SiteCatalyst compared to HBX

Ok, I'm not going to go into too much detail here, but I've been playing around with SiteCatalyst today to see what it is like. Given that we use HBX at the moment we are probably in a similar boat to many other people in that we are looking around and thinking about our options. In fact I have blogged in the past on the options that HBX clients are facing. This is the progress report that I have sent up top from basically just one days use with some dummy data:

Positives:

• Reports easier to create in the user interface – can select your own columns (as well as having standard forms)
• Can create calculated metrics (eg bounce rate) and put them in any report
• Reports can be added to dashboards in a much easier way and can be viewed in a more efficient way to HBX
• Not as big issue on the table lengths (they start at 1million whereas HBX started at 1,000 or 10,000)
• Dashboards/reports can be automatically emailed in pdf, excel, word etc and can be set up to be emailed on a regular basis (or via ftp)
• Funnels can be set up on the fly for any amount of data (looking at historic data and new data)

Negatives:

• Content hierarchy has been replaced with custom events (effectively – although there is a hierarchy option) – not necessarily a negative but may take a while for RBI staff to get head around
• Some reports not that intuitive – many will need to be built into dashboards in advance
• Segmentation options not readily available until Discover 2 (not even like the active segments we have in HBX) – they all have to be coded onto the page in advance
• There may not be an ability to measure the number of pages viewed if a user comes from a particular source (eg a search engine, email campaign, )
• Much of the nomenclature is different to HBX

Questions to ask

• How SiteCatalyst works with first party cookies across many domains?
• How SiteCatalyst works with campaigns where we have a url rewriting system?
• How we can run reports for multiple sites using the excel client?
• I haven’t seen anything on the administration of the tool (setting up users, etc).

As I have mentioned before one of the areas that always gives me the greatest concern is that we have a large volume of users of the tool and very few analysts. What we'll need to do is to find a solution that fits both of us. One of those solutions might be to hire a few more analysts - which will give us more scope to help do analysis as well as training.

Anyway - back to the original point - what are the main differences for the users:

HBX ran most things in standard ways using the content hierarchy and the page name. You could then use either report builder to help you with common elements within names, the active segmentation module or the available custom metrics if there was something not already captured.

SiteCatalyst has a very simple naming structure and likes to put things in 'channels'. The hierarchy then is set not in the page level, but in custom 'props'. The ability of SiteCatalyst to do much more detailed segmentation and report building in the user interface means that you may not need the active segments. However this is very dependent on implementing correctly in the first place.

However I have always said that one of the hardest things about web analytics is setting it up properly in the first place. Hopefully though with the HBX experience already existing, you will be able to take some of that information and put it into SiteCatalyst.

How? Well you get paid a fortune to be told that - but let me start here. You can put each of your content levels into these props and then drill down to the pages that way. You can easily assign entries to these reports because you can build the reports on the fly and this will show you areas of the site that are driving the most traffic.

Concerns? A couple - as you can see from the questions. I'm also not quite so sure about how scalable it is across a company with 65 websites that does lots of central reporting.

What I like most? I like the idea of Genesis and being able to plug in the email suite (if not the ad suite yet). One reporting mechanism saves a whole load of heartache.

Interesting times ahead, as I'm sure you'll appreciate.

Widget and Gadgets Examples: SES NY 2008

So I said I'd put up another post if I managed to find some examples of the widgets that were showcased in the widget and gadgets session at SES NY - and I have!

I've found a link to loads of interactive examples of Google's gadget ads, including the Nissan traffic map that you can see further down this post.


Job Search Widget





National Geographic photo of the day widget

Widgets and Gadgets at SES NY 08

I would love to be able to show you some of the widget and gadgets (wadgets?!) that were showcased in this session but I don't have the links just yet. I'm going to do some searching and I'll add another post with visuals if I'm successful!

The main message of the session was that organisations should be using widgets and gadgets to give people content wherever and whenever they want it. They should not be using them to drive people back to the main site, or if they are then it should be to deep relevant content.

Christian Oestlien (PM at Google) asked if anyone in the audience went to the Post Office to pick up their mail. The answer was no. The mail is delivered to your house. And that's the way it should be with widgets and gadgets.

Overall themes included:

• Ideas not technology should be the driver.
• Marketing departments and not IT departments should be creating gadgets and gadget ads.
• Promote a widget or gadget once you have created it, don't expect it just to be picked up.

There seems to be a real drive for all companies to create widgets, but the message from the team was that a lot of these companies are not clear why they want the widget and what they want it for. A widget or gadget should be part of a strategic marketing plan - you need to be very clear what you are hoping to achieve by creating it. (Direct response or branding, not both).

Examples of widgets or gadgets:

• Nissan - a widget that uses Google maps and includes a search box. A user types in their post code and it shows current traffic holdups in that area and enables drag and drop functionality. There is also the option for a user to view the Nissan dashboard in the same drag and drop way.
• National Geographic photo of the day widget.
• Kraft - recipe sharing widget that pulls in data from the Kraft site.
• A job search widget that enables users to conduct a search within the widget, sign up for job alerts and view related blog posts.
• A review widget that allows a user to write a review directly into the widget and submit it to the review site. (Can be put alongside poor reviews to dilute negative messages).

Gadget Ad Checklist

• Keep ads under 40k
• Animations should be under 15 seconds
• No downloads within ad
• Keep outgoing links underlined
• No audio on-load
• Conform to IAB standards
• Do not mislead users with content

External related link: Widgets are the new ad kid on the block

Moderator:
Kevin Ryan, Vice President, Global Content Director, Search Engine Strategies and Search Engine Watch

Speakers:
James Welch, Head of Research and Development, GetUpdated
Christian Oestlien, Product Manager, Google AdSense
Jeff Williams, Associate Director, Creative, DIGITAS
Marc Johnson, Chief Marketing Officer, Hitwise

Universal Search at SES New York 2008

This session on universal search started well with the presentation of some interesting research data from James Laberti of comScore, Inc about the prevalence of universal search results in the SERPs. Then it rapidly turned into "bait the Google guy," led by John Battelle, which would have been interesting if the Google guy was able to field answers with anything other than the equivalent of I don’t know, it’s nothing to do with me, I’m not at liberty to say, or the corporate line is...

So to start with the useful stuff, the research project was focused on finding out how many search engine results pages (SERPs) contain universal style results, and how this impacts on the users’ likelihood to click on those results.

A universal result in this project was classified as:

• video
• news
• images
• multiple
• map, stock, weather

Key findings:
Of the 1.2 billion queries studied, 220 million contained a universal result, categorized as news, video, images etc.

The Google Universal search penetration by type was:
58% anything universal
38% video
34% news
19% images
15% multiple
10% map, stock, weather

Overall universal search trend
Results pages that contained universal search results received fewer clicks overall – both paid and organic clicks.

Possible reasons for this trend
The Google SERPs are acting like destination pages – maps or weather results are displayed within the SERP so users do not have to click through to another page. This was referred to as a “view thru,” where a user can view your content via Google without having to click through to your site.

Questions raised by the audience and some of the panellists:

• Is the current Adwords model compatible with universal search?
• Is there a value to having your site result displayed on a SERP if a user does not need to click through to your site?
• Is there a future for the view-thru metric?
• Just because we currently measure search as a direct value, will we have to become more flexible and consider other values such as branding?
• Will it be difficult to get the budget to support view-thru media when there is no ROI?
• Should Google be classified as a media owner?
• Does Google artificially inflate the position of their content or the content of co-partners like YouTube?

The last question about Google artificially inflating the position of content they have a vested interest in generated a flustered response from the Google guy. He basically said no, but included a caveat that relevance is the key metric and YouTube represents most of the video content that is currently available.

There were no absolute answers to the other questions, but I think it's something that we'll need to think about more and more as universal search becomes the norm.

According to James, the two major implications of universal search include:

1. Organic search will become increasingly critical

• search result pages becoming the destination
• technology and content supercede marketing spend
• inherent ‘view thru’ value will challenge measurement

2. Paid search will become more competitive

• fewer paid click options on fewer pages
• consumer in control, not marketers
• conversion rates should increase

You can find some more detail about the question and answer section on Top Rank Blog's Universal Search post.


Moderators
Kevin Ryan, VP, Global Content Director SES & SEW
Mike Grehan, Global KDM Officer, Acronym Media & SES London Co-Chair

Panelists
John Battelle, Founder/Chairman/CEO, Federated Media
James Laberti, Senior Vice President, Search and Media, comScore, Inc
Lyndsay Menzies, Managing Director, Big Mouth Media
Jack Menzel, PM for Universal Search, Google

SES New York 2008: Converting Visitors Into Buyers

This session was focused on converting visitors into buyers. Although the focus was primarily on e-commerce sites, the concept of conversion was extended to include b2b conversion points such as white paper downloads, e-newsletter sign-ups and subscriptions.

There was a lot to take in – four speakers who presented for approximately 20 minutes each, so I’ve summarised the main learnings for this post (speakers are listed at the bottom).

1. Ensure you know what all your conversion points are and track them individually. You should consider tracking mini-conversions, such as the step from one part of the journey to the next, so you can work out when people abandon their trip through the conversion path.
2. A site needs to be as persuasive as possible – this ties in to Eisenberg’s Hierarch of Optimisation in the Redefining The Customer session I blogged about yesterday.
3. Test, test, test, test, test. Search marketing should be approached in the same way as direct marketing. Segment your users, try different pages for different users; move calls to action; constantly conduct A/B testing and if something does not work you can change it back. (Amazon A/B tested the position of the checkout cart, and it’s now on the right hand side of the site because it generated a higher conversion rate than when it was on the left hand side. The decision was not taken by an exec, or someone within the company, it was the outcome of testing.)
4. What people see and when they see it has a direct impact on what they buy (or what action they take). This relates to Michael Sack’s supermarket analogy. Why is the milk always in the back of the supermarket? Because it has been proven that people buy more when they take a longer route through the store. The placement of the product has been tested. The flow of the store is scientific. This approach should be used with web sites so that we ensure we getting the most out of each visitor.
5. A home page is a really bad idea. Continuing the supermarket theme, it’s like presenting a consumer with a giant shelf full of products and asking them to choose what they want. In reality there are thousands of doorways into a web site, so you need to make sure that the right doorways are in place and that you provide people with what they are looking for once they walk through. (Apparently there is a Web Aisles White Paper about this so I’ll have a dig around and see if I can find it).

Types of Tests We Could Conduct

• Top 5 High Bounce Rate Pages
• Top 5 High Exit Rate Pages
• Top 5 Lowest Time Spent on Pages
• Top 5 Key Pages (checkout page, final sign up page)

Tips For Converting Visitors Into Buyers

• People like product images and interacting with images.
• Test headlines.
• Optimise forms.
• Add call to action buttons.
• Don’t make users wait too long – make sure files, images etc download quickly.

My next post is going to be on Universal Search and how it is affecting click activity, so keep an eye out.

Speakers:
Mike Moran, Distinguished Engineer, IBM
Nigel Ravenhill, Program Manager, McAfee
Michael Sack, Director, SEM technology & Development, Idearc Media
Howard Kaplan, COO, Future Now Inc

Segment your data by campaign

First job of this weeks post is to introduce my lovely colleague Kate Duffy. Ok its not that one really, but Kate has actually been writing some posts this week live from SES in New York. Firstly she wrote about Jeffrey Eisenberg and his presentation on people being cats and not dogs. Her second exciting installment is a piece on turning data into action specifically if you are a Star Trek fan.

Secondly, and in my long running theme of writing about things I've been doing at work, I am going to write about something I have been doing at work. Specifically I've been looking at a series of segmentations based on either campaigns or on referring domains/urls. Here is the best way to do it with a bit of a warning at the start.

When you do your SEO effort one of the things that you may do is a url rewriting system so that all of your urls point to a canonical version. That is each page now only has one url for the content within it.

How does this work? Well you'll have to find your own way of doing it, but one thing you'll need to make sure is that you remove all query strings and turn everything into one case.

Why is this important? Well the reason is that search engines will think that your url with a query string on the end is a different page to your url with no query string and will therefore split any link juice you have. They may eventually bring it back in again when they realise, but you may lose out.

What impact does this have? Query strings are your life blood if you want to create campaigns all day long. Most web analytics tools rely on them. You send people to a page, the tag loads on the page, the tag looks for a query string to see if there is a campaign code there. If you've just rewritten your pages it won't be there any longer

How do you get around this problem? Session cookies. Collect your campaign codes in session cookies before you rewrite the url. Then populate the parameters in the tag from the session cookie. Everyone is a winner. Even Errol Brown.

Anyway this aside (always track all your campaigns - emails, ppc, RSS, banners, affiliates, etc) brings us on to our next section on segmenting your data. Or context as Avinash put it. Want to know why your traffic is going up or down, you have to segment it.

My tricks for segmenting always start this way:

• Look at the total visits to the site over a time period
  
• Look at your key entry content over a time period
• Compare the two

This first level of segmentation will usually help you the most. You'll have key sets of pages that your sending your users into and you want to be able to work out whether one has gone up more than the other. More specifically you'll probably be able to work out a bit more an idea of which of your campaigns is working the best (all campaigns should have different types of landing pages).

The next option is to segment your campaigns by the entry point. This is actually really easy to do in Google Analytics:

I've just gone into the Search engines report and then chosen segment by landing page from the drop down. You can choose this option in the campaigns menu and the referring sites menu and having clicked through to each of them.

The other important thing about this table is that search box at the bottom that allows you to search the content so that if it contains only a certain set of words of if the structure of your url system is set up in the right folders you can use that. Also don't forget that you can then compare is on the graph to the whole site.

In HBX it is just as easy to do this if you have report builder and you are looking at referring domains. You can choose the cross referenced metrics, the referring domains and entry pages report and then you are away. The advantages of this in HBX are that because you've structured your multi level content in a sensible way you can use this in your filters. The disadvantages are if you want to do it based on campaigns then you'll need to create segments based on your campaigns first.

How does this help? Well it means that when I was sitting trying to work out why one of our sites traffic had gone down this week, I could isolate it very quickly (a broken RSS feed). And when I am reporting which areas of the site are going up and why I can isolate that equally quickly.

SES New York 2008: Data Into Action

At SES New York Matt Bailey from SiteLogic presented on web analytics and managed to draw some enlightening similarities between Star Trek and data analysis.

Being a hard core Star Trek fan Matt Bailey worked out that crew members dressed in red shirts have a mortality rate at least 50% higher than their yellow and blue shirted counterparts.

He determined that the two factors that affected whether or not a red shirted crew member is likely to die are:

• If the member is given an earthbound mission – more die.
• If Captain Kirk meets a female alien – less die.

So how does this anecdote relate to web analytics? In this scenario Matt Bailey explained that death is the conversion point. He analysed the data available (20 plus episodes), and as a result he was able to work out what factors influenced the number of conversions. He did not just report the number of deaths and compare them month on month – a reporting trap that Matt Bailey believes many marketers fall into.

As nicely illustrated by his Star Trek example, Bailey went on to say people respond well to stories. So make your metrics meaningful to colleagues, and the board, by working out personas for your visitors (not all visitors are the same), and ask yourself the following questions to build context:

• What are your visitors looking for when they come to your site?
• Where are your visitors from?

Once you’ve answered these questions you can use this information to generate personas and context. For example, one persona may be a grazer, someone who accesses the site as a result of following an e-newsletter link and then munches around a specific topic they are interested in. The conversion point could be a page view.

To keep a grazer munching up the content and thereby consuming as many pages as possible, you would need to make sure that each page of content contained links to related information.

Matt Bailey’s key learning points:

• Analyse the data, don’t just report the numbers.
• Segment your visitors – not every visitor is the same.
• Set up separate conversion points for each segment.
• Use stories to make your metrics more meaningful to you and your business.
• Use personas as part of your story telling – they will bring clarity to the data.

Redefining the customer: People are cats, never dogs

It’s the first day of SES New York and I’ve just attended a session about redefining the customer that compared humans to cats, pointed to the absence of beautiful women on conversion pages and gave some ideas how to make a site stink.

The quote that really summed up Jeffry Eisenberg’s presentation for me was this:

“When online, people are like cats, not dogs.”

The reason they are not like dogs, is that dogs have masters. Cats on the other hand have staff - they are only concerned with doing what they want, not what other people want them to do. (Eisenberg is also the author of Waiting For Your Cat to Bark).

As marketers we really need to grasp that knowledge and apply it to the way we design our pages, our sites and the interaction with have with customers. We can tell customers to do what we want them to do as much as we like, but the customer is entirely in control and they decide when to communicate with us and how (just like cats). Eisenberg helped clarify this with four definitions.

Jeffry Eisenberg’s four customer behaviour definitions:
Customers want to communicate faster than ever before and everyone is connected.
Customers control the conversation. Not us.
Customers desire meaningful and relevant experiences. Your actions matter, your words less so.
Customers are in control of their buying process.

Another way that people being like cats relates to websites and marketers is scent - not scent as in how the site smells, but scent as in the what the user follows through a site – it could be text, an image, but whatever it is that scent needs to be continuous so it guides a customer from one page to another, or from an advert to the site and on to conversion.

Jeffry Eisenberg’s example of scent (or lack of scent to begin with) was a GoDaddy.com SuperBowl XL campaign. In a nutshell GoDaddy spent heaps of money on a successful tv campaign that included a beautiful woman. However, if you visited the GoDaddy.com site this beautiful woman was nowhere to be seen, and the site looked nothing like the tv campaign. By rectifying this lack of scent the site saw a huge increase in conversions.

A useful model that Eisenberg presented was Eisenberg’s Hierarchy of Optimisation

Persuasive (top of triangle)
Intuition
Usable
Accessible
Functional (bottom of triangle)

What works well about this model is that it shows that functionality, accessibility and usability are key – if people can’t use your site then they might find it and bounce straight off. Once you've got these foundations in place then you need to keep the site intuitive and make it persuasive so that you coax customers to do what you want them to do. Being persuasive might be using better images, improving your headlines or including reviews. The best way of finding out what persuasion tactics are going to work is to make sure you know what your customers want and what they hope to achieve.

You may or may not agree with these types, but Eisenberg outlined four key personality types that all people fall into:
Competitive
Humanistic
Methodical
Spontaneous

If you are not getting the conversions you want then you could double check that your site enables each of these four personality types to get what they want, and in the way that they want it. Is there is logical display of information for the methodical type? Is the copy written in a warm and informal way for the humanistic type?

To finish Jeffry Eisenberg finished with these key questions that should be answered in order to increase conversion rates:
Who are you talking to?
What do you want them to do?
Why would they do what you want them to do?

Site Overlays and Persuasion Architecture

Previously on whencanistop I talked about HBX Active Viewing in terms of how to use it and how to use the results (ish). This time I around I am going to talk about how you can use the active viewing (read site overlay for Google Analytics or whichever tool you have) to help design your homepages. In this case we are going to revisit the analysis we did for ComputerWeekly before the relaunch and look at (specifically in this case the home page). We're going to use a combination of the site overlay, the link analysis, a print out of the page and a load of scribbles.

Because I like doing things on the back of a packet of fags (or a nicely printed out version of a page), lets start by taking the page in question. In this case it is the home page. I've screen grabbed it, plonked all the bits together as best as I could and then saved it so that I can print it out easily on one page:



One of the important things to remember with this page is why we built it and how we built it. So lets go all the way back to our initial wire frames and look at the reasons that we positioned certain things in certain places.

The next thing to do with this page is work out little boxes, using your wire frames and using your initiative of things that are related on the page. You'll notice on this page that I haven't grouped everything and some of things that I have grouped we may not be able to tell whether they have been clicked on anyway (I've missed out ads, polls, buttons, etc).


My recommendation is that you print this out, put it on a desk, get a big red marker and start counting how many clicks are on each section. If you've had enough foresight to realise that you are going to be doing this exercise, you can make sure that each link has a unique id (HBX), query string (Google Analytics) or however your site overlay product distinguishes between links. If you haven't, then you'll probably realise that some of the links appear more than once on a page (eg more...).

• Ok there was a reason that we had the top nav like that - we think our users are getting a bit more savvy with the web and understand how top navigation's work. We can look at our personas and understand how people are intending to use them, but lets be frank - this navigation is the same across the site. It has to be. That is what people expect. Finding out that one is more clicked than another on the home page is irrelevant to us because that is only a small percentage of the people. However finding out that people are clicking on it suggests that the content on the rest of the page isn't specific enough for the users (or they don't understand it). This is why I have grouped the whole navigation into the top box.
• Secondly in the top right we have our users profile details. This is fairly standard. What it does is irrelevant - if it is going to be anywhere this is where users expect it to be (or in the top left next to the site name - but it is fairly clear in this case and we have the search box up there). We also how our email newsletters and RSS feeds. These are a bit more specific (hey they are on the page 3 times) and relate to the Business goals that we gave our users in the personas. We wanted to get our regular users to sing up to these because it gives them better engagement with the brand.
  
• We then have our main headline (chosen, rather than scrolling through latest). Again think back to the personas and the reasons why we have given this top spot (with a nice picture). We want to showcase our best content and this is the perfect opportunity
• We also have a load of 'news needers' for want of a better phrase who come to the home page purely for news (get them signed up to RSS and email!!!) who just want a box with the latest news. We've also given them options to link through to news about specific subjects. Does it work? Look at the site overlay and work out whether it does or not, but in this case I've grouped them in.
• Right hand box then shows the Editors choice. This is an extension of the main headline, but should include the best content. These are the things we are using to keep our first time viewers on the site. These are also the things that one or two of our personas said that they wanted - expert content to help them with their job.
• News from around the web was actually something that we decided that our users wanted based on our own business goals and the interviews we set up for the personas. We know that users like to have a 'hub' of information, so lets make it ComputerWeekly rather than getting ComputerWeekly linked to on other hubs. Usage of this may appear that we are driving visitors away from the site, but it should have a legacy metric of encouraging users to visit more often (Loyalty Index anyone?)
• We have our sign up on the left hand nav - deliberately made more explicit in what it offers (separate links for digital and print magazine). These were another of the things that the users said they wanted to be able to do more efficiently
• The 'Downtime' is an important area of the site for many users. Giving them the ability to easily get to this fun section will stop them hunting around - this is the sort of thing that you should be able to check with your internal search analytics
• We have another big Sign ups box across the middle (pictures explaining what they are)
  
• We have a section pushing our blogs (user generated content was something many personas said they were keen to see)
• Jobs by role is one of the most important parts of the page. This is a section that many users said that they visited. 'Jobs' in the tool bar is one of the most clicked on links in the top nav, so lets have a section of more detailed types of jobs
• Most read is something that every user expects to be able to see on the site. It will show the users what other users are finding interesting (and hence maybe they should be too)
• Bottom nav of products, terms and conditions, frequently asked questions, etc. This is something every website should have at the bottom, just in case someone wants to know.

Ok so we have our page on a piece of paper with big red markings on it sitting in front of us. We have our list of items on the page and why they are important. Lets look at the two of them and work out if they are each working or not.

Is one getting many clicks? Yes? Is it is in the best position for that option? Are they clicking through and then giving up because it isn't what they thought it was going to be. Remember that this is a page flow and you need to consider what the user is doing on the page afterwards. Is it because we've done a good job and the users are happy?

Is one section not getting any clicks? Well why is that? Is it because it is not very well placed? Is it because actually the user is finding it somewhere else. Is it actually because whilst the users claimed it was important when asked, actually they don't want to click on that bit, because something else is more important. Consider moving it to another point in the journey.

Consider each element carefully and whether it performs its function on the page. Amazon famously give each of their rolling ads on the home page only a limited time until the point where something can make more money. Stop making a certain volume of money and they are taken off the page. And by limited time I mean minutes.