How to make Web analytics actionable with Web Content Management? Market overviews, trends, social analytics,.... EU Privacy law and cookies

1. Making Web Analytics actionable
with Web Content Management
30/08/2012 – Damien Dewitte

2. Making Web Analytics actionable
with Web Content Management
Introduction and market overview
Damien Dewitte
Lead ECM consultant
2.

3. Contents
- Introduction
- The EU Privacy Law
- Analytics Implementation & WCM
- Social Media & Analytics
- Market Overview
3.

4. “If you can not measure it,
you cannot improve it.”
(Lord Kelvin)
Go, wondrous creature! mount where Science guides;
Go measure earth, weigh air, and state the tides;
Instruct the planets in what orbs to run,
Correct old Time, and regulate the sun
4.

5. Why Web Analytics?
Web Analytics is a thermometer for your website, constantly
monitoring your online health.
Web Analytics allow you to study the online experience in
order to improve it.
It’s about “Measuring Success”
5.

6. Monitoring what?
Optimization of content production efforts
 Does my content really matter to my visitors?
SEO effectiveness
 How do my Search Engine Optimization
efforts perform?
Patterns for conversion
 Where do I get the most (un)succesfull
conversions and what can I learn form it?
Errors on my website
 Good idea to check for:
404 errors (Page not found)
Forms abandonned
Internal Site search performance
6.

7. Metrics
“Dimensions” versus “Metrics”
7.

8. Metrics
The usual suspects
 Visitor  Visit  Pageview
 Average Time on Page, Bounce rate, Exits
 …
Some metrics are calculated metrics: e.g. Pageviews/Visit
8.

9. Key Performance Indicators
KPI’s allow to establish the link between the metrics and the
Business Goals.
KPI’s are figures (relevant ratio’s, percentages, averages or
rates)
9.

10. KPI Examples
Reach: click-through-rate (per traffic source), % new visitors,
cost per acquisition
Engage: bounce rate for landing pages, page depth,
average time on site, usage of apps, social media
engagement
Activate: global conversion rate, conversion rate per goal,
goal value per visit, cost per lead
Nurture: loyalty (returning visitors), conversion rate of
returning visitors
10.

11. Key Performance Indicators
A KPI is only a good KPI if
it allows to take action
11.

12. “Categories” of KPI’s
Adobe Google
Visitor Acquisition
Visitor Identification
& Segmentation
Visitor Activity &
Content consumption
Visitor Retention &
Growth
“REAN” model
12.

13. Conversion
In E-commerce sites, conversion is obvious. Each shopping
cart check-out has an associated value in €. Therefore it’s
easy to calculate the ROI of your website, SEO and analytics
efforts.
But non-transactional sites also have conversion events
(which could be given a value, but it’s more difficult to
express the exact value in €.)
 Filling in a contact form
 Downloading a document
 Signing up for an event
 Registering for a newsletter
 Submitting a question to a helpdesk
 …
The E-Tailing Group Survey april 2011: Average conversion
rate for US Merchant websites is 1-3%
13.

14. EU Privacy Law
“Cookie-law”
14.

15. EU Privacy Law
European Union ePrivacy Law, May 26, 2011.
Implying that setting website cookies without a visitors
consent would be illegal.
Interpretation:
 Cookies should be completely anonymous (not containing Personally
Identifiable Information or reference to personal information)
 Cookies should be “first party” cookies (set by your own website
domain)
Google Analytics and Adobe SiteCatalyst are “OK” (and have
published their own disclaimers) , but still … they require
attention from site-owners and legal advisors.
15.

16. EU Privacy Law
Google Analytics terms of Service
(http://www.google.com/analytics/tos.html)
 You will not (and will not allow any third party to) use the Service to
track, collect or upload any data that personally identifies an
individual (such as a name, email address or billing information), or
other data which can be reasonably linked to such information by
Google. .... You must post a Privacy Policy and that Privacy Policy
must provide notice of Your use of cookies that are used to
collect traffic data, and You must not circumvent any privacy
features (e.g., an opt-out) that are part of the Service.
Adobe (http://blogs.adobe.com/digitalmarketing/executive-
insights/european-union-eprivacy-directive-update/)
 … To address this and related data protection concerns, Adobe’s Web
analytics solution, SiteCatalyst, obfuscates IP addresses by default
before storage and provides an opt-out mechanism customers can
offer their website visitors should such visitors elect not to be tracked.
16.

17. EU Privacy Law
First Step Advice:
 Make an inventory of cookies used on your site
 Refer to the inventory from within your Privacy Policy pages
 Explain how visitors can disable or delete cookies, or even how they
can opt-out for specific cookies set by your website.
UK Example: BBC.co.uk
17.

18. 18.

19. 19.

20. 20.

21. 21.

22. 22.

23. Analytics Implementations and WCM
23.

24. Which trackings requires extra
attention or implementation effort?
Multiple domains/Multiple languages
File downloads
Outbound links
In-Page events (event-tracking)
Flash animations
Interaction with Embedded Videos
Defining goals
Tracking E-commerce transactions
Groupings of keywords, dimensions
Custom segments
Tracking error pages
Tracking internal site-search usage
24.

25. Social Media
Is a Twitter follower considered more
important than an email these days?
25.

26. Social Media
Social Media are powerful referrers to your website, and
therefore deserve specific dimensions and reports in
Analytics.
Unfortunately, analytics can not evaluate all the efforts you
put in Social Media Marketing. Because engagement in
social media communities very rarely leads to a person
clicking on your link and then purchasing your product or
service.
26.

27. Social Media Monitoring Solutions
Adobe SocialAnalytics
Radian6
Lithium
…
And also:
URL shorteners (like bit.ly, tinyurl.com, goo.gl…) also do
tracking
Services as Hootsuite allow to post on several Social Media
platforms simultaneously and offers tracking
27.

28. Analytics Tools – Market Overview
28.

29. Measurement Methods
Logfile Analysis (Server-side data collection)
Page Tagging (Client-side data collection)
29.

30. Measurement Methods
Logfile analysis approach is fading out at most Web
Analytics vendors.
Page tagging allows for:
 More accurate measurement of unique visitors
 In-page Event-tracking
 …
 SaaS offerings, which remove maintenance costs from IT-departments
Logfile analysis though, can still be suitable if:
 Website pages can not be modified
 Website is part of an Intranet without access to the Internet
 Data retention over a long period is important
 Company needs to hand over raw data for auditing
 Data needs to be re-processed into reports frequently
 Company needs to track bandwidth or completed downloads
30.

31. Market Overview
Forrester Wave on Web Analytics, november 2011
Leaders:
 Adobe (SiteCatalyst)
 IBM (Unica +
CoreMetrics)
 Webtrends
 comScore (NedStat)
31.

32. Market Overview
Vendor Product Hosting Method
Adobe SiteCatalyst SaaS Page
Tagging
comScore Digital SaaS Page
Analytix Tagging
Google Google SaaS Page
Analytics Tagging
Urchin On-Premise Logfile
Software Analysis +
(offering
discontinued)
IBM Unica On-Premise Logfile
Analysis +
Coremetrics SaaS Page 32.

33. Analytics Tools Landscape
The analytics landscape is populated with a broad spectrum
of tools which fulfill specific (extra) needs:
 A/B Testing, Website Optimizers
 SEO-specific monitoring tools
 Email campaign tracking
 Advertising
 Focus on e-commerce
 Add-ons for Microsoft Sharepoint
 Focus on Video
 Social Media Monitoring
Some of these tools are part of the broader Suites of the
bigger players. Other are offered by niche players.
33.

34. Google Analytics
2 Analytics Products
 Google Analytics (Free, max 10M Pageviews/month, 25 months data
retention)
 (NEW) Google Analytics Premium (150K$/year, max 1.000M
Pageviews/month, 36 months data retention, Support & SLA)
 Urchin Software (On-premise, 10k$ per installation)
Market Leader in terms of number of installations
Integrated with Google webmaster tools, Adsense, Adwords
Very often the “default” integration in common WCM
Systems
34.

35. WCM integrations: e.g. Drupal -
Google
35.

36. Adobe SiteCatalyst
Part of the Adobe Digital Marketing Suite, with:
 CQ5 (WCM)
 Test & Target (A/B Testing)
 SocialAnalytics
 Genesis (Mail)
 …
“Adobe continues to maintain the largest enterprise web analytics
footprint of any vendor… expansions into social media, audience
measurement, and data management show a deep commitment to
providing a comprehensive suite of products to support the analytics
and execution of digital marketing.”
The Forrester Wave™: Web Analytics, Q4 2011
36.

37. Adobe Digital Marketing Suite Platform
37.

38. “Why buy Adobe SiteCatalyst if
Google Analytics is for free?”
(Without trying to compare each feature in detail)
Data retention is not limited (Google: 25 months)
No limit on pageviews per month (Google: 10M)
Possibility to import data from external applications into
SiteCatalyst (Google: import is not supported, export only)
SLA (uptime and performance) and Support (Google: no
SLA, support through forums)
Some more flexibility: e.g. On demand, Adobe can apply a
rule or logic to your SiteCatalyst data after it is collected, but
before it is stored in the data tables.
38.

39. Thank you!
39.