My NGO Analytics work, showcased in my company's blog.

I have been doing a bit of Analytics volunteer work with the Center for Independent Documentaries. We are on our second project now, a video series to show the independent producers that are supported via the CID how to install GA code and how to report via the GA interface.

It's been a minimal time commitment, as I have been paired with an extremely talented and efficient student Cedric Williams (cedricwilliams.com) He is a Search Engine Marketer who's trying his hand at a related skillset, Web Analytics. The Analysis Exchange is the perfect forum to learn WA skills.

It's also been great fun to learn tidbits about the documentary industry and to hear insightful commentary from David Hartman, our project owner over at CID. David has been a great resource and very flexible.

http://bit.ly/mSwz2z

First SERP result HIJACKED!?

Twice today, I clicked on the first organic result in google and was directed to a squatter page much like the one below.

The first search phrase that this happened for was "External Keyword Tool" which I expected would lead me to the Google External Keyword Research tool, which was what the first result on the SERP said it would link to. It led me to an SEO Consulting service comparison shopping squatter site.
The second search phrase was "Car Hire" which displayed Enterprise as its first result. It lead me to a Car Rental comparison shopping squatter site.

I clicked back to the Google SERP and then reclicked on the actual link, which lead me to the actual site that was advertised (the Keyword Tool page and Enterprise's home page, respectively)

What is this shit?? Is Google being HIJACKED?? Or (and this is probably the more likely scenario) is Google giving love to these squatter sites by quietly redirecting first result clicks???

(link to a squatter site as an example: http://www.kdirectory.co.uk/results.asp?qry=car%20hire&rfid=lakc1_60675-20932&cmp=1&bp=car%20hire%20in)

Worst Case Scenario for BP Oil Spill

Yea, this is pretty hysterical. A rolling firestorm that redirects the Mississippi river westward? You bet.

http://andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com/.a/6a00d83451c45669e2013482cd04fd970c-popup

5 Tips on Being a Consultant

This is my first time being a consultant. So take this all with a grain of salt and be glad that in this economy, there is still a need for strategists.

Here's a list of what I've noticed are critical to successful consulting.

1) Schmooze with a smile
2) Keep everyone on your team in the loop.
3) Over-communicate.
4) Learn Powerpoint and SmartArt function like your life depends on it. In fact, it does.
5) Get published, and speak your way into seminars.

Mashup: Rich Internet Applications and Web Analytics

Can they collide?

With the explosion of RIA sites in recent years, a visit no longer begins and ends with pages loads - rather, we have had to come up with ingenious ways of measuring a visitor's "engagement" and "conversion path". Using the traditional web analytics toolbox, analysts have been able to leverage "event based tracking" (such as is available through Google Analytics and most enterprise-level vendors). This has proven to be a tricky road, and deriving actionable insight is highly dependent on defining the right macro and micro level experiences and events to track.

What has been your experience in RIA analytics? Have you been able to build an engagement model that steps past the limitations of the traditional WA toolset?

The Importance of Site Search Analytics for e-Commerce

Executives can't get enough of case studies. Why? Because they like to hear how others in the same vertical/industry/boat have failed in an endeavor and then rattle off at least 3 reasons why their own business is going to succeed and why they have an upper hand.

I was tasked with making a case for why a previous ecommerce client needed to invest X dollars into building a better site search engine. The following is my case study on "Company 734" (alias) that I presented to my client.

"Company 734 and Site Search" (so exciting, I know.)

The Business

Company-734.com began in 1990 with the idea of extending their reach of the brick and mortar brand online as many of its competitors began launching simliar retail eCommerce websites. The main focus was to attract the Baby boomers who were beginning to adopt the idea of the web as a new way of shopping. Through this initiative, Company 734 strove to better service online shoppers while preserving its brand.

Company 734's recent marketing strategies have included partnerships with comparison shopping sites such as CouponCabing and DealSea. On average, 85% of buyers coming from comparison shopping sites used promotion codes to make a purchase. Versus all other shoppers, these promotion code users were three times more likely to make a purchase, and their average order value was $20 higher, resulting in a positive $11 ROI [Figure 1].

Promotion code usage dropped significantly when other channels of traffic were evaluated, especially among the loyal customers, who received promotion codes weekly through email newsletters.

Considering the higher conversion rates of segments that had easy access to promotion codes, it was in Company 734's best interest to have their codes front and center in all marketing channels.

The Challenge

Compared to all customers, loyal customers of Company-734.com were unable to locate the best promotion codes for their purchase, exhibited by their lower site search usage as compared to other segments' site search usage. To counteract this, the content team published codes weekly onto a "content" page, but weekly promotion code usage did not rise as a result.

The analytics data showed that customers were not able locate promotion codes. Searches including the word "Coupon" and "Promotion Code" were trending upward month over month as the holiday season approached. At its height, "Promotion" -related search terms accounted for 20% of all site search but generated 0% conversion. The majority of these searches were coming from loyal customers.

The Technology

After initial research it was determined that iNile, Company 734's eCommerce platform provider, had built a basic site search engine that could only index product pages. This meant that the Promotion code content page that was published as a means to fix this problem was not showing up in search results. To further exacerbate this problem, iNile's system was unable to show available promotion codes at checkout, though this is not best practice for eCommerce sites, it would have been a workaround until the advanced site search engine was built.

Assuming that customers who were seeking promotions on-site act the same way as customers who came to the site with a promotion code (visitors from CouponCabin and other comparison shopping networks), this technical failure carried an opportunity cost of $5,425 in lost revenue, or 1% of annual revenue [Figure 2]. With consumer spending trending downward month over month, this opportunity to gain incremental revenue could not be ignored.

The Results

iNile's development team provided a workaround for their site search by building an "intelligent" redirect system. The content team would upload a batch of search terms - variations of "Coupon" and "Promotion Code" - and when a visitor entered a string that matched the batch, the Promotion Code content page would be served in place of the normal Search Results page.

Within a month after implementation, conversion from the "Coupon" and "Promotion Code" search terms and variations increased to 3% from 0% - a 300% increase. Average Order Value from these search strings was 15% higher than the site average. The growth in conversion was the impetus the content team needed to further optimize their search term batch that triggered the intelligent redirect. After 1 week of optimization efforts, the conversion from "Coupon" and "Promotion Code" related search terms grew to 4%.

The end result was that the segment of visitors who were searching for Promotion Codes once they got to the site outperformed the comparison shopping segment in terms of Net Revenue [Figure 3]

Next Steps: Building a Better Coupon Strategy

With the success of this site search project, Company 734 is now building a more robust shopping cart where there is much more flexibility to display and add multiple promotion codes. Customers can layer available deals in different product categories.

Mashup: Neuromarketing and Web Analytics

I love the smell of libraries. The muted tones of a library. The prehistoric librarian sitting behind the desk who types with a pencil eraser.

All these things lead me to ease up on purchasing books and borrowing them instead. Anyway I tend to read books in less than the 28 day borrowing policy, so we're covered in that area.

The booklist this month centers around my recent interest in Neuromarketing. This field melds scientific data with known customer behavior models. Why it interests me is it bissects the field of Web Analytics. Click here for the Wikipedia def of this field.

The books I'm currently perusing:
-The Secret of Scent, by Luca Terin
-Why Choose This Book? by Read Montague
-The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and other stories, by Oliver Sacks
-Buying In: The Secret Dialogue Between What We Buy and Who We Are
-Neurosciencemarketing.com blog

Why Neuromarketing??
I hit a chord in my brianiac side when I learned about the following true story:

The collision of Neuroscience and Marketing was brought to the masses in 2004 when Read Montague, coined the father of this field, gave a blind Coke and Pepsi test to test subjects. His experiment first tested their taste receptors for the ability to differentiate between Pepsi and Coke. He hooked his subjects up to fMRI machines and the results showed that his subjects' brain patterns were similar when tasting Coke and Pepsi, and that his subjects' preferences were about equal for Pepsi and Coke. However, when he primed his subjects with the brand of the soda they were about to taste test, their brain activity showed that their emotional response was the main indicator of which brand they ultimately chose as their favorite. That's why Coke won out hands down. Most of the subjects' first memorable experience was with Coke and knowing that their sip was of Coke triggered their "preference computation" to choose Coke as the winner in the taste category.

This excites me. I can't say how many times my facebook profile has said "in retail therapy" because there really is a mental high that I experience from buying something for myself. It's also stunning to know that especially in the online experience, we can hone in on our customer's preferences by testing which factors will trigger the emotional reaction that causes their "preference computation" to purchase a product. Will it be the color of the background in the product image? Will it be how the products are displayed on the Category pages? Or can it be as simple as the type of font you choose to display the prices of your product?

The invention of the functional MRIessentially made this field possible to study on a larger scale.
Functional MRIs run off the traditional MRI machine, but scan the brain at low resolutions but at a faster rate. Thus it can tell with good accuracy when neural activity increases or decreases in specific areas of the brain. So you can run through a set of 5 photos of a particular product taken from different angles and let the fMRI tell you which one activates the most emotional part of the brain, which may indicate which shot to use when persuading your customers down the conversion funnel.

Personally, I find that the fMRI methodology could be intrusive and can change the results of the experiment. If you can picture yourself in an MRI machine, or have actually had an MRI done before, you know the kind of claustrophobic environment you are subjected to. In this kind of closed quarters, I'm sure that my brain is upset by the claustrophobic environment I'm in and can't fully focus on the task at hand. I'd like to see a more practical neural activity scanning machine, maybe a hat? that can do this type of task and report back equally precise amounts of data as the fMRI machine.

Good stuff, right? I'm pushing pieces from Web Analytics and Neuromarketing together to see where they would fit.