Marketing Channel Reporting in Omniture

Recently I was involved in some top secret, hush hush beta testing.  But enough of virtually every single Google product that there is out there, I've actually been beta testing some exciting new Omniture products that were released with version 14.8 of their SiteCatalyst tool.  Of course most of the chat around has been about how Omniture has now changed to Adobe Marketing Suite, but the casual rebrand and slightly different colour scheme for the home page is a bit more incidental to those who already use the tools.

Of more interest to me was something that Omniture Adobe have introduced that many other tools already have - which is the Marketing Channels report.  In Google Analytics you can see this report by going to your Traffic Sources report and selecting to just show the medium, although this normally defaults to Source Medium, which will show you the website and the medium.  Note that this isn't as silly as it sounds as you could have one source which is more than one medium (eg users coming from Google as a referrer, organic search, email, etc).

With Google you are limited a bit in what you can have as your mediums.  You have the ones that you have set up as campaigns, plus organic, paid and now it appears twitter.  Everything else gets bunged into referrer (if it has one) or not set (if it doesn't).  This means you need to make sure you set up your campaigns in the right way in the first place, otherwise your classifications here are going to be slightly out (ps it can be quite funny googling links for this blog - "whencanistop campaigns" in Google gave me some links to quit smoking!).

With SiteCatalyst your choices always used to be slightly limited.  You had a Referrer type report, however this was very limited - it would tell you how many came from search engines, direct and referring websites, but that was about it.  Not only this but your options were limited to just 'instances' which is a rubbish metric which should be retired.

The new channel report does that extra level that you always thought SAINT classifications should be able to in your referring domains report, but could never quite do.  What this can now do is come up with some proper conditional logic that allows us to claim all of our traffic in a particular way.  Here below is how I've set up our traffic:

It's highly critical that you set this up in the correct way, otherwise you'll have the wrong buckets of data in the wrong place.  For example you have to make sure that you have your paid search before your organic search otherwise all your paid search may accidentally end up in the organic search before you've had a chance to include it.

Just out interest - you direct traffic is automatically set up to be only included if it is the first page of the visit.  Keep it like this, because if you don't then you might find lots of visits that weren't direct being included as they may not have a referrer in mid visit (some browsers and anti-virus software do this automatically without the user noticing).   The other thing that I've done is that I've set these up so that they only count on the first page of the visit for all of the different types.  Why?  Because I want this to reflect the start of the visit.  If someone comes from Twitter, but quits their visit mid way through to search in Google before coming back to the right place in the journey, I want it to be associated with Twitter.  We also have situations where the user can leave the site for an alternative journey and then come back, we don't want those clicks to be associated with the second website.

Because these are effectively a custom conversion report, they allow you to do all the things that you can with other custom conversion reports.  Notably you need to think about your conversions and your visits for each of your individual channels.  If you've set up your revenue reports in this way you can of course work out for each of your channels which individual source is the most costly (although don't forget to count your lifetime value of each of your sources in a backend database, if you can).

The other thing that your marketing channels report does something very clever with its breakdowns.  With organic search it is easy because you've got those reports already - your breakdown of your keywords is a standard report.  However the ability to breakdown your direct traffic by the page that the user arrives at is something that wasn't previously possible.  In fact, you might want to do this for your organic search as well, as you don't really want to have to waste an ASI on Organic search just to find out which are your top landing pages in Google.

The other thing that SiteCatalyst does really well here that I haven't seen anywhere else is that you can not only view your reports based on the most recent channel (in this case the most recent visit), but you can also view your reports based on the first channel that the user came by.  This allows you to find out if your paid search is causing users to convert, but that they need more than one visit to do so.  Don't forget of course that users can delete their cookies so if your conversion is more likely to be multi visit expect lower conversion rates on your first touch channel.

EU cookie laws verified

A bit of a stray from the norm this week on this blog, we're going to talk about some legislation that has just been ratified by the EU.  Before I start I should point out that I am not a lawyer and so this is just my opinion on the situation.  But if you are a regular reader of this blog you will have remembered that in November last year I wrote a post about the EU cookie law that was introduced.  Recently, this has been ratified by a working party on the subject to clear up some interpretations.

A potted history of the subject:

In Late 2007, Facebook caused controversy when they used their Beacon advertising to produce detailed targeted adverts based on the information that you had entered in Facebook.  The real concern was that your data was being passed to Facebook on their partner sites when you were logged out and reconciled with data from when you were logged on.

In March 2008, Phorm, an advertising agency started to hear a lot of concern about their controversial use of behavioural targeting.  Controversial was mainly because of the fact that nobody had ever really done it before with adverts.  Whilst it was accepted that Amazon would monitor your web browsing pattern and combine it with what everyone else was doing to provide you with things that you might like to also buy (hence increasing their revenue), it was ok whilst they were just using their own sites data.  Phorm on the other hand used data from not just the site you were browsing at the time, but also all other sites with Phorm adverts to find user behaviours to give you targeted adverts.  The British Government green lighted this activity as the user had the ability to opt out of the advertising by blocking cookies in their browser.

Late 2009 the EU decided to create a new ruling on cookies.  It stated that the user had to give express permission for the website to give the user except in exceptional circumstances "strictly necessary" for "essential services".  This was fairly woolly of course and the IAB, the outspoken voice of the online advertising industry, said that users were expressly giving permission for cookies, because they had the option in their browsers to do something about it.

This of course, didn't go down well with the EU who have just verified the rules in the past week.  They say that this is not true and the fact that of the major browsers, three of the four of them default to having third party cookies accepted.  Users, they claim, don't understand the risks and therefore are not changing these settings.  The IAB, of course disagreed with this and were quite vociferous in their rebuttal.  The heads of the publishing industry, agreed with the IAB as this is their major source of income (although maybe not for those that are going behind a paywall).

Generally speaking, the word that is being bandied around is 'Shambles'.  A more detailed piece on the subject from the last couple of days comes from Struan Robertson at the out-law.

Advertisers and publishers would rather not ask users if they want to be tracked for advertising purposes because users' answers could damage their businesses. But it's hard to avoid asking that question: the Working Party's interpretation of the law is, in purely legal terms, the most compelling interpretation, however flawed and unhelpful the law itself may be.

So the compelling story is that so far this is a bad thing for advertisers and Publishers - it really affects their business models.  They are going to have to ask users if they want to be tracked on their advertising and if they don't, then they will lose out on a whole host of information.  Click through rates of display advertising have plummeted and stand at about 0.1%.  It is generally accepted for display adverts that the main purpose of them is for branding to encourage users to come back to the site at a later date.  It is of course more or less impossible to track this if you can't draw information from the advertising back to the sale of a product.  This is of course done by linking a tag loaded on an advert with a tag on a sale complete page with the use of a cookie.

Now we have suddenly affected a group of Marketers who aren't necessarily trying to do any behavioural targeting, but they are trying to monitor the effectiveness of their advertising.  If they can't do this, they'll move to a more favoured method that means they can monitor this.  More of that in a minute, but if the death of the newspapers was started by the web, the death of online news could be started very easily in this new ruling.

Web Analytics

It would be remiss of me if I didn't talk about Web Analytics.  Most Web Analytics make use of cookies these days.  In case you hadn't noticed there are lots of blogs talking about how to do web analytics and make use of the data collected.  Virtually every website in the world has a web analytics tool associated with it.  Does this mean that every time you look at a new website for the first time you are going to be prompted to opt in or opt out of using the cookies associated with that website.  The ruling seems to be suggesting it that way.  This will have a serious impact on your analysis - opt in always means that you are going to be working on a smaller sample that you would otherwise.

What about networks like YouTube?  Every time I embed a YouTube video on my site, Google is going to drop some cookies on my computer so that it will know that this video has been viewed and by who.  This sounds like not only are you going to have to expressly ask permission every time you look at a website, but potentially at every single bit of embedded content.

Finally there is an opposite end to the advertising - if I pay money for Google to put me on their sponsored search results, I want to be able to tell if causes more people to buy my product.  If it doesn't, then I'm not going to spend that money.  How does this work?  Well it links up the information that is passed in the tag of the landing page that says that you have come from a paid keyword, with the information passed in the tag of the thank you page.  How does it do this?  Yep - they have the same cookie ID.

What about online optimisation tools like Omniture's Test and Target or Google's Website Optimizer?  These tools allow you to do A/B testing on your site, but to do this they need to know which one performs better.  Yep, they need that cookie information.

And in all the examples above we haven't really done anything that the user would notice, that would infringe on their personal data rights, but what we have done is optimised our business and increased revenue.

This whole this strikes me as an odd way of working the system.  It's a bit like banning glasses because people are drinking too much alcohol.  Not only are you having a big effect on things like Web Analytics which are mainly harmless ways of getting information on how to optimise your site, but the behavioural advertising guys are just going to come up with new ways of getting around this issue.

I'm hoping that the UK Government takes a stand and doesn't ratify it.  Unfortunately the only ones arguing against are the IAB and the Publishers, who are concerned about their revenue streams.  Really we need one of the big analytics companies to make a stand - an Omniture, a Webtrends or a Google.