Back from another excellent eMetrics.  I’m a very big fan of the eMetrics Marketing Optimization Summit…  Props go to Jim Sterne for growing this event from a little seed into an incredible, blogworthy blossom.  How involved is Jim in eMetrics?  I’d say he’s completely immersed in every little piece - he even came up to me at the SF WAW (way to go June D!) to find out about the renegade AV work I did in one of the sessions, and to get my take on how it could have been avoided.  He’s that intimately connected to what’s going on.  Macro and micro, micro and macro.  And when you have one of the best Internet Marketers in the world, keeping a tight rein on the Clydesdale of conferences, you know you’re in for one heck of fun ride. 

And so it was for about 500+ of the top web analytics in the beautiful Palace hotel.  Props to consummate conference organizers Matt Finlay and his crew at Rising Media for keeping the road smooth as we all trotted on it as well.  Fanny, you are one helpful polyglot of a marketing manager!  I never knew German keyboards were so wild… Thanks.

The eMetrics sessions were informative and actionable.  The lobby bar and after-hours parties fun and enlightening.  You really can’t ask for more out of a conference.  As I flew home thinking back on it all, there was a lot to blog about, including:

• It’s all about attitude, dude – as in attitudinal data.  Like my father says “it’s all about your attitude.”  And so it is on the Internet in 2008.  From ForeSeeResults, to iPerceptions, to OpinionLab, to CRMMetrix, the often missing link in customer analytics is attitudinal data.  I’m talking here about Voice of Customer (VOC) technology that allows you to ask a question set to site visitors and then apply some sort of algorithm or model to express the meaningfulness of the data in quantifiable terms.  From the American Customer Satisfaction Index to 4Q.  VOC technology enables you to participate in a continuous, automated dialog with your customers in order to identify problem points on your web site and enable you to measure purpose and success of your most valuable segments.  Expect to see some of the big players gobble up these smaller companies.  Omniture, Unica, WebTrends, and CoreMetrics should be thinking about acquisition in this space to round out their offerings.
• Testing, 123… as in multivariate, MVT.  The rage is site optimization technologies beyond the simple A/B, champion challenger, test.  In this category you find folks like SiteSpect (the only non-intrusive multivariate testing solution!).  I’m a big fan of these guys (and was in 2006 long before they ever sponsored a WAW, thanks to a nice demo from Larry at my old job).  Eric Hansen and his crew have specialized software that you install in your data center.  No futzing with damned tags.  Swap out your variations, create different recipes, determine what’s statistically significant in giving you a lift to your macro or micro conversion goal, and you’re off to the races.  The good folks at Google are doing it and doing it well with Google Site Optimizer (thanks for the t-shirts!).  Interwoven is baking in Optimost to the CMS, and Omniture has their Test and Target integrated with the Business Optimization Suite.  Accenture has Memetrics.  Kefta too. And what ever happened to Verster?

In a nutshell, these technologies enable you to test variations of content themes, colors, creative, calls to action, points of resolution, buttons, navigational elements, –whatever you want to call the stuff on the screen—to determine what combination performs best against your goals.  But of course, this is all just software, so don’t get too excited.  The tests are about as good as the people creating them…  And complex tests that take a long time to execute may not finish.  Imagine 1-800-Flowers starting a test in January and not finishing until March, missing Valentine’s Day.  Or Intuit running a test beyond April 15th for a tax product.  Go humbly and carefully into this space, my friends, or you may end up optimizing for everyone and appealing to none.

• Tying it all back to the dollar for profit-generating sites and to the mission of non-profit generating sites…  It seems like a “no, duh” moment but metrics for the sake of metrics can be a big waste of time.  If you can’t tie metrics or visitor actions back to value on a revenue-producing site or to the betterment of a non-profit site’s core mission, then what’s really the point of the measurement…  That’s why I’m a big fan of the stuff ZaaZ does.  They totally get the fact of how actionable metrics turn the wheel of Internet commerce and ad-based models, and they can model it all to prove it out the ROI.  Folks like newly elected WAA Director Alex Langshur’s company Public InSite do similar stuff for content driven sites.  That is they know how to use metrics to optimize the channel to goals, not to just puke confusing data, like most web analytics tools do.  Again, it’s all about the people you hire, not the tools you use… My good friend Avinash, right again!
• The emergence and rise of deeply psychological and neuro-behavioral methods for automating persuasion and conversion.   Anyone who knows my good friend Joseph Carrabis, over at NextStage Evolution, knows that besides being one heck of giant kite flying, music master, he’s also got the models and the patents to help target and respond to human behavior across programmable devices.  We’re already seeing some companies, like Seven Billion Joe’s, er People, taking what he’s been saying for years and going to market with it.  The idea here being that if you can identify the affective, behavior, and motivational drivers of site visitors, you can maximize cognition in elements on the site (like pictures, text, informational flow) to appeal to target segments and persuade/provoke desired behavior.  It’s like a higher rung on the optimization ladder.  It’s not test what they see, it’s figure out how they think, then make the site better because of it.  Cool stuff.  Blows my mind.
• Integrated, multichannel marketing.  Just ask my good friend Akin Arikan, author of the newly released Multichannel Marketing.  (Disclaimer: I was a technical editor on the book.  It’s easy to do when you edit brilliance).  Make sure to check it out!  Marketing in general will become more Internet-centric, but will continue to clutch the roots of broadcast and print.  You will have the database marketer and statistical modelers working with a union of web channel and offline data.  What’s preventing it now?  A unified marketing database.  You see companies like Salford Systems circulating in this space.  And take a look at Unica’s blend of Enterprise Marketing Management…  I’d stay tuned to see what Unica has up their sleeve for bringing together online and offline.  When you can segment and target across online and offline campaigns, if I were pure web channel player only, like Omniture or CoreMetrics, I’d be a bit concerned that people are waking up to open systems, not closed black boxes.  WebTrends is already moving in this direction…  But they all remain far behind Unica when it comes to multichannel marketing.

And that’s just a few of the things the phenomenal eMetrics got me thinking about…  I hope to see you in Washington DC in October! 

Wow!  It’s been a few weeks since I’ve had any time to blogviate. 

What other things do web analysts do?  Besides blog and do WAA stuff… And ensure tool configuration/administration, date collection, data verification/validation, reporting, KPI generation, conversion optimization, deep site analysis, stakeholder guidance, outcomes evaluation and so on… Well the fun answer is “it depends” on a things like your boss, the organization you work and the holy org chart, your recognized skill set, and what you want to do.   But as I talk to my colleagues in the industry, I’ve noticed some web analysts do a lot of different things.  Here’s a few beyond the norms (or in some case maybe part of the norm, but not often discussed):

• Write business requirements.  You may be writing biz reqs for the extension and maintenance of your own tool, or you may be asked to participate in the definition of the metrics strategy for product or site features.  The analyst may define the attributes, capability, and characteristics that are necessary to accomplish given business objectives.  Generally these biz reqs will be functional (the system must do this in this way and look like this) and not technical (but every so often you may need to justify why you keep saying “ah, page tags, not logs” or vice-versa or packet sniffers or hybrid).  Fun!  And time consuming! 

• Participate in product development and usability discussions.  A rich topic here for sure.  As web analysis sort of fractures into those who study how the site routes visitors, navigational elements, information architecture, and into those who prepare AB and MV tests and report the results, it’s not uncommon for analysts to be called into to determine what should go where and what functionality should or should not exist on the site in order to drive business or conversion goals.

• Contribute to the keyword set.  As I explained in my last post, web analytics is morphing into multichannel analytics.  Analysts are increasing leveraged to participate in and analyze the outcomes of SEO and SEM.  Based on keyword data, I have a few friends who spend a ton of time selecting and managing the keyword portfolio and even the bids! 

• Have a say in “strategy”.  Analysis informs tactical decision making, which is guided by strategy (and analysis and decision making and strategy again).  When fully leveraged, a web analyst has much to offer the strategic decision making process.  Think about something as simple as using referrers to establish content syndication and affiliate partnerships…  Cool.

• Guide the content agenda.  For those who work in what my buddy, Alex Langshur (who runs a boutique consultancy in the public sector), calls “content-rich” and “mission driven” sites, the web analytics tool has utility as an editorial or content research tool.  From understanding what keywords/phrases are driving traffic to determining whether the editorial plan is actually mapped to the information demands of site visitors, web analysts can have a lot to say, if asked.  But be weary, the last thing an editor wants is some hot shot web jockey telling them what to write. That’s not what I’m saying to do, rather, some analysts work with content and editorial teams to ensure frequently demanded content topics are rounded out on the site, expanded on/developed, put on the content plan, or simply just known about, so the content folks can do what they do… 

• Code. Yeah, some of us know how to do it, and many of us just don’t tell anybody.  Because “that’s not what I want to do anymore” as my friend who works at a local agency told me the other night.  My personal opinion is that code is better left to the coders, but any web analyst who can throw down with web development and talk about things like X-Forwarded From headers will only make themselves more valuable to the organization.  Then again, some analysts would rather analyze data than futz around with overly esoteric tags and variables and the plumbing of web pages.  Then again some of us love that.

• Direct IT.  Those of us fortunate enough to have control over our web analytics technology already know they’ll be spending perhaps inordinate amounts of time with our good buddies in IT.  They may be the audience for your business requirements, or you just may need to connect with them to ensure your technology is factored into the larger plan for next generation integrated, service oriented architectures.

• Due diligence on acquisitions.   A fun one for you MBA’ers is when you get drafted into the acquisition or merger process, having to examine the target’s web traffic.  You gain real insight into the core of their web business, and may even find things, I’ve heard, like page view inflation from not filtering bots on including things like favicon.ico to inflate page views.  Heh!

And more!  So yeah, it’s not all about spending all day just thinking about who comes to the site, why, what do they do, and do they complete their purpose according to specific goals.  While that is all a big and important part of it, the role of web analyst can go far beyond tradition, if you are capable and you work for the right business that lets you excel!

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.

In Part 1, I mentioned that the Web Analytics team will look very different depending on company and business goals.  I identified three elemental constituents (business strategy, analytics, and technology) necessary to select a web analytics tool, and I divided them up into three different folks who fill those roles when you’re selecting an analytics technology.

Once the tool is selected, companies will want to create a structured team framework with defined roles and responsibilities in order to successfully deploy the tool.  What I’m describing is a suitable team-structure that enables you to successfully deploy a tool in your organization that finally gets you to a point where you are able to do web analysis. The team structure I describe below lets you get to the hub-and-spoke model that my good friend, Eric Peterson, described in these Part 1 and Part 2 of “what’s your web analytics communication strategy?”   What Eric excellently describes takes the team to the next level of actually doing Web Analytics.  It’s excellent stuff that I encourage you to read.

A formalized team structure for rolling out a web analytics tool may have the following constituents: 

• Executive Advisory Board.  Beyond the Executive Sponsor mentioned in Part 1, these board members are the ones who really control the budget and strategy at the highest level.  They may be your boss, your bosses’ boss, or board members at your company. Regardless, they are the analytics project champions at the highest level in your organization – often C-level executives.  They support the project structure and analytics strategy, confirm the scope of the project, and approve any budget allocation.

• Steering Committee.  You may be on the steering committee, Mr Web Analyst, or it may consist of very senior representatives of all the internal teams that the project touches.  These people work to define the strategic direction of the project, decide on how to resolve critical issues that come up during the rollout, and generally handle any escalations.

• Web Analytics Expert.  That’s probably you, fine reader.  You will provide analytics-based strategy and informed decision making across all aspects of the project. You’re obviously critical to the success of this project, and will ensure technical, tactical, procedural, functional, and financial adherence across the entire analytics program.   You are the chief evangelist, and will define the overall reporting and KPI structure.  In addition, you will be responsible for the overseeing the partnership with your vendor. Other things you may do will include managing costs, coordinating schedules, risks and resources, and reporting overall project status and important communications (often with the help of a project manager) to the steering committee and advisory board.

• Web Analytics Team.  If you are lucky enough to have a team, these folks will gather and document project and technology requirements, liason with business stakeholders, lead training, build awareness of and evangelize web analytics, and in general work with those who receive reporting and leverage the tool.  In many companies the solo web analytics expert will do all this stuff (and drink a lot of coffee or green tea too!).

• Project Manager.  A web analytics rollout can be complicated. While the solo web analytics team member may be expected to project manage, it may make sense to give that role to a formal project manager (y’know a PMP) who works with the Web Analytics Expert to manage the schedule, risks, resources, communications, change, and quality management plans.

• Business Partners.  Since web analytics will touch many different groups, you will need to ensure your analytics team communicates with them.  Business partner are critical stakeholders.  They can’t be neglected.  They will provide business requirements, test the technology, and work with analytics team to ensure the technology, reporting, KPI’s, and analysis you rollout helps drive business performance.

• Subject Matter Experts (SME).  Similar to business partners, these folks will probably be more technical in nature.  The Technology Expert you worked with when selecting the project will transition into a roll as a SME.  You may have one SME who oversees the overall technology architecture, another who coordinates BI resources, another who QA’s the system, another who creates interfaces to your data warehouse, and perhaps another who acts an IT contact covering issues across the operating system, database, security, and networks (especially if you are running an in-house tool).

• Vendor Professional Services Team Members.  Last, but certainly not least, are the folks sent from your vendor to do what you want them to do.  From installing the application (in a in-house environment), functional training, to advanced configuration, these people are critical to ensuring that you don’t make simple, avoidable mistakes that can thwart your efforts and delay the successful rollout, golive, and extension of the project.

In reality, you may not be able to effectively isolate all of these groups to support your analytics rollout.  To some degree I’ve presented big company structure above.  In smaller companies, one or only a few people may do all of the interlaced activities necessary to rollout a web analytics tool.  Regardless, I think the groupings I’ve presented above define the primary roles and responsibilities necessary for success when rolling out a web analytics tool (in fact I presented things in a general way to apply to other rollouts as well).  The next challenge comes once your up and running (make sure to read Eric’s posts)… You need to use the data to improve business performance and guide strategy, decision making, and online tactics that reduce expense and yield profitable revenue.


Image by Jim Sterne, from Emetrics 07 San Fran.

The best answer to that question is that “it depends.” The members of the Web Analytics team vary widely by company based on a number of factors, such as the company size, where you are in your rollout, capability maturity for analytics, established corporate processes, the number of sites to implement and maintain, the granularity of the implementation, the technology used, the number of people to which you give access, support requirements, and many more company-specific factors.

For many companies, the number of web analysts can be counted on one finger of one hand.  The lone cowboy is expected to champion the effort, and pretty much do everything under the sun - from orchestrating the tagging to reading the data to being a project manager.  Sure, that can work.  It just means empowering one individual to get the entire job done and giving them the budget, resources, authority, and clearance to make all the decisions - and communicate up the chain.  In reality though, few companies can find the right person who can do it all. Does it take a village to do web analytics?  We’ll not quite, but it does take many different people to select, implement, extend, and maintain a web analytics platform.

Over the next two (or maybe more) posts I’m going to cover my take on what skill sets, roles, and responsibilities are necessary on for doing web analytics - from when you start thinking (and believing) that you need a web analytics tool, to when you implement, to the ongoing day-to-day operations of the web analytics department and maintenance of the tool.

When you are just beginning you web analytics selection, prior to implementation, you want a small, focused web analytics team (watch out for too many cooks!):

• An Executive Sponsor.  This person is usually the HIPPO (highest paid person in the room) - until their boss gets involved ;).  For some companies this could be a C-level executive, VP, or Director.  The Executive Sponsor is in charge of setting the broad-based strategic vision for the analytics roll-out.  They may have hired you!  They help to set the overall scope of the rollout, remove obstacles, and set and control the budget. They are who you go to “escalate.”
• A Web Analytics Expert.  This person is most likely you. You may be an MBA, a techie, a marketer, an IT person, or someone who was promoted into the position.  Lucky you!  You will be in charge in identifying a vendor consideration set, writing an RFP (if you do one), identifying business requirements, collaborating with internal stakeholders, doing the due diligence with the vendor, determining the features and components needed in the web analytics product, figuring out the appropriate financial model, championing for the budget, communicating with internal stakeholders, debating the merits of the technology with your internal team, and generally supervising and stewarding the whole selection process along so that the job gets done (and your executive sponsor looks good).
• A Technology Expert.  This person could be you too, Ms. Web Analyst. Or it could be a systems architect, a data warehousing expert, a dba, an application engineer, or another tech-savvy colleague with a computer science degree (or maybe not - a degree from the school of hard knocks). This person will vet the underlying technology provided by the vendor.  You want this person to ask deep, hard questions about the innards of the technology offering to ensure the technology will match and scale to your internal technical requirements.  Say you want to integrate internal data with your web analytics tool.  This person should know all about your corporate systems, what data your company has, where/how it’s stored, other technology projects, and so on.  They’ll help you ensure technology you are leaning toward fits into the technology ecosystem at your company at a very deep level.

After short-listing vendors, doing the due diligence, pilot/proof of concept(s), you’ll finally make a decision about what tool to buy (or perhaps you’ll determine a free tool meets your requirements now (but will it in the future is the question you should be asking… LOL!).

At the “buy” decision is made, the Web Analytics team will grow to include a more people with different skill sets, roles, and responsibilities.  I’ll cover that in my next blog post.