Non-Line Blogging

Here are a few definitions from Wikipedia to get the blog rolling:

Serendipity is the effect by which one accidentally stumbles upon something fortunate, especially while looking for something entirely unrelated

Behavioral targeting uses information collected on an individual's web-browsing behavior, such as the pages they have visited or the searches they have made, to select which advertisements to display to that individual

Stalking is a term commonly used to refer to unwanted attention by individuals (and sometimes groups of people) to others.

We’re not short of data in digital marketing.  In fact, we’ve too much of the stuff.  Let’s take the marketing of expensive holidays:  Every couple of years in the Hughes household wanderlust overcomes us and a couple of weeks in delightful West Wales will not quite tick all the R&R boxes.  So, sensing this restlessness, I venture onto a few travel web sites and see what destinations like Thailand may offer us that Wales can’t.  (Sunshine seems to be the short answer).

20 years ago I went on a Kuoni holiday with my parents and, as it was a great success, I thought I’d check out the delights of Kuoni once again, so Googled the brand and went to their site.  I say this to demonstrate that key drivers to branded search could well be deeply emotional , not just seeing a Kuoni banner a few days ago – oh! the perils of attribution modelling.  Anyhow, I now left a rich stream of data across the Kuoni website and was maybe a couple steps nearer to knowing what I wanted.

Meanwhile in a distant galaxy far, far away...some analysts were piecing together this trail of data. 

• Total pages in session – check. 
• Depth of content viewed  - check.  
• Total time on site – check. 

We have engagement!

Cue the scary music. 

A few days later I am on the Autotrader website looking to replace my recently-written off Fiat Punto (that’s a long story), and what appears before me – a display ad for Kuoni.  But this is not any old banner – it has behavioural targeting under the bonnet:

“Thank you for visiting the Kuoni website” whispers the disembodied voice of the banner.

And then it gets a little more scary.  A couple of page loads later, my stalker says

“Thank you for your interest in Thailand”

Now at this point some people may be looking over their shoulder to see if some Peeping Tom is behind all this.  For hairy old digital marketers like me it’s not a problem – good luck to Kuoni for using all this data in a positive way.  But I can’t help feeling that some customers out there will be a little spooked by all this, which leads onto my real point here...

The medium is the message.

I often use an Amazon email as an example of “as good as it gets” in digital marketing.  A few months ago my TomTom SatNav died and I wandered on to Amazon to check out prices of a new one.   24 hours later I got this delightful email with the wonderful copy...  

I’m a little more comfortable with this “email stalking” because the terms of engagement are different to display advertising:  I leave myself logged in on Amazon because I can do useful things like “buy now with 1 click” and  I expect Amazon not to shout general email offers at me...I am delighted when they notice things that could be worth re-visiting.  Similarly, I like it when they say on the web site

“Hello David Hughes.  We have recommendations for you”

They remind you of things you may have been looking at and fire up the old “collaborative filtering” engine to make things even more relevant for me.   Virgin Atlantic  have a delightful personalisation box in the “My Booking” area that reminds you how long it is until the next time we meet.  They could probably serve that up to me as a banner when I’m on Autotrader, but just wouldn’t be right and proper, would it?

Less is more.

I may wish to keep myself anonymous in certain media, but expect/demand more personal touches at other times.  I do not always expect to be singled out for personal treatment and when strangers start talking to me like long, lost friends I begin to feel uncomfortable.  I’m talking here about a slight shift in creative tone that would have the same relevance but in a less threatening way...

“Latest ideas and greatest offers for Thailand Holidays”

...could have been equally powerful from Kuoni but with far less emotional damage! People like it when they "accidently" stumble upon something fortunate, especially when looking for something else unrelated!  Maybe Amazon has mastered the science of "dynamic serendipity", where people think that stumbling upon relevant things is pure luck!  After all, Amazon don't say:

Last night between 7.21pm and 7.28pm you viewed the Garmin Nuvi 225 pages for 4 minutes, the Navman S30 for 2 minutes and then you had a quick look at the Tom Tom ONE v4.  Here are some special offers.

That would be stalking.

But, Behavioural Targeting is wonderful! 

Wherever I have seen it used, behavioural targeting generally drives up opens, clicks, conversions, average order values and drives down costs per outcome.   It may well be that Kuoni have tested the “less” versus “more” intrusive copy and the ones I didn’t like pushed up sales...so there, they would say.  But for many consumers this “stalking copy” can create the wrong feeling, a sense that something sinister is happening on the interweb.  It's a question of using the right tone and not relying too much on the data to drive the conversation.  The whole BT industry nearly came clattering down in Europe a couple of years ago with Phorm and British Telecom’s sneaky attempts to get it in under consumers’ privacy radars.  Let’s hope that over-friendly creative techniques don’t have a similar impact on people’s goodwill.

American author Will Rogers is attributed with this rather caustic one-liner from the 1930’s.

"When the Okies left Oklahoma and went to California, the average intelligence of both states went up."

It has since been used by many people, including  Robert Muldoon, the former New Zealand Prime Minister, about his countrymen migrating to Australia.  I’m proud to say that I am personally responsible for improving the average health of many cancer patients – another example of the “Will Rogers Phenomenon”.  A while ago I was at the un-healthy end of the “Stage 2” cancer segment, but after a couple of scans and no change in my overall condition I was popped into the “Stage 4” cancer segment along with some really ill people.  In that single action I had improved  the “average health” of both segments . How barmy is that?      

These examples show us that averages can be misleading and confusing. So, what do we get when we open up our web analytics reports or our email campaign dashboard?  Averages!  I’d like you to stay awake long enough to convince you that averages are a bad, bad thing in digital marketing and here’s why...

“Utterly Useless Average Metric” Number 1 – Site Conversion Rate

Let’s take an “average” site conversion rate.  It’s probably 3%.  That’s average.  But just a couple of simple steps gets us to a better place – how about conversion rate between new and repeat visitors, or conversion rate by source of traffic? A couple of clicks and you’re somewhere exciting.  As Avinash Kaushik would say “BAM!! Context, Baby!”  You find that repeat visitors are probably 3 times more likely to convert than first-timers, or that people coming from your Facebook invitation-only group convert 10 times better than people clicking on banners.  So get into some pretty basic segmentation to give some meaning to what you’re doing.  Here’s how Matthew Tod of Logan Tod demonstrates it.

See, conversions from banners are much worse than “average” and conversions from previous customers is much higher than “average”.  In short, it looks like people don’t buy on their first visit from any source, but will probably buy if they are returning visitors or past customers.  We could drill further and find out what products drove highest re-purchase rates, or what creative/media gave the best conversion rate....there may be some winners lost among the “average”.  More segmentation; more context; more correct actions taken!

“Utterly Useless Action” to improve average site conversion rates? Turn off your marketing.

I’d like to thank Matthew Tod for this one, too.  Promotional activity will drive prospects to your site and they are unlikely to buy...but some of them will.  Trouble is, they drag down the average conversion rate.  So switch off all your campaigns and watch those averages soar. The only people who will come to the site will be your family, close friends and past customers - and they love you.  Average conversion much better, sales volumes plummeting. 

Be careful what you wish for.

“Utterly Useless Average Metric” Number 2 – Email Click-through rate

Here is a list of average metrics from Mailchimp. 

Email marketers feel a sense of “market sector envy” creeping in as they look jealously at how big the averages are elsewhere.  Art has a 26% click-through rate and Arts_Music has a feeble 5%.  And what about Education getting a whopping 181% click-through rate?  Does the average relate to how good they are compared to other sectors, and if you have a low average are you a bad, bad marketer? 

The trouble here is that we are worrying about “soft” outcomes – even if we do improve our average open and click rates we will not necessarily improve our revenue, or net yield. 

If you want to improve your click-through rate you could probably make everything you wanted people to know about on a web page.

"Find out how many points you earned last month - click here"

Bingo!  A quick and easy way to improve average click-through rates, and here's another...

“Utterly Useless Action” to improve Average Click-Through rates?  Don’t mail non-openers.

So let’s really improve the average click-through rate.  Below is a graph showing what happens when you mail lots of "emotionally un-subscribed".  If the number of customers (who love you) is low, then the average click through rate will be, well, average!

But stop mailing people who have not opened for over a year as part of the same campaign.  Drop them into a different programme and the composition of the file will change.  You will have fewer non-clickers and your average click through rate will shoot up like this:

I have been banging on for years about “open” and “click” rates being “soft metrics” and I’m sure I’ll blog about that again soon.  In the meantime let’s all just agree that improving “average” click through rates is an utterly meaningless objective. Getting the “emotionally un-subscribed” to click on something is good, but judge yourself by what “outcomes” you deliver and then you’ll be adding value to your marketing activity.

We really need to segment out the non-openers and treat them differently (test From fields, Subject Lines, Preview Panes, time of day, day of week, text only messages etc etc) and you will be able to improve the open rate for non-openers.  Just don't mix them up with your best customers or you'll never be able to be relevant and engaging to all of them.

So there you are.  If your company's "bean counters" want you to improve averages, tell them that it may not be what they really want.  Increased clicks, sales, order values by all means.  But not averages, please. 

And how about this for one final silly average...Twitter users have more than the average number of ears.  That’s because nobody has 3 ears (apart from Davy Crockett with his “wild front ear”), but a few people will have only one or no ears.  So dividing the total number of ears by the total number of users we have a figure of 1.99 something, so most people have more than the average number of ears.  

As I said, Barmy, isn't it?

With Christmas nearly upon us I was wondering what presents digital marketers would like to find in their stockings.  A perennial favourite toy across the world is Lego and, whilst we’re probably a bit too old/busy/grown up to get any this year, the joy and wonder of the little bricks is brought to life with these fantastic advertisements from 2006.  

Then I began thinking that, just like some children these days, digital marketers have too many toys to play with.  We should play more often with the fantastic tools we have or we should be using our imagination to make the most of them. 

Display Advertising - Just add imagination

What do you see when you look at a 728 x 90 Leaderboard display ad - just some pixels (a digital Lego Brick?) or a wonderfully flexible and creative marketing format?  

Here are some games you can play long into the New Year with your digital ad inventory:

• Frequency capping – it’s amazing how many campaigns still get deployed in a wasteful, sub-optimal way...work out how many times people need to see an add before it wears out, and make sure your ad budget goes further by serving it to somebody else
• Format testing – so they didn’t click on a leaderboard, so re-assemble the pixels into a sky or an MPU and measure the impact of format on response (interactions or clicks...you choose).
• Contextual targeting – find out from publishers how they can deliver ads based on page content and do some playing (testing).  The click-through rate uplift should pay for the incremental costs and your conversion rates should grow too.  
• Behavioural targeting – make 2010 the year that you unwrap individually targeted ad deployment.  It will mean that you can alter your creative to suit people who are in different stages of the consideration and purchase funnel, based on what they have been viewing and clicking recently.

Email recipients are like snowflakes - every one is different

What do you see when you look at an email address?  Just another name to blast a standard message to?  The wide-eyed marketing child will see some wonderfully exciting opportunities to create imaginative messages that make email more interesting for the customers and more successful for you. 

Here are a few traditional email marketing games to get you started...fun for all the marketing family:

• Acquisition tools – if you’re renting data, ask the list owner what variables they hold and then deliver different versions of the same message.  For BtoB that should be different subject lines, opening paragraphs and calls to action based on “job function” or “industry sector”.  For consumers you may know their lifestyle and affluence from geo-demographic variables that list owners like Acxiom hold...have different propositions for less affluent and older prospects or use a different creative for young professionals.  Let you imagination run free!
• Conversion - as digital marketers we sit on the most valuable real-time prospect data so let’s get it out of the toybox and play with it.  Who clicked on an email link but did not complete a successful outcome?  Who looked at deep product pages on your site but did not buy?  These re-marketing campaigns should deliver 4-16 better conversion rates than one-size-fits-all messages so start building them.
• Retention – send different message programmes to your newer customers, or have a different tone of voice for purchasers of specific products.  Build “personas” (imaginary friends?!) to help with your tone of voice, imagery and calls to action.
• Re-activation – how do you know when you’ve lost a customer?  Probably when they’ve not bought for a specific time period.  So develop a “win back” programme with the first message triggered by a “date of last purchase is more than 60 days".  And be relevant...”we’ve noticed that you have not bought from us for a little while....” is a good start.

Fuel your imagination – get reading!

It’s good to know that even digital marketing kids can find pleasure in moveable type. When I was growing up the “must have” book was the BBC’s “Blue Peter” annual.    This year you ought to be asking Santa to bring you the wonderfully comprehensive “Web Analytics 2.0” by Avinash Kaushik.  Weighing in at more than your festive turkey, with 450 pages that gives you just over a page a day for all of 2010! 

But aside from being a real “value for money” present, this book encourages us to explore our world of data.  It’s partly a “how do they do that” book (go on, admit you’re not really sure how “multi-tabbed time on site is calculated, are you?), but it’s also an activity book along the lines of “what shall we do today to make sense of our marketing”.  With information covering pure web analytics, analytics for search, email and social media and links to further reading it is as near to a “Boys Own Annual” that digital marketers can get.

So there you have it.  Some ideas for kindling your imagination in 2010.  And we’ve not even touched on multi-variate landing page testing, search marketing or social media experimentation...better leave some of those for your birthday!

Here's wishing you a peaceful Christmas and an imaginative New Year. 

Don't believe everything you read.  Here is a story from PR Week in the UK

Thierry Henry Brand 'Not Irreversibly Damaged', Say Sports PR Experts

Synergy Sponsorship director of comms Stephanie Branston said: ‘The Thierry Henry brand is not irreversibly damaged. His value to sponsors will not suffer in the long-term although I would not envisage too many Irish companies beating down the door of Henry's agent this week offering brand endorsements.'

Now, I've never met Stephanie Branston and I wish her all the best in her career, but really, what planet is she on?  What do Audi and Coca Cola think about placement in photos like the one on the left...or the many others on-line?

So Stepanie, and anybody else out there in "PR", this is a quick lesson in what is happening to shatter Thierry's brand.  Goodness me, things move fast.  Just when I'm about to post this blog something else pops up worth talking about.  So, in the spirit of real-time information I'll make it as short and current as possible. 

This is not a lesson in how mean football fans are...it's a lesson in how quickly your brand equity can be destroyed on-line in front of global audiences.  (Insert your brand name for Thierry Henry and it may make it more of a lesson in how you need to keep track of on-line sentiment)

The story so far...

Thierry Henry, gifted, charismatic talisman of French football is taking a bit of an on-line kicking.  He helped France beat Ireland (and so gain entry to the 2010 World Cup Finals) with a deliberate hand-ball.  Cue much anger from the Irish, followed by much derision from the rest of the world (except France).   

Let's start off with a song.  After all, the Irish like a nice sing song...especially this cunning re-working of Michael Jackson's "Beat it" into "Cheated".  What do you think of that Stephanie? 

Next, the tweeters.  Here is the chart from this morning showing a search for the fabled French footballer...at least he's in people's minds!

Being able to track what those brand advocates are saying is pretty important and so here are a list of Twitter tracking tools for Stephanie to use as the day wears on...these are from the fantastic social media site Mashable 

1. Twitter Search: The simplest way to see trends on Twitter is on their official search page. Hot trends on Twitter appear on the search page and on the Twitter homepage, and clicking any will bring up a feed of the public conversation.

2. Twist: For those who are visual, Twist provides a graphical interface to see trends and keywords on Twitter. It not only lists out the hot trends over the last few hours, days, and week, but it provides embeddable charts and the ability to compare trends.

3. Monitter: Monitter is one of the best ways to track trends in real-time. Type in keywords and it will automatically update with the most recent tweets containing those terms. Add or remove columns to give you the right amount of information.

4. Hashtags.org: The popular webpage on Twitter hashtags also provides graphs on hashtag use just by hovering over the hashtag. There are also pages that show the most popular and newest hashtags, but their uptime is unreliable.

5. Tweetmeme: Looking for the most popular links on Twitter? Tweetmeme is the epicenter link sharing on the service.

6. Plodt: This website is a user-generated trend tracker based on tagging and ranking your tweets. It requires you to follow the Plodt Twitter account to participate. But even without participating, its timelines, tags, and statistics are still useful and interesting.

7. Twitturly: Twitturly is another way to track top-shared URLs. The interface allows users to see all of the active tweets that have shared a specific link.

http://mashable.com/2009/04/04/twitter-trends/

Next come the socially networked masses and  here is a selection of the Facebook groundswell.  Plenty of groups for Stephanie to join where she too can add her thoughts to why Thierry Henry is a good investment for brands right now.  Go tell 'em Stephanie!

16,265 fans for "Le Handball" group 

81,694 fans for  We-Irish-hate-Thierry-Henry-the-cheat group
    
60,913 fans for  La-main-de-Thierry-Henry (Can't work out sentiment of this one...French ironic seems best bet)

And already we have the first Facebook Application up and running..they must have been burning the midnight oil to get that one up and running

http://www.facebook.com/apps/application.php?id=177803303259

Then after that we get the saboteurs hacking into Wikipedia.  Today, the Free Encyclopaedia page for our footballing hero says... 

This page is currently protected from editing due to vandalism.

Changed protection level of Thierry Henry: Excessive violations of the biographies of living persons policy: France/Ireland match fallout

And all we wanted to do was have a little harmless fun, and now they've taken our ball away.  Despite this, there have been a number of less-than-complimentary versions that have stayed live for a few minutes and it seems the challenge here is to share the "naughty" version with as many people as quickly as possible...as these tweets show... 

theneilthing RT @lucyporter @Mark_Wyatt: RT @rupinjapanThierry Henry's Wikipedia page http://tinyurl.com/yzmq56u - QUICK BEFORE IT CHANGES! (quite rude) 

Finally, it's time to turn our attention to the sponsors and see what damage we can inflict on them.  I think this is not a bad effort to have a dig at one of them and there are many other similar versions doing the rounds.

So there we are.  48 hours in the hands of the technologically democratised and Thierry Henry is probably worth a little less than he was.  The lesson for all of us is that we need to be able to track the social media world and be aware when a storm is brewing (start off with Google Alerts for your brand on the "as it happens" frequency setting).  Then we must recognise that it is foolish to underestimate quite how much power tweeters and bloggers and Facebook groups wield in today's networked society.  That's why sorting out your social media strategy for 2010 should be top of your list of things to do over Christmas...followed by your email strategy to keep in touch with all your customers.

Quite how much long-term damage has been done to Thierry will remain to be seen.  At least Stephanie's right behind him.  

Allez les Bleus!

Avinash Kaushik has been de-mistyfying the world of web analytics for years through his excellent blog Occam's Razor.  He took us deeper into the murky world of Java-script tagging and standard reports with his comprehensive "Web Analytics:  An Hour a Day" in 2007.  Now he has written a book that all digital marketers should buy, read and leave on their desk to refer back to on a regular basis. 

Web Analytics 2.0 shows us how to move from shovelling  buckets of meaningless "clickstream" data around our organisations to developing a love for true insight.

In short he encourages us to move towards adding qualitative data to our limitless supply of quantitative data in order to really understand what people are doing on our sites.  We must learn to use our hearts as well as our minds.

Lets take a simple example - that old favourite of "Engagement".  Marketers run so many analytics reports to get a fix on engagement that the lights in most offices regularly dim.  And the bad news according to Avinash is that you will NEVER be able to measure how much people are enjoying themselves on your site just with the click-stream data.  For instance, to paraphrase Avinash, 2 people visit your site and spend 10 minutes looking at 12 pages.  Both  happy right?  One loved your site, but the other was frantically trying to find some content and gave up after 10 fruitless minutes - you will never ever ever know this just from your data.  By adding some qualitative data (an on-site survey?) we have more chance of finding out how satisfied, not engaged, these 2 visitors were.

So Avinash takes us on a journey to show us where we should be using our hearts to make sense of data.  On our way we look at the need to move away from once a week reports to continuous streams of  meaningful data;  we are constantly reminded that customers, not marketers, are the best people to inform us what our site should look and feel like; and we are taken on a guided tour of the mountainous areas of competitive insight and told how to mine it profitably.

But this book does so much more than just change the way you think, critical though that is.  It shows you what buttons to press to make your reports more actionable, tells you what sites to look at when considering additional solutions and gives clarity to virtually all the web analytics jargon terms.  Some of the content will be familiar to regular readers of his blog (like the excellent explanation of multiple-tab time on site calculations!) but that makes this even more of a reference book for all our analytics needs.

As you may know I am a huge fan of testing everything that we do in digital marketing and so the chapter titled "Failing Faster:  Unleashing the Power of Testing and Experimentation" took me around all my favourite sites in the digital marketing landscape:  A/B testing, Multi-variate testing and some really sound advice about where to start and a few quick wins to get you in the mood!  Here is my favourite slide that I use to introduce the issue of testing in my courses...I'm sure Avinash would not disagree!

Avinash shows us that web analytics is woven into all our digital marketing activity - from search to site usability and email campaign analysis to off-line integration.  I even spent a rewarding few minutes simply reading the sub-heads and being reminded of things we ought to be doing all the time: 

• Segment or go home
• Five Rules for creating a Data-Driven Boss
• The Key to Glory - Measuring Success 
• Context is Queen
• Failing faster - unleashing the power of Testing and Experimentation

So there we are.  Web Analytics 2.0 is a digital marketing book that takes you from thinking differently to doing better, packed with explanations about the things we ought to know about (or showing us how wrong we have been!).  It comes with a CD brimming with Podcasts, Video and Powerpoint material as well as lists of additional resources.  He even finds time on page 400 to mention Non-line Blogging as a resource people may want to use!  It's taken me 2 weeks to work from the start of the book to the end but it's been a fantastic journey...and at over 450 pages you may want to pack a lunch before you set off!