The presentations centered around the measurement, analysis and optimisation of all types of digital marketing from websites to mobile applications and from bid management for search marketing to social media.

I presented the findings of the 2010 Australian Web Analytics Survey. This year’s survey establishes a strong correlation between the web analytics capabilities in an organisation with the criticality of the online channel and types of online services provided. You can download the full survey report free of charge and watch a short video on the key findings at www.bienalto.com/research.

Mark Vozzo of Microsoft Australia (@markvozzo) efficiently summarised each session for Yahoo Web Analytics Group. With his permission, I have reproduced it here.

— Start of Mark Vozzo’s summary —

Sydney eMetrics Day 1

#1 Jim Sterne
Keynote on Time to rethink your metrics. This was a great opening to the conference.

#2 Hurol Inan (Bienalto)
Reviewed data from the latest Australia Web Analytics Survey. This was very insightful and created a lot of discussion. Key take out – there is a need to link business goals to metrics and get reports under the noses of senior management.

#3 Stuart McKeown (Hitwise)
A excellent presentation on Conversion Optimisation. Great slide on how DailyConversions Team optimised a Homeless Man’s sign board to generate a 200% increase in conversions.

#4 Marcus Falley (Wineselectors.com.au)
Real Life example of Web Analytics in practice based on a new site they launched late last year.

#5 Rod Jacka (Panalysis.com)
Titled “Beyond the Bounce, Modeling & Measuring Qualified Visitors”. Great content of why bounce rate is not what it made out to be.

#6 Will Scully-Power (Datarati.com.au)
“Using Behavioural Data to Qualify and Nurture Sales Lead.” I never really knew much about Marketo and marketing automation solutions until Will presented really interesting information.

Sydney eMetrics Day 2

#1 Martin Walsh (IBM) @martinwalsh
I use to work for Martin, hence have been always inspired by his charismatic and informative presentations. He delivered an excellent presentation on “How to create a structured Digital Marketing, reporting, Optimization & Testing Framework.”

#2 Andrew Rodrigues (HotelClub)
I’ve been doing SEO for many years but Andrew’s presentation on “New Search Results require New Metrics” really got me thinking and as a result I’ve been able to add a few more metrics that I hadn’t considered before such as trend number of high quality broken backlinks over time.

#3 Dennis Yu (BlitzLocal) + Gillian Muessig (SEOmoz)
This energetic duo provided great insights into the potential of Facebook. It was an inspiring presentation as I don’t think many in the room really understood its potential until the presentation.

#4 Frederick Vallaeys (Google)
He gave a great presentation on the importance of testing variations and gave some insight into the tools Google have made available for testing landing pages and campaign creatives.

— End of Mark Vozzo’s summary —

No doubt, many of us will be eagerly awaiting for the eMetrics Marketing Optimization Summit to return to Sydney 2011.

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

Much to my dismay, I’ve discovered that once a client gets it into their head that they want to re-design their website, it’s ‘out with the old, in with the new’. Their customers have told them that the existing site doesn’t work, so they think there’s no point in analysing it. Instead, they want to toss the old site in the cyber-dustbin, and start coding again from scratch.

Sure, a clean start is nice. But what if you could use valuable insights about the strengths and weaknesses of your old site to improve the user experience design on the new site?

By identifying what works – and what doesn’t – before you embark on the re-design project, you reduce the likelihood of building a new site that may look better, but carries the same problems as before.

Through quantitative analysis, you can capture insights about your current users – customers and prospects – and understand how the site is currently being used. For example:

• You may find that a really important piece of content or functionality isn’t being used because it’s buried too far into the site. With the new customer experience architecture, you can devise pathways to guide traffic to these areas.
• By analysing the terms customers use on both internal and external search engines, you will learn the language your customers speak when referring to your products or services. This will help you devise the right labels, and contribute to your content strategy.
• You’ll see which areas of the site have been successful at converting customers, and which haven’t. For example, if you discover that most prospects use your calculator before lodging an online application for personal loans, then you may consider closely integrating the calculator in the customer experience architecture.
• You’ll discover the relative popularity of related items such as content categories and lists (often expressed as navigational menus). This should aid classification decisions. You may want to combine items that are receiving little attention or split items that are dominating. To take advantage of sequence bias in reading lists, you can enlist items in the order of popularity.
• You’ll identify where the exit points are and delve into factors that might influence the exits. If a page – especially a gateway or category page designed to steer traffic to detailed pages –experiences a high exit rate, it means either the page is getting untargeted traffic or there is something wrong with its design. Your experience architects should use these findings to contain the exit rate.

If you don’t perform quantitative analysis at this phase, then the user experience design phase becomes a subjective process – requiring large amounts of guesswork by your information architect. It’s guesswork that doesn’t need to happen, because the answers are right there on your current site.

Four years ago, I wrote about Understanding your website’s users. Never is this more applicable than in a re-design project.

We did in-depth quantitative analysis before commencing the site re-design for AMP, and the results speak for themselves.

And as for some other clients, I’m going to give them the benefit of the doubt: they simply do not understand the full benefits of web analytics, and it’s my job to educate them about how valuable analysis can be at any stage of a website’s evolution.

What I want to know is, how many web analysts are putting their skills to use in a re-design project? When was the last time you used quantitative analysis to inform a website refresh? And if you did, what were the major discoveries you made that impacted the redesign?

Multichannel Marketing: Metrics and Methods for On and Offline Success, the new book by Akin Arikan, is a thorough and practical exploration of the topic, with enough how-to’s and advice for all on and offline marketers to reap the benefits of multichannel marketing.

Akin sums up his mission perfectly:

Close your eyes. Visualize a multichannel analytics dashboard with charts, gauges, and funnels. We see the complete status of marketing initiatives. We see what customers desire of us next and where there is opportunity for greater efficiency. Meanwhile, leads and service alerts are distributed through the system to the right people at the right time for prompt action.

This is great.

My first main take-out from the book is Akin’s compelling argument about why direct, brand and online marketers can no longer work in isolated silos.

In many large organisations we deal with, these people aren’t even talking to each other, let alone sharing customer data. If they work as a team, as Akin proposes, they get to know where to concentrate effort for each customer.

Secondly, Akin reveals what each group is tasked to do, techniques they use and how they measure their success. Reading this, you see that each group has valuable experience to share, and it reminds me of how we recently took a well-established direct marketing technique, propensity scores, and applied it to email marketing.

The good news for marketers is that Akin delves deep into measurement techniques and insights that can be used to assess the impact of one channel on another, and on the organisation.

I recommend that every marketer – brand, direct or online – get a copy of Akin’s book.

Read it from cover to cover. Seek out your colleagues in the other channels, make friends with them and get them a copy of the book too. Then keep your copy handy for quick reference every time you plan a new marketing campaign.

Akin’s book is on a topic close to our hearts. We’ve written about cross channel and multichannel marketing in these blogs:

• Cross channel marketing best practices
• Using site search analysis in integrated marketing
• 360 degree campaign measurement

It’s a hot topic. An article on web analyst skills, written nearly three years ago, still ranks second most popular on our website. Our clients frequently request help from us in writing job descriptions for their web analysts.

Then we have the web analytics is hard argument on the other side. Yes the interpretation of the online data could be hard.

But is the real issue web analytics or lack of skills in web analytics.

Let’s face it. In most organisations, the person in charge of looking at web analytics data is not qualified enough. They are often members of the web team, but they lack formal training in data analytics.

What skills does a web analyst need? Primarily, analytical skills.

Honing these skills should be a top priority, so that we can collectively raise the bar of web analytics and achieve greater penetration and efficacy within business.

It’s why all of the recent recruits at Bienalto come from a traditional analytics background. Our new recruits quickly pick up the online measurement and analytics terminology. They learn the secondary web analyst skills, such as user experience design and online marketing, to diagnose user experience issues and assess the traffic quality. And they become effective very quickly.

Once you’ve got the skills set right, the next question is where to house them within the organisational structure? This is another frequent point of discussion with our clients.

Of course, there is no right answer to this question – it changes depending on the structure and function of the organisation. However, one principal stands still: your web analyst must be able to collaborate with offline analytics and business intelligence teams.

Why? We are moving more and more towards multi-channel environments, so web data will be analysed hand-in-hand with traditional analytics and business intelligence.

For the budding web analysts out there, if you crave for more training, consider building on your analytical skills first.

For the businesses out there looking to recruit for the position of a web analyst, go further afield and recruit from traditional data and analytics backgrounds. Design a ‘boot camp’ orientation program to get them trained in the online environment, and then sit back and watch them deliver results.

The formula we’re talking about has web analytics as the key variable. Web analytics as a standalone solution has limited value, but team it with other customer information and you’ve got powerful information at your fingertips.

Think about it. On its own, web analytics has the capacity to study behavioural data, which is often anonymous. The insights gained are primarily used for site optimisation purposes. This is valuable – but there is potential for so much more. By integrating web analytics with other data, you have the ability to make strategic decisions about the online channel and start optimising the campaigns that, in the end, deliver the most tangible results.

We know that web analytics delivers real value when the data it produces can be used in actionable, meaningful ways, for measurable results. Let’s look at a cross channel marketing example.

You merge the online behavioural and transactional data captured by your web analytics software, with offline profiling data in your CRM software. This gives you a more in-depth view of your online customers.

Armed with this information, you serve targeted, customised content in DM and email marketing or even at the branches – so the customers are offered what is relevant to them. You can then measure their response – whether it’s a conversion to sale, engagement, or any other variable – to see if the campaign has had an impact on their subsequent online and offline behaviour.

It all sounds easy, right?

It is, as long as the software you’re using enables it. Your web analytics software essentially needs to talk to all the other tools and technologies you use in marketing to start making these big leaps in campaign strategy. Some of categories you may have invested in already include:

• CRM
• Email marketing
• Ad serving
• Bid management for search engine marketing
• Content management
• Behavioural targeting
• Testing and optimisation
• Site search
• Survey

With a list this long, it’s little wonder that actionable integration, until now, has caused something of a headache for the marketers in charge of managing all these disparate systems.

The good news is that we’re starting to see great leaps forward by the major vendors, such as WebTrends, Omniture, Unica and SAS. These vendors are opening up their solutions through APIs and by collaborating with other solution platforms, to create real-time marketing ecosystems. Let’s take a look at what’s on offer.

WebTrends offers Open Exchange, an open platform for exchanging data via ODBC access or web services APIs. WebTrends has partnered with vendors specialising in all the categories listed above to provide out of the box integration with their solutions. In response to customer demand, we expect many others to become Open Exchange partners and make their solutions more connected.

Omniture Genesis similarly integrates marketing tools to facilitate measurement of the many technologies in your mix. Instead of having half a dozen different applications working in isolation, this plug-and-play application automates the integration of marketing tools. With a list of accredited application partners already signed up, other online solution providers can become accredited with Omniture to slot into the Genesis platform too.

On the other side of the spectrum sits vendors such as Unica and SAS who provide integrated cross channel marketing and business intelligence platforms with formidable web analytics capabilities. Both vendors store online behavioural data in industry standard databases, enabling data and platform integration with marketing solutions you have invested in.

The bottom line for integrating web analytics solutions is the time savings for marketers, who no longer have to sift through mountains of disparate information about their customers and campaigns; and inherently more powerful marketing campaigns that utilise multiple online and offline channels in a truly targeted fashion.

As marketers continue to embrace online as a primary platform for connecting with customers, we’ll see the role of web analytics continue to grow, in everything from tracking and reporting to having a real-time role to play in making snap decisions about what information to send to which customer, and how.

Integrating marketing solutions will open up new opportunities for each organisation. So take an inventory of your marketing practices, add your dream marketing campaigns, and develop scenarios for integrated cross channel marketing. Then talk to the vendors of your marketing solution platforms about integration.

If you are selecting a new platform, always go for the ones with open architectures – and ideally one that many others have already integrated their solutions to.

Some of the more exciting possibilities of cross channel marketing are explored in Bienalto Blog post titled “Cross channel marketing best practices“.

As the name implies, reporting provides the results of various metrics in pre-defined formats such as charts and tables. It usually deals with the ‘what and how much questions’.

Analytics, on the other hand, is about uncovering the areas of opportunity and sources of problems. It is about optimising. It deals with the ‘how and why’ questions. It attempts to explain why things are happening the way they are. It captures learnings, insights from the data. It sets a direction towards a resolution or solution. It produces actionable results.

Analytics is iterative, investigative. It cannot be prescriptive. It is a process of discovery. One clue leads to another until eventually the analyst can form a scientific opinion on what is happening, what is causing it, and how it can be corrected, improved or maximised.

Let’s explore a few scenarios by organisational roles to further contrast reporting to analytics.

Organisations wanting to make data-driven decisions need analytics.

When the decision involves web and online media, Analytics becomes Web Analytics.

Yet for more sophisticated organisations, web analytics quickly reverts back to analytics again – with a web flavour.

These companies use the web as an integrated channel with the rest of the business. Web related activities are often intermingled with other campaigns and channels. Therefore the analytics extends from web analytics to campaign response, channel and customer analytics.

Organisations wanting to make timely and appropriate business decisions need analytics.

Analytics delivers efficiency to business because it reveals strengths and weakness and hence help to define priorities. Furthermore, analytics gives us confidence that the direction being taken is the right one and will have the largest favourable impact on business.

The technology to capture web analytics data is available. In most instances, it is the structure or culture of the organisation that is holding them back.

Here are some tips to get web analytics over the line in government, or any organisation with a bureaucratic structure.

Concentrate your efforts

Concentrate your resources, energy and attention to a particular area of concern, responsibility or investigation. Formalise your area of focus in the form of written objective(s) for your website and develop key performance indicators to measure your progress. If you need more information on how to define measurable site objectives and KPIs, refer to the Victorian Government’s Web Analytics Toolkit.

Get a champion

A very important step and one most often overlooked. When starting out, web analytics often suffers from a small voice and limited visibility. Change this by getting a vocal and energetic supporter from management on board. Your web analytics champion will be able to present the benefits of the discipline in meetings and make reviewing the data a basis for any business decision. This person will be able to reach people that you may not have access to and influence the culture of the organisation. Getting respect, creating understanding and improving the visibility for the discipline is the ultimate goal. Use case studies, facts and results to share the successes and opportunities which should motivate your audience to adoption.

Proficiency

Gaining proficiency in web analytics comes from experience and skills. As web analytics is a relatively new discipline finding someone with these skills and experience could be difficult.

If this is the case, use external professional services either from your vendor or a web analytics consulting service to help you get started. This is a simple yet effective way to transfer skills to your staff whilst accelerating your website’s return on investment. We may be able to help.

For formal training, the Web Analytics Association and University of British Columbia offer an online course, the UBC Award of Achievement in Web Analytics. Also, speak with your web analytics tool vendor as most provide training.

Be like Jack: Nimble

Unfortunately, most organisations stop one step before they reach their goal. This is due to the inability of the organisation to take action or to change the way they do things. How nimble your organisation is to change and how alert they are to opportunities is a factor in the success of your website. Here are some ways that you might be able to train your organisation to be more agile:

• Use your champion to enforce that web analytics data be used to support everyday business decisions. For example, if management is discussing action over whether to extend a service to a new area, your champion may recommend for the web analytics data to be reviewed to determine what customer needs may be as shown by they behaviour and activities on the website.
• Conduct regular metrics meetings and have an open door policy that encourages staff from other function areas (eg marketing or operations) to attend. Make sure you assign ownership of the KPI or metric to a specific person. Ask this person to report on the progress and develop a response plan should negative progress be highlighted. This will help increase the understanding of web analytics by explaining the analysis techniques behind the recommendation.
• Share the results in a visually appealing way. Create spreadsheet reports that hold the viewers attention. Hold lunchtime forums to demonstrate how web analytics could be used to support the objectives of the different functions within your organisation. For example, in most organisations HR is responsible for implementing strategies to position the organisation as an employer of choice within the industry. Demonstrate how web analytics will be able to measure the progress towards this goal through visit metrics and online survey results.
• Compile the data with offline data. Integrate the data with other sources, for example contact centre data, competitive analysis studies, or in the case of the HR example, the number of job applications received and the quality of the applications. The data becomes so much more powerful and insightful when a complete picture is presented, allowing management to make quick and accurate decisions or report on performance.
• Lastly, make the changes as recommended by the data. Conduct A/B testing or user testing to ensure the recommended changes create the result you are looking for. You have the facts, you have the approval, you have the knowledge that the integrity of your site will be maintained and the visitor’s online experience will be improved – go for it! Remember to share your successes, even the small ones. They all add up.

Refer to the Victorian Government’s Web Analytics Toolkit for a simple framework on how to get started with Web Analytics.

There are a number of user identification techniques available with varying degrees of accuracy. Obviously the most accurate measure is user authentication, by which users are asked to log in with a user name and password. However, this method of user identification is impractical and unnecessary for many websites.

Instead many websites use cookies (first or third party) for user identification purposes. Cookie-based sessionization could be considered as the next best option in terms of accuracy and reliability. Cookie deletion and blocking by the users, impeding the accuracy of this technique.

Web Analytics community has been debating the cookie issue for some time now and are in search of other means of accurate and reliability user identification on the web.

So what does it take to be a competent web analytics specialist – or, as I call it, a web analyst? In my opinion, web analytics as a discipline has two main components:

1. Analysis
2. Implementation

The analysis component deals with studying the user activities captured via a variety of means – such as server log files, page tags, search logs, custom-scripts, etc. The skills and tools required for this component have been widely written about.

The implementation component is about making adjustments to the website to optimise it. For adjustments and optimisation, a competent web analyst must convert raw information into actionable information. Moreover, you must elaborate on what or where fixes are needed. To achieve this, the required skill set suddenly broadens because you need to understand all the aspects that bring a website together.

Web analysts should understand the subjects listed below at least at a basic level, to have conversations with the experts in these fields and come up with solutions. Some of them include, but are not limited to:

• Navigation principles. For example gateway and category pages have high exit ratios because the labels are often unsuitable or the menu sequencing fails.
• Page layout. For example the placement of content elements on the page.
• Copy issues. I recently come across incorrectly written instructional copy which caused visitors to stop on a particular page. We changed the copy and the problem disappeared.
• Traffic issues. For example, not being able to bring well-targeted traffic – often search engine traffic is less targeted, so if the organisation is not doing a good job on SEO, you are likely to get more unwanted traffic.
• Taxonomy issues. For example, the bulk of users are interested in only one element of the taxonomy.

With these in mind, I define the skill requirements for a web analyst as follows:

• Analytical and detail oriented – exploring data, discovering patterns, meaningful relationships, anomalies and trends.
• Business – translating business needs to analytics requirements.
• Marketing and brand building – driving traffic, integrated campaigns, online branding tactics and principles.
• Information architecture – knowledge of established practices, suggesting changes to navigation, page design, task design.
• Technical – HTML and website development.
• User behaviour and habits – understanding differences, trends to develop strategies to accommodate them.

Out of the above list, two skill requirements are worth highlighting, as they are essential for adjustments and optimisation – namely information architecture (IA) and technical. In my specialist web analytics experience, I deal with IA-related issues every day, as most sites need to address the area at all times.

Technical skills are essential as well – often we find sites were structured in way that is unmeasurable, so the web analyst has to be able to communicate with developers the “technical” basics of what needs to be measured. For example, URL conventions often need adjustment to enable better tracking; or cookies are reviewed to capture the right information for integration back to the web analytics solution. New technical developments appear all the time: think of blogs, RSS and flash tracking. A web analyst needs basic understanding of how these technologies work in order to implement suitable tracking.

Finally, you need to understand the new kid on the block – multivariate testing. In addition to its technical implementation, those wanting to undertake multivariate testing need to understand, at least, the concepts of experimental design – i.e. designing tests and compiling the results.

It’s clear that web analytics is a multi-faceted discipline. So a good web analyst needs to be multi-skilled, too. The good news is that the continuing evolution of internet technology promises an exciting career for all of us.