Adam Proehl to speak at San Francisco eMetrics Summit in March 2011

NordicClick’s own Adam Proehl will be featured on a panel at the eMetrics Marketing Optimization Summit being held in San Francisco from March 13-18, 2011.  The eMetrics Marketing Optimization Summit is recognized worldwide as one of the leading e-marketing conferences in the world with 2011 events being held in Munich, Toronto, Sydney, Paris, Stockholm, Washington DC, and London in addition to San Francisco.

The Marketing Optimization Summits typically bring out some of the best and the brightest speakers and industry thought leaders and the 2011 San Francisco summit is no exception. Featured keynotes from founder Jim Sterne, Eric T. Peterson from Web Analytics Demystified, and Guy Kawasaki from Garage Technology Ventures are planned.

Topics covered will include website optimization, search analytics, campaign optimization, web 2.0 optimization, public sector metrics, behavioral targeting, competitive analysis, customer experience, statistical analysis, business implementation, and multi-channel marketing metrics.

Adam’s panel is called “Free and Cheap Tools”  and will be held on Monday, March 11 from 11-12 PST in the Web Analytics Fundamentals track.  He and his fellow panelists, John Marshall from Market Motive, and Benjamin Rudolph from Relevance Advisors,  will share 30 free or low cost tools they’ve used in their marketing efforts.  You don’t have to spend a lot of money on search and analytics tools to plan your media, test your offers, and optimize your site.   Session attendees will learn about the best survey, analytics, social media, and competitive intelligence tools and will walk away armed with new knowledge.

Early Bird registration is now open through January 28, 2011 and can be found here.  We look forward to seeing you there.

Analytics: The Four Types of Data You Must Understand

By Adam Proehl

Hopefully I don’t need to ask you if you have a web analytics package for your web site. With the myriad of both free and paid tools available, it’s an absolute no brainer.  Not using Web Analytics to measure your site is about as smart as owning a retail store without keeping books.

When you look at web analytics, not all data is equal. I like to break analytics data into four distinct buckets:

1) “Actionable” Data: There is no better type of data. When you have data that actually tells you that you need to do something to improve your site or that you should leave it alone,  your measurement process is working at its best.  A great example would be traffic from a particular keyword phrase that doesn’t convert. You may show up on the front page of Google and get a lot of visits to the site from that phrase, but if the conversion rate is atrocious compared to the rest of the site, that’s telling you something.

Either you’re going after the wrong keywords, your landing page sucks, your site experience sucks, your price is too high, etc.  With proper analysis, you can understand the site behavior from those specific visitors and take the appropriate action. Even with free analytics tools, you can drill down to get a deep understanding of this particular traffic source. For example, when looking at the keyword phrase in question, do searches originating from one geographical location outperform another as far as conversion metrics are concerned?

2) “Interesting” Data: There’s an overwhelming amount of data that you can get from analytics and not all of it is actionable. Some of it’s plenty interesting, though.  There is no defined list of what data is “interesting” vs. “actionable”. It varies depending on your business needs, how you drive traffic to your site, what’s on your web site (content, products, subscriptions, etc), and your ability to actually affect change.  Interesting data is obviously not as good as actionable data, but it’s not necessarily bad either. To be honest, sometimes you’re just expected to know your numbers. Why?  Well,  a board member in a suit may be demanding to know so that means you better.

3) “Who Cares?” Data: Let’s be honest, some data is just useless.  It doesn’t have to be, however. If I tell you that your site got 10k visits last month, that is pretty much a useless figure.  Is 10k visits good? Is it bad? I have no idea.  The numbers are what the are.  Now  the “visits” metric taken by itself may be a “who cares?” data point, but add some context then it becomes interesting – maybe even actionable.

So you had 10k visits to your site last month. What was it a year ago? Are you up or down? If you’re up, what sources are causing you to go up? How is that additional traffic converting? Is it better, worse, or the same as the rest of your site traffic? If you’re down, which source of traffic is causing the downturn? Did you lose some positioning in search? Did you lose some links from other sites?  Has the market demand changed for your product or service?  All of these (and more) are valid questions to consider that can give you context for your data. Without that, you just have numbers.

4) “Golf Course Executive Brag” Data : Two weeks ago I was at Pubcon’s Annual Vegas Conference as both a speaker and attendee.  One of  the things I love about conferences in general is the great hallway/bar/dinner conversations that happen with my fellow industry peers.  One of those conversations with  my friend and colleague, Alan K’necht from Digital Always Media, inspired me to write about this fourth type of data.  He is spot on.  Imagine the site of a couple of C-level friends out on the golf course. The first guy says “My site got a million hits last month”. The second guy says “Well  that’s nothing, I got 2 million hits last month”.   The numbers bear no real relevance to the performance of your website much less your overall business. Also, if you’re still using the word “hits” when talking about your website metrics, stop immediately and seek professional help.

Thanks for reading. As always, I’d love your feedback.

Adam Proehl

adam@nordicclick.com

Twitter: @adamproehl

Social Media: Back to the Future

By Adam Proehl

Do you follow a brand on facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, or any other platform? Do you also suffer from information overload?

This week I had the pleasure of attending the Minnesota Interactive Marketing Summit (MIMA) in Minneapolis. I particularly enjoyed Gary Vaynerchuk‘s morning keynote. I’ve heard him speak before and he isn’t for everyone (if you are offended by foul language, you may want to sit out his presentations, but since I’ve been known to drop a few four letter words myself, it didn’t bother me).

As always, his morning keynote was lively, full of curses, references to the New York Jets (whom the Vikings are going to beat in a couple of weeks, BTW), and colorful anecdotes.  Even with all of that, what I was most impressed with was his vision and his intelligence as a thought leader in the interactive space.

There was one thing in particular he brought up that struck me is something I’ve been giving some thought to lately as well. He asked how many of us remember how good click thru rates on banner ads were in 1996.  He also asked how many of us remember email click thru and conversion rates from 1998. Well, I’m old enough that I remember both vividly.  The click thru & conversion rates on both of them were fantastic.

For banners, we could basically paste them across the networks and people would click on them. Better than that, people would actually buy. My business partner, Mike McAnally managed network banner campaigns for a $20 software product that basically helped them speed up their dial up internet and they were enormously successful. There was no targeting, retargeting, segmentation, or any of the things we take for granted today. We just plastered them all over.

Email was slightly different.  I’ve run email campaigns since 1997 and I think about how wildly successful text only “blasts” were then. All of our names were acquired thru proper methods and we never spammed anyone, but they were still just non-segmented blasts.  You can’t get away with that now and expect to last too long. The inbox is too cluttered and most emails will get deleted instantly if the message isn’t relevant.

Still with me?  That brings me to social media. As cool as it is, it still has some growing up to do, in my opinion. There are plenty of brands that I would be happy to “like” on Facebook (and I do “like” plenty of them) until I read their wall and see how often they post.  If I “liked” them, their posts alone would take up all my newsfeed space (especially when on a mobile device, which I often am).  So I haven’t “liked” them yet.

I’m on Foursquare, but really only so I can understand how it works. I have no interest in being mayor of my local McDonald’s.  This platform is still very young (honestly, at this point most of the people I know on it are fellow internet marketers) and it remains to be seen what becomes of it long term with Facebook now in the “check in” game.  One of the benefits to Foursquare is that if you “check in” to a place over a period of a relatively short period of time, you can become “mayor”.   Now, when you check in near a business that is active on Foursquare, you can be presented with a special offer to view. Starbucks is great at this, but I don’t like coffee, so it doesn’t do me much good.

Where I’m going with all this is that brands as well as social media platforms will eventually need to step up their game when it comes to a “like” or a “follow”.  Email is still very relevant (see my previous post below) when best practices are followed.  Put simply, you need to segment your customers and provide them with relevant offers in a manner which they prefer.  Banners still have a little way to go, but they’re getting better (although sometimes retargeting goes a little overboard to the point where it’s almost creepy – case in point I went to the Speedo site once to do some competitive research for an apparal client of ours and I couldn’t get away from them afterwards!).

For brands wanting to talk to consumers on social media platforms (which I’m all for, BTW), there’s going to need to be some technical as well as best practice solutions that present themselves. I’m not thinking of anything that’s rocket science – just best practices similar to what some of the best email marketers do. Specifically:

- What types of products are you interested in?

- What do you want to receive notifications on (news, specials, freebies, new products, etc)?

- How often do you want to receive messages from us?

- What format do you want them in (abbreviated or long post)? Some brand on facebook can put out some really long posts that take up a lot of screen space. I know plenty of people that find that annoying.

- Integrate it with email.

These are some of my thoughts. Thanks for reading. I welcome any questions or comments. Thanks.

Adam Proehl

adam@nordicclick.com

@adamproehl