Adventures In Digital Marketing

THE FUTURE OF WEB APPS - London, 20-21 Feb, 2007
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That’s right! The Future of Web Apps is returning to London in
2007. The biggest names in web apps will be there talking about
everything from design and development to marketing and funding.
Registration opens 13th November.

Full details:
http://www.futureofwebapps.com

Every audience group has different needs and requirements from an
analytics professional. However, it is important to keep in mind that
various items are common to all like clarity of presentation
and a clear focus on the specific needs of the audience.

The key to presentation of metrics is the provision of “the exact
reports people need to succeed in their job, nothing more, and nothing
less, presented in language that they understand.”[i]

CEO:
Before starting I would try to find out what data would help the CEO do
his job. Web analysts need to “sit down with your core audience and
figure out what motivates them”.[ii] Metrics for a general manager type
CEO could include:

· Revenue (gross and net sales)
· Gross and net profit
· Sales per visit
· Cost per visit
· Conversion rate
· Competitive benchmarking rates
· Feedback from customers about the customer experience

Marketing manager:
Will want to focus on the most profitable campaigns, key metrics to
highlight (per campaign and across all campaigns and campaign types)
could include:

· Return on investment (ROI)
· Cost per acquisition
· Cost per new customer acquired
· Total net profit per newly acquired customer
· Average order value
· Conversion rates
· Prospect rate and abandonment rate – to improve the profitability of poorly performing campaigns

Customer service agent:
The goal here would be to increase customer satisfaction and decrease call centre calls volume and costs. Metrics could include:

· Number of visits to self-service area of the site
· Frequently asked questions (FAQ) visits
· Top internal search terms
· Successful and unsuccessful search rates
· Call center contacts per visitor

Finally, it is important that all information highlighted is
actionable. Actionable data enables people to make informed decisions
that will lead to continued improvement.

References
[i] Peterson, Eric (2006).
The Big Book of KPIs

[ii] Inan, Hurol (2006).
The Web Analytics Business Process: How to Drive Web Analytics ROI with the Tools and People You Already Have.
http://www.webanalyticsdemystified.com

Without a CMS, what used to happen when localising the content of a Flash site was that you and your team would end up spending countless hours bashing away in your text editor of choice (EditPlus yay!) cutting and pasting away at XML documents and Microsoft Word documents, in an attempt to get the words in the right place.

This is a tiring and loathsome exercise in it’s own right even before you take into consideration the fact that as soon as you introduce foreign languages and complex character sets into the mix, you lose the ability to even read what it is you’re supposed to be producing, meaning that at best it’s often a good guess that paragraph A is supposed to go in between XML tags B.

Trust me - I’ve been here myself (many, many times!) and, to be honest, not that long ago either! It’s not pretty, it’s certainly not fun, and it can mean late nights in front of notepad.

I spent a long time thinking about this, and basically I came to the conclusion that the best thing to do would be to get someone else to do the boring and dull XML cutting and pasting for me.

It did not take me long to come up with this plan but it did take me a while to work out how to do it.

Obviously, when localising a Flash microsite, sending a word document and an XML document to an account team or client would not be the best approach.  Not only would they not understand, most of the time, the tools needed to achieve the job, but the risk of them adjust, in error, the XML structure, is far too high.

But, as that was exactly the result I wanted – to pass off the work onto a different team, I needed something that could act as a tool for the job, in exactly the same way a CMS does.  Note that this isn’t what you should actually say!  You want to do this to make the process more efficient and streamlined, reducing risk along the way.  Everyone will know you mean to pass it off, but you don’t need to actually tell them that!

So, after toying with the idea of creating ASP.net pages that would write to a database, and pass XML back out via XSL stylesheets etc. etc. I was almost ready to give up until an XML developer I was working with pointed me in the direction of a free tool developed by a company called Altova, the makers of XMLSpy, called Altova Authentic.

Howard
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A collection of excuses for not blogging more.

"I haven’t had the internet and I have been drunk or busy alot." 

"This guy says he hasn’t blogged in awhile because he’s busy becoming a full-time blogger."

"work has rurned out to be a curse and blessing, more money but I work with a bunch of alcoholics"

lol

One more time, Google think about us. "Today, Google is launching the Google Custom Search Engine, a new way to bring tailored search to websites and blogs. In just minutes, anyone can use the Google search platform to create a search engine focused on any content they like – from Hollywood heartthrobs, to favourite sports team, to personal hobbies, and more".

That’s great for them as they gonna be able to analyse even more data and use crowdsourcing to improve research. Then, It will also expend google technology on many websites and blogs.

For me, I was sometime complaining as they were too much irrelevant results. Now, if I want to explore several sources that I’m used to visit, I can build my Google CSE….hum, basic at the moment but I’ll improve it.

Then for a company, they are now able to put all their resources together in a collaborative process and create a dedicated Google CSE to search… Let say, we’re like 10 creative people, everybody have their own websites where they like to take inspiration.

e.g. With an average of 50 sources per person, you’ll arrive at 500 websites focus on design stuff. You can, then, create a search engine for these specific sources.

And you can do it as much as you want… The only thing missing, for me, is an import OPML function. Indeed, with this function added, Google would have created a tool that is able to search in all your favourites sources, your RSS.

Then, the Topics function is also very interesting.

"Topics are specific search areas that Google is developing with the help of expert contributors. Contributors to topics annotate websites that they think are especially useful, relevant, or authoritative to a topic with pre-defined category labels. These labels appear as links at the top of search results pages when users search for something related to the topic. Users can click these labels to refine their search results, giving priority to sites that have been labeled by topic contributors."

It seems that, finally, human are not that bad to improve research…

Vincent

Technorati Profile

What with Microsoft releasing IE7 last week to the general public, well ahead of the impending Vista release (presumably still due for November 2006 for Corporate clients) and Firefox releasing version 2 of their browser at any moment, the time would appear to be rapidly approaching for RSS to truly start hitting the masses.

So, what next for RSS in terms of marketing? Where could it be going in the future?

Firstly, the most common idea is that RSS will replace email, as we and others have discussed a lot, and that’s all well and good – but is that the best thing to think of it as? Email marketing does more than one thing in terms of what it communicates, so maybe rather than looking at RSS as an alternative for email, we would be better positioned to look at RSS as just another delivery channel, and think of how it would work with different communications objectives as opposed to being a blanket email replacement.

So, what quick fixes spring to mind?

Time limited offers and promotions
RSS allows people to grab what they want and when they want it.  So, rather than blanket bombing people in the hope that they’ll be ready to buy your discounted widget at the right time, why not have an RSS feed linking directly into all of your sales promotions, be they discounts, BOGOF or whatever, and let people pick and choose their way around them.  Tesco has been way ahead of the pack in this for some time with it’s daily deal RSS feed and if they’re getting anything like the success with it that they have with their email marketing it’s going to go through the roof when the public adopt IE7 as the browser of choice (it could happen people!)

New product notification
Tired of searching around the web for new products that you’re interested in?  Well, people are already used to (or getting used to) using RSS feeds to update them of new articles in the news and blogosphere.  It’s only a short step to waiting for new product information down the same stream.  My friend Phil’s site, www.e-depot.co.uk (ok - so it’s a cheap plug to help him, but he does sell great snowboarding gear!) already has these on it for each and every product category they sell.

Time sensitive communications
Similar to the above, but useful perhaps for financial intermediaries such as money supermarket?  RSS feeds listing the latest credit card or loan details.  In the market for a new loan, or thinking of a new credit card but not yet seen the offer to tip you over the edge?  Sign up to the RSS feed and wait for it to turn up.

Customer support and after sales service
Ideal for customer support requests, rather than waiting for the emails to turn up once you’re filled in the HTML form on a company’s web site, add the newly created RSS feed to your aggregator of choice and wait for them to feed right into you.  Once the support enquiry is closed, remove the feed. Now if only technorati had this service maybe I could work out why they STILL won’t index me!!!

After-sales service/order tracking
Why waste time going back and forth between your e-commerce site and the parcel company cutting and pasting consignment numbers here there and everywhere?  Add the RSS feed for your order to the browser and see updates on where in the World your next DVD box set is as soon as they arrive.

News letters and PR
A no-brainer obviously, but I should probably mention it.  But RSS is ideal for PR and news articles.  But you knew that already, right?

OK, so this list isn’t complete, and I am sure we can all think of at least a dozen more instances of where RSS is going to be useful for us as digital marketers, but that’s the whole point! 

Howard
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Technorati Profile

Link: What_puts_the_2_in_Web_20.pdf (application/pdf Object).

This timeline is a very useful tool to help understand how Web 2.0 has evolved.

A little late perhaps, but I just wanted to give a quick congratulations to Vincent on landing his new gig as Junior Digital Strategist at Tribal DDB.  Second week in and apparently already busier than he ever was with me.

I always told him he had an easy ride

Well done mate – you deserve it! 

Howard
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