As I downloaded the eMetrics Stockholm presentations a couple of days before leaving for Atlanta & DC, I promised myself that this time, I would blog about it: charming eMetrics Stockholm & those stairs, those stairs, the horror!
It reminded me of a Web Analytics journey: you have to hang in there to get to the top, the holy grail of the low hanging fruit before moving onto more consistent testing & optimization, once you’ve fixed the obvious stuff. This in order to drive those conversation rates up and influence your company’s online strategy by suggesting ways of decreasing costs & increasing revenue i.e. make smart use of Internet applications. And by applications, I don’t only mean public sites, Intranets & Extranets but any web based application used by any person involved with your company who needs to get something done. We’ve been having quite some fun with that lately at OX2/LBi 
integrating data coming from multiple sources while setting up readable dashboards for business users and adding Web Analytics data when only necessary.
Because let’s face it, at the eve of the next US presidential election, while oil prices seem to be going down, stock markets are still not at ease and the doom & gloom of the D word – depression – seems to be hanging on everyone’s lips. Thank God for Google!
Jim Sterne’s keynote speech was therefore elegantly titled “Tough times call for tough measures”: as budgets are shrinking, we’ll have to do more with less. It’s indeed Bad News but there is Hope so it’s time to Get Serious! Even HBR titled this month The Year of Marketing Dangerously to explain why today more marketing budget might be moving towards our preferred channel.
And to be quite honest, something I’ve always experienced is that companies who are gaining market share or are in a monopolistic situation don’t need to bother about Web Analytics, it’s too complicated and who can blame them. So the times they are a changing as good old Bob sang a couple of decades ago but despite promises by tools vendors that Web Analytics is easy, smarter people than me have made the case that Web Analytics is actually damn hard!
It’s indeed much easier to just throw a couple of additional tens of thousands of Euros towards traffic acquisition than to measure correctly whether the figures you’ve been given by your Media Agency actually compare with the traffic you’re seeing on your website. And I’m not even talking about questioning bounce rates on landing pages which sometimes mount up to over 80% – if they even bothered to go passed the language splash page, Belgium being a bilingual country – let alone conversion ratios…
Building the case for actual ROI using Web Analytics while measuring up traffic acquisition efforts is actually not that hard, if you can get those damn processes right i.e. make sure you know where your traffic is coming from and how much you paid per visit(or), lead, conversion… As a rule of thumb, once we get cracking on such issues, we found we could easily win 10 to 20% in efficiency when looking at the numbers, using one of those preferred free or paying Web Analytics tools.
Beyond traffic acquisition and the classic low hanging fruit such as broken funnels for example, I’m stumbling more and more upon “those building the case for ROI using WA” questions. Having free tools certainly helps to get the ball rolling about the power of information rendered by quantitative data crunching tools but to answer such questions, you have to look at the overall context and sometimes put it in a different light. That’s where eMetrics can be so precious: in the little details you hear, the comments, the discussions with your peers of the industry. One such a comment came from Jim where he mentioned that an electronics company, let’s be vague here for confidentiality reasons sorry, actually hired 4 guys during an entire quarter to get the purchase conversion rates up by 1 percent. This meant 15 million dollars in additional revenue. However you put it, dollars or euros, paying these people for a specific amount of time with a particular objective in mind actually makes sense, if they are paid by result that is and if the freedom is given to actually adapt online collateral – in the broad sense of the word – to get to that objective. That’s ROI for you!
In any case, Web Analytics goes today clearly beyond your WebTrends, Omniture, Unica, Yahoo! Analytics, Google Analytics & what not implementations as Avinash Kaushik has actually been saying for quite some time now to integrate behavior & attitude into those quantitative number crunching data. And then you’ve got to take a look at the competition, what they’re up to – that’s where I hate being European, we don’t have all those cool tools like Hitwise, Compete, etc. and have to work our way around that, which is not easy, I’ll give you that!
The name of the game remains Relevancy: putting the right message in front of the right person at the right time, told in the right way as Jim reminded us during his keynote in Stockholm. If I had a euro for every time I’ve heard that over the part 2 decades, I’d be even more blessed by the Gods than I am today!
We have to remain curious, break down barriers, keep our hearts & our minds open to new ideas, new ways of dealing with the data we’re collecting, analyzing and distributing on a daily basis. Tough times call for tough measures and if you’re reading this, believe me you’re in the right sector! So, get your brain cells moving, roll-up your sleeves, get your hands into the grout, and let’s try to make this world as accountable as we possibly can for us and the generations to come. And if you are a company, wondering whether you should slash marketing budgets, fine, be my guest and make sure to move some of it online. It will be our pleasure to make sure your choice is made accountable.
To infinity & beyond!
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