- Sir Ken Robinson, TED Talk, 2006

Three frames of the Accenture Tiger Woods Ad

Usually, when celebrities enter a phase of mad (and negative) controversy, brands that they endorse do one of two things, lie low, or drop the celeb.

Accenture have taken the high road. They’ve used the very same controversy to put out a report (really now, a report??).

Interesting, eh? I’m not sure if it’s a good or a bad thing, but it’s certainly brave.

I’ve been saying this to folks for a while now, but never put it down.

@OmnitureCare (or Ben Gaines, as some may know him) is an excellent example of how businesses can engage users and customers using the internet (from e-mail to twitter to forums) . I often recommend him as an example to some of my clients.

I’m sure there are other good examples out there, but this is one I end up seeing very often. He is super quick to respond to people’s cribs and queries on (i think) every major web analytics forum there is.  At least, on all the ones that I am on. He even responded to a (very innocent) tweet this morning. I was just grumbling waiting for the report to load, given that it was taking long today.

Honestly, I’m not Omniture’s biggest fan – I find Google Analytics to be easier to use and more intuitive, but that’s just my opinion. YMMV. However, I have to use Omniture often because some of my clients use it, and it’s nice to have Ben on the networks, listening in, and jumping in when he feels he can contribute. I wager that he’s saved a lot of client attrition, though something like that would be hard to measure.

I think this is a great example of how a big corporation can spread some love and listen to the folks on the ground. Especially since, more often than not, everyone hates the big player. And that’s just natural.

It’s a simple lesson: listen.

The client, not the friendliest even in good times, was full of questions about how ‘effective’ the microsite (and the entire campaign) is. To add to the mess, it was an ‘engagement’ campaign, designed to generate thought about the brand, and an awareness of the impact the brand has had on it’s customers. No loud calls-to-action, no sales push.

If you ask me, it’s a great campaign. I can not tell you more about the details because I’m bound by confidentiality. But the buzz, whatever little, is very positive. It’s a B2B service and not the sort of thing that website or microsite visitors will sign up for immediately. It’s not Amazon or eBay.

Naturally, being the Data Monkey here, I was dragged into heated discussions on the campaign and it’s impact. The client wasn’t in a position to share ANY internal data with us. Nor is there any brand health tracking.

While the battle is ongoing, and I’m continuously coming up with different metrics to ‘prove that the campaign works’, which is the most annoying task, I found this eMarketer post on Deep Brand Engagement very useful. It essentially gives benchmarks from a study about how people who interacted with a brand online either buy it, or recommend it.

Fortunately, my client bought the stats (I don’t, completely, without seeing the data and the methodology). I’m posting because someone else might find it useful, too.

Sorry for the ‘Rant’ish nature of the post, it’s been a hard week so far.

I’m quite excited to meet other web analytics folks. I’m really looking forward to this one.

Oooo!

I need to put all the useful tips in one place now. That place is here.

We’re going to put up a promo website outside the client’s domain, and I was wondering what we have to do to use the normal tracking codes. I found this, which was the perfect answer:

If you have multiple domains or add your tracking code to third-party sites that do some of your hosting (such as for a promotional campaign, fundraiser or contest), make sure to specify these domains as internal within the Admin tab under Edit/General/Internal. If not, supposedly you’ll have some page names show up as “other” in the reports–in which case you’ll have to call Omniture to find out what those pages are. However, I had a case where I hadn’t identified a third party as an internal domain, yet the data came through fine; the senior implementation consultant who came to the class couldn’t explain this. Nevertheless, I’ll set the internal domains going forward.

Thank you Church Mojo.

To quote

“Marketing’s New Key Metric: Engagement” by Brian Haven of Forrester Research identifies four areas of engagement that can be measured. Engagement is the name of the game when it comes to social media and measuring successes and failures.

• Involvement: Just how involved is the community you’re engaging with? Are they visiting your site? Are they subscribing to your blog? How many video views do you have? Did they request information from your site or from a member of your team?
• Interactions: How are your efforts working in the way of gauging interactions? Are fan visits to your fan page increasing? Have those fans started conversations? How many replies to a post in a forum have you received? How many comments are your blog posts getting?
• Intimacy: Intimacy demonstrates the level of comfort/love/hate your audience feels with your company brands, products, or services. How much user generated content such as videos, photos, blog review sites or even threads in forums are being generated around your company? How many ratings are you receiving? What is the sentiment of your ratings or product/service comments?
• Influence: Just how much influence are your efforts (or those of other influencers) having on your strategy? How willing are people to recommend you? Did you get a brand awareness lift with your efforts? Are influencers sharing their opinions and are they creating user generated content around your products/services?

More on this soon, I hope.

- Jon Steel, Truth, Lies and Advertising, (John Wiley & Sons, 1998)

I recently came across readings on the topic, which I finally read this evening, after sufficient procrastination. First, the Forrester release on the topic*. And then, two Coremetrics documents, both by Eric Peterson of Web Analytics Demystified. Peterson’s first line is a great introduction

One of the best-kept secrets in online marketing is that most campaign attribution data is completely wrong and the models used to evaluate campaign performance are wholly inappropriate

John Lovett’s Point of View

The Forrester document discusses various issues, but the bottomline is really their model, which boils down to weighting three points of data, (1) frequency (2) recency (there is a time-period cutoff) and (3) time-on-site, which represents site engagement and interest. The image below, once you parse it, explains it all.

Forrester's Model

It’s an actionable idea, once you get the measurement in place. However, I’d love to see some testing behind the weightage method. Every minute spent on the website is equivalent to one exposure of the ad. How does one reach this conclusion? I agree that this is extremely hard to measure, but I’m sure there should be/can be research on the weightages.

A strong point that Lovett makes is that while most folks will agree that it’s important, there seems to be a paucity of strong case-studies out there. I also think it’ll be a strong source of competitive advantage, and would sympathise if someone who’s figured out the weightages already isn’t sharing them.

As Eric Peterson quotes Andy Fisher (Razorfish) in his white paper

“Coming up with a good weighting system is hard!”

Eric Peterson & Core Metrics

Eric Peterson wrote a white-paper (and a solution brief) on the topic, which was sponsored by Coremetrics. Half-way through the paper, I lost the thread somewhat, especially since I have never, and don’t, use Coremetrics. The paper starts with an intelligent analysis of the curent situation, which decries the absence of multi-touch attribution. Peterson calls it ‘Inappropriate Attribution’, strongly putting down all commonly used attribution systems. He then suggests the 3-touch view (something that Coremetrics does), which is where I started to lose the plot a bit. Perhaps when I get to fiddle around with Coremetrics tool, it might get clearer.

Peterson goes on to classifying each campaign as an acquisition, persuasion or conversion campaign, based on the the Appropriate Attribution Ratio (AAR). In other words, the performance of the campaign would define the kind of campaign that it is. This, I have a disconnect with. I advice clients to think about campaign objectives when planning them, not when reviewing the results. Because, campaign objectives would define the campaign copy, ad placement, and overall campaign design. Of course, this system can be used to see if the campaign met the desired objective or not. I’d also like to nitpick about the term ‘acquisition’. Peterson uses it to refer to acquisition of a lead, while a good part of the industry might refer to it as a sale. It’s a nitpick, but take note, or you might be confused when reading the paper.

Just before I was to post this, I figured out that this is part of Coremetrics’ overall masterplan to track individual users on the net. It has sparked off a debate between individual tracking and aggregate tracking. A subsequent post will parse that.

In all, an important topic, and it’s likely that there will be more posts on this as I explore.

*Note: I got the Forrester document from here, where you can download it if you offer pimp yourself as a datapoint for their database.

To quote:

If I go to any community and pose a question about anything, from a life-threatening disease to a new brand of toothpaste, I’ll get an answer. And that, without a shred of a doubt, is search. That is information retrieval in its purest sense.

It seems to be a strong idea, and I can find many examples from my own life. I bought a wireless router last week on a forum, and NOT from e-bay or a search engine. I ask for advice on my e-mail groups. I get phone tips from facebook or twitter.

I’m going to think about this for a while, but till then this seems like a very strong idea to me.