Source: Kiwi Flickr

This year was the third time I’ve been to Webstock. I go for a few reasons: to visit Wellington!, to get perspectives on web design & web development that I wouldn’t normally, to let my brain think about things other than digital marketing and to catch up with people.

Of course, it isn’t easy just to turn off from the digital marketing side of things so I spend a lot of my time at Webstock thinking about the impact of changes & future trends to the digital marketing industry.

Here’s what I learnt online businesses need to be doing this year:

• Iterate. Listen to your customers, watch your analytics, learn what needs improving and optimise like a crazy person. The website that is most agile will win.
• Don’t be late to the mobile party, be early. How does your online audience want to engage your business via mobile? Does that exist? Is there a business case for it?
• Be wary of “gut feel” or “I just know” interpretations of data by your staff or your third party providers. Expect empirical evidence that backs up that gut feel.
• “If you review the first version of your site & don’t feel embarrassed, you spent too long on it” – Reid Hoffman, LinkedIn.com
• For Barack Obama’s US presidential campaign, his online team were tracking how dollars spent on online ads were turning into dollars received via fundraising. If a campaign that complex can achieve it, no-one has an excuse for not knowing their ROI from online spend.
• Jeff Attwood’s description of social software was very good: “tiny slices of frictionless effort, spread across an online community”. A good reminder that to leverage user-generated content you need your users to want to contribute and make it super-easy to do so.
• I thought Daniel Burka’s recommendation that “subtraction is iteration too” was a good reminder. Don’t be afraid to subtract

The talks & presentations are going to be made available in the near future so keep an eye on the Webstock blog for those.

You can also follow Webstock on Twitter: @webstock.

Do you know how well your online marketing tactics are performing?

How much does a conversion cost from your pay per click campaigns, search engine optimisation efforts or your email marketing campaigns…? – Do you know the answer?

Most Marketing Managers would answer yes to this question. For example: “Our PPC campaign costs us $6 for every sale”. For the majority of organisations, the data would come from Google Analytics or another web analytics platform.

But what does “$6 cost per sale” really mean?

You would probably agree with me that the data provided from any of the major web analytics platforms (including Google Analytics) can actually be quite misleading. Especially if data is used from analytics software that is installed using the “default” parameters, without correct configuration and expert interpretation.

Interpreting Analytics Data

Let me give you an example: Let’s assume your website sells Sony TVs.

A searcher on Google searches for a Sony TV and finds your Google Adwords PPC ad. They click on the ad (and if your PPC account is set up correctly) they land on your website and are presented with a range of relevant Sony TVs. They find the “SONY Bravia KDL40X4500 model”, they like the look of it and decide they want to buy it. Let’s assume they do this on a Monday.

But before they purchase, let’s assume the consumer wants to do a bit more research the next day on other websites. In the end they find that the product is cheaper on your site and that your delivery and returns terms are more favourable. So they decide to buy the product from you.

However, this particular consumer didn’t bookmark the product page – and can’t remember what your web address is! But they do remember what your company is called. So they type in your company’s brand name into Google, and click the top natural listing. They navigate around your site, find the TV that they liked, and finally, purchase it.

Here’s how that process would look:

The default setup on most analytics packages would register the sale under the branded keyword clicked in the natural results. Is this fair? What about the paid search click that happened first?

By comparison, the conversion tracking option within Google Adwords would attribute that same sale to the click on the paid search ad. The data within Google Adwords and Google Analytics would fail to match up and there is a strong possibility that sales would be “over-reported” using Adwords data only. The reason behind this is due to the differences between first-click and last-click conversion attribution.

Google Adwords Conversion Tracking

Google Adwords employs first-click attribution. If Google sends a visitor to the website because the visitor clicked on that paid search ad, Google Adwords would always attribute any sale to that initial click. The cookie is not over-written and even if Google Adwords was further down the buying cycle, it would always attribute a sale to the click as long as the sale happens within 30 days of this click.

Google Adwords employs post-click tracking, which is initiated when the user clicks on a paid ad that has been assigned a tracking URL. From that moment, a cookie is stored on the user’s machine and if they visit the website’s complete page within 30 days, the Google tracking pixel meets with the cookie and reports back to Google Adwords which click brought the sale, and on what date.

Google Analytics Conversion Tracking

Google Analytics (and the majority of the other analytics packages), as a default, employ last-click attribution. This means that the cookie will always overwrite itself based upon the last referrer to the website. This means that no-matter what medium referred the latest visit to the website, the sale would always be attributed to that medium (other than direct – Google Analytics doesn’t overwrite direct traffic). This means that the website that initially referred the visitor gets no credit for the initial introduction.

This is where first-click and multi-click attribution comes in.

First-Click Attribution

For a Google Analytics installation, First Rate has produced a product called “Acquisition by Referrer”. This product changes the way data appears in Google Analytics and attributes the sale to the first click the visitor made (much in the way that Google Adwords would record it). In the above case, Google Analytics would record the sale as a coming from the PPC advert, rather than a branded organic search phrase. (Note: The script records both first-click and last-click – it doesn’t stop the default nature of GA recording last-click.)

Another interesting thing to note is the cookie length set by Google Analytics. The cookie that stores where the visitor came from, what link in an email was clicked on (it is possible to tag the links to tell Google Analytics about the email campaign and each individual link), what keyword was used if they came from a search engine and also other data such as screen resolution and browser language used when the website was accessed – all of that is stored in the Google Analytics UTMZ cookie.

The UTMZ has a 6 month life-span. This is adequate for most websites, but for some websites it may be necessary for this period to be longer, or potentially shorter. First Rate can recommend a suitable cookie length to suit your company’s business model (eg. time it takes for customers to make a purchase decision or a cookie length that aligns with your own understanding of your customer’s loyalty/lifecycle).

Multi-Click Attribution

For the serious analysts out there, it is possible to assign multiple values within the JavaScript employed in the implementation of the Google Analytics tracking code.

The implementation of multi-click attribution is quite tricky and not for the faint-hearted. It requires JavaScript programming to draw data out of the website and send it to Google Analytics within a field reserved specifically for advanced reporting.

In addition, because of the overload of data, the results will become illegible within the Google Analytics interface. The best way to make sense of the data would be to export the data into excel and then use pivot tables to analyse the data.

A reason why multi-click attribution is becoming more popular is due to the ‘weighting’ of visits to the website. How much weight should the first click have, then a potential second, and what about a third or fourth?

Of course we can go another step further – what if you have a traditional ‘bricks and mortar’ store. The TV example above is a perfect example – a visitor goes online, researches the product that has the required specification, and then goes into a store to look at it, or even a competitor’s store! The salesman tells them about the TV, gives them a demonstration that could never happen online, and then the shopper returns home, goes on the net and buys from your website. How much emphasis should be placed on the in-store visit, but more importantly – how can we measure it? How can an analytics package possibly tell that the customer went in-store? At the moment, we simply can’t.

Website Analytics Recommendations

First Rate suggests initially using first-click attribution to see how the data is affected to get a ‘clearer’ picture as to how each marketing is acquiring traffic and sales (and at what cost!)

As a Google accredited partner (GAAC), First Rate can certainly help with custom Google Analytics implementations, please do contact us if we can assist in any way.

Businesses engage a variety of professional consultants to improve their company’s performance: Online marketing consultants, general marketing consultants, management consultants and PR consultants.

Yet many companies fail to get the best value from the relationship and some may even consider it a costly exercise, instead of an investment. That should not be so.

Continue Reading »

So – You’re making a new TV ad for your business.

You go out and hire the best creatives you can afford.

And after a long pitch process, going through idea after idea, you find “the one”.

Then there’s filming, location, editing and a host of other costs to be negotiated. But once you get the edits through, it all starts to look much more exciting. Then there’s the back-and-forth with the editors until you’ve finally got a finished product that you’re absolutely delighted with. And your agency is thrilled at the prospect of perhaps winning an industry award.

But then it dawns on you that with all the additional changes, locations, actors, revisions, re-shoots and so forth, there’s not actually any budget left to put it on TV anywhere meaningful..!

So it goes out at 3am on an obscure local channel that no-one watches. And you’ve got away with it…until that is, the CEO asks why he hasn’t seen the ad on TV.

Sounds ridiculous right? I mean, who’d do something like that?!

Turns out plenty of people would: There are a lot of websites in NZ that have had five and six-figure sums spent on them along with the associated amounts of time looking at visuals, concepts, wire frames, beta versions, user testing and so forth. Yet when you search online for the products these sites sell (and at least half of NZ consumers do just this), you just never see their (amazing) new site in the search listings.

Anywhere.

And there’s no budget left to run a search engine advertising campaign (eg. AdWords) or to do SEO properly – the budget has all been spent!

Hard to believe..?

Try searching on Google for, say LCD TVs –  some retailers have put obvious effort into both paid and natural search. Others simply have not.

Or maybe you’re trying to buy books online, say as a Christmas gift. Again, there is a lack of proactive SEO, or PPC campaigns for that matter, from some New Zealand retailers.  The results speak for themselves.

Making TV ads and then not showing them to anyone sounds ridiculous and you’d never do it.

So why is it ok to do exactly that with your website..?

First published on StopPress.co.nz

New Zealand advertisers are poorly represented in what is, in most cases, the most cost effective channel to market that there is. Overseas, online marketing has rightfully established itself as the fastest growing marketing channel and mandatory in marketing budgets. Within online, search marketing is the fastest growing channel and now accounts for more than 50 per cent of the online spend. How does New Zealand fare in comparison?

This begs two questions—why are online budgets so small and why does search have so little share of online?

It is not as if we are less savvy or connected compared to other nations nor can it really be blamed on broadband penetration as often touted by some.

Taking 2008 figures from the OECD, NZ compares favourably in terms of overall internet connectivity and has now passed over 20 per cent in terms of broadband.

For larger advertisers, agencies certainly seem to decide how the overall budgets are sliced and diced and there seems to still be an over familiarity with old style advertising, such that online is an afterthought, not a mandatory thought. This is reflected in the fact that while online ranks 2nd or 3rd in terms of overall marketing spend in the UK, US and AU, it still ranks only 6th in NZ, behind billboards.

This data is also reinforced by the recent Forbes study into what C Level executives believe are the more valuable channels. Internet 1, Print 4, TV 8.

Is online really that hard, or are people just too comfortable with the status quo, or is the truth just simply not out there enough? Education of the marketplace certainly seems to be a challenge and advertisers are paying the price.

Is it the fact that online is actually measurable and thus makes agencies accountable? After all, how many advertising awards are there for actual results, rather than creative excellence? Could it be that there is less agency margin in online? Or is it that for some of the key decision makers, TV and print is what they know best?  It’s not that these do not have a significant part to play, it is the over reliance on them that is telling.

Or is it the high profile failures? Think Flying Pig and Ferrit—online strategies deployed with an above-the-line mentality and offline marketing strategies.

Whatever the reason, the change will come to NZ and those organisations that recognise the opportunity online can make some early gains.

Click Cliques

So, what’s the story online? Where do visitors actually come from and what do they do when they arrive at the site?

The beauty of online marketing is that it is immediate, measureable and flexible, yet it is our experience that many organisations and agencies are not exploiting online effectively.

If we look at some research, the most effective channels stick out like a sore thumb.

Attracting visitors to your website is the first challenge, we should also consider the effectiveness of each of the digital channels in terms of delivering web traffic that converts these visitors.

Forbes data suggests an interesting insight into results versus expectations for different online campaigns.

Quite clearly, search (SEO and SEM) sit in places 1 and 2 and display is last. Overseas, we have clearly seen a shift in spend from the non-performing online channels such as display to proven performance channels, most notably search.

This is reinforced by the view of C Level executives in the US about the effectiveness of online channels, again search in top place, more than 400 per cent more effective compared to ad networks.

Track and Trace

One of the fundamentals that all marketing managers and senior executives should insist on is accurate measurement and reporting. There really is no excuse today as reporting systems, such as Google Analytics, are quite capable of delivering marketers with a wealth of data about the effectiveness of different online channels, not just search. Even where some form of analytics package is in place, reporting is often misinformed or misrepresented due to a general lack of understanding, meaning that apples are rarely compared with apples. The most common misrepresentation is that of post-impression tracking, potentially a gross over-representation of the effectiveness of certain types of online advertising due to the common lack of a comparison control group.

Consider a simple example: over the last month you may have seen hundreds of different banners on hundreds of different websites, but can you even name more than 10? Yet, post-impression tracking will “claim” any sale you make online to any of those advertisers – in some cases for up to 90 days into the future. This is regardless of what you would have purchased anyway and is not dependent upon whether you even saw the banner as a lot of these appear below the fold of the webpage, let alone actually clicked on the banner. It is in this manner that banner effectiveness is grossly overstated compared to other channels. Compare that to search, where you have specifically entered a query yourself and then clicked through to a website. Studies have shown that post-impression tracking without a control group is often 200 times overstated. Look at this recent example I read about from Australia. In this instance, the search organisation had taken over an account and recorded the following:

With cookie windows of up to 60 days this introduces a high level of bias into reports. But today the problem goes deeper, some digital media plans are unethically designed to introduce a cookie spraying methodology into the media plan. Cookie spraying is a deliberate tactic to buy as much low performing, low placement, cheap remnant digital inventory as possible. This type of media strategy can ensure upwards of 70% of an available Internet population (e.g. Australian internet users) always have a cookie on their machine. In some instances, I’ve seen a single client drop 4 billion post impression cookies in a 12 month period, with only 13 million active Internet users in Australia you do the math. So a user may never ever click, engage or even see a brands ad, navigate to the brands site either by direct entry of another medium (e.g. Search) and the value is attributed on a post impression basis to an advertising / media plan that had little or no effect on consumer behavior.

So, where does that leave us, apart from paying too much for too little

Well, the tide will eventually reach NZ, but for now can I ask that marketers demand certain answers from their agencies?

• What is our online strategy?
• Are we spending on our money on the highest return channels?
• Can you prove it?
• What key performance indicators are we measuring?
• What reporting tool are we using to measure these?
• What measurement system was used to record the conversions?
• Are the conversion numbers based on successful conversions only?
• Were search conversions attributed to the last cookie only (last-click)?
• Was the measurement based on post-click or post-impression? Or was a blended metric of post-impression and post-click used?
• Were the number of conversions reported unique (1-conversion-per-click) or where these transactions non-unique (many-conversions-per-click)?
• If unique, what was the timeframe in which the conversions are treated as unique?
• Was the CPA inclusive/exclusive of GST, and inclusive/exclusive of agency margins?