Social Media is no "Passing Fad"

Social Media is here to stay. A year or so back it was widely speculated that “Social Media” (SM) is a fad and will soon evolve or vanish. However, no one can deny that SM is here to stay and perhaps even revolutionize the way we buy, sell, stay connected, interact and also evolve socially.

Just as the Internet revolutionized the world in the last decade of the 20th century, Social Media and Social Media Marketing (SMM) are in the process of doing the same. Just as with the advent of Internet a whole lot of ancillary industries evolved and are flourishing, the Social Media is nurturing quite a few industries already.

Any powerful invention will find its own use is so true, because social media is traversed all the boundaries that it was perceived to be built with. It is now a truly creative medium just like a canvas or cinema, which you can use to tell any story you want.

Social Media Marketing is of more interest to me as a marketer. Hence I will dwell more into SMM than SM in this blog. I would like to start with the most important phrase in any manager’s vocabulary – “What cannot be measured, cannot be managed”. And yes, SMM can be measured. There are various free as well as paid tools that are available with which you could manage your SM activities.

With the knowledge of we can track what is on SM and hence optimize our spend and increase our returns, let us now venture into how we could be associated and grow our business through SMM. The only prerequisite to be a good marketer in SM is you got to be imaginative and know your fundamentals well.

The Marketer has to follow the customer, if the customer is on the Moon we better be there and so be it for SM. The advantages that we have with SM are that the customer can double up as the marketer as well and when it comes from the horse’s mouth, the recommendation is worth much more. It is as close to as one can get as the product being recommended by a friend or a close associate/ family member and hence it is powerful and we cannot afford to ignore or let it grow organically. As marketers it is our responsibility to seed, grow and nurture these social relationships and what it can do for us and vice versa.

One Size Doesn’t fit all
SMM is by far the most creative as well as complex media that I have come across so far. But it is heartening to see so many creative marketers out there who are redefining many set principles and notions. SMM straddles from being a tactical tool to sell products and services and raise awareness to a tool that can facilitate research and understanding of the market place, target audience preference, etc to being a strategic tool that could facilitate or change the business.

The Different uses that SMM could be put to:

Crisis Management:

Alerts are set to highlight when there is a negative experience shared by consumers/ visitors in a forum or blog to tackle it by providing justification and the necessary corrective action we use it as a crisis management tool.

Selling Channel:
This aspect of SMM is widely and creatively used by many companies. Facebook, Twitter and Youtube are the best resources in this area. Twitter was even used by the present American President Barack Obama in his campaign, need we say very successfully. Youtube is used by different technology manufacturers to promote product acceptance and demos. Facebook has innumerable success stories, please check Facebook marketing success stories

Brand Insight:

It can provide brand insight which is better than any market research. To explain in simple terms - Say for example you are Macdonald and when you find that your customers blogs or on discussion forums use keywords like tasty, delicious, wholesome and in contrast uses keywords like green, healthy snack, low calorie etc to talk about your competitor – Subway. It helps you macdonalds to form associations that your brand has in the minds of the customer.

Trend Insight:


Another area where SM can really benefit marketers is in getting a quick read on a trend. This is typically one of the hardest things to pick up using standard surveys. But social media gives you the opportunity to quickly scan millions of blog posts to see if there are themes emerging. For example look at this chart from Google trends where the red line indicates weight loss and the blue one MacDonald, see the occurrences when there is a spike in weight loss there is a drop in McDonalds. This would indicate an emerging trend to McDonalds, if the red line was steadily going up, it would be a cause of worry to McDonalds and they would react by introducing a calorie free range to their menu.

Consumer Insight:
Social media can help you to know your consumers better. (1) You could track all the topics/ keywords that are relevant to your brand and then evaluate the tempo of the conversations that are accompanied with these topics/ keywords. And then understand who are the contributors or influencers to these conversations online and then profile them (potential customers) and finally target them. Or (2) We identify a group of our customers/ potential customers and then track their behaviour online, which websites they frequent, how much they contribute/ influence their groups, what is their psychographic profile, interests, affiliations, etc.

Hence SMM is not just another channel that we could use to sell our products and services. But it could facilitate a lot more strategic marketing initiatives and helps to build a powerful brand for the new age.

eBrands- unraveling the phenomenon

I intend this blog to be the first of the series I intend to write on brand building on the Internet.

Recently I was working on increasing the conversion rate for a website selling flowers online. While doing so, I realized the susceptibility of these websites getting into experimentation conundrum and overlooking the simple principles and importance of brand building.

Brand building has withstood the test of time and we have with us brands with vintages of more than a century. How could this not be true to any medium even though it is still termed the new media. Online/ ecommerce needs to quickly embrace brand building and place their long term strategies based on the same principles.

It is true most big internet players are aware of building brands and created mammoth brands such as Google, Yahoo, Amazon, eBay, etc. However, as the internet provides an ideal platform for any creative entrepreneur to set up shop, it is important for these small & medium scaled organizations to realize the importance of building their brands and marketing online.

Building brands online is different from the traditional ways, as there is no separate communication medium that talks to the customer about the brand. As in case of online the customer is simultaneously consuming the communication of the brand as well as consuming (read buying the product or experiencing the service or both) at the same time.

This concept is not entirely new to marketers as even in the traditional companies especially service companies have aligned brand building with customer experience. Where the frontline would be trained to show case the brand with its inherent characteristics that it stands for. Though traditional business had the luxury of time, i.e. if the customer was not happy with the service or found it incoherent with the image they had in their mind, the switch over would be gradual and provide the company time to react and place corrective steps. In case of the online medium the switch over will be instantaneous and the marketer does not have this luxury of time. Hence experimentation becomes even more important.

Also in the traditional medium the agents or medium of communicating the brand were limited and well understood by marketers like advertising, PR, corporate communications, etc. However in came online medium the opportunity that it presents is enormous and could have juggernaut effect. Further there are more ways that the customer himself or herself could promote or demolish your brand (Web2.0). And no other medium except (to a limited extent) direct mail could offer one to one communication with the end audience.

However, experimentation only starts after we have identified the brand values, characteristics and how it would impact our customers.

Web Analytics powered 1to1 targeting

The First Step Change (As I had mentioned in my previous blog about the 3 step changes in Web analytics) in my view is how online marketing (Banner advertising, PPC, affiliates, email and other online marketing channels) and behaviour targeting are putting to effective use the power of Web Analytics.

Typically there has been a big gap in spending when it comes to off-site marketing channels like

- Email marketing
- Affiliate programs
- Search Engine Optimization
- Offline marketing to web
- In-store Web promotion
- Banner advertising

And On-Site resources like

- Optimization
- Web analytics
- Usability testing, etc.

With the former hogging the major share and the later (on-site resources) taking a back seat most often.

However more and more marketers are realizing that though the off-site marketing activity drives all the traffic to the website. It is the landing page/ homepage or the other critical product pages determine if the prospect converts to a customer or not and how much he / she would spend on the site products or services.

Right after the prospect lands on any of the pages in the site and interacts on the same determines his/ her engagement with the site.

You have probably experienced at some point that you were searching for a product that you are interested in, clicked on a seemingly relevant search result and landed on a page which has no flavour of the product that you were searching for. Could you recall your reaction…it most probably was, Uhh…

This is what the marketers are striving to eradicate and make each visit to the site by the prospect as engaging as possible. This could be achieved by accurate one to one targeting.

One to one targeting or behavioral targeting is achieved by the following process:

a) The visitor arrives at the website.
b) The information goes to the “Visitor profile repository, to figure out if he is a new customer or an existing customer.
c) If he is a new customer, we will build the customer profile.
d) If he is returning customer then we retrieve his profile.
e) Ping the self learning predictive modeling engine determine the suitable or optimal content that we need to show
f) Pass this on to the CMS system, which will then serve the relevant page to the customer.

Apart from the technical solution of how to serve the relevant pages to the visitor, there is a bigger task of determining the criteria (to be fed into the predictive modeling engine) of what pages/ information to serve to the relevant customer.

If we could answer a few basic questions, we would be able to target our highly predictive anonymous visitor.

- What is this visitor doing now?
- What have they done before?
- When is this visit occurring?
- How frequently & recently have they visited?
- Where is this visitor Located?
- What is their online experience?
- How did this visitor arrive here?
- And Have they already expressed what they want?

We already collect all the data that we need to serve the relevant page to the customer

With the Site behavior variables we know the customer’s

- Previous visit pattern
- Previous Product interests
- Whether he is a New/return visitor, etc.
- Previous online purchases
- Previous Campaign exposure
- Previous campaign responses

We collect temporal variables like the time of the day, day of the week, Recency & frequency

We get Environmental variables like
IP address, country, city, browser type used, etc…

We also get the referrer variables like

- search keywords
- affiliate site
- campaign ID
- Direct/ bookmark
- Referring domain, etc..

With these details and an analysis of what is best suited to your site, the landing page relevance could be built and conversion rate, customer engagement with the site and loyalty could be enhanced.

This blog is inspired and derived from the presentation published by the eminent “Brent Hiegglke” the link to his presentation is as below:

Brent Hiegglke presentation

Behavioral targeting is gaining prominence because of the need of the marketeers to maximise the bang for the buck and also to ensure customer satisfaction & their loyalty. In the US alone the market is estimated to be 3,800 million by 2011.

In one example Brent had demonstrated how a leading European bank had adopted one to one targeting which was supported by high end analytics to drive relevance to the visitor. This Bank earlier had a generic landing page that displayed all its products and services based on some analytics such as conversion rate, etc. However when 1to1 targeting was launched it had a dynamic landing page based on the search question that the visitor had chose to land on the site. If the visitor was searching for loans, the leading banner would be their loan products banner, and if the visitor was searching for credit cards the lead banner could be the one with the same and so forth. This way the bounce rate from the landing page was reduced and a tremendous increase in conversion as well.

Also usually Behavior or 1to1 targeting is misunderstood as targeting to customers who come from another site reference or through marketing. It is also important to target customers based on their on site behaviour and their personal details. If your target audience is a working mother with young kids you would’nt want to show her a Ducati unless she has been viewing or searching for one. Similarly if a visitor spending a great deal of time and had numerous visits to the “High end plasma TV” should’nt we show our latest discount offer on the “Plasma TV’ or other high end entertainment devices in his next visit.

WAW Bangalore Dec 07 - A big success

After a hiatus of 1 year 4 months the WAW Bangalore was kicked off again on the 14th of Dec. Trinadh who is country manager WAA contacted me sometime in mid Nov and discussed about the initiatives that he is putting together as WAA representative in India.

He wanted me to put together the WAA Bangalore during the second week of December. First task was to get a suitable location, The COO of IndiaPlaza Mr. Vaitheeswaran, kindly agreed to accommodate in his conference room which could seat 15 people.

We went with the assumption that a maximum of 20 people would attend the event. Then I set up the wiki page and sent out emails to all those who attended the previous WAW and also posted the link on a couple of networking sites.

All of us were surprised to receive an overwhelming response of 55 registrations. Then we realised that we need a bigger place and Ravi from Triology who is also a WAA member organised to book a place in Jaya nagar. And thanks to Eric Peterson (http://www.webanalyticsdemystified.com/) and Webexpe who were the sponsors to the event we were able to book a nice hotel to host the event.

The event started with introductions and a keynote by Trinadh. I presented a paper on "Step Change in Web Analytics" and Seby of Flatworld Solutions presented on "Segmentation".

I shall cover the topic that I had presented in this blog over the next three blogs which are the 3 major step changes that web analytics is witnessing.

And the session ended with a question and answer session and high tea. The response from all those who attended the event was very positive and the feedback that we received was that we need to have more of such events at regular intervals.

Interview on Web Analysis Blog

It was a great honour, when I got Anil Batra's email to be interviewed and featured in his popular Blog on web analytics. Anil is a renowned Web Analytics and Online Advertising Consultant working at ZAAZ. Prior to ZAAZ he has worked in various analytical roles in reputed concerns such as Revenue Science, Microsoft, Business Objects, etc., which culminated to his expertise in web analytics.

Anil's Blog is the 10th most popular blog as published by Avinash Kaushik in Top 10 Web Analytics Blogs on 16th April. Avinash is one of the most respected professional in the field of Web Analytics.


Anil questioned me mostly on my understanding of Web Analytics, entry into this field and achievements & challenges. There were also other questions which were not related to Web Analytics; they were on my other passion, cricket. You could read this interview on his blog, the excerpt of the same is as below:

AB: How long have you been working in Web Analytics?

JC: I have been working in the dotcom industry right from 2000. I started my career in CricInfo.com, where I had a fantastic initiation into the dotcom industry. I was handling corporate communications here, which included advertising and public relations. This is where I implemented advanced online advertising techniques and was initiated into a very crude form of web analytics. After the dotcom bust, I gained some experience in conventional advertising. However returned back to online advertising in 2004. I joined BharatMatrimony.com as campaign manager. BharatMatrimony was one of the leading advertisers in the online medium in India. Here I handled the complete advertising budget and was given the task of optimizing effectively for every buck spent on the Internet. Subsequently, I had a very brief stint in an online advertising firm called Regalix, before I moved to present job in Tesco.

AB: Tell me about your work, education prior to making a switch

JC: Before entering into the online industry, I was in a completely different profession. I completed my education in commerce from a reputed college in Chennai – Stella Maris College and had also done a course in advertising, from the Madras Advertising Club.

I started my career as a professional cricketeer with the Southern Railways. I had taken to the sport right from my school days, I had played at the state and zonal level at both junior and senior level. I had been a wicketkeeper – batswoman and played at the highest-level national championships representing Tamil Nadu and South Zone. I realized that my scope was limited at getting selected to play for India, as I was a wicket keeper and the Indian team already had an established wicketkeeper. And my only chance existed if this player performed poorly. Instead of waiting for someone to fail, I thought I should choose the other passion of mine, which was online advertising.

AB: What are you responsibilities in your current job?

JC: I handle a team of analysts, in the Insight team. We are responsible for having a sense check on the performance of the business on daily and weekly basis by running various reports. This includes running, querying and retrieving data from the data warehouse, formatting the same, draw inference and present it to the various users of these reports. The scope includes reporting on category-based performance, performance of the various marketing channels like email, online advertising and CRM. It also includes site intelligence, which is web analytics software. Apart from the regular reporting we do various adhoc reporting and analysis on customer behavior changes, uplift of sales due to activities, targeting specific audience, etc.


AB:How do you make sure you are learning and growing in this field?

JC: I am regular on the yahoo web analytics forum and read up the various blogs of Eric Peterson, Avinash Kaushik and also try to organize a "Web analytics Wednesday" meetings here in Bangalore

KPIs for an Online Retail Site

The Online Retail or an E-commerce site is the most advanced of all the types of website, as it is very critical for these sites that they get their sites absolutely right as both their top and bottom lines depends on the site’s performance. Though the KPIs could vary from one site to another, some of the basic and most commonly used KPIs of the ecommerce site are listed below:

• Order and Buyer Conversion rate: is the Holy Grail of retail metrics and the leading indicator of change for retail sites. It is the Buyer or order/ Visitors.

• Average Order Value: is the Total value of orders/ no. of order. A close watch on the average order value on a daily basis, over a period of time would show customer buying behavior and present opportunities to up sell and cross sell.
  

• Average Revenue per visit: is the metric of Total revenue/ No. of visits. According to Jim Novo it is the "grand dame" of retail site KPIs. This metric distills all marketing, merchandising and site design efforts into one key question - Did we get revenue during this visit?
  

• Average Cost per Conversion: helps in keeping a close eye on the per conversion marketing cost. It is calculated by Total cost/ conversion.
  

• Average time to respond to email inquiries: creates an opportunity to delight and surprise your prospects and customers which usually positively impacts your overall customer satisfaction. It is calculated by Avg (Date+time of response - Date+time of inquiry).
  

• Ratio of New to Returning visitors: is New visitors/ returning visitors. This metric gauges the mix of visitors on the site and compare that to marketing efforts
  

• New and Returning Visitor Conversion Rate: Helps managers set expectations about visitor acquisition efforts. It is Conversion from new visitors/ No. of new visitors, etc.
  

• Percent of Revenue from New and Returning Customers: Will give a complete picture of customer purchase behavior. The percentage is calculated by (Revenue from new/ no. of new customers x 100). The classic case where this metric could help is, when the site-wide AOV declines slightly, causing senior strategists to panic. The good mid-tier strategist will hopefully be able to report that while AOV is down slightly, sales to new customers are up overall, shortening the sales cycle and improving overall site profitability.
  

• Home Page and Key Landing Page “Stickiness”: Often time’s changes to key landing pages or audience targeting will cause a dramatic and unexpected increase in the number of visitors “bouncing” off your site as quickly as they arrive, thus increasing visits without increasing revenue.
  

• Search to Purchase Conversion Rate: The Search function in a retail site helps shoppers quickly find the “right” products to purchase. This metric shows the relevance of the search results to what the shopper is looking for. (Orders from search/ No. of searches ) This KPI is important to track because good search functionality has been shown repeatedly to help drive purchases and any significant decline in your site’s order conversion rate may be tied to problems with search relevance or results presentation.
  

• Percent Low Recency Visitors: According to Jim Novo, recency is the most powerful predictor of whether or not a customer will repeat an action. The lower the recency of visitors, greater will be the likelihood they’ll make a purchase. Percentage of visitors who have been to the site recently (total number of visitors in a given time frame/ overall visitors to the site). Jim novo uses the RFM model to determine the lifetime value of the customer by scoring each individual customer in a file of customer transactions against all other customers based on the "most Recent Date of Activity (Recency) and the "Highest Total Activity (Frequency) on a scale from 55 (highest) to 11 (lowest). I will try to elaborate on this KPI in my future blogs.
  

• Cart and Checkout Completion Rate: This compliments the order conversion rate, to know quickly whether any measured decline can be attributed to the carting or checkout processes on the site. No. of orders/ Number of visitors (page views of) to cart.
  

• Order Conversion Rate per Campaign or Campaign Type: Helps you to identify which marketing activity yields the highest returns, and an opportunity to optimise the same. This KPI is calculated by No. of orders from campaign type/ No of PVs (clicks) from campaign type (can be used for channels, position, ad unit, creative, etc.)
  

• Effect on offline sales: This could be the relation of the website that could be linked to offline sales that could be sourced through the following:-
  o Unique toll-free numbers
  o Store locator
  o Order printout

KPIs? Keeps us Ponderings & Investigating, eh..?

In this industry the most common and frequently used buzzword is the KPI or the "Key Performance Indicator". Rightly so because it gives us the ability to measure accurately, predict and forecast customer behavior and hence has earned the new media the edge over the others in the recent times.

KPIs are quantifiable metrics which reflect the performance of an organization (in our industry website) in achieving its goals and objectives. The concept emanates from the principle “What gets measured, gets managed”.

Umh... Now that we know what a KPI in Web Analytics is, it brings us to which ones to choose. There are so many standard KPIs and Metrics, how do you decide which one is for you?
To answer this in short - "It Depends"

Depends on;

- Who is our audience?
- What are they trying to accomplish?
- How well are we helping them get the job done?

While a KPI can be either a count or a ratio, it is frequently a ratio. While basic counts and ratios can be used by all Web site types, a KPI is infused with business strategy - hence the term, “Key” — and therefore the set of appropriate KPIs typically differs between

- Site type KPI:
E-commerce, content, lead generation & customer service
- Process type KPI:
Reach, Acquisition, conversion and retention

However most sites would have overlapping business models, and would also require customized KPIs. This is where an experience consultant would be able to help. In the coming blogs, I shall elaborate on the various most commonly used "Site Type KPIs".

1.2.3.4.5.6.7.8.9.....Is there anything more than Numbers?

It is general perception that "Web Analytics" is all about numbers. But numbers on their own do not add any value unless they are fitted into a context.

Eric Peterson in his book "Web Analytics Demystified said that “The numbers on their own are less interesting and less informative than changes in the numbers over time.” . However this is just one aspect of web analytics. The other and the most important one being to infuse critical business objectives/ goals into identifying, tracking, reporting and analysing the numbers.

So ultimately this boils down to the following 2 most important criteria while analysing web analytics data, they are:

1. To choose the correct, accurate and comprehensible numbers with context. The context could be time period, segments, sections, formats, etc.

and

2. The business goal/ objective that the task will achieve thereby adding value and ensuring ROI to the business.

The companies that have realized that web analytics is all about measuring and forecasting customer relationship with the business have benefited a great deal. This brings us to the next level in web analytics eCRM, which is extending the knowledge of web analysis to all other points of contact with the customer apart from the digital medium. And the task of integrating these two disparate data and knowledge to deliver better and add more value to the customer and also to enhance the businesses bottom line, credibility and brand value.

Web Analytics - Elevator Pitch

Many a time, we are posed with the problem of explaining our core area of business or competency in a nutshell or within 3 minutes depending on the number of floors in the building. In my case this elevator pitch is invariably on web analytics. Though there are many aspects in web analytics, but the aspect most of them are interested in is how will web analytics benefit my Business or Organization.

Any organization big or small has a website, sometimes the website becomes the core business or it supplements the business that they are in. E-commerce or retail sites exist only because of their websites or are content sites whose lifeline is their url. There are businesses which is increasing by the minute, who are looking at the internet to supplement or source the leads and hence marketing becomes their core focus and other business that are trying to reduce cost and increase efficiency by developing self service/ customer service models on their websites.

When business are investing so much money in the websites, they ideally should also spend effort, time and money on analyzing how the website is contributing towards the business goal. Its common knowledge that "What gets measured, gets managed" in web analytics we need to add a suffix to this adage which is, "What gets measured accurately, get managed properly" and follow it up with "What gets managed well, will increasingly result in value and efficiency".

Hence my elevator pitch on web analytics has been "monitoring and reporting of website usage to make business understand the complex relationship "What are user action on the website" and "the offering of the website" and use the continuous insights to accomplish the predetermined objectives/ goals of the business.

WAW Event turns into a WOW Event

I was pleasantly surprised by the number of people who signed up, came to the event and participated actively in the presentations, group discussion and Q&A sessions. In fact the event paved way to next two event sponsorships, topics for the forthcoming events and patronage from the participants.

By all means The "Web Analytics Wednesday" (WAW) Event held yesterday (June 14th) in Bangalore was a big success. The participants were web analytics or allied professionals from major corporates such as Fabmall, HP Invent, Intel, Mphasis, Webex, Tesco, Malayala Manorama, etc. The audience appreciated and welcomed the event, and it was decided that it would be regular quarterly event. Further the group will be active in the web analytics forum as well to keep abreast on the developments in the field of “Web analytics”.

The topics that were presented were “Data Proliferation in Web analytics” by Seby Kallarakkal working in Nabler. And the second presentation was by me (Jaisri Chety from Regalix Inc) on “Web Metrics and Business KPIs”. This was followed by a question & answer session and group discussion.

Web Analytics Wednesday is a global effort to put "faces with names" and to get local members of the web analytics community networking, updated and share & enhance their collective knowledge on Web Analytics. This is the Indian chapter of the “International Web Analytics Forum” started and moderated by “Eric Peterson” under the patronage of “Web Analytics Association”

I started the event and the forum to spearhead web analytics discussions and knowledge sharing in India. The newly formed group will focus on: -

- Increasing awareness and usage of web analytics and web analysts in India.

- Convene, meet and share knowledge every quarter (or more frequently if possible)



“WebTrends” the acknowledged global web analytics market leader sponsored the Event. For more than twelve years, WebTrends is now leading the category into Marketing Performance Management. It enables thousands of web-smart organizations to easily improve campaign performance and web site conversion as well as build stronger relationships with their customers.

You can download the presentation on WebMetrics & Business KPIs from here. Download