Field Notes Inside an Integrated Communications Agency

In addition to the great speakers at the Omniture Summit, some of the breakout sessions teach me things about Sitecatalyst and web analytics in general that I hadn't considered previously. 

This year was no different. I took some notes on a few of the sessions and what I learned. First up was the Advanced Power Strategies.

SiteCatalyst : Advanced Power Strategies - hosted by Ben Gaines

Quick note on Ben - I've been communicating with him for years through Twitter as he's helped me with numerous Omniture issues and this was the first time I met him in person. Really good guy and always helpful. Loves his job, its obvious. His session was one of the best I've seen in 3 years of going to this Summit. Here are a few he uncovered during the breakout session:

1) Measuring engagement - while the topic of measuring engagement is controversial (another post on this later in the week), Ben and crew had some tangible ways on computing an engagement score. First off, you need to decide which events on the site qualify as 'engagement' activities. Each one of those events would get a value. You would capture that value in a counter eVar (conversion variable).

Example: Say you have 4 things on your site you to show someone is engaged with your site and assign values accordingly

Email a Friend - 5

Subscribe to a newsletter - 8

Upload a video - 2 

Write a review - 4

If someone came to your site and subscribed to the newsletter and emailed a friend, their engagement score would be 13. The values need to be thought through to determine which activities are more valuable. Now that you have that engagement score, you can relate it to campaigns, keywords, anything to use as a criteria for success. Really clever way to use eVars to create the scoring.

Additionally you could classify the scores into ranges with names such as 'Low Engagement', 'High Engagement', etc.

You could also use an incrementor event to score it so you could create calculated metrics, such as enagement per visit, etc.

Check out the Omniture blog  for a ton more on this. 

2) Use a new plugin called GetPercentPageViewed to figure out if visitors are scrolling vertically to see content. ClickMap is useful to a point but doesn't tell you how many visitors scroll to the bottom of the page to see everything. You can capture the percentage as an eVar and then classify them into ranges to see what percentage makes it all the way down. Very useful in designing pages and to understand if your content is even visible to visitors.

Again, Ben can talk more eloquently on this on the Omniture blog.  

3) Participation is a different way of attributing credit to web site activities. Typically, credit for pages is split it up amongst the pages encountered. Participation gives full credit to a page or activity so that you can figure out which content is the most valuable in driving conversion.

Example - say you have 10 pages involved with a $100 order. In the normal way attribution occurs for a page, each page would have a value of $10 (100/10).

With Participation you would give $100 to each of the 10 pages involved. That way you can determine the relative value of pages in generating conversions (or revenue). You can do similar things with other events such as a lead or subscribing for an email to understand which parts of your sites are a part of the conversion.

I've been using this one for the past few years, but wanted to share in case you weren't aware it was there.  

One of the fun aspects of every Omniture Summit is the product enhancement announcements. Much like an Apple release, web analyst geeks nervously await the new goodies to arrive with much anticipation. This year's announcements focused on 2 aspects. Both are pretty significant. 

The first is a Display Targeting Solution for Advertisers. Essentially, Omniture is allowing advertisers to leverage the data collected onsite to run offsite advertising. By using the onsite data, advertisers can create more targeted ads based on customer segments. Segments could include groups of visitors that exhibited certain behaviors such as viewing specific content or abandoning a cart or other information you know about a visitor such as source of traffic, browser type, geography, etc.

Example of how this works...say you have a group of visitors that have put Widget A in their shopping cart but for whatever reason hasn't purchased it yet. Using that knowledge, Omniture can generate targeted display ads (banners) on other websites that are geared towards closing the deal. Whether its better messaging, different offering, more relevant imagery...it can be customized to that audience. Additionally, using some of Omniture's other products like Test & Target, advertisers can do A/B and Multivariate testing to figure out which creatives generate the best results.

Or let's say you are a non-commerce site, you could leverage the data about what kinds of content a visitor group consumes, and push targeted ads that appeal to those visitors based on what they've read in the past or what other visitors have also looked at. 

Previously you could do something similar with DoubleClick's Spotlight functionality but that was always somewhat limited. This solution offers much more promise based on the richness of the data collected for segmentation.  

Segmentation, targeting and relevancy is the name of the game these days when it comes to your website and the content you are showing to visitors. Technologies like this allow for you to be a lot more precise in your marketing as opposed to carpet-bombing everyone with the same message.

The second major integration Omniture announced is with Facebook. Even better, that integration is free. By leveraging an API connection, some of the interesting data Facebook is collecting can be brought into Omniture and combined with the data you are collecting about your site.

What do I mean by interesting data? Facebook has a ton of demographic information such as gender, age, interests, groups, etc that can be brought into Omniture Sitecatalyst and used for drilling down into the data. You can find out what age groups are checking out your content, what gender likes product A, what kinds of interests generated sales, and so on. So from a customer intelligence perspective, this is huge. Facebook has 130 million users and with that its probably the largest collection of demographic data in the world.

Not only can this data be leveraged inside of the reporting in SiteCatalyst, but also used to create segments to advertise within Facebook. So again, suppose you have a group of visitors that have checked out certain content on your website, you can re-target those visitors on Facebook with relevant ads. 

The one lingering question I have on this is whether you can see all the demographic info of all Facebook visitors that come to your site or only fans of your brand. Obviously, the latter becomes less useful since you might only have 200 fans of your brand. But if it is everyone, this is the holy grail of marketers based on the sheer size of Facebook users.

Just to reiterate a point I make a lot in discussions, we aren't tracking you as an individual but in aggregate. We don't know John Smith is the one on our site doing these activities, instead we see you as some long visitor id like CWXY-1323-2233jd-45jasd. So the passing of data between these disparate systems shouldn't be a cause for concern from privacy advocates. It anonymous. What we are doing is leveraging the aggregate information to create segments for targeting and relevancy.

With both of these major integrations it is obvious what Omniture is trying to achieve, a campaign optimization platform. Omniture already has tools that optimizes content and website design. This is the next logical step, taking your online (and offline) advertising and developing technology to help marketers optimize their budgets to generate the best results. Additionally, the integrations are making it easier to create custom segments based on cross-site knowledge which will ultimately allow marketers to pinpoint their marketing and improve conversion.

Once Omniture cracks the code on campaign attribution and cross-channel influences and combines with these products, they are going to be on to something extremely powerful. Essentially, Omniture could become your campaign planning/media mix tool.  

Exciting times in the world of online marketing. 

For other posts on the Omniture Summit (and more to come over the next 48 hours):

Post 1

Post 2  

So it turns out that I lied somewhat about maintaining a semi-live blog during the Omniture Summit 2010. It proved too difficult with everything going on and because the battery life of my laptop didn't really allow for it. If anyone was jonesing for information during the Summit, you could have followed my assault on Twitter. I think I had in the neighborhood of 125 tweets in a span of 2 days. Insane. 

So now I am back in Raleigh and beginning to transcribe my handwritten notes (the ones that I can actually read) into digestible pieces for the Capstrat blog. 

I was really interested to see how the Summit was going to change after the Adobe acquisition. Once the doors opened for the general session, I could see it was the same look and feel as previous events. I've always likened it to a web analytics rock concert, complete with huge monitors and loud music, and this one didn't disappoint.

Opening session saw Josh James (head of Adobe's Omniture business unit) welcome everyone to the summit. In his opening monologue, he mentioned that we are in the midst of the Industrial Revolution of Data and that this was the decade of the CMO. Successful CMO's are going to need to:

1. Create engaging experiences
2. Unify and personalize consumer interactions across channels
3. Make the leap from marketing metrics to business metrics
4. Inform other business functions and invert accountability 

 

Greetings from Salt Lake City, Utah site of the annual Omniture  Summit. For those that don't know Omniture, they are one of the biggest web analytics vendors (others being Google Analytics, WebTrends, Unica, Coremetrics, etc) and recently acquired by Adobe. The annual gathering is a smattering of who's who in the digital world. While a decent chunk of the content centers on Omniture products, there is also a lot of industry knowledge that is being shared which makes the Summit immensely valuable not just for analytics geeks, but also web marketers.

Last year I attempted to run a semi-live blog of the happenings here at the Summit on my personal blog "Diary of a Madman...", and I will attempt to do so again. I am going to opt for short bursts throughout instead of my usual 6 pages of notes crammed into one post.

I got in late last night so missed yesterday's kickoff and meeting some folks but am ready to roll this morning.

Some interesting things so far...

1) I missed the last Omniture shuttle from the airport. After learning that was the last one, I went on Twitter and asked if there were any more shuttles. Omniture monitors Twitter religiously and responded to me in about 30 seconds, and within 20 minutes they sent a car to pick me up. That is incredible! Builds goodwill, but also demonstrates how important Twitter comments are to them.

People who don't get Twitter don't understand the massive power it has. All messages get amplified, and smart companies are interacting with customers to show they are listening and are a part of the conversation. The walls of vendor and customers is eroding at a rapid speed. Is your company a part of it?

2) The vendor showcase has a lot more Adobe content to it. I wonder why?

3) When I registered I was given a Poken stick. Poken is used as a virtual business card where you can trade contact info by touching Poken sticks (which sounds funny). I think this is a great idea as one of the main benefits to this conference is the networking aspect. This tactic makes that a little easier.

On to the general session. You can follow me on Twitter @hazenj as well. 

OK, so I waited a loooooooong time before writing about my thoughts on Adobe's $1.8B acquisition of web analytics vendor, Omniture. I've probably missed the boat on saying anything groundbreaking, but I've wanted to espouse my beliefs ever since it was announced.

I've worked a ton with Omniture over the last 3 plus years and even interviewed with them for some positions recently, so when this showed up over the wire, people were peppering me with questions on what this means. So...I'll try to explore what I think it means and hopefully somewhere in here I have something that somebody else hasn't mentioned before.

Adobe?

This was the hardest piece to figure out at first. It seemed like it came out of left field. I always thought that it might make more sense for a company like SAP, Interwoven/Autonomy, or IBM to be the one to buy Omniture and integrate with their web platforms to create a seamless web ecosystem, where the content and the presentation of that content is based on the data being collected. Think of the Amazon model, where you come to the site and it 'knows' about you and suggests things based on behavior. That isn't done through magic. It's all web analytics and algorithms. Ok, and a little magic thrown in. So for an IBM, you'd throw Omniture on top of Websphere and all of a sudden you have a decision engine integrated with a web platform. Web personalization and delivery become a little easier.

But once I thought about it for a while, Adobe started to make more sense. Adobe wants Omniture so tracking of Flash and rich media becomes common place and tightly integrated. Tracking Flash applications today is not exactly the easiest thing in the world. Once you get the hang of it is not terribly difficult, but imagine if it was already in there out of the box with a few checkboxes to click to turn on. All of a sudden you have can track all the wonderful interactions inside of Flash. Here is something I learned a long time ago, if you can see how things work from a measurement perspective you end up doing more of it and do it smarter/better. The easier it is to track interactive media, the better the end products of marketers and web designers.

I'll give you a simplified view...one of the reasons Google Analytics exists is to drive more Paid Search and Banner ads. Why? Because if you can measure the effectiveness of these tactics you'll end up spending more to drive it. Google gives it away with hopes that it gives you a view into your online campaigns so you do more of them. I am thinking some of the same characteristics exist with this deal. If you can see what is happening with Flash or other Adobe applications, you'll use them more.

Optimization is key

A lot of folks might only use Omniture's SiteCatalyst and not realize that Omniture has bought a ton of technology over the years in the realm of optimization. In fact, over the last year they viewed themselves as an optimization platform, not a web analytics vendor. The notion is that you can leverage the huge amounts of data collected to determine what gets presented to visitors of a site. Behavioral targeting and personalization are possible using some of these tools as they utilize the reams of data to dictate the content, images, messaging, color, whatever you want. A/B and multivariate testing are part of the solution to designing better web sites as well as recommending content or products to visitors who have exhibited certain behaviors either on this visit or on previous encounters. Its pretty awesome stuff and a marketers dream. This is where the web is heading in a big way.

So...take it again into Flash or other rich media applications. All of a sudden you can have Omniture's Test & Target/TouchClarity platform underneath the application to generate different versions of content based on behaviors. This could be used on site as well as in off-site rich media banners for demand generation, especially around retargeting or different messaging based on what site you are on. Imagine if that was all integrated into the tools so you didn't have to think about it, you just come up with the content (no small task mind you). And you track it.

All of a sudden the applications become somewhat self-learning and the content more revelant for the visitors. I am oversimplifying, but I think you get the idea. The Omniture piece creates the feedback mechanism that drives the content through Flash.

Different Businesses

Unlike a lot of mergers where there is often cross-over with businesses and the deal is just to grow market-share, this is a deal that really broadens Adobe's business. Not much overlap with what Omniture does and what Adobe typically does. Theoretically, Omniture will benefit from Adobe's funding and software expertise.

Concerns

My biggest fear is that being owned by a particular web platform will mess up Omniture's agnostic view of web applications. For example, will Omniture devote as much time to figuring out how to track Silverlight applications now that its owned by the guys that create Flash? 

Will all the guys that have built up Omniture over the last decade jump ship and Adobe runs it into the ground? I've seen it all too often where a company buys another and all the talent eventually flees or the integration doesn't really fit because of cultural differences. Time will tell.

Implications

As I mentioned before, in theory this might help bring web analytics more into the mainstream as I would imagine this might get embedded inside of all of Adobe's software so that tracking is common place and not an IT exercise. I got to thinking though, if that happens doesn't that open up the door for some level of free web analytics? If it's in the tools, would you have to pay for an Omniture license or is it out of the box? And in that case, does it create different versions of Omniture SiteCatalyst where you have the free bare-bones one that comes with Flash, Dreamweaver, etc, or a pimped-out enterprise version that does everything and costs you something. Is that the way to compete with Google on this? And by being free with the tools, does that grow the usage of Adobe products? 

It's possible that Adobe isn't going to integrate it with their products so maybe the above never becomes an issue, but I sort of think integration makes the most logical sense. 

So...there you have my thoughts on the situation. What are your thoughts? Did I overlook something? Am I crazy/delusional?

 

 

My first post on the Capstrat blog!

Not sure what life this will take on but I hope to write a lot more often than I do with my current blog Diary of a Madman, which is as often as Halley's comet passes the earth. It's possible that I keep this blog more closely aligned with what I do professionally and the Diary will end up being a hodge-podge of randomness such as what I had for lunch. We'll see. On the Diary I tend to write on the wonderful world of web analytics and will probably transition those sort of posts here as well as occasionally veer into web marketing. Adjust bookmarks accordingly!

My first entry here focuses on my impressions of the Internet Summit that took place in Raleigh last week. Keep in mind these are my impressions and not those of Capstrat (unless we share a collective brain). I don't tend to go to many of these kinds of events other than the annual Omniture rock concert/Summit in Utah, so I don't have a lot to compare this to but I think overall I was a little underwhelmed by the Internet Summit.

From my perspective it was a little too high level for my liking. That doesn't mean it didn't have some value as there are definitely attendees with varying levels of experience and knowledge in this space. If you've never heard of Twitter then this might have been a very educational experience. If you are looking for pointers on strategy, examples of tactics that companies have deployed, or deep knowledge in areas than you probably came away slightly disappointed. I found most of the topics to be a broad overview of what people are doing on the Internet, but nothing tangible that I can use for myself. 

Because of the limitations of time and place I didn't get to see all the speakers, but here are the sessions I saw and my take on them:

Keynotes:

I found John Kosner from ESPN to be fairly entertaining and knowledgable and the fact that he's Bill Simmons boss didn't hurt him, as I am a huge Simmons fan. Especially interesting is ESPN's decision to be pipe-agnostic which is a key take-away from his speech. Being pipe-agnostic means that you as a company don't care how people get your content whether its on the web, print, tv, mobile, etc. As long as you check out ESPN's content, they don't really concern themselves with how you do it. That is a escpecially important as it allows your company to be everywhere and mass-consumed. Companies that ultimately wall themselves off and limit how you get content or products are going to stifle their growth because customers want freedom to choose how they receive it. Think of Netflix. By having multiple approaches for how you watch movies they are able to touch more people. Same concept here, let the customers pick. Something the record industry probably should have thought of.

The next keynote I saw was from the CEO of Technorati and it was sort of pedestrian with a lot of data thrown in. A lot of folks I chatted with were not terribly impressed. The one sort of surprising thing was the rising amount of professional bloggers of which I guess I am sort of one now.

Onto the sessions....

Blogging: New Media and Personal Branding:

This session was probably the highlight for me as the speakers were pretty good with Andy Beal (Marketing Pilgrim) and Rick Klau (Blogger/Google) being the standouts. I thought they had good ideas for how to generate more traffic, followers, etc., such as writing a lot and getting linkages. I wish they would have spent more time on measuring social media. It's one of the dirtiest things to measure, success on social media, but I would have liked to hear tangible things they've done to measure ROI or change perception based on companies actively participating in this space. I know a lot of people would cringe about trying to tie social media to objectives but I think at the end of the day you need to have some sort of measure as to whether or not you are doing this well. A lot of folks have mentioning tracking # of comments, followers, subscribers, and rankings as a way to measure but wondered if there is something more.

I suppose that if you have a measure of success such as moving from 10 followers to 100 followers then that is success. But I'd rather measure it against changes in perception (via surveys) or cost avoidance (such as reducing customer attrition or reducing customer support calls). Like the panelists said, it all depends on your goal. So the key take-away...if your company is getting into social media, have a purpose. Don't do it just because it's the 'in' thing to do or just to say you're doing social media. Have a reason and measure against that goal. 

As a side-note to social media measurement, I know Avinash Kaushik has a chapter on it in his new book, Web Analytics 2.0. I just haven't gotten to that chapter to absorb his teachings, but you should definitely go buy it here. I need to become an affiliate for Avinash as I tell everyone I know to go get his book. I should at least try to profit it from it.

For personal blogging I think there are more interesting goals. Quite honestly, the more you write and the more passionate you are about particular subjects, significant doors can be opened. Personally, I know my meager blog doesn't get a ton of traffic, but it gets the right kind of traffic, especially in the web analytics space. I've had companies contact me about job opportunities and I've had closer communication with Omniture because of my blog. If I was actually serious about it I could probably get speaking engagements and book/movie deals (I mean wouldn't you want to see a movie about this?). Klau mentioned he blogged so people would perceive him differently and not pigeonhole him. Additionally, someone on the panel mentioned that quantity is not as important as the quality of the people reading your content. Are the right people reading? So the take-away....blogging and blogging well with a purpose can help build your personal brand and get you places such as being viewed as a thought-leader or even a job.

Analytics:

Next on the agenda was the Analytics panel. Obviously, that was of keen interest to me. What was awesome to see is that it was one of the most heavily attended sessions, standing room only.  This is important for a couple of reasons...1) the continued interest keeps me employed which is of paramount value 2) shows that companies are starting to grasp the importance of measuring their online presence. Unfortunately, I think we are still in the infancy of web analytics, where a very few companies are actively measuring and, more importantly, reacting to it. Intuition and HIPPOs (Highest-Paid Person's Opinions) still run a vast majority of decision making, but that is going to change rapidly as smart companies view analytics as a competitive advantage. 

As for the panel itself, I didn't get the sense that the participants were that knowledgable in this space. That's not to say they aren't, I just didn't hear much that led me to believe it besides Ron Garmon at VueLogic (he was good). As I mentioned before, it seemed like the theme was that you need to measure stuff and test. Basic stuff, but surprisingly few companies are doing it. Why is that? 

My take is multi-pronged:

1) Companies think web analytics is hard or you need a PhD in stats to do this which is completely incorrect. The tools are getting easier to use, all you need is curiosity and a will to learn. 

2) The implementation of tools is complex and difficult. It definitely can be, as tools like Omniture aren't for the faint of heart, but that is starting to erode or at least has the potential to, see Adobe buying Omniture (more on that in my next post).

3) As mentioned, intuition still reigns supreme despite evidence to the contrary. People want to believe they are right or don't want to hear their baby is ugly. Often companies view their content or website as if it was their child and don't want anyone to tell them it's not the greatest site ever. As a side story, I heard a VP at Ford mention one time they used to internally bet on which banner would get the best results. They were wrong every single time. Lesson is that we look at things with our own inherent bias, instead of how customers view us.

4) Lack of staff with experience or expertise. It really is difficult to find anyone that has any sort of long-term experience in this space and even more surprising is the lack of higher-education programs in web analytics. North Carolina State has the Advanced Analytics program and the Univesity of British Columbia has the Award of Achievement in Analytics, but other than that I can't think of a program that exists. There aren't any teachers to teach essentially. As a side-note, this would be a great opportunity to embed these kinds of courses in an undergrad marketing degree or an MBA. 

As for the panel, things tended to stay on the generic side and maybe that was fine for everyone in the room but I wanted someone to get into strategies to solve some of the big problems with web analytics such as campaign attribution, how to pick revelant KPI, or how to measure offline world influencing the online world (and vice-versa). It's possible that the panel setting wasn't the best way to do this and maybe case studies or someone talking about the new developments in the analytics space would have been what I was looking for.

Social Media: Engage:

Quite honestly I missed most of this session because I decided to take a walk down Fayetteville St and get a bite to eat because I am crazy about what I eat and couldn't dine on the food provided. I wish I would have seen more of it because I do think its fascinating about the phenomena around people sharing things with each other. Of course, I love to measure the effect of that behavior as well. Smart companies are making it easier for people to share stories, content, links, etc in a multitude of ways such as Digg, Facebook, Del.icio.us, Google reader, etc. The key to that is not just enabling the ability to do so, but actually creating something that someone would want to share. I really believe companies (and people) lose sight of the fact that, in order for things to be shared, there actually has to be something interesting/important to share. Sounds simple, but it's often overlooked. 

Online Advertising Strategies:

This to me was one of the more disappointing sessions as there was no strategy to be found. It literally was an overview, and a fairly shallow one at that. I should have taken more notes, but literally it was basic tactics like Paid Search. I would have loved to hear how a company like Expedia looked at how all their tactics work together to generate sales on Expedia. For example, how do they evaluate where to spend money in advertising in a media-mix? Do they understand the effect of banner ads on their paid search? Those are the kinds of strategies I wanted to hear discussed, not that companies need to do Paid Search and then banners and so on down the interactive marketing food-chain. Even with banner ads, what kinds of things are they doing such as multivariate testing with different creative approaches or retargeting? Just needed more depth instead of the basic "here are things to drive traffic to your site".

Online Video Discussion:

Stepped out of my area of experience and ventured over to hear about video. I don't know much about this space but thought the speakers were entertaining, especially Max Haot from Livestream. Again to rehash a point, being able to distribute media across multiple outlets is more important than walling off where people view the content. 

Twitter/Real time:

Its very possible I missed some valuable insights by this point in the day as it was getting late and my caffeine buzz was deminishing. Nothing terribly revolutionary here but somewhat informative to learn of some new business ventures using Twitter as a platform such as Twitpay and Spitter. What I can't figure out is how those ventures are going to make any money. More importantly with Twitter is whether or not the real-time search stuff eventually screws the Google search monopoly. Twitter has a crazy amount of traffic and searches, wait until they start monetizing it. I am not a huge user of Twitter but I do use it for finding out whether or not people have the same problem I have with software vendors or other products. Example, if I create a support ticket for Omniture, it might get answered in a week. Do the same thing in Twitter and I have a response from either Omniture or another user in like an hour. The ability to have problems or issues amplified and searchable is going to completely change the nature of customer support. Companies that are listening and reacting build up trust and credibility as well as learning insights about their customers. 

Coda:

Its very possible that I don't understand the intent of the conference. Maybe it is designed to just give an overview and not get into specifics. Maybe it's just a place for vendors to showcase, job seekers to meet people, or an excuse to hang out at the new convention center all day (which is fine as well), but I was looking for things I can take back to my company or clients and use. I wanted to hear of something I hadn't considered or can easily read about. My suggestion is to potentially have less panels and more demonstration on what companies are actually doing on the web and get underneath the overview and dig into strategy. Sometimes seeing is the best education, I just didn't see much that caused me to write down something to check out later. I know this conference is in its embryonic stages, but I hope to see the topics explored a little deeper next time. I think the Internet Summit can become a really valuable event, it just needs a little fine-tuning. 

If anyone has other insights or take-aways from the session, especially the ones I didn't post about, please feel free to add in the comments. Or call me an idiot for anything I've written above. But if you are going to call me an idiot, please have proof.

Looking forward to posting more soon.........