors who were cookied or not. Caveat is that if users delete their cookie or switch their browser, they won't be recognized as return visitors; instead they'll be tracked as new visitors.

What to look for in returning visitors are the number and growth in returning site visitors, conversion rate, and revenue contribution and distribution. You don't want to take action before knowing where you stand. The number of returning visitors doesn't mean anything, but if you add some context, then it can tell you a lot. Here is an example of what you can start off with:

I just randomly made this up, so don't worry so much about the actual values. The idea is understand your current numbers, and where you stand. You might want to start from here and understand the growth and distribution of new and return visitors, and their revenue attribution. Ask following questions on how well your site is doing on:

1. New and return visitors. Are they both growing or not? In above example, your overall traffic is growing, but return visitors are not growing. Sad...
2. Is your returning visitor's distribution relative to overall visitors low or high? 20% of the site traffic is return visitors, and about 80% new visitors.
3. How much is the revenue distribution between new and returning visitors? 20% of your site visitors are returning traffic and they are contributing 55% of the revenue!!
4. Conversion rate for return and new visitors. What is the difference? Typically, return visitors are much higher than new visitors.

So from this scenario some the actions you can plan and take are:

• Grow that number of return visitors. You need to look at recency metrics and continue to improve that number so return visitors are coming to your site in shorter time span. Market to them, and continue to offer fresh ideas, content, products, price, features, and services.


• Improve conversion rate for new visitors as much as you can. If you set up your site so users can opt-in to receive future message from you, you can remarket to the converted customers.


• Improve conversion rate for both new and returning visitors, and do it through testing. Always test, test, and test. Testing in this case is web site optimization through A/B, multivariate testing, etc.


• Don't worry so much about new and returning visitor's revenue distribution. Think about the growth of retuning visitors, because that means your strategy to bring in more loyal customers is working.

Few tactics I've mentioned here to move that KPI's are:

• Fresh content, services, products, ideas, right price, features, etc. You have to have something to spark the interests of your consumers so they come back.
• Re-marketing. Re-market to current customers because you know they are likely to buy from you again. Re-marketing could be done through newsletters, emails, calling, sending out coupons to current customers, DM, etc.

I have seen some articles that mentions some great findings and research from eMarketing or pitches from Email marketing solutions tying up with some web analytics solutions. I was thinking, what can we do or even think from web analytics perspective before jumping on to implementing remarketing program.

In this writing, I would like to focus on remarketing with email. Keep in mind that in order to remarket via email, people have to have registered on your site or who have opted into your email program.

The best starting point is to review the type of site you are running the remarketing program. Your site could be an e-commerce, content, lead generation, etc.

Second point, what interactions by these identifiable visitors would you consider as abandonment? Abandonment in this case could be anything that you consider people who didn't execute the desired action, after subscribing or registering for communication.

Examples based on an assumption that the site visitors are logged into the site and registered for email communication:

• People who added items into shopping cart, but did not completed checkout.
• Visited a specific page (like promotional page), but didn't complete a desired action like subscribing/registering/applying for promo.
• Didn't sign up for magazine subscription.
• Didn't bounce, saw old product, but missed viewing the new product pages.
• Registered users with twitter account (based on profile info), but didn't click or attempted to show interest in following the site owner or company's twitter account.

You get the idea. Remarketing could yield positive results. According to a research found on a study for ExactTarget and TicketsNow, researchers found that transactional emails sent after a shopper had abandoned items in a shopping cart actually worked to improve overall company revenue by 30%. Therefore, remarketing could be an effective marketing tactic based on people's interaction with the site. So far, re-marketing sounds great and very promising.

A lot of the findings based on research talks about X% improvements in revenue or increase in conversion by Z% after doing XYZ. That makes me wonder about the kinds of web analytics data, which should be reviewed prior to investing your time in executing remarketing program.

Here are some ideas that I think web analytics metrics can help you decide rather to tackle remarketing with email or not. Idea is to understand where your site stands in terms of data, and gain a better sense of expectations from remarketing.

Number of registered users who can be emailed:
You site may be selling your products pretty well, but if a lot of them shoppers didn't opt-in to your newsletter (for whatever reason) then the overall volume of re-marketable people may not be significant.

Imagine an e-commerce site where the owner decided to give customer an option to opt-in for email communication at the thank you page, which caused only 1% of the overall customers to register. Let's assume there were 10,000 absolute customers to date. That means there are only 100 remarketable customers. Is that a good number for you to invest in re-marketing? You decide.

Email click-through rate (unique):
If your average click-through rate (unique clicks per email delivery) was around 1%, then only 1 response would be generated from 100 emails that you sent out (based on the above example).

If your site is awesome, and have 1,000,000 absolute customers, with 1% of them registered for email, there will be 10,000 remarketable customers. With 1% click-through rate, you have about 100 responders to your remarketed email.

Conversion rate:
Self explanatory, but let's assume your re-marketing tactics are so great (the best in the world), and 10% of the email responders actual complete the desired action. With the case with 1,000,000 absolute customers, you'll get 10 conversions.

Average order value (AOV) or Average Conversion Value (ACV):
Regardless of your site being e-commerce or not, it would be important to understand how much your conversion are valued. Say your site sells an item that worth $100 on average, then that will be your ACV or AOV. With the 1,000,000 customers example, that will mean your remarketing efforts may generate about $1,000 in value. Not sure if that is good yet.

Return on Advertising Spending (ROAS):
So you may be happy that $1,000 is a great outcome, and now you can go buy your team some drinks... but wait. Ask you self, about how much money are you planning or expected to go out of your pocket for this remarketing program?

Let's say you paid this one freelancer that use to work at a top marketing agency for about $1,500 (I'm sure it is more in reality...). Using above scenario, your ROAS is 67% (1,000/1,500). You basically lost some money just running the re-marketing program. Nice... maybe that's why you hear a lot of fancy agencies having trouble making their clients happy because clients might be seeing this ROAS below 100%.

Additional/potential value generating from re-marketing outcome:
This is where your segmentation in web analytics tool come into play. If your remarketing efforts are to drive certain outcome or interactions, what does your web analytics segmentation tells you about those visitors after they converted or show potential additional value?

Say you segmented those 10 converted customers (visitors coming from re-marketing email), and found out that they advocate the site's product through tell-a-friend feature. You happen to know that tell-a-friend or advocacy by customers generate about $50 in value (this is just an assumption for example).

Therefore, 10 customers telling 10 of their friends generated additional $500, making your ROAS 100%. The idea is to look at the segment of different interaction and outcomes so your remarketing efforts are based on interactions that drive the biggest return.

These interactions could be existing even before you run the re-marketing program, so understand the values from different "micro conversions" using segmentations. Here is a nice article that talks about "Macro and Micro conversions".

I guess the challenging part is to assign some kind of $ value on to those micro conversions, or those segmented interactions that leads to additional returns for your site/business.

A visual to support my writing...

In web analytics especially for eCommerce, we tend to discuss within the context of the web analytics tools that we use. Other than measuring the click-stream data, a lot of the web analytics tools are capable in integrating external data into the web analytics application.

I am not sure if there are a lot of companies out there that relies on the web analytics applications to integrate external data and report it out of the web analytics application other than the Business Intelligence tools.

The idea of integrating and assessing offline metrics to web analytics data is nothing new, but I feel like I don't hear much about offline metrics that impacts online business and strategies.

In this post, I would like to talk about some of the key operational metrics that web analyst or eCommerce managers should look at when assessing the success of your eCommerce business.

In web analytics, we focus a lot on marketing, traffic source attributions, conversion rates, etc. It is vital to also think about your customers' experience beyond the website or after they completed the transaction. In eCommerce, there are a lot of things happening even after customers completed purchasing. Orders have to be processed, transactions will need to be settled, products need to be wrapped, shipped, confirm delivery, subtract inventory, process returns, etc.

All of these required actions or processes correlate to customer satisfaction. Sure, you can improve your traffic by 200%, and increase conversion rate by 300%, but if your customers aren't receiving the products within promised timeframe, then they will not become a repeat buyer or even advocate your service. Here are some of the metrics you will need to take into consideration.

Shipped to Order
For a given time range of data, it is the percentage of shipped orders per total orders. If one of the weeks in previous months show less than 100%, then maybe something is wrong with the fulfillments or the orders aren't getting processed.

Duration between Orders to Delivery
If your slowest shipment option in your eCommerce service is 5 to 7days, you definitely don't want to see seven plus days for this metric. Your customers do expect to have their product delivered on time.

Number of return orders and percentage of returns
So you have increased your conversion rate and successfully optimized the campaigns to drive higher revenue, but you didn't realized that more products are getting returned due to whatever reason. When you're working with a great eCommerce solution, you should be getting back the number of returns. Make sure to gauge this key data.

Percentage of in-stock per order
Maybe your site is selling hot out items quickly, but the orders surpassed the amount of units available in inventory. You want to know what percentage of orders are actually available for delivery. If its below 100%, you might want to double check which products are short on inventory, and for what reason is it short. (sky rocketing number of orders for particular item?)

Remember, that one of the key desired outcome of websites is to "increase customer satisfaction and increase loyalty". Make sure to close the loop in your supply chain/logistics/fulfillments by taking action upon these key metrics.

I found this article from CNET, which is interesting from web analytics point of view. It clearly depicts businesses are looking beyond hits and pageviews, but shows a wide gap between web site objective and desired outcome. Web analytics analyst should view this as a learning. It also underlines the importance of web analytics data and the leadership of an analyst.

Inside the short, troubled life of a music start-up

Here is the background of SpiralFrog's business.
SprialFrog is a free digital music download service, which became the first company to convince a major music label to offer downloads on an ad-supported basis. The company's goal was to give away music and supported itself by selling advertising. SpiralFrog's management believed that the record companies would rush to do business with anyone who competed directly with illegal peer-to-peer sites, and they have focused heavily on simple plan to grow their business via aggressive marketing to turn visitors to loyal users.

Here are some key highlights from the article. Mostly a reflection of bad decisions. Let's see how you see it...

• Low registration rate, pages per visit, time on site, high bounce rate


• Company burned $26.3 million while generating sales of just $1.2 million


• The dramatic falloff of site traffic coincides with the board's decision to cut spending on affiliate marketing


• Management says "it needed to build volume and then swing over to quality. If you didn't build the volume, you could never get ads on the site from tier-1 advertisers".


• At one point, traffic grew from 2 million visitors to 3 million in the following month


• Affiliate marketing programs were introduced to spread the company's brand across its own site and many other affiliated sites.


• In January 2009, SpiralFrog's 2008 sales and marketing expenses came to $11 million (twice the $5.6 million the company paid in music licensing that year).


• One of their promo's ROAS was $60 per registered users. In worst case, they paid $490 for registered users.


• When the marketing programs were halted, traffic numbers crashed. SpiralFrog saw just 775,547 unique visitors in October, a fraction of the site's monthly peak of 7 million.

These are clear indications of two different HiPPOs (SpiralFrog management & investors) with one objective to make money, and outcomes driven by poor management and allocation of efforts. In other words, objective of making money off free music, with one outcome to drive enormous site visitors without putting emphasis to convert new visitors to loyal customers.

HiPPOs: Borrowing Avinash's term "HiPPO's", which means Highest Paid Person's Opinion.

From web analytics analyst stand point, it is important to diversify your analysis and translate the data into information for business. In SpiralFrog's case, web analytics analyst should emphasize their analysis and insights on:

• Measure sticky traffic driven by marketing efforts. Look beyond increase in site visitors. 1,000 visitors with 1 person converting, and putting more money just to increase that 99.9% of non engaged traffic makes no sense...


• Translate metrics to further optimize landing pages to increase conversion and ROAS.


• Gauge web metrics data and support CRM efforts to tackle efforts that work in converting new visitors to return visitors, and optimize marketing messages to drive loyal visitors.


• Test various campaigns that drive return visitors/ad clickers.


• Stop investing in marketing campaigns that don't work, and support business with metrics that eat lower hanging fruits instead of trying to consume the entire tree.

After all, at some point, management should have noticed that increase in traffic doesn't translate to great services and user satisfaction. Few ways web analytics analyst could do to assess learnings and support increase in satisfied users are (in SpiralFrog's case):

1. Segment your loyal visitors data, and see who they are and how are they engage with your service.
2. Web Analytics can only tell you the "what", but not "why". Take surveys, and assess the qualitative insights.
3. Look at visitors who bounce vs. visitors who don't bounce when arrived to the site. "High bounces equal throw more money to bring visitors that don't bounce" is a mistake. Is it a specific ad, keywords, ad group, banner color, or CTA that caused high bounces?
4. Measure and optimize rigorously on CRM efforts. You are dealing with loyal visitors, what can you do to increase and turn them into your "advocates"?
5. Track affiliate networks that drive loyal visitors. Affiliates emphasize on numbers rather than quality. They get paid for what they refer, not for referring satisfied visitors.

It sounds like I'm talking trash about SpiralFrog's web analytics analyst, but I can really understand the challenges in small companies that is backed up by huge amount of cash. HiPPOs are probably the bottle neck, and is the primary cause of not being able to take best actions based on web analytics insights.

Web analytics analysts are facing a steeper challenge in 2009. If these HiPPOs start to pretend they know all or everything about web analytics, investors and businesses will continue to burn cash for nothing. Plus they'll blame the analysts and eventually media will use web metrics to put blame at web analyst indirectly. Maybe that is a good stimulus plan for this economy... having these investors burn cash... j/k.

Good luck to all of the web analyst in the world !!

I am writing this article because I think a lot of the shopping carts are very unique for every sites, and based on my experience in dealing with web analytics tagging for shopping carts, there are always issues.

What I need to make clear is that this article is not intended to discuss how to make your web analytics tagging perfect. It could be nearly accurate to address your data needs in areas of high priority, but everything can not be tracked perfectly accurate in 100% manner. You have to accept that truth. Also web analytics helps you find actionable insights and trends, and the main objective is not to use it as a report for reporting accurate numbers.

Shopping cart is one complicated beast. Some eCommerce sites may have their shopping cart handled by third party applications or vendors, complicating web analytics tagging delivery. Also there are many if and else conditions so web analytics implementation may not handle every little single data capturing instances.

Let me list out some possible shopping cart tagging/tracking/data challenges, and see if your web analytics handle such instances.

• Item addition and removal. You may take cart add into consideration, but not car removal.
• Login session considerations. Some carts require login after an item is added to cart or some time before the confirmation. This dependencies may throw off your tagging exepectations.
• Page refresh on order confirmation page (thank you page). If your analytics software counts conversions based on pageviews or don't dedupe redundant sessions on confirmation page.
• Campaign variables not being pass along to cart, or conversions not attributing properly to campaign tagging.
• Search Engines indexing shopping carts with items in it, which could inflate unnecessary cart add. Not really a tagging issue, but felt like mentioning it here.
• Any optional activities and trackings required to address those usage. Example, promotional code, shipping calculations, billing info update, edit profile, etc. Anything in such nature may cause page refresh, and could be a potential cause of data inflaction.
• Different combos of quantities, products, special offers, etc. Depending on how these instances are handled, item, quantity, and revenue may not sync up right. Example, a user buys two pens with special promo of buy one get one free: You could tag it so it reflects two orders of pens applying average price on each, or two orders of pens with one full price attached to only one of the order, or handles it as one pen order and special offers tracking in separate bucket. The key is to have your data expectations aligned to what is really getting tracked.

The most important thing is to have your analytics planning well defined in advanced, and QA properly. Learn the trade offs, and be flexible about it. Do not lose focus on addressing the desired outcomes!!

Connecting the dots between site objective and desired outcomes could be done in multiple ways, and do not expect to answer every possible scenarios including stuff that is okay to know. Focus on NEED to know and ACTIONABLE KPIs.

In this post, I would like to introduce and illustrate my web analytics framework or methodology for connecting the dots between Web Site Objectives and Outcomes.

Avinash, a well known web analytics evangelist says three specific desired Outcomes from a website are:

• Increased Revenue


• Reduced Costs


• Improved Customer Satisfaction/Loyaly

Now stepping a back a little bit, on a higher level, the three main Objectives for making a website are:

• Acquire


• Convert


• Retain

In a nutshell, the web analytics framework should support you (web analyst), to en light key business people with actionable insights on the desired outcomes to the site objectives. There should be nine main initial points of thinking to help you start analyzing and inspire actions through data.

1. How your acquisition initiatives impacted your desired outcomes in terms of revenue? So the three areas of points would be: Acquisition vs. Increase Revenue, Acquisition vs. Reduction in Cost, Acquisition vs. Customer Satisfaction/Loyalty. 3 points of interests here.
2. How your tactics in increasing conversions impacted revenue, reduction in costs, improving satisfaction/loyalty. Another 3 things here.
3. How did your customer retention efforts impacted your revenue, costs, and improved satisfaction/loyalty. Another 3 things here.

This sounds good, but it can be confusing... For example, with "Acquisition vs. Reduction in Cost", you may ask how can you reduce cost when you're investing your money to drive traffic? Well, maybe one of your acquisition efforts is SEO, so that you could spend "less" on PPC campaign and drive free traffic.

To make things less confusing, let's take a look at a visual of an idea and possible KPIs to look at for these 9 different points (actions points, web analytics methods, whatever you call it...).

These KPIs are just examples of what I thought really quickly, but hope you get the point.

The challenges for web analyst is to work with people, managers, executives, marketers, etc. Even if this methodology explicitly clarify the what needs to go into dashboards or actually do the changes, if those people don't help supporting the actions, then the data could become useless.

The main point of this visual table is for web analysts to vision and make decisions to connect the dots between Outcomes and Site Objectives. KPIs won't do all the work, analysts will need to dive into the analytics software and do more analysis to be confident in the findings and justifying the next action. Action to make more money!!

Depending on your reporting needs, you may come across making a weekly/monthly/adhoc reports just for an acquisition, conversion, or retention efforts. In that case, make sure to not forget the basic principle of 3 outcomes, and do your analytics magic to find actionable insights through the metrics you (including business people) think are important.

Remember, connecting the dots (analysis) is the fun part of doing web analytics.

Marketers have been talking about social media and using it as their primary online marketing tactics to drive traffic and qualified leads to their site, business, brands, etc. Some of the obvious tools are twitter, digg.com, stumbleupon, delicious, facebook, myspace, linkedin, etc.

I believe all of those social media tools are powerful, but it has to be used wisely, and have a long-term commitment. When I mean long term, I really mean lo---ng term.

The important thing about social media is not only about the quantity of comments and feedbacks that your throw into the social media space. It is also about the quality.

Successful bloggers, twitters or diggers have been contributing targeted and relevant content to their audiences. When I say audiences, those audiences should reflect people who are interested in you, your thought, brand, services, products, etc. Basically, you have to step up and represent your specialty and serve your audiences like they are your customer.

If you're purpose to tweet about your personal life so that your family or friends can feel close to you, that is totally fine and ok. From marketing stand point, it is wise to stick to your niche of specialty. For example, if you're in the field of web analytics, social media will work great for you if you contribute your knowledge on web analytics to the internet crowd. That quality of sharing will reflect you. So don't just shoot random messages on twitter, and digg irrelevant sites you're not interested into digg. Keep it niche and high quality. Don't forget to comment and network though those social media platforms.

Social media is a medium just like your website, which is part of an internet eco-system and it has to represent yourself or business. The important thing to know is that no matter what you do (as of 2009), most of the social media will generate your comment or direct traffic to other web page. What does that mean??
You have to have great content.

Why? Well, eventually if you're so bad ass in marketing, you will promote your site really well through social media.

If you're so good at it, you'll receive positive results (positive result could be increase in traffic, leads, conversions, etc.).

If you're so bad ass in marketing, people will talk about your site or article. Success in online marketing using social media or search needs to come from great content.

What are the ways to create great content for social media or search?

1) Create relevant content for your audience. Hopefully, you know your target audience and their interest. Create content that inspires them from your point of view and ideas. You first have to listen though. Listening in online could mean researching keywords that your users search online, use in comments, etc. Find out their interests.

2) When using social media, share comments and links that are helpful to the others. I believe karma works well in social media. Be good to others and others will be good to you. Share great information, and they will give you back great informations/comments/feedbacks/links !!

3) Don't always think about pages to convert. Think about pages to support pre-selling. The majority of people research before making their decision to purchase. Some say almost 90% of online consumers read reviews before making a purchase. Create content to stimulate their desire to want something and eventually need it. Massage your consumers into your great products or services!!

4) Your content strategy should also support long term goals. Sure, technology changes and information gets old quickly. However, have you heard of long-tail in SEM? Well, those dead contents can support your current topics through internal links. Make sure you leverage your old content through internal links and social media to drive conversation.

5) Be creative. I always hear from people who are interested in writing a blog, but can't because they don't know what to write even if they have a passion for something. There are so many tools out there for you to understand what people are searching and talking about the topic relating to your passion. Isn't that what social media is for? Share and talk, and don't be afraid to write content based on your learnings.

I'm sure I can go on and on about ways to create content for social media and search, but the bottom-line is, you have to take advantage of various tools that are part of internet eco-system to drive your passion or business. It all comes back to your site, follow your traffic trends in Google Analytics or other web analytics tools you use. If you aren't tracking your site... do it now!!

How did it work out for me? Well, I've just started using twitter recently (@k_irizawa)... so far I saw little, but a sure growth in traffic from twitter. I'm starting to see some effects from digg.com after heavily participating in commenting and digging. I increased my usage on stumbleupon, and I'm noticing traffic referrals from stumbleupon is growing. They are pretty engaged with my site, too. (low bounce rate, yes!!)

Note that I don't only promote my site through these social media channels, but I participate in sharing great content. It looks like karma is working for me. Let's see how it turns out next year. I'll do my best in reporting back that results to you.

When launching a site or considering implementing a web analytics trackings, you may want to consider thinking about the following points.

This should guide you in formulating your thoughts around what to track on your site.

• All pages should contain tracking codes with unique page identifier (page name, content title, etc.).
• All campaign initiatives driving traffic to the site (via banner, email, link exchanges,e tc.) should be tracked through campaign tracking. Typically done through putting a unique query code in the URL string.
• Any conversion pages (thank you pages) should be defined as a "Goal" or an event in analytics tool. Any key pages where you want data to persist across the site or metrics, consider using special custom tracking to reflect those trackings. Example, SiteCatalyst uses eVar and Google Analytics uses "user defined" tracking.
• Activate eCommerce tracking in your analytics suite if your site is an eCommerce site.
• Make sure to activate or acquire internal search tracking in analytics tools. It is also important to assess what users are searching within your site.
• Create segmentation strategy and consider implementing it in your analytics tool. Custom segmentation should be assigned around several key factors for deeper insights and analysis. i.e. Users that bounced, users from search with specific terms, users from specific campaign, login vs. not logged in, etc.
• Take into consideration of Flash & AJAX tracking if your site is planned to be rich in graphics.
• Any click events including outbound link should be tracked if it is part of a key business strategies or objectives.

In site tracking strategy, you have to consider analyzing many data points. You won't be able to cover every single data points. That'll be TOO much. Understand your site's goal, and select your KPI -- KEY Performance Indicators.

Understand and at least formulate your thoughts for analysis around the following:

Traffic Source

• Traffic source or campaign includes (not limited to): banner, rich media, email, PPC, link exchanges, RSS, etc.


• Consider using vanity URL or friendly URL when driving traffic from other medium such as DM, radio, tv, etc. (offline). Make sure you're tracking those vanity URLs.


• Segmentation should be applied to all different sources to assess the optimal source of traffic with great ROI.

What users are doing (behavior metrics)

• All content should be tracked to see what users are interested, and their level of engagement.


• Customer advocacy should be tracked (tell a friend, share with friend, etc.).


• Product awareness and exposures should be assessed separately from content performance.


• Conversion metrics should be tracked by identifying the conversion pages, and set up necessary funnels to view optimization opportunities.


• If possible, track RSS subscription click on "subscribe to RSS".


• Capture internal search queries to assess what users are interested in and looking for.

Visitor Type

• Identify demographic of site visitors. Especially if viral and brand awareness is the key to success, it may start at regional level and spread across the country. It would be worth gauging traffic level and engagement metrics by demographic data. Such demographic data could be utilized when investing in PPC campaign to target your audience and properly allocate budget to proper regions.


• New vs. Returning traffic. This would be an important data to observe, especially considering that loyal users would come back to the site, and they would definitely behave differently from new visitors. Acquire deep insights from your visitors by looking at new vs. returning traffic.


• Loyalty metrics would be important to identify deeper insights about the site's audience who are loyal to your site/brand/product/services. Especially if your repeat buyers or highly engaged audience are key to the site's success.

Segmentation

• Always think about segmentation during your analysis. Segment various dimensions. (i.e. by source, conversion, specific behavior, etc.)


• Think about integration of different variables from campaigns to conversions. Then segment according to the integration.


• Tie metrics to conversion. Making sure that every key conversion pages are tracked and able to segment by different dimension of metrics. (i.e. conversion by traffic sources, conversion by demographic, etc.)

Hopefully this bulleted points will contribute to your thoughts around setting up web analytics trackings. Feel free to throw me your thoughts. I may have missed out an important point.

User with a "need" for something is slightly more difficult to convert than a user with a "want".

When building your site or pages, you should be aware of how you serve your site content based on your users' point of view. Different users may have different intent when they arrive at your site, so catering your content based on such difference would be an important part of your content strategy. In this article, I'd like to talk about content strategy based on users' needs and wants.

Here is a basic difference in definition for "NEEDS" and "WANTS".

Needs are strong human desires to fulfill lack of feelings or things.

The above NEEDS become WANTS when they are directed to specific objects that might satisfy the need.

- So an American needs food but may want a hamburger, French fries, and a soft drink.
- A person in Mauritius needs food but may want a mango, rice, lentils, and beans.
- A person may need a computer, but may want a Dell Laptop with 4GB of memory.
- People may need to drink because they are thirsty, but they may want some beers, coke, tea, or coffee.

Overall, It is easier to sell to a person who already know what he/she wants. That's because it is likely that a user will search what he/she wants in search engines, and he/she will land on a page that is relevant to what he/she wants.

For a user with a specific needs, he/she has to be convinced into wanting something in order to make them take a desirable action.

Let's look at a basic example

User A "WANTS" an iPod
1) Searches for "iPod" on Google

2) Lands on an online store that sells iPod

3) Makes a decision to purchase based on various info

User B "NEEDS" a portable music player
1) Searches for "portable music player" on Google

2) Land on an online store that sells different kinds of portable music players

3) User B will have to learn about various music players including iPod

4) Makes a decision to purchase based on info

What does this all mean??
That means, you need to understand that how you position your site/pages, you need to be aware of the keywords used from search engines, and assess to see if your content strategy is working properly (making users taking a desired action).

So it is advised to look at --
1) Pages (perhaps landing pages) against the keywords from search.

2) Assess the keywords from search and see what kinds of keywords (w/ different possible intent) generated lower/higher bounces, conversions, etc..

3) Optimize your content or CTA (call to action) to better serve your users.

4) If a lot of your users are arriving based on their "NEEDS", then make sure you have a nice user friendly page that serves useful information. Make them "WANT" what you got!!

LA Times had an article about this one Korean BBQ taco truck -- Kogi Korean BBQ that successfully used social media (twitter) and promoted his taco truck business.

I thought their tactics are interesting because who would have thought to use twitter in promoting a taco truck that traditionally relied on location, repeaters, and a horn (to notify people).

The fact that it received 300~800 people for its food, indicates that the twitter successfully delivered their viral efforts in attracting customers. This is a true Viral Marketing + Social Network + Offline marketing integration. Kudos to Kogi BBQ.

In my observation, the key to success had to have these ingredients.

• Unique product to catch people's attention. In Kogi's case, food menu that are different from common taco truck.


• Introduce unique food to the mass in the right timing. While many marketers are figuring out how to leverage social media with a lot of attention to Twitter, Kogi used such tools to successfully promote their business.


• Obviously, Kogi successfully used social media to promote their offline business. The key is offline promotion through online media. Thinking outside of the box!


• Location: Instead of choosing common area where they could potentially gain their targeted audience, they chose locations anonymously to stimulate consumer interest and curiousity around different location consumers aren't familiar with.

As we learn from recent air plane landing on Hudson river (NY) that Twitter can deliver quick news and information around the world, Twitter and social media could be utilized to spread information quickly to a wide range of audience. It also has clearly demonstrated it could be used to stimulate offline business as well.

The next challenge is to retain consumer interest and build loyal customers. Good luck to Korean BBQ taco trucks.

On Friday night, I've met a well known affiliate marketing guy from Japan. Let's call him MR. Affiliate. According to him, he was making more than $30,000 USD per month. He started out working for a financial firm working on foreign exchange or currency exchange related operations. In Japan, it is commonly called as FX trading.

He hosts various sites regarding FX trading covering wide range of topics around that vertical. I've came to learn many things from MR. Affiliate. I've learned that he doesn't use web analytics, but continues to maintain great affiliate conversions.

I'm sure you want to here how he made it that far. I don't want to write a whole lot of about every single thing, but here is a list things he mentioned that describes what he does to maintain his financial success with affiliate marketing.

• MR. Affiliate maintains 20 sites that focus on affiliate conversion (money acquisition).
• MR. Affiliate maintains 500 sites that caters specific topics to FX trading, and applies "links" back to his main sites.
• MR. Affiliate is only interested in high EPC (earning per conversion) affiliate partners. Which are couple hundreds of dollars.
• MR. Affiliate writes and updates his site everyday. Only on the main 20 sites that he focuses on.
• MR. Affiliate is partnering with Chinese content writer in China, and catering sites with language other than Japanese. I'm assuming he links some of those sites back to the main sites as well.
• 50% of MR. Affiliate's efforts are on SEO.
• MR. Affiliate uses Google Analytics for tracking his sites, but doesn't use it often. He uses Google Analytics to gauge what keywords people are searching to arrive to his sites.

MR. Affiliate is at a point where his EPC is not growing anymore, but maintaining its position in FX trading vertical. So he wanted to know what he could do to promote and increase his traffic to the site traffic. He was curious to learn what is new and hot in America.

Since I'm a web analytics specialist, I had to start from Google Analytics and walk him through how he could leverage the application better. Web analytics could definitely support assessing what is going on within the site, acquire knowledge in potential area for optimization, and understand source of acquisition for improving conversions.

Since his new goal is to understand and increase his user acquisitions, I showed the following features within Google Analytics:

• Setting up "User define" value on his site, and applying it on outgoing links.
• Setting up campaign tracking from his media campaign, other sites, etc.
• Since he focus on a lot on SEO, utilizing the search traffic segmentation
• Landing page analysis and dimension drill down by different metrics breakdown.
• Linking these methods and other analytics strategies to link clicks defined by "User define".

Through these recommendations on effective usage of Google Analytics, MR. Affiliate was able to better understand:

• Setting up key tracking point for user actions. (link clicks for this case)


• Better understand effective traffic source for his affiliate business.


• Linking effective traffic source (including search and keywords) to desired user action.


• Gauge and analyze landing pages that could be optimized and further acquire conversions. (key is to look at bounce rate on key landing pages).

Other than analytics related discussion, we talked about SEO practices. Since his site his heavily dependent on SEO, he was very curious about such new and common SEO practices in USA. He heavily concentrated on his efforts on external link acquisition, but I recommended him to further look at the content and internal links.

I've learned that his site used "_" rather than "-", so that was one area of SEO recommendation. Another point was to encourage usage of page title within URL. For example, instead of xyz.com/2008/09/00001-abc.html, I suggested him to use some like xyz.com/fx-article/article-title-abc-2008-09.html.

Another point of SEO practice he could focus on is the internal link exchange. Certain pages could have high "Page Rank", and it could be utilized to cross pollinate that ranking to other pages with high conversion.

It was interesting to learn that a person could be very successful without web analytics, but it was also an eye opener for him to realize how web analytics could be used in optimizing his sites, and increase conversions (more money for him).

If you like this blog, subscribe to my blog Feed!!

I've recently helped my wife setting up Facebook page and groups in some online community site to reach audience that could engage well with one her company's site/brand. What we did should not be limited to what we discuss in this article, and it is definitely not the limitation of capabilities available through online community and social networking sites. This is simply to share some of my learnings from this experience.

To give you a little background, the community we wanted to reach was very niche and sub-cultural. The target audience is very unique, so we thought leveraging the community site on various domains would be interesting. Here are several points I've noticed and thought were interesting. It may not be interesting to you, if you practice marketing through social media or online community already, but if you're new and wanted to try it out, you may find these information encouraging for your future online marketing tactics.

Communicating with the community

I was surprised to see how quickly communities could be built. It depends on which site you used in creating the community, but for Facebook page, it was nice to see the "fans" increase from 3 to 50 in one day.

In terms of communication with the fans in Facebook page, it would allow you to directly send a message to your fans. This is one great CRM strategy you can put into your CRM tactics.

Being able to communicate with your community is a very important feature you need to be aware of, and understand "what to" and "how to" use the site's features in executing communication would be critical.

Depending on the site or community you create, you wouldn't need web analytics tool because the number of members/fans joined would be clearly stated. That would be equivalent to your database filled with user who opted in for your communication.

Community interactions and its effectiveness

Depending on the community or social media/networking sites that you're participating in, user interaction or involvement with the community would vary. For my wife's account, we uploaded several photos of new products and special offers, and seeded messages to promote what was happening with the brand at that time. On other site, it was a simple text notifying the special offers at that time. Other possible ways of interaction with your audience under your community:

• Send messages to the group
• Create polls and surveys, and learn about your audience/community
• Utilize site specific features such as apps, ads, pokes, etc.
• Share links and information
• Tag product images with brand names, to make it searchable, etc.

To measure how effective these interactions and community participations would vary on the objective, but it is important to keep your community live and active. At the end of the day, higher positive feedbacks or comments from your target audience translate to better brand awareness, and it could possibly increase your brand or product advocacy.

For my wife's account, we instantly saw several transactions (product purchases) from one of the community site in Google Analytics' referring sites conversion. Note: eCommerce tracking was activated in Google Analytics.

We've also saw an increase in product testimonials and interests for the products/services. These points of actions and conversions should be your metrics to gauge along with your KPIs.

Just like media campaign running impressions to assess brand or product exposures, your user activities and interactions within those community sites could translate to positive and effective user experience with your brand. It would also be a great place to address negative comments and concerns amongst your community as well. Now, that's some stuff that could be highly effective.

User loyalty and retention

It would be unlikely to use your web analytics application on these sites (Obviously, it is nearly impossible to throw your tracking code on other sites), but there are many points of data within those sites you can translate into metrics. Example: no. of fans, no. of comments, no. of positive/negative testimonials, polls and survey participations, etc. It is imperative to utilize those metrics to gauge the activity within your community.

You definitely have the choice to promote your community by actively promoting those communities, but I believe the value of those social networking pages and communities is its capability to retain and promote user loyalty and retention.

We typically measure retuning traffic to the site and come up with strategies to promote return traffic, loyalty, and retention. However, these community and social networking sites are purposely built to bring back people to communicate and interact with others. Therefore, leveraging such nature of those portals would make sense, than just using it to acquire traffic to your site.

Summary

I think it would be important for my wife's account to understand that building user loyalty on those external sites would increase overall user satisfaction, loyalty, and retention with their brand. So looking beyond the property of their own site, and expanding their reach into other properties would be an important online strategy going forward.