Last week, OX2’s Web Analytics European Dream Team (WAEDT) consultants were treated to a presentation by Nedstat’s Chief Innovations (CI), Michiel Berger, and CEO, Michael Kinsbergen. We were given a walkthrough of their Live Segmentation platform, and I must confess, while our expectations were not very high based on what we knew of the SiteStat platform from several years ago, we were quite pleasantly surprised by how powerful and easy to use it seems. We are reminded that this industry changes quickly, and that vendors such as Nedstat are responsive to meeting their customer demands with high-quality products and services such as this.
Author Archive for David Rhee
Quantifying emotions, particularly those associated with a brand for marketing purposes, has always been a challenging task. If you’re considering adding qualitative survey data to your web analytics reporting, whether in dashboards or other periodic reports to management, this should help you evaluate the relative value you might expect to receive from using the Net Promoter Score, 4Q from iPerceptions and Avinash Kaushik, Foresee’s ACSI, or Gallup’s CE11.
At its best, qualitative research can provide deep insight into customer motives and behavior far beyond what the raw web analytics data can tell you. Open-ended questions allow site visitors to speak freely about their likes, dislikes, frustrations, and successes in navigating your site to achieve their session goals. However, this is often difficult to condense and summarize, and the few who speak up may not be representative of the target audience you are attempting to reach. In any case, you want to collect the data in a way that makes analysis possible with limited staff resources (who has time to read or process a thousand comments a day?), and moreover, create insights that are actionable by management.
Continue reading ‘Yes, but how does it make you feel? Adding qualitative insight to your web analytics approach’
René and I (“Wandering” Dave Rhee) had the pleasure of attending eMetrics Munich last week, where we were able to meet with many of the other thought leaders in the Web Analytics industry. We are delighted to sponsor such a gathering of the industry’s finest minds, and the reason we recommend to OX2’s existing analytics clients as well as our analytics prospects who are already LBi Group agency clients is because of the breadth of real case studies you can find presented.
In the early years of the industry, back when Jim Sterne and OX2 partner Eric T. Peterson were just getting started with the Web Analytics Association (which we are also proud to sponsor), the discussions were usually about tools, what they could measure, and what they couldn’t. Even recently, when we’d grown to understand that both logfile analysis and page tagging solutions were complementary, and not competitive with each other, we’d hear the endless debates about cookie deletion, or today’s technology-based issues such as how to tag flash or video. (Should AJAX events be considered page views? It depends on what’s important to you!)
What keeps the conference fresh and exciting, though, is that each year, in each city (Munich, San Francisco, London, Stockholm, Washington DC, or Toronto), practitioners show up to tell us what works for them — and more importantly, what interesting and unexpected ways their analytics initiative may have failed to drive their business forward, so that we can all profit from their lessons learned. Now, it’s rare in any industry to find such cooperation between practitioners, whose firms are ostensibly competitors, and we give Jim and his team all due credit for taking the time to find presenters who understand that thinking carefully about what didn’t work as expected can be just as good an investment of your time as building on your past successes. Continue reading ‘eMetrics Summit Munich 2008′
That’s right — just 16 minutes is how long it took me to complete a short survey from the Research Committee of the Web Analytics Association. It’s a good attempt to learn more about who we are, as individual members of the global web analytics community, what we do on a daily basis, and how we are compensated. Feedback from those of us who live or work outside the U.S. is particularly welcome, so I hope you’ll join the rest of the OX2 and LBi Group team in participating in this valuable research.
The survey is in English, and will be closed after this week, so your quick response is very welcome.
Once the WAA releases the results, we’ll be sure to let you know with another post here on this blog, as well. The more of us who respond, the more valuable these results will be.
A big Thank You to Jim Humphrys of WL Gore for his volunteer work as Co-Chair of the WAA’s Research Committee, too!
As you know from other posts, OX2 was just recently acquired by the LBi Group, and will partner with their offices throughout Europe and the U.S., especially with the office in Brussels. I had the pleasure of meeting with the Brussels team just a couple weeks ago, at an annual event to review the progress made in 2007, and the anticipated growth we expect for 2008. I came away quite excited at the prospects of growing large accounts to their potential, given the group’s historic strengths in online marketing, and the OX2 team’s addition of strong web analytics to drive creativity with accountability and measurable return on marketing spend.
The people are clearly top-notch — they know how to work hard, and they certainly know how to play hard, which is just what’s needed to foster creativity while staying grounded in marketing fundamentals and maintaining a disciplined project delivery approach. Their recent revenue growth is proof of their success, and it’s pretty obvious that this will continue to grow for at least the next few years as the OX2 way of thinking about web analytics as a cornerstone of marketing culture spreads throughout the rest of the LBi group.
Beyond the high caliber of the employees overall, I was also impressed with the executive management team in particular, led by Benoit Lips. They have a strong background in understanding their clients’ needs, and ensuring that their work is effective in meeting those needs, rather than simply winning “beauty contests” with flashy (yet ineffective) campaigns, or trying to impress other ad agencies instead of building a client’s brand in the eyes of the customer.
I knew it would be a fun ride when I joined OX2 a few months ago — and now it looks as though it’s only going to get more exciting!
Of course, if you’re not already a partner of OX2 or LBi, we hope you’ll get in touch with us to see how we might be able to work together to help you establish and surpass your online marketing goals.
OX2 provides, among other things, web site auditing services for our clients. We try to help them figure out what they really want to get out of their web site, especially when the answer isn’t quite so obvious as “increased online sales.” Sometimes it’s providing product information to prospective customers, then referring them to retail sales partners. Other times, it’s helping provide product support, such as downloads of product manuals or tutorial videos. And sometimes, it’s engaging readers by providing content, as on a site for a magazine or newspaper publisher.
One of the steps of our audit is to help make sure that their analytics tools are capturing everything they are expected to. But no matter how well-written the javascript code is, and how well the Rich Internet Applications are designed (RIA such as Flash, Flex, AIR, Ajax, and others), if you have a partner such as an advertising agency who is helping with the design and implementation of your site, then you have to have a good process in place to make sure that your analytics tagging is consistent and complete.
For many of our clients, great care is taken to ensure their primary site is well-maintained, but the process sometimes fails when multiple agencies help create sites for individual countries, or business units or divisions of the company, individual product lines, or even one-off campaigns, such as launching a new product and coordinating it with television, print, and other media vehicles.
When we explain why consistency and completeness are important to gathering metrics, so that business decisions can be made with the benefit of insight and interpretation from robust data, our clients are often ask us if we can help validate their data capture efforts.
This is when we are pleased that we have partnered with MAXAMINE to offer their tactical-level auditing solutions to complement our strategic-level process and design work.
Continue reading ‘Why do I need MAXAMINE?’
Yesterday, we were pleased to see a couple emails from our friends over at MAXAMINE announcing their acquisition by consulting giant Accenture.
Debbie Pascoe, VP of Client Services for MAXAMINE, shared with me their formal statement, “We are excited about this tremendous opportunity, and believe it will ultimately expand our capacity to deliver compelling value to our customers and partners. Accenture Marketing Sciences shares our unwavering commitment to maximizing the value of digital investments and online operations, and can help us deliver on that promise within the broader context of overall marketing excellence.”
Perry Kamel, MAXAMINE’s COO, said, “This is a tremendous opportunity for us and a perfect fit in terms of driving continued industry leadership. It will ultimately give us significantly more capacity to deliver even more value to our customers and partners on a global scale. We’re excited about the future!”
Stephen Hamill, their VP of International Markets, who bounces between their UK and Australian offices, shared his excitement, too.
While we’re inclined to take any such statements with the usual grain of salt, it’s clear that Maxamine never got the respect it deserved from the market, considering the unique position its powerful site auditing tools have. Accenture’s historical reputation as auditors, and the strength of their Marketing Sciences consulting arm’s management team would seem to be good indicators that Maxamine chose well in finding an acquirer who can give them more visibility, both to their existing global client base, as well as to new prospects they may not otherwise easily be able to reach.
Indeed, Accenture’s UK Media Relations group says of Maxamine that, “The services they offered will continue to be available and their clients also will have the benefit of the breadth and depth of Accenture’s Marketing Sciences capabilities as well Accenture’s global industry experience and Accenture’s array of consulting, technology and outsourcing services.”
Accenture’s formal press release also announced the completed acquisition of Memetrics, an A/B and multi-variate testing firm, which also lists a number of blue-chip clients among its customers.
We offer our congratulations to our friends at all three companies, and hope that they are able to realize the potential synergies their clients can clearly benefit from.
Recently, Dennis R. Mortensen, COO of IndexTools, shared with OX2 a sneak preview of Rubix 1, which is part of their new marketing optimization framework, and we were so impressed that we wanted to share with you (with Dennis’s permission) a little bit of what we learned.
Aurelie Pols, Julien Coquet, and I (“Wandering” Dave Rhee) all agree that one of IndexTools strong points is that, unlike the American market leaders, they do not feel compelled to re-invent everything with new terminology, and pretend that it is new. Instead, they quite happily take the best of every tool already available, listen closely to their customers about what their most important features are, and then focus on developing only the most valuable items to the business user.
For example, Jim Sterne and the eMetrics Marketing Optimization Summits have influenced everyone to think about web analytics as one part of a larger marketing optimization program. Our friends at Omniture have made clear their partnerships with other firms, and acquired many other players to be able to offer a wide spectrum of complementary products and services.
IndexTools (IT) continues this trend by branching out from their basic web analytics offering, comparable to Omniture’s SiteCatalyst. (The primary difference is that IT includes their data warehousing functionality for free, while Omniture offers their data warehouse as a separately-priced product.) IndexTools also includes their integration platform (which without any fuzz is called “External Data Sources”) in the base costs, while using Omniture’s Genesis platform typically incurs additional integration charges.
Continue reading ‘Rubix from IndexTools’
I (“Wandering” Dave) moderate the Web Analytics Forum, and a few days ago, Tim M posted a question about cross-sell activities, and determining the effectiveness of some changes they recently made. In particular, he notes that, “The difficulty I’m finding is in determining the attributable growth in store sales overall to cross-sell.”
This is indeed a difficult problem that I seldom see addressed, so I wanted to note that there are a couple of ways to “buy” some measurements in situations like these. Of course, they are dependent on a few attributes of the product or service you’re selling, such as the average unit price. If you’re selling $1000 items, then you can probably afford a short 3-day coupon promotion where a web-printed coupon is brought into the store for a $25 discount. That will cost you $25 per response, but if you’re already doing something like a $20 discount promo, then it’s only an incremental $5 to collect some cross-sell data. Of course, if your average unit price is a $2.49 bottle of aspirin, you’ll need some other kind of incentive, like, “Print this coupon out and bring it in for a free buyer’s guide.”
This year, attendance at OMD, the Online Marketing conference held in Düsseldorf, was expected to top last year’s 6000 attendees — but I think everyone was surprised by the 11.000 who registered!
And for much of Tuesday, it seemed as though they were all blocking the aisles between me at the next seminar I wanted to attend or booth I wanted to visit.
Naturally, the web analytics vendors were represented — Omniture, WebTrends, Nedstat, Visual Sciences — though they all had smaller booths since for them, it’s a “must be there to show your face” kind of event, not one where prospects really coming looking for you. Google had a huge presence, and at least one or two of the GA folks where at their booth, but you couldn’t find them among the 50(!) other Googlers who were wearing brightly-colored T-shirts and chatting with everyone who came by. Continue reading ‘OMD Düsseldorf 2007′
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