But this is an important time to write about. We are launching the fourth annual Australian Web Analytics survey. As per previous years, our goal is to understand the state of the play in web analytics nationally and understand what prohibit or inhibit organisations’ adoption of web analytics.

This year we have decided to delay the launch to eliminate the confusion caused by the research being done late in the year and report being published early in the year. So this year’s data and report will be published early.

Coincidently this has worked out perfectly to time the release of the report at the eMetrics Marketing Optimization Summit to be held in Sydney for the very first time on 22-23 April 2010.

I am pretty excited about the eMetrics Summit coming to Sydney this year. I spoke at the inaugural summit in Santa Barbara in 2002. Since then the summit has grown to a well sought-after think-tank travelling to major cities around the globe such as Munchen, Toronto, San Jose, London, Madrid, Sao Paula, Stockholm and Washingto DC.

There is no doubt the summit will be full of insights for the Australian marketing professionals to help them succeed online.

I also personally can’t wait to hear Jim Sterne on stage again. His ideas, insights coupled with his amazing presentation skills will be well-remembered.

To support the Summit (and help the organiser’s with their decision to add the summit to their global calendar each year), Bienalto has become a major sponsor of the submit.

We also want to give away a pass valued at AU$995 to one of the participants of Australian Web Analytics Survey 2010.

Take the survey now
Learn more about eMetrics summit

The free web analytics solution is now more attractive than ever, giving users the ability to conduct extremely detailed analysis to extract a better return on their online investment.

Advanced segmentation

Segmentation of data is one of the fastest and most effective ways to gain real insights into the efficacy of your marketing programs. As I’ve said before, segmentation takes the noise out of web analytics data, breaking it down into meaningful chunks that you can analyse more effectively.

In the past, however, the best segmentation tools on offer were through high end solutions.

The good news is that the power of segmentation has just been brought to the masses, with advanced segmentation tools now available to Google Analytics users.

There are nine default segments that will come in handy to most people who use the analytics tool. These segments can be applied to any report you want, and include:

1. All visits
2. New visitors
3. Returning visitors
4. Paid traffic
5. Non-paid traffic
6. Search traffic
7. Direct traffic
8. Referral traffic
9. Visits with conversions

But the real power lies in the ability to create custom segments. This means that you can isolate a certain behaviour, examine it carefully and see whether your marketing campaign worked for that group.

For example, you might want to isolate:

• All visitors who came from a specific email campaign AND purchased at least one product
• All visitors from Sydney who completed a goal
• All visitors who started a transaction, but dropped out (and where).

Once you have defined your custom segments, you can then compare the performance of that segment with the rest of the site using the reporting tools.

Or you might want to compare the performance of one segment to that of another. For example, you could view the bounce rate for a page, and then split it into the bounce rate for visitors who came from search and direct traffic.

Custom reporting

Until now, users of Google Analytics have had to content themselves with using the standard reports on offer (e.g. visitors, traffic sources and so on).

With the new “Custom Reports” tool, you can define your own criteria and create your own report. For example, you may want to create a report showing e-commerce information by geographies. Here’s how it’s done:

1. Create a custom report with the following metrics:
   • Visits
   • Unique purchases
   • Revenue
   • Per visit value
   • Average value
2. In the dimensions, add “city” at the top level. If you have customers from around the world, you may like to define “country” as the top level, and add city as the second dimension. If you do this, the report will initially show visits by country, and you can then select a country to see data segmented by city.
3. Then you can compare cities according to the metrics you defined – so you can see, for example, the average value of a visitor from Sydney to that of one from Melbourne.

More information at your fingertips

Once you have your segments and custom reports created, you can then access deeper insights by combining the two. Want to see which city is of greater value, as well as where your visitors are coming from in that city? Not a problem. In terms of segmentation, you’re only limited by the data sets you have to work with.

Setting these reports and segments up doesn’t take long at all. Once they’re up and running, you can begin to make more finely tuned marketing decisions, and better target your offering to particular groups of customers.

Bienalto can provide Google Analytics setup and configuration services. Read more about how we can assist you in implementation and optimisation.

Further reading

You can learn more about the value of segmentation in some previous posts:

Web Data Segmentation – a pre-requisite for gaining actionable insights

Understanding your website’s users

Informing information architecture with quantitative insights

The annual Web Analytics Buyers Guide 2008 from E-consultancy is now available for purchase. With its in-depth vendor profiles and market analysis, it helps you to put things in perspective when making buying decisions.

So what’s in the Guide? And how does it compare to what’s going on locally? With responses flooding in to our Australian Web Analytics Survey, we can provide a few answers.

One of the biggest predictions in E-consultancy’s guide is that the UK market for web analytics would grow by 12% in 2008. We agree (give or take a few percentage points).

Already, we can see a trend in comparing results from this year’s Australian Web Analytics Survey to last, with organisations spending significantly more on the investment in external professional services and in-house web analytics staff.

Not surprisingly, the investment in tools doesn’t show the same growth – a great proportion of organisations in Australia now use Google Analytics as a preferred tool.

According to the UK report, only 21% of companies use Google Analytics exclusively, but typically use it as a complementary tool to support another investment.

But with Google raising the bar with its new segmentation and reporting tools, it will pay to see how these figures change next year.

Purchase the Web Analytics Buyers Guide

Download the latest Australian Web Analytics Survey

It’s why marketers love customer demographics, and information on product holding, past purchases and campaign responses.

But what if you could go beyond this, and use online behavioural insights for your campaigns as well?

Taking it one step further, what if you could build or tailor an analytics solution to capture these behavioural insights – not just from the web, but from offline data as well?

It would place some pretty powerful information at your fingertips.

Instead of putting the behavioural data on your website into the “too hard” basket, organisations need to start asking how this data can help them achieve better ROI on their marketing campaigns.

The first step is to think about the scenarios, or insights, you need.

For example, you might want to capture insights about repeat purchasing behaviour; or the instances when a loyal customer starts browsing in new product areas.

In these scenarios, if you track the customer’s movements and collect the right data, you can then target them with campaigns across all channels – online through dynamic offer targeting, email marketing, direct marketing, and telemarketing.

The second step is to work out what’s required from your analytics or tracking solution. And this step represents a fundamental paradigm shift.

In the past, organisations would simply state, “I need a web analytics solution.”

Now, instead of selection of an out-of-the-box solution and thinking how it would help your business, organisations would benefit more from a solution that is built around those specific scenarios or insights identified as delivering value to the business.

Here’s where it gets contentious. Many of today’s web analytics solutions are not on an open architecture, which makes it incredibly difficult for you to integrate behavioural and offline data.

Seek web analytics solutions with open architectures. Get them to show how they can meet your specific scenarios. Be prepared to build custom tracking mechanisms, which are specifically designed to generate leads for your business.

Once you’ve done this, you can start capitalising on your behavioural insights. Not only are they easily actionable and translate into truly targeted marketing, but they also make the measurement of ROI much easier.

As Akin Arikan says in his excellent book, Multichannel Marketing, there is “no excuse for not using the rich lather of behavioural data from the website as a component for targeting marketing communications.”

So start thinking about it. Your customers will love your intuition.

NI has both built-in and user-defined key performance indicators (KPIs), with integrated trigger-based reporting for both types of metrics. So, for example, say your abandoned carts reached a certain limit in the past week, a report/email can be sent out.

What we particularly like about NI is the ‘drill down feature’, which allows you to slice and dice the data in any way you wish, for example:

• Content groups – group different URLs together and then report on these groups (page tags aren’t necessary).
• Visitor profile – group different visitors together and then report on these groups (for example, compare weekend visitors to weekday visitors). Again, page tags aren’t necessary.

Other great features include:

• Data Conduit – this can be used to enhance data (from cookie) that is reported on. For example, if a visitor with ID 123456 visits your website, instead of reporting on this ID (which doesn’t mean much) you can look-up the ID in the database to get the visitor’s name, address, title and so on; and report on that instead.
• Campaigns are set up in the hierarchical format in the following order:
  • Campaign
  • Channel
  • Segment
  • Entry pages

This means that campaigns can be aligned with multiple channels that, in turn, can be aligned to multiple segments and entry pages. Thus, analysis can be carried out at any level you want.

Dynamic Content – is where visits receive different content. Reporting can be enhanced using a search and replace function to get rid of any unwanted parameters. For more information you can use a data conduit here as well.

Using this model, the time between identifying a problem and resolving it to unlock value can be as long as three years. Clearly, this is not ideal.

Fortunately, along came Web 2.0. One of the main principles of Web 2.0 product development, which has underwritten the rapid rise and success of its products, is the concept of ‘always beta’.

‘Always beta’ simply means designing and launching online web assets rapidly and frequently. At every redesign, as long as user-centred design principles are applied, the business notches up an incremental improvement on the experience.

Embracing the ‘always beta’ principle requires a major shift in mind-set for the heads of e-business, the online channel, and website managers.

It’s a huge departure from doing one major overhaul every three years – which involves an element of crystal ball gazing as you try to build a site that will work for your business over that period. With ‘always beta’, you manage ongoing development all of the time.

To overcome the organisational challenge of mobilising this approach for managing the online channel, you need a plan.

First, gain the full support of the internal and external technical development teams, so you are all working together on this ongoing optimisation path.

Secondly, arm yourself with the right tools. A key tool in capability development is a platform to conduct real-time user testing, also known as multivariate testing (MVT).

The notion of MVT is to get users to help you discover the optimum online experience. The qualitative research and expert knowledge is the basis of your product design. Once built, put it to the test in a democratic environment, where real users vote with their clicks.

MVT isn’t limited to website redesign. Marketers can use this technique to optimise email or paid search campaigns, or to optimise conversions on a website landing page.

Now, we look at what they offer to marketers and web analysts. Their comprehensive solution looks set to appeal across many levels – for its client data warehouse, its vertical applications, and its benchmarking capabilities.

Essentially, the product is a suite of marketing optimisation tools, including Web Analytics, Targeted Email and Search (SEM/SEO) – all provided as a hosted service and readily accessible through a browser.

Unique to the Coremetrics solution is the Lifetime Individual Visitor Experience (LIVE) Profiles that form the core of the Coremetrics’ client data warehouse. These profiles provide a complete record of all individual visitor interactions with a website over time.

We like the ease with which LIVE Profiles can easily be enriched with offline data, or exported to an external data warehouse – ideal for the cross-channel marketing opportunities that many of our clients are looking to tap into.

The Coremetrics solution includes pre-built vertical applications for Retail, Financial Services, Travel, Content/Media and SMB users.

The solution is also the only marketing optimisation tool on the market that includes web analytics benchmarking and behavioural analytics in a single interface.

Coremetrics LIVEmark leverages aggregate performance data across more than 300 participating brands to deliver over 35 benchmark metrics addressing performance indicators such as campaign and channel effectiveness, site stickiness and conversion rates. It’s a valuable tool for seeing how your site rates compared to your competitors.

Now available in Australia and New Zealand, Coremetrics has set up shop in it’s own right and is working wiht local partners to provide sales, implementation support and training. See www.coremetrics.com for more information, call +61(0)3 9653 7397 or email asiapac@coremetrics.com for more information.

It lays out possibilities in data capture, reporting and integration while also providing “how-to” style information for the Google Analytics practitioners to get on with the job.

The book reveals a number of features (and hacks) you can use for an advanced implementation of Google Analytics such as:

• Using Virtual Pageviews for managing dynamic URLs, tracking file downloads and partially completed forms
• Integrating online campaign activity such as online ads, email campaigns and search engine marketing
• Tracking in multi site and sub-domain environments

Reporting and website optimisation are two constant challenges for web analysts. Brian has good tips on how to use Google Analytics for KPI based reporting by job roles, and identifying and fixing poorly performing pages.

Visit Brian’s Blog to learn more about Advanced Web Metrics

These days, however, search is becoming more complex. What with the rise of behavioural targeting, blended search and local search combined with the sheer volumes of search engine traffic, you will need to become more strategic in your approach.

Hence, SEO and web analytics are merging like a classic Venn diagram.

When you get the merger right, you’ll reap the benefits of increased volumes of search traffic – and more welcome, targeted traffic.

Get your website optimised for search engines first

Before the merge, you need to make sure you’ve got the right strategies in place for both SEO and web analytics.

We spoke to local SEO specialist Jeremy Bolt, from Bruce Clay, to get the low-down on what every good website needs from an SEO perspective.

“We like to use the three-legged stool approach, meaning there are three key areas of focus required. Firstly, get the technical side of your site right. Make sure your IP is clean, and that you are serving up content fast.

“Secondly, you need great copywriting and unique content, incorporating relevant keywords and keyword phrases for your target market. Finally, linking is important – inbound, outbound and internal link structures will all contribute to your ranking in the search engines,” said Bolt.

“But it’s no good spending all your time just on one of these aspects. You need to work across these three areas consistently – otherwise you may end up with a wobbly stool and fall off.”

Find out more about the Bruce Clay SEO Approach.

Using analytics with search engine optimisation

With local, blended and behavioural search, monitoring search engine rankings for specific search terms will become increasingly difficult, as different search engine users will get different search results.

Web masters need to become more reliant on web analytics to assess the quality of organic search results – whether they are targeted, how well they span across the website and how much they contribute to the site’s goals or conversions.

If you are new to web analytics, Starting out in web analytics provides some simple steps to get started.

Once you’ve got your web analytics systems in place, start looking at inbound traffic in conjunction with search engine ranking reports.

As a simple example, a client of ours used search engine ranking reports and web analytics to run diagnostics on why they were getting such large volumes of untargeted web traffic.

Analytics revealed that the site was getting high volumes of traffic from the search term “telephone icon”. Why? It turned out that every image of a telephone (which appeared whenever they listed a phone number on a page) was tagged with “telephone icon”.

Such unwanted traffic can wreck havoc with your KPIs and the overall assessment of the site’s performance.

Increasingly, customers – even known ones – use Google to research and get to a page in your website. You need to make sure your content is indexed in the search engines to ensure customers get to the pages they want, when they want them.

Through web analytics, you can ascertain how well each section of your site is exposed to search engine traffic and develop strategies for increasing the “findability” of your content using SEO.

In addition to frequently used search terms, keyword analysis is essential to understand the search context. For large dynamic websites with huge volumes of search traffic, this can be a tricky process.

You’ve no doubt heard of the Long Tail – which refers to the traffic demographic that doesn’t fall into the “mass”. In search, you can get additional success with the long tail (or the 80% of less popular search terms) because these search terms are often more specific.

When people are more specific about what they’re looking for, there’s a greater chance of conversion – as long as the product’s good and the price is right.

The future of search

Bolt believes that SEO will play an increasing role as paid search or PPC becomes more expensive.

“Yet, as search engines replace organic results with behavioural, blended or local results, it’s going to become harder to use ranking monitors to assess the ranking of your keywords, but on the flipside more opportunities will arise for other SEO strategies,” he argued.

“Web analytics will be critical moving forward. You’ll need web analytics to test keywords, assess traffic and build content as required.”

Web analytics will also play an increasingly important role in analysing SEO KPI’s and answering questions such as: What percentage of your traffic is from organic search? How much traffic comes from non-brand related search terms? Which are converting website visitors?

In the meantime, you need to think about how well your web analytics tool “merges” with your search strategy.

SAS, which has built a strong reputation in Australia for its Business Intelligence suite, is now tapping the growing web analytics market with its “Customer Experience Analytics” solution.

SAS Customer Experience Analytics, is an integrated package that includes reporting, analytics, and data warehouse. Our pick of the top five features are:

1. Speed-Trap. The SAS solution is the first web analytics package to use the Speed-Trap technology for tracking and data collection. This tracking tool is quick and easy to implement, as it only requires a single tag to be inserted which then collects data on whatever the site visitor does. You get more comprehensive data – from mouse-overs to search lists and dynamic loads –and eliminate the risk of tags being out of date.
2. Easy integration. The SAS solution integrates with off-line data from Oracle, Teradata and SAP). This is valuable for multi-channel integration, particularly for larger companies.
3. Heat map based on mouse-over. Speed-Trap enables a visitor’s mouse-over behaviour to be captured and replayed in video format. This provides powerful data for Information Architects and Web Designers, who can see exactly how visitors interact with a site.

The real benefit may lie with sites that have dynamic content (eg media sites) where click density maps are often not able to capture the story that a visitor viewed, as the stories change dynamically on an ongoing basis.

1. Goal-seeking. This powerful tool enables scenario based “What-If” analysis. For example, an analyst can identify what happens to conversion rates if factors x, y, z increase by 10%. It will help companies in determining where they should focus their efforts.
2. Decision-tree based segmentation. Here, business intelligence meets web analytics. It is a tool favoured by many business intelligence analysts to identify best performing segments, and most important factors.

SAS Web Analytics also integrates with SAS Digital Marketing, which enables multimedia messages to be sent via email, SSM, MMS and WAP.

Other vendor news

Unica

Unica launched NetInsights in Australia in 2007, and it’s generating strong interest on the local market. They key differentiators for Unica are:

• The degree to which they can integrate offline customer data into NetInsights and perform integrated marketing
• Its strong analytics and reporting capability within a single module
• Data warehousing for behavioural online and offline data, which runs on standard relational database technology
• Integration of both tagging and log files. This approach is particularly beneficial to financial institutions that for security reasons may prefer their secure sites to be captured via log files rather than page tagging.

WebTrends

Late last year, WebTrends launched their new “Marketing Lab 2″ which is an integrated end-to-end web analytics solution. WebTrends Marketing Lab2 is comprised of:

• WebTrends “Dynamic Search” – a search marketing solution that continuously monitors, measures and tunes the variables impacting the success of paid search advertising
• WebTrends “Analytics” – a web analytics solution with powerful collaboration tools and flexible reporting
• WebTrends “Score” – a patented event-based solution that reveals the interests and engagement of visitors
• WebTrends “Visitor Intelligence” – a full-featured, multi-dimensional reporting and analysis solution for enterprise organisations that need deeper visitor and marketing intelligence
• WebTrends “Marketing Warehouse” – the enabling platform technology that offers an open, enterprise-class relational database that powers the data behind WebTrends Visitor Intelligence and WebTrends Score.

Omniture

At the recent Omniture Summit in Sydney, Omniture revealed three new products: SiteCatalyst 14, Test & Target and SearchCenter 3.

Test & Target generated the most interest among attendees, for its ability to test and optimise landing pages and emails. It is an amalgamation of the Offermatica testing and optimisation tool, and the Touch Clarity behavioural targeting tool.

SearchCenter 3 is a major upgrade and redesign to Omniture’s SearchCenter product that is designed to help companies manage search advertising spend and keyword bidding.

CoreMetrics

CoreMetrics has arrived in Australia, with a new office in Melbourne that opened early this year. The latest Web Analytics Survey showed they already have a number of customers in Australia, and analysts such as Forrester place them as one of the leaders. With their local presence, we expect to see more CoreMetrics customers in Australia.

Google Analytics

Following a major update in May 2007, Google Analytics has made smaller incremental releases throughout 2007 and up to March 2008 that offer a range of new features. Google also recently acquired DoubleClick, which is sure to strengthen Google Analytics’ offering.