Hello good readers!  Every month I write a column for MediaPost’s Metrics Insider.  Here’s my most recent one:

Companies that derive revenue from multiple channels often have two analyst teams: the “database marketing team” and the “Web analysis team.”  These groups tend not to communicate.  In some companies, however, these teams are merging to form the “multichannel analytics team.”  This specialized team analyzes, reports, and evaluates both Web data and offline data — often in coordination with the “business intelligence team.”  The emergence of this new team structure makes sense for companies that are shifting their offline business models to become more online-centric, and thus want to understand value-generating connections among channels. 

Several macro-level catalysts are necessitating the shift to a multichannel approach to data collection and analysis.  The ongoing mainstreaming of the Internet channel for enabling commerce, conversation, and relationship marketing is certainly pushing this movement.  The burgeoning set of analytics tools that integrate with other technologies to enable event detection and trigger a customer-specific response is also promoting change in the way companies think about connecting offline and online data to improve overall business performance.

If database marketers and Web analysts are evolving into a new type of team, then what roles are necessary on this new multichannel team?  Here are a few:

• Web Analyst.  The overall Web analytics professional has a deep understanding of the Web channel.  This person uses a Web analytics tool to understand the performance of site traffic, online marketing campaigns, and to segment Web data in order to understand how visitors referred from certain channels navigate (or don’t) through the site.  They understand, measure, and report whether the site is fulfilling its purpose for conversion, task completion, and other KPIs when compared to business goals.  
• Site Optimizer.  A niche type of Web analytics professional, the site optimizer is in charge of determining the right approach for configuring and reporting the results for AB (champion/challenger) and multivariate tests.  This person is all about testing components of site and page design to yield the best combination of elements that provides a lift in a particular metric against a goal, such as conversion rate.  Content targeting may also fall under this person.
• Social Metrician.  Another niche type of Web analytics professional, the social media measurer is concerned about the performance of customer touchpoints outside of the main Web site.  He or she collects, monitors, and analyzes data related to things that happen “out there, on the Internet,” such as syndicated video, mobile, widgets, blogs, social networks, and other social media.
• Database Marketer.  The traditional offline analyst and database miner.  This role analyzes data from channels that are not online but may reference and promote online interaction, such as television, radio, print, catalogs, and direct mail.  Of course, these analytics skills can be applied to online data as well!
• Search Analyst.  The analytics professional in charge of keyword identification/selection, keyword management, bidding, and analyzing the outcomes of search.  He or she may be in charge of analyzing site performance against known SEO goals too, not just SEM.
• Market Researcher.  The traditional market researcher gathers, analyzes, and reports data about the overall market, key competitors, and customers. 
• Qualitative Analyst.  Part market researcher and part analyst, this individual is in charge of online customer and visitor surveying, relating customer feedback and visitor opinions to the context of on-site behavior to help deduce “why” people did something on your site.
• Ad Analyst.  Solely dedicated to assessing the performance of advertising campaigns, the ad analyst assesses and educates clients on ad campaign performance both online and offline.
• Audience Measurer.  The wielder of an audience measurement tool informs competitive decisions, influences media plans, and provides benchmarking and competitive data to give context to other data analysis activities, such as keyword bidding or media buying. 

How would these professionals all work together?  The market researcher’s data is used to help craft a customer-focused and competitively differentiated campaign strategy.  The audience measurer provides data that focuses the strategy on the right online demographics and sites, while the database marketer mines historic data to figure out the best-performing offline tactics for the identified demographics. 

Let’s say a mix of search, social media, and online and offline display ads are selected as part of the campaign.  The search analyst concentrates on SEO/SEM, while the ad analyst tracks the performance of display ads.  The social metrician examines the social media ecosystem’s response to the campaign.  The Web analyst analyzes how campaign-referred visitors behave and navigate through the site, taking into account the context of the qualitative analyst’s voice-of-customer data.  Meanwhile, the site optimizer tests landing pages and funnels to ensure they effectively convert visitors and fulfill business goals. 

For many companies, it would be unrealistic and perhaps impossible to find and hire people to fill each of the roles I’ve presented above.  In fact, in most companies these roles and activities are completed by only a few people, if at all.  An option for companies that seek to expand or combine teams is to look at consultants, contract workers, and full-time equivalents allocated across multiple people.

That said, companies that are unable to bridge together online and offline analytics teams will miss important data points.  In the digital future, we’ll see different types of analytics professionals working together across channels to yield profitable insights that support campaign and business goals.

The infoglut in web analytics is enormous.  So much data.  Companies report that 69% of all people who consume the data don’t understand it.  How does a business go about making sense of it all?  Formulating a comprehensive KPI (Key Performance Indicator) strategy is a big part of differentiating signal from noise and directing appropriate tool usage.  We’ve all heard about KPI’s before.  They are ratios or derivatives of metrics that pinpoint critical, business relevant web performance.   My good friend, Eric, even wrote a book (a BIG one) about it. 

The process of moving an organization through KPI Change Management starts with a well formulated plan for doing so.  Here are some tips for formulating your KPI plan: 

• Educate senior management and get managerial buy-in.  Education and buy-in can take shape via a number of methods.  Maybe you publish and circulate an internal-only white paper about the importance of KPI’s measurement.  Maybe you leave Eric’s book on the chair of your C-level executives.  Perhaps you hold a meeting and present the web site optimization process and how measurement via KPI’s provides the foundational informational on which to make site optimization decisions.  Perhaps you take your boss out to lunch and explain that basic reporting and tool access is helpful, but “Web analytics is hard” and that KPI’s give context to the data to staff that’s otherwise somewhat confused about what they pull for the tool.  You explain that KPI’s provide a focal point for centering analysis around business goals.  Whatever the method, the goal is managerial approval that “yes, you can do KPI’s.”
• Determine the audience for the KPI’s and train them.The importance of KPI’s will vary by stakeholder, and your KPI strategy needs to take that into account. Different segments of stakeholders will be interested in specific KPI’s, and you must accommodate that need.  As an analyst, you should identify the functional roles and job responsibilities of the people who are going to receive KPI reports.   Everyone may not be the right choice (though it could be), and it may make sense to concentrate a KPI rollout on the needs of the few or it may make sense to “go broad.”  Follow up with comprehensive training about your KPI project and how KPI’s can most effectively be used.
• Start with simple, well-qualified, highly relevant KPI’s.  While some folks with want to throw a “kitchen sink” strategy at KPI’s.  That’s a mistake.  If you report more than 5 to 10 KPI’s (imho) per stakeholding group you may end up with a set of unworkable, confusing, and neglected reports.  It’s better to report just a few, well qualified, highly relevant KPI’s.  How do you qualify them? By mapping KPI’s to important business objectives.  How do you know they are highly-relevant? Because you’ve compelled management to buy-in and to agree that they are critical indicators of site success. 
• Elicit the business goals for the KPI’s, compare KPI’s to goals, and report associated variances (i.e. deviations). Make sure you have determined business performance goals for KPI’s.  Goals give context for performance. It’s that simple.  Without goals, you have no context for determining what’s good and what’s bad.  If your conversion rate KPI is 5%.  Great!  So what though?  If you know your goal is 3%.  Awesome job.  If you know your goal is 10%.  Stop reading now, and get back to work - you have much work cut out for you. 
• Identify the frequency and format for reporting.  You need to determine a frequency that is timely and sustainable, and the format in which you present KPI reports needs to common enough that people can easily examine the data. Perhaps you deliver the reporting in Excel, make it available directly in your tool, use Xcellius, or create reports using a BI tool. 
• Automate the delivery of the reporting.Without automation, you may put on the Report Monkey suit and enter Excel hell.  Critical to the successful rollout of any KPI reporting is an automation plan.  Do you email reports, put them in a shared directory, create a set of reports in the tool and provide access, or deliver them in weekly presentations?  The best choice is the option that gets people to use them, listen, and understand what you are trying to do with KPI’s.
• Following the reporting up with analysis and guidance.  Depending on the size and scale or your organization and the resources you have to work with, it may not be possible to provide every stakeholder with detailed analysis.  But you need to do your best to follow up KPI reporting with true analysis and guidance.  Why are KPI’s going up or down?  What are the drivers of the changes? 
• Segment, segment, segment. Site level KPI’s are helpful in understanding overall audience and customer behavior, but they hide important details.  When you slice a KPI by a specific segment, you will realize insights that help you conclude what action to take next.  Overall site repeat visit rate is 37%, but the repeat visit rate for customers who use your “product lookup tool” is 96%.  What does that data indicate about how you market the site, or about why people are coming to the site? 
• Test, test, test.  As you measure > report > analyze > guide based on KPI’s you will undoubtedly determine actions to take on the site.  You should be testing the hypothesis behind these actions via controlled experimentation.   

There’s obviously a lot more to talk about here - from what constitutes a good KPI, to what types of KPI’s different stakeholders should examine, to what are the best KPI’s for particular site types and more.  I guess there’s more blog posts for that, but in the meantime I hope you’ve found this blogviation useful.  Let me know if you have any thoughts to share.

eMetrics Toronto is about two weeks away, and Boston Web Analytics Wednesday is tomorrow night.   I’m pretty excited for both events.  

I think eMetrics is thee premier web analytics and marketing optimization conference.  I’ve been to a bunch of them, and I always walk away with new ideas with which I can hit the ground running when I get back to work.   The real world case studies, practitioner advice, vendor spiels, and the cadre of notable analytics and marketing professionals who attend and make themselves available to you, the attendee, is unmatched.  

Web analytics pals Jim Sterne (and Andrea Hadley in Toronto) in association with Rising Media ensure the content and tracks focus on the knowledge needed today to drive the real-world application and usage of analytics and marketing measurement technologies in way that enables your online competitive advantage tomorrow.  eMetrics is far beyond a beginners conference (though there’s always plenty of good stuff for beginners).  Gone are the days talking about simple definitions and whose tool can do what (though they’ll be plenty of that stuff covered in some sessions, at lunch, in the bar).   Today’s eMetrics is focused on the application of analytics in business context, especially in the context of marketing.  The conference, as I see it, is about what you should measure and how to take action from what you measure in order to improve business performance and increase top-line revenue and bottom line profits (while reducing middle-line expenses).

I’ll be there in two sessions.  The first session I’m in is on Monday afternoon and occurs in two parts.  The first part is where I’ll fill in for my buddy Marshall Sponder, Director of the WAA and Chair of the Social Media Committee, and give an update on Social Media Committee activities.  During the second part of session, I’ll participate on a panel moderated by Chris Williams, Managing Director, Media Contacts Canada, and panelists Brent Bernie, President, comScore Inc., Paula Gignac, President, IAB Canada, and Jodi McDermott, Director, Product Management Clearspring Technologies.  We’ll be talking about the importance of standards, collaboration between industry organizations, and the real-world application of all the measurement tools you can use to run an online business (and more).

In the second session, on Wednesday afternoon, I’ll be on another panel speaking about the analysis of audience behavior and engagement levels on media and content sites.  Sitting alongside me will be moderator Mitch Joel, President, Twist Image, Sibel Satiroglu, Interactive Marketing, Hewlett Packard, and Mike Sukmanowsky, Web Analytics Specialist, Rogers Media. 

Should be some good conversation.

For those people trying to gain insights from the data, to those actively working on taking action from the the data, and for those who are trying to manage it all, I highly recommend attending one of 2008’s eMetrics Summits.  If you’re in Canada or nearby or really anywhere on Earth, now’s the time to sign up for Toronto.   

And for those in the Boston area tomorrow night (3/19), please join me at the monthly Web Analytics Wednesday I host.  This month, Jonathan Mendez, Founder of RAMP Digital, will be presenting on the “Crawl, Walk, Run” approach to onsite targeting.   Omniture is sponsoring and providing free food and drinks for all attendees, so swing by and swing back a drink whilst enjoying some smart conversation.

See you at both events.

At some point in the career of a web analyst, you will be asked to investigate, assess, and possibly judge the current state of how a company “does” web analytics.  What are some of the areas you should ask about?  Here are some thoughts and a few questions to ask to help inform your analysis (and grease your mental gears):

• Business strategy.  Why does the organization do web analytics?  What’s the goal of having a web analytics team?  Who defines the strategy?  What is the strategy?
• Analytics organization and team structure.  Who is the chief owner of web analytics?  What does the analytics team look like?  How has the team structure been formalized in the organization?  Is the web analytics team effectively staffed and have enough control over resources to do the job?
• Process.  What analytics processes have been defined?  How does a site or site feature progress from not being measured to being effectively measured?
• Data collection. What methods for data collection are being used?  How much data is being collected, and for how long is it stored, and at what level (i.e. detail, aggregate)?
• Reporting.  What data is reported?  What do the reports look like?  Who creates them?  How are they distributed, and in what format?  To whom?  When?  How?
• Analysis.  What’s the difference in this company between reporting and analysis?  How is analysis communicated to stakeholders?  When?  How?
• KPI’s.  What Key Performance Indicators are you measuring?  How are they relevant to the business?  What actions have people taken from KPI analysis that improved business performance?
• Segmentation.  What audience and customer segments exist?  What audience and customer dimensions and attributes are segmented?  Why are they meaningful to the business?  What has the business learned and what action has been taken from the current segmentation analysis strategy?
• Technology.  What analytics technologies are being used?  What does the schema for web analytics look like?  What homegrown technologies are used?  What external technologies have you bought or deployed for analytics?
• Integration.  How is web analytics data integrated with other internal and external data?  Is it integrated with other systems, how? 
• Site Optimization.  Does the company test landing pages, and/or use AB or Multivariate testing software?  If so, whose software, and what business gains have been realized?
• Advertising/Advertisers. How is analytics used to inform or enable advertisers and advertising?
• Privacy.  What safeguards does the company take in protecting analytics data? 
• Qualitative Data.  Is qualitative data contextualized with web analytics data? Do you capture voice-of-customer data?  Use Net Promoter Scores?  Have a research department?  Does web analytics collaborate with research? 

Those are just a few questions to ask.  Many others can be asked.  What would you want to know, and what would you ask?  Please leave a comment.  I’d love to hear your thoughts.

Now for some random thoughts:

• News from Orem.  API / Fusion / Video Tracking… cool.  I’m pretty psyched that Omniture announced a web services API.  That’s fantastic, and confirms how truly important integration is now and will be in the future for analytics data (as I’ve been saying for years… Google will be next). 

Omniture has announced a new methodology, Fusion, and improved capabilities for tracking video.  All sounds very exciting.  But, like Eric, I’m wondering what revolutionary new methodology Fusion really is?  Or is just what Eric’s been saying for the last 4 yearsbranded by Omniture and delivered by the Great Belkin? 

Regarding the video capabilities, I haven’t seen a real demo yet, but I wasn’t immediately impressed with what I saw on my friend Marshall’s blog.  Instead of quartile tracking, it seems like you track the playhead (the part of the video playing) across audience aggregates in increments of one-twelfth, and you get some bubbly visualization (what would that look like with 10,000 videos on your site?), and better access to forums.

I’m hoping I haven’t seen the whole ball of wax, and I look forward to Omniture giving me the grand tour. 

But for a playhead visualization, I was much more impressed with what I saw from Visible Measures and their engagement curve.  And what the heck are those folks at Divinity Metrics up to for measuring video? 

• News from Novato.  One of my favorite gangs of web analytics folks reside in Northern California.  My colleagues at Semphonic have just released a rather impressive “Omniture Implementation Toolkit.” 

I was able to procure a copy, and I’m totally impressed.  It’s full of hard-learned and hard-earned real world practitioner knowledge.  If you are trying to implement Omniture, it is well worth the money. 

Now I’m not sure if this document competes with or acts as a companion to Fusion.  All I can say is that I know the folks at Semphonic are smart, savvy, and very experienced, and there are thousands of Omniture customers out there who could benefit from this document.

• X Change Conference.  I am totally excited for X Change brought to us this year by Semphonic and Web Analytics Demystified.  The last X Change in Napa at COPIA was one of the most intimate, educational, stimulating, and enjoyable conferences that I’ve been too (and did I mention the wine?).  It was pure “class” all the way (in both the sense of style and learning, and did I mention the wine? ;-). 

This year attendance is limited to 100 folks (99 if you count me ;).  Last year, I huddled on “Deploying Measurement Systems in Globally Distributed Enterprises.”  

If you aren’t familiar with X Change or Semphonic  check them out, and make sure to read a few of my favorite bloggers - the prolific deep thinker and expert Gary Angel, the always impressive (and fun) June D(ershewitz), and bright author and web analytics veteran, Phil Kemelor.