Analytics/Measurement

Putting the M in Social Media

There are over 400MM Facebook users, Forrester estimating social media marketing spend to surpass email by 2013 and Nike Football has 11MM views on the their youtube video, so far. There is no lack of examples of how prevalent social media has become yet we need to remember that it is no different than any other media; we’re investing hard dollars and we need to understand how it is contributing to our bottom line and establish formal benchmarks of measurement like we have for all other media.

However, social media is new, and like anything new (think email or the web 10 years ago) we have to experiment and figure out how to properly measure it, what the agreed upon metrics and benchmarks are and how it drive sales.

But one thing is certain; we have more data, not less, and this data tracks the impact social media has on our behaviour as we interact with content, media, advertising and each other. It can track our awareness of brands, how we have conversations and about what, how we feel, give information, on how we connect you to each other, not to mention how much time we spend on various social networks. All of these behaviours are measured in the social media world, quickly and effectively, without the use of expensive market research. The new data streams created allow us to see far deeper into consumer behaviour than ever before; further before and after the actual transaction. While measuring social media has quickly become highly complex, there is a wealth of data we can leverage. We have data on pre-transactions such as sentiment analysis and assessing brand conversations, we have data on post-transaction behaviour such as word of mouth, good or bad. We can see how many people are talking about our brand (on Facebook), how many like to follow what we talk about (on Twitter) or how many are advocating us (with share tools).

There has been a lot of discussion of ROI of social media, it’s important to remember that ROI is a financial measurement, not a media measurement. Our focus needs to be on using the data being created more, understanding industry benchmarks, understanding the relation ship between these new data points and the financial impact they have by driving purchase and loyalty. Remember, we can now hear the conversations consumers are having about our brands, let’s listen and understand how that helps us do better business.

Chris Osborne

Measuring Social Media

Measuring media has been a challenge of business for a long time. I even wrote a controversial blog entry here on
The Fallacy of Return On Investment in Marketing.

Now with internet, social media and web 2.0, the challenge is even greater. This new media has "democratized" the press and proliferation is huge. Tracking this new media and combining it with "old media" measurement is the new goal.

Let's first remember how much the media world has changed. Media was formally shout box from Brands to Consumers: TV, Radio, and Print: that was about it. Then technology and the Internet came along with a major curveball.

The world went online. All the news, weather, sports - everything went online. The sources of information increased dramatically. Blogs, Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin etc became easily accessible to all. Plus, these medias had influence. But their influence varied based on the number and character of each site. They are not all of equal value. It depends on the quantity and quality of the readership. Measuring the sentiment and changes in sentiment became a challenge.

Listen carefully. The noise on the internet is your customers. Your place is determined by your competitors. You need to see where you stand. Measuring it is the new challenge. Twitter, Blogs and Web sites can make and break companies. And there is no professional editor checking facts. But the media value still impacts. Measuring social media is not like measuring the news. These are your very customers, the most passionate of the bunch, talking about the very products you
are trying to sell. Listen to nuances, the qualitative component of discussion. Discover the context, associated topics and sentiment-laden words. And then check for volume, exposure, and statistical relevance. Your focus groups are
fine, but this is better.

The world has shifted from a few huge media sources to a multitude of small ones. The tough challenge is - how do you measure all this new media? What is the value of it. The new term is Media value. Measuring it is the new challenge.

Marketing Impact Measurement - Whether it's a product launch, public relations push, or advertising campaign, you need a yardstick to measure the reaction. In today's world, Media is leveraged such that you may pay for your first set
of eyeballs, but the rest come as word-of-mouth. Media Value is a new way of attributing impact and measuring the success or failure of marketing initiatives. Your tracking studies can work, but this is better (and cheaper).

Brand awareness is the key. Where does your brand stand? Where do you stand compared to the competition? And importantly, is the perception changing positively or negatively? Knowing what people feel about brands is important. Or trying to get a brand onto the radar. Not only awareness, perception, sentiment. All these are key components.

It is good to have an early warning system. Something that can tell you if sentiment is changing for or against you or for or against a trend. It is also great to know and understand the value of that media.

Measuring marketing impact is the key. Social media can give valuable feedback on the success (or failure) of a media campaign. Having the public comments and weighing them can provide critical decision making data.

Marketers are turning to things like media value reports by General Sentiment to try to figure out the value of various social media mentions and to determine the trending - whether it is positive or negative.

Customer Insights and the Qualitative and Quantitative Mix

Word of mouth is likely the oldest form of advertising and traditionally one that has been nearly impossible to target and measure. But that is changing, and changing quickly. In addition to web analytics and third party audience measurement data, there is an increasing wealth of information available for organizations to measure and mine. Consumer feedback sites, social networks, blogs as well as on-site tools all provide a wealth of information that companies can use for product and service improvement. With these opportunities come new challenges, as success is a measure of more than just numbers and percentages.

The eMetrics Marketing Optimization Summit (April 6 – 9) is a good place to go to really understand how far eMetrics has come. One of the panel presentations, that includes Lisa Lloyd of Microsoft (who will also be wearing her CMA hat) will address this very issue.

On a related panel, named Predictive Analytics and Digital Marketing - Paul Tyndall of RBC (also wearing his CMA hat), will be discussing how RBC and other marketers are utilizing predictive modeling in the online space.

Full disclosure – CMA is one of the association sponsors of the Summit.

.... if you are a member of CMA, you can save an additional 15% off the regular attendee rate by using discount code CMAPARTNER15 when registering for the conference.

Elizabeth Harvey, Manager of Councils and Self Regulatory Programs, CMA

Marketers, Beware the Decimal Point

In CMA’s Weekly Watching Brief February 5th edition (accessible to CMA members), there was reference to a study from the US-based CMO council regarding the value of loyalty programs. I found this posting very interesting for many reasons, but mostly because it illustrates how easy it is to potentially mislead people, whether intentionally or not, by including a few choice numbers. In the classic 1950s book called “How to Lie with Statistics”, the author Darrell Huff describes how easy it is to prove whatever point you want by choosing which numbers to present and how to present them.

In the case of this posting, I am referring to its fairly rash generalization regarding loyalty and reward programs. There are probably as many different types of loyalty and rewards programs as there are published studies about them. Loyalty programs could be something large and complex, or as simple as a frequent coffee-buyer card from your local shop. To state that 61% of marketers believe that the consumers who take part in these programs are their best and most profitable customers demonstrates such an oversimplification as to make this statistic practically meaningless. How did the survey respondents choose to define loyalty program or best customer and which ones were included, or excluded? There are no consistent definitions of these concepts and I have rarely met a marketer who has actually pursued a data-driven assessment of their own program to find this statistic to be true. It depends on so many factors including the type of products or services being offered, the competitive context, the types of rewards being offered and the types of consumer behaviours required to earn these rewards. Depending on how a program is set up, its heaviest users could actually be the least profitable customers.

Too often marketers are willing to turn over any quantitative assessment of marketing initiatives to the data geeks or finance and take the answer at face value, without questioning the results (unless of course they are positive). There are usually many ways to skin the proverbial cat, including such things as definitions of test and control cells, definitions of success and what costs are included in profitability calculations. And depending on how these various factors are defined you could come up with very different results. Since these calculations are used to support decisions about potentially significant major marketing investments, you need to be completely confident in how these calculations were done and what was, or wasn’t, included. I strongly encourage marketers to get more involved in the analysis and understand the definitions being used, how the results are calculated and what other factors could influence the outcomes instead of simply going along with an answer because it was calculated to 6 decimal places.

By Paul Tyndall, Senior Manager, Predictive Modelling & Segmentation at RBC. Paul is also a member of CMA’s Marketing Technology and Database Intelligence Council.

Getting Started with Your Data

I recently wrote an article that attempts to depict how one would get started in developing a measurement framework within an organization. While I acknowledge that there are a number of marketing/business issues that need to be addressed when beginning such a process, the primary focus of my article deals with data issues. My philosophy in tackling data analytics projects is, first recognize what you want to do from a business perspective, and then identify a data strategy that accomplishes those business goals. At the heart of any analytics exercise, it is all about the data and what can be used to meaningfully solve business problems.

As practitioners, compromises are sometimes made in terms of the data that is both accessible and available for analysis. Yet I would argue that even if compromise is necessary, it is still better than doing nothing.

I would certainly invite your comments concerning experiences in building measurement framework solutions that are clearly sub-optimal given a limited data environment.

Posted by Richard Boire, Partner, Boire Filler Group - also Chair of CMA’s Marketing Technology and Database Intelligence Council

The Fallacy of Return on Investment in Marketing

Return on investment in marketing cannot be measured accurately. We are fooling ourselves if we think it can. The main reason ROI in marketing is virtually impossible to measure is that most actions from marketing are not instant and many actions from marketing are caused by a cummulation of impact over a period of time.

Do you buy a Nike shoes because it is on the billboard; because you saw the ad on television; because you saw the billboard; because you like the Just Do It slogan; or because the store clerk suggested them? Was it the ad this month or last? Or was it the ad you saw when you were 12? Or is it the recommendation of a friend who had been impacted by Nike marketing?

The answer is - you probably don't know exactly why you buy the shoes at the particular time that you do. It is a combination of all these factors that make up marketing that cause the consumer to take action.Most likely the purchase was made due to a combination of factors. That is why all marketers preach multiple medias and multiple frequencies. Marketing effect happens over time.

Marketing is the battle for perception. Good marketing can create the perception needed to cause purchasers to buy. It can also create the warm feeling towards the company or product that prompts the purchase.

The only type of product that can have an instant return on investment in marketing is something that is truly commoditized.

If you are selling water and there is no perception that your water is any different than anyone else's water, then if you do a marketing campaign or a promotion or a price reduction, you can shift share from a competitor. Most manufacturers should actually be spending their marketing dollars differentiating their product. It is much easier to sell "Clean Glacier" water over "bottled city" water if Clean Glacier can sell the refreshment and health benefits of their brand. Even water is not a commodity.

The only companies that should want to commoditize their markets are ones that are truly the lowest cost to produce (not to be confused with lowest price). To sell at the lowest price without the lowest cost is a recipe for failure.

Because of the difficulty in measuring ROI, some companies will just stop marketing. This is great news for those that keep marketing. In time share will shift to those that continue to invest.

Just because ROI in marketing is impossible to measure accurately does not mean marketing has no value. Just because we desperately want to know how to measure ROI in marketing does not mean it can be done. And just because the measurement is not accurate does not mean we should not try to measure it.

Lessons of a Recovering ROI-aholic

I admit it. I used to think ROI was the be all and end all of analytics. If it couldn’t be measured, it wasn’t worth doing. I brushed off measures of awareness and “eyeballs” as relatively useless terms that were thrown out to prove the success of a campaign or initiative when nothing of substance really existed beyond the printed page or website. Then, something changed - the broader marketing industry became gripped in this cycle of having to prove everything and show ROI on all marketing activities. I expected to be happy when that day arrived, but I’ve realized that we created a monster. We are starting to get crippled by ROI paralysis. You can’t measure everything – or, better said – you are limited to the extent to which you can measure some things.

Take the ascendance of Social Media. There are now huge streams of data at our disposal but none of it can easily be tied to a sale, making it really hard to measure in terms of a return. My colleagues and I have argued over how to measure this thing, how to prove an ROI. Truth is, you can’t. Get an ROI that is.

Oops...did I say that out loud?

Even beyond whether you can calculate an ROI, the first question you should ask is, do I really need to? What other measures are good enough?

Every business has to engage in advertising, marketing, promotion, public relations and sales. They are all part of the mix, but only a few can be tied directly to a sale in a meaningful way. Does that mean you should stop advertising because all you can measure is GRPs or number of views or capture awareness through a research study? Of course not - unless staying in business isn’t one of your objectives. Awareness is the first step in closing a sale, so it has to be done.

Back to Social Media. Ultimately, it is a promotional and public relations tool as well as an engagement mechanism. At the moment, there is a lot of activity that can be measured around interest, buzz and the adherence to blogs and tweets. That’s a pretty good starting point to gauge interest and awareness of whether customers and prospects are circulating in your universe.

Once they are in your universe, then you can start to do some things that can prove an ROI. Increasingly, there are companies out there that are offering capabilities to deploy offers via Twitter using a Tinyurl. Companies that created Facebook pages are targeting offers with campaign codes attached so they can start to track and measure ROI out of this environment. Now that they have prospects and customers in their sphere of influence, they are using more traditional, measurable tools to generate provable ROI.

It may be time to wean-off from the ROI Kool-aid and consider a well rounded measurement plan that incorporates elements that are appropriate to the objective. ROI can be measured on many things, but trying to apply it to everything under the sun is folly.

In the meantime, I’ve got a few extra cases of Kool-aid in my basement if anyone wants them.

Analytics in Good Times and Bad

“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times” – for data analytics that is. When times are good, some marketers seem less concerned about the efficiency of their marketing investments and will target just about anyone who qualifies for a promotion. But when times are bad, and budgets are being aggressively managed, there is usually renewed interest in making these budgets work as hard as they can. That’s when data analytics becomes a marketer’s new best friend. Data analytics can help marketers justify their investments to management and help them to make smart decisions about where to cost effectively cut back on programs to minimize the impact. An effective predictive modelling infrastructure aligned with business objectives can quickly and relatively painlessly identify where to trim budgets, if required.

Even better, effective post-campaign tracking linked to these suites of models can make ROMI-based decisions even easier to make. Accurate attribution of marketing investments combined with targeting tools like predictive models are some of the best strategic tools marketers can use to effectively manage their budgets. These can help marketers decide between potentially competing marketing investments by program or channel and defend the business case for their programs.

However, there is no reason that the value of this approach needs to be limited to bad economic periods. Just like any other business, marketers should be looking to optimize the return on their investments through both good and bad periods. Sometimes the business priorities may change (acquisition vs. retention, revenue vs. profit) but every marketer should be aiming to generate a positive return for their business, regardless. A well designed suite of analytical models and tracking tools gives marketers the flexibility to adjust to these changing priorities without needing to change the overall process.

So don’t be afraid to engage your pocket protector wearing data analytics team (I’m allowed to say that because I’m one of them) in good times and in bad. We can help you spend your budget more effectively whether it’s big or small.

Tell me I’m wrong!

The deeper we get into this cyclical (yes, Dorothy, there still is an economic cycle) recession, the more bleating I hear about changed paradigms, new economies, death of TV, death of print, and so on.

On friday afternoon I packed my brief case to go home for the weekend. I had trouble stuffing it full of the “dead medium” reading material that I receive just about every week (Marketing, Strategy, Contact Management, Applied Arts magazine, VUE (MRIA Magazine), Argyle (A lifestyle quarterly), Backbone (Business, Technology, Lifestyle), Driven (Fashion, Automobiles, Electronics, Fiction, Travel, Men’s Lifestyle), Report on Business Magazine, Midtown Post, not to mention three daily newspapers for Friday(I try to avoid the Sun on Friday). On Saturday around two hundred pages of newspaper landed on my doorstep (and I only read the Post and the Star on Saturday), and the list seems never to end.

Every one of these gems is supported to varying degrees by advertisers.

I watched the news on TV on Friday evening (twice, actually), 60 Minutes on Sunday, several Sunday Morning news shows, and, I confess, a rerun of Boston Legal on CITY. All of these are supported by advertisers. When I look out of my urban window I see, if it’s not snowing, billboards, superboards, backlit boards. All supported by advertisers. I took the subway to the movies last night and between the two I was barraged by more ads than I could count…I could go on forever, but I think you get the point.

New paradigm?

Talking of which, the Facebook site for “Advertising Week” in November, had, at its peak, 274 members: 4 news posts all describing the event; three posts to the “discussion board” all of them appearing to be ads for unrelated products and 7 posts on the wall, all of which seem to be shills posted by the organizers. The group was started at least two months ahead of the event. All of this, and Facebook is a social site, not a business site.

Which reminds me. The linked in site for the same event achieved 41 members, many of whom were speakers or presenters at the event.

If somebody doesn’t call the “experts” on their expertise soon, there will be seriously disruptive results. The marketing communication and persuasion industry is in the middle of a Tornado of cloudlike idiocy, propagated by people who should know better! So far, this has led to an obsession about measurement that will destroy strategic and advertising creativity, but not lead to any increase in business. Brand loyalty (in which, as you know, I hardly believe), or brand loyal-like behavior (in which I totally believe) will be reduced to short term bribery, and profitability and margins will be shot to hell. But mostly, we will all live in a dull, HTML driven world of bland pantone numbers, formulated letters making up “tested” sentences to "drive" immediate, "trackable", on-line behavior that matches the results predicted by the "modeling" programs..

Call me a Luddite, or anything else you want. But before you do that, prove to me that I’m wrong.

From the What to the Why: Understanding Web Analytics on a More Cerebral Level

Most Web analytic tools available today -- both paid (Omniture, Core Metrics etc) and free (Google Analytics) -- provide functionality to let you see what customers are doing on your site. These tools allow you to understand how customers are getting to your site (referral reports), where customers are roaming on your site (next page or previous page flows), and even where you are losing customers (fallout reports).

All of these products are great at telling you "what" the customer is doing on your site. However, it’s up to the marketer to figure out "why" they are doing it. Sometimes it’s easy. Just by looking at fallout (where the customer abandoned their path), you can begin to hypothesize the usability improvements that might be required. Unfortunately, after a few iterations, you may still be left guessing..

To understand the "why", marketers in all areas of business have traditionally employed focus groups as a key way to learn more about consumer behaviour and test new ideas. In my opinion, this has limited value for Web marketers looking to optimize their sites. While it is always interesting to watch consumers perform tasks and answer questions, the results of a focus group can be skewed due to the small audience that is interviewed, and also by the quality and impartiality of the script for the test itself.

In the past year, it seems more and more sites are measuring the "satisfaction" of the Web experience. I’m talking about those invitations to “answer a few questions” that are showing up on top sites. While it might be seen as an intrusion, the acceptance rate is remarkably high. Fact is, these marketers are taking advantage of a tremendous opportunity: They have an engaged online audience that is willing to talk about their site experience, isolate hot spots in need of remedy, and as a result, put the business’s own assumptions to the test.

Online customer satisfaction mechanisms provides the ability to:

1: Measure if your Web experience meets consumer needs.
2: Provide insights into "why" customers might be dropping off.
3: Understand future behaviours. Will the customer come back or recommend the site to other prospective customers? It’s bedrock stuff; the whole raison d’etre for any Web site.

The top online customer satisfaction companies, and their tools, are quite sophisticated. They go well beyond capturing customer verbatim insights. They have the ability to generate satisfaction scores across numerous site characteristics, benchmark against other sites, and pinpoint exactly where the most meaningful ROI opportunities exist for improvements. How? You can do so by asking customers to score their experience, and then cross-tabulating those scores with verbatim comments. It’s a rich vein of voice-of-the-customer intelligence, and in combination with more quantitative data from an Omniture or a Google analytics, can take the guess work out of understanding if your navigation, or content, or site performance, or task-related steps, or (pick one!) are passing muster with your visitors. You would be surprised how many customers are prepared to take the time to respond and provide constructive insights. Needless to say, this information is gold!

Measuring the satisfaction of your website adds perspective, some of the intangible value that your Website offers. Let’s say you’re not an e-commerce site, but you are heavily used by prospects seeking product research information. Customer satisfaction tools can help you understand if you were successful, if you are making a positive impact on brand, and if you are bringing the visitor closer to a purchase decision. Of course, if you are e-commerce enabled, you may also learn whether customers are running into barriers when trying to complete a purchase.

A satisfaction score doesn’t have to be isolated to the Website itself. It is also impacted by the overall satisfaction the customer has with your brand, your call centre or bricks and mortar operations. Learning and differentiating the specific activities offline that are impacting satisfaction will bring valuable information back into the organization. In one case in my own company, we discovered that customers were unclear how to reach us. By doing some research and partnering across channels, we created an online solution with more detail about business hours, key phone numbers and email addresses, these complaints dropped significantly.

I encourage you to investigate the tools on the market, ranging from free (4Q), to commercial (Foresee Results) and find the right fit for you. In my own experience, the “why” has taken on extra importance this year as we strive to improve our site. The information we have gathered from our customers has influenced our agenda, and led to improvements. It can for you too.

Other Reference posts on Web Analytics:
Your Website’s Success—Beyond Online
3 simple steps to analyzing any online campaign

If you are already using satisfaction as a measurement, comment on this post--- how do you use it and what other ways it has helped you?

Measurement Help is on the Way

With increased discussion this year around traditional marketers shifting media budgets online, what remains to be seen is how these marketers will measure their digital spending vis a vis their traditional marketing allocations. In the past, hesitation to shift budgets online has been largely attributed to a lack of commonly accepted ways to measure the impact of online efforts. Tools available to marketers today range from Web analytics programs, to control vs. test measurement, to the more complex Econometric or marketing mix models. Unfortunately, within marketing mix models, companies have continued to struggle with how to incorporate the results of their search, banner advertising, sponsorship, social media, and other interactive programs to establish a reasonable comparison.

It now appears that some progress on this exercise is finally being made. The "Marketing When Customer Equity Matters" article in the Harvard Business Review in May focused on Wachovia Financial's efforts to find an effective, data based method to make the company's marketing spend, including online, more accountable.
Going beyond measuring the short term impact of marketing spend on revenue or unit sales, Wachovia is exciting in that it successfully found a means to value customer equity and to compare everything from traditional to direct and digital media spends.

For those of us concentrating on helping mainly traditional marketers find value in the digital space, one can only hope that the Wachovia example is a sign that times are changing. It would be great to see further successful examples from industries beyond financial services coming to light over the next year - even better if Canadian marketers were driving some of these best in class studies. As the Wachovia article concludes, with the right models in place, marketing dollars spent in digital media can make the shift from being logical based on consumer habits and analytics to being comparable and quantifiable.

Does LTV even exist any more?

As a traditional Direct Marketer, I was raised in this business to focus on response, results and the bottom line. If you didn’t have a sense of a customer’s lifetime value – you were doing something wrong. At the risk of sounding outdated, CLTV was the catch-phrase of ‘the day’. Obviously, this is no longer the case. I know this because I’m still a direct marketer – but rooted much more in the online space. I said to a co-worker the other day: “Do we have a sense of the CLTV? It will make the response projections much more meaningful.” Not only did I get a blank stare in return, not even the client in question had this figure readily available.

So if not CLTV, what’s the new accepted standard of measurement online? We talk about click-throughs, unique visitors, conversion…but even these terms are meaningless outside of specific industries and without knowledge of the online offering. Is it an e-commerce site? Well then traffic and conversion are King. Is it a brand site just looking for consumer attention? If so, length of time on site and volume of user generated content may be relevant. Regardless, the evolution of the World Wide Web (in the form of Web 2.0) has brought about significant change to not only what we measure, but how we benchmark and classify ROI across the board.

So here is my own 2 cents based on constant banter and discussion around the topic of measuring truly interactive, two way online properties.

Instead of talking about CLTV as the be all and end all, we start thinking about results in a different light. Perhaps it is at times less tangible then what we grew up with in this industry, but still valuable in a marketplace that is constantly changing.

I call it E3: Exposure, Experience & Engagement.

Exposure…obviously, how many people hear about your site, visit the site, passively browse around your pages, etc. The starting point for any analysis and a critical measure that is a carry over from the traditional advertising days.

Experience…where we start to divert from days past. How many of those exposed to your site actually experienced your brand? Did they go deep in the site? Did they read product reviews? Did they view consumer generated videos? Did they link through to related properties? It’s exposure on caffeine.

Engagement…think active experience. Not just sitting in the audience but volunteering to be part of the show. Posing a question to an Ask and Answer forum, uploading your favourite tv commercial, ordering product, posting an article to your Facebook page. Engagement is difficult to achieve and getting more and more challenging as brands realize the need to truly connect with consumers in an honest, relevant and open manner. Without mentioning names, we’ve all heard the horror stories of big brands seeding comments in blogs and so forth. Engagement can’t be forced – it must connect to real consumer insights and answer the timeless question of “what’s in it for me?”

When analyzing online activity, it’s critical to look beyond session-based data as it only reveals a partial picture. By reviewing a multitude of variables from the passive (exposure) to the interested (experience) to the involved (engagement) – the value of your brand online begins to clear up – and reveal the new value in your customer.

So what’s the new CLTV? Is it E3? Maybe. Is it some other formula? Possibly. At this point, the only sure thing is that measurement will continue to evolve and it’s up to us Marketers to look for ways of showing the different dimensions of ROI.

3 Simple Steps to Analyzing any Online Campaign

At the end of an online campaign one often hears from media agencies that they ‘over delivered’ on the online impressions. That’s easy for traditional media buyers to understand and easy for agencies to sell. But a web campaign does not end at impressions nor at click throughs (this is where a little knowledge is dangerous).

To analyze the effectiveness of a web campaign, I suggest the use of a very basic funnel mechanism:

Attract: Track and measure the traffic from all media/tactics used.

Engage: Once traffic has arrived does it engage? Read your product info/whitepaper? Engage in a conversation or forum? View demos/videos?

Convert: Once the visitor has gained the necessary info, does he convert to an action? The action will depend on your objective and can range from subscribing to a newsletter, to ordering a product, to placing a call to a rep or paying a bill online.

Now put on your web analytics shades and look at the ‘over delivered’ impressions – what does it really mean?

Attract: Are the people who saw the impressions interested in your message, did they interact with the ad and/or click through? If so, how many and from where?
Measurement: Visits or Unique visitors.

Engage: Once they did click through, what did they do? Did they engage or just exit from the landing page as they were not ‘qualified’ traffic. This is where a little knowledge hurts. If you measure your success by CTR, it could be unqualified traffic drawn to your website under the wrong pretext.
Measurement: Product Views, Demo’s downloaded or form posts.

Convert: Of the traffic you received how many took the action you wanted them to take, from subscribing to your newsletter to calling in/going in-store for more info or buying it online?
Measurement: Online sales, leads generated or email subscriptions.

A good online campaign delivers on all 3 aspects and ultimately connects the right consumers to the right products and services. Your cost per conversion to action is the bottom-line financial measure which should become your benchmark.

A situation where the agency ‘under-delivers’ the impression would not be too bad IF--- it was more qualified traffic who engaged and at a higher percentage and/or bringing your overall cost per conversion lower.

Go ahead, change the conversations with your media agency and ask them to start measuring the whole funnel and your cost per conversion.

Managing the Explosion in Data

Every year or in some cases every day a new source of data is discovered or created that could be used for marketing and analytics. But how much is too much? Data Mining and/or Business Intelligence has been around for a long time but, now it seems to move into a whole dimension in the past few years. So what really is the difference between Business Intelligence and Data Mining?

There are also ongoing discussions around the new buzz word of "Real Time Analytics." What does it mean and how much data should be utilized in real time? What additional benefit does it provide and is it better then the traditional approaches? And with this explosion of data what is the better business model for Data Management....a centralized or distributed one?

If you have been wondering about the same thing, the Marketing Technology & Database Intelligence Council recently held am internal roundtable with a group of other experts to discuss these types of topics and it will be posted on the CMA website soon... so stay tuned.

Leverage Your Data With 1-to-1

Let’s take a magic carpet ride through the space-time continuum.

Fast-forward ten years from now. Will anyone be doing mass advertising? Will there be any value in Television advertising, unless it’s targeted to each household or individual. The future of marketing can only be as good as the technology available, and considering where it’s at now; we’re in for some hardcore one-to-one marketing.

Right now, personalization is where TV was 40 years ago. Everybody knows it’s there, but no one quite knows what to do with it yet.

Early response rates on personalization have been very promising – three times the industry average, with many running higher – but there’s not enough of a track record to make accurate predictions. Marketers like to go with what works, and having an X factor can be intimidating. That enchanting unknown territory of “potential ROI” is like the land of OZ.

It seems like a lot of people are getting into personalization, including companies as diverse as Xerox and Canada Post. These companies offer complete conception through production one-to-one services. There are other companies such as Lift Agency that specialize in personalization and have been pulling in impressive results for clients such as Telus and Mercedes.

Personalized mailings aren’t in any way new. Variable print technology has been around for many years. But advancements in client databases and increasing awareness with one-to-one marketing is starting to perk up some ears to the idea of leveraging available data to really speak to customers in a way that resonates and promotes stronger relationships.

So if you have the data, why not use it?!