1. Top 5 Do’s and Don’ts
for Measuring Web 2.0
April 18, 2007
Akin Arikan,
Internet Marketing Solutions Group
Unica Corporation®
Web Analytics & Internet Marketing Solutions
6. • Do think of measurement from the
beginning of your project
• Don’t think of page views
• Don’t use log files for RIAs
Web Analytics & Internet Marketing Solutions
You use the lowest level of measurement to maximize the value of your online application or web site.
The goal of the 2nd level is to maximize the value of your product offerings, or messaging.
And the highest level is about maximizing the value of your customers.
I think this really makes it obvious why you don’t want to be stuck with your web analytics just at that lowest level. You would be leaving all that money on the table.
Let’s study an example that combines multiple web 2.0 elements namely some from a blog or a wiki and some from a RIA. You know those traditional product reviews that some retailers offer on their sites where you can read other shoppers product reviews or add your own comments. Now take that idea up to the level of web 2.0.
Imagine that you can pick the product, for example a digital camera, and you can rotate the camera by dragging your mouse around.
And you have hot spots for features of the camera.
You can zoom into any feature hot spot, for example the LCD display
And that is when you can read users reviews of the LCD display, .
And moreover, you can reply to other users reviews and ask them questions.
But when you do so, and this is the part that I really like, the application will first ask you to rate how important is this feature to you, and secondly how satisfied are you with this feature of this particular camera if you already own it.
Even if you are not a retailer yourself nor a consumer products company, this case study will provide you with methods that you can apply to any web 2.0 initiative. So when you come up with your own web 2.0 idea and like me you might say, oooh this is going to be really, really cool.
We first need to tag the relevant usage events within our application to collect the right data at the right level. And what is the right level? It is not page views. For example when people rotate the camera by dragging the mouse, that is not a new page view is it? At Unica we think that this is better described as an event. So Unica provides you with event tags that you can use for instrumenting your application.
Basically, an event tag is a variation of the page tagging idea. In an application built with AJAX, an event tag is nothing more than a bit of JavaScript. But instead of invoking the tag when a new page loads, the application calls this JavaScript tag when, for example, the user drags the mouse to rotate the camera. JavaScript is the appropriate language for tracking AJAX. If however we build our camera wiki using on Flash or Flex, you would use ActionScript event tags because that is the language behind Flash and Flex.
So where would you place these tags in our camera wiki so that we can measure the metrics that we decided on? You would tag the selection of products and features. You would tag events such as rotating the camera, zooming into feature hotspots, reading reviews, replying to reviews. You would measure which camera features attracted how many reviews, and you would also capture how users rated the various features of the cameras..
That dashboard was good for the marketing manager. But does that dashboard help your designer who is responsible for developing and improving the camera wiki? No. That colleague needs reports at a lower level, for the individual features and usage events.
So here is a sample report that shows how many visitors searched and selected a camera, read reviews, zoomed into features, rated camera features, added their own reviews and so fourth.
Remember your key performance metrics though? You don’t want to know just how many visitors you reached and engaged but did this lead to commerce? So you want to know what the business value was from visitors using different features of your wiki application. Only based on business metrics can you properly decide which wiki features you should prioritize for development
That dashboard was good for the marketing manager. But does that dashboard help your designer who is responsible for developing and improving the camera wiki? No. That colleague needs reports at a lower level, for the individual features and usage events.
So here is a sample report that shows how many visitors searched and selected a camera, read reviews, zoomed into features, rated camera features, added their own reviews and so fourth.
Remember your key performance metrics though? You don’t want to know just how many visitors you reached and engaged but did this lead to commerce? So you want to know what the business value was from visitors using different features of your wiki application. Only based on business metrics can you properly decide which wiki features you should prioritize for development
Here is another tool to help your designer improve the usability of your web 2.0 applications. This is a clickstream report, but here it actually became an event-stream report. What were the usage events that led up to the final exit point on the right hand side where visitors gave up and clicked exit to close the camera wiki.
Let’s look at some examples of reports that you might run using Unica’s NetInsight solution for web analytics . Here is NetInsight’s main user interface with a custom dashboard that a user has put together for herself.
Remember how you wanted to measure Community? So the chart at the top left shows your reach over time. Rather than looking at just unique visitors however you always want to look at meaningful segments of visitors, here for example we measure the trend of couch potatoes that don’t use your application vs. those that actually read reviews, vs. Critics who reply to reviews and Creators who add their own original content.
Remember how you also want to measure Commerce? So on the top right you have a trend chart for the conversion rates also broken down by the four personas. I promise you will be surprised when you look at your own data. If you look sharply here you see that the highest conversion rates are with Creators and Critics, but strangely couch potatoes have HIGHER conversion rates than Readers. What do you say to that? I will just say this is exactly why you have got to measure, and not just assume things about your customers. In this case it leads up to the idea that you want to move these Readers to become critics over time or even Creators .
What do web analysts do to manage persuasion processes like that? We use funnel reports. So on the bottom left we have a funnel report that shows how many visitors started out as couch potatoes but then became readers, and then became critics, and then even creators and how many of those went on to become customers. In NetInsight these funnel reports are unique - as far as we know – in that they measure not just what happens within a single session on the site but what happens over time during repeat visits.
So we looked at reports about the application itself. But remember the Customer insights that marketers want to gain? So here now is an example for customer insights first at the level where you look at all of the market. If you read this report’s table, you see that x number of users selected the digital snap shooter, looked at the LCD display and weighted it as the most important feature for them. And then they rated how satisfied they were with the LCD.
So what you learn is exactly which features are desired by the market. Isn’t that great? Who knew that web analytics could deliver this kind of insight? Not only can you now adjust which products you will offer at what prices but you could even sell this data back to the manufacturers of the cameras.
Bring this down now to the 1:1 level of the individual customer. This funnel report shows those visitors who reviewed the LCD display of a particular camera, weighted the LCD as important, but rated the LCD as lousy. So these customers are probably dissatisfied with their purchase from you. You have their contact information since they are customers, and NetInsight has pulled that contact information from the funnel report here thanks to its underlying data warehouse.
So here is an opportunity to do something with these individuals. Remember, you have the data about which camera’s LCD displays were ranked highly by other customers. So wouldn’t your dissatisfied customers like to hear from you if you can let them know about these other cameras ?
That kind of 1:1 communication is exactly what you can automate using Unica’s marketing solutions. You can build decision trees such as this one here based on the NetInsight web analytics data but you can also incorporate any other customer data. You could design your decision tree such that a dissatisfied customer will get an e-mail. But if this customer is one of your top clients, the decision tree could route the incident to this customer’s preferred store or to your call center or to the account rep so that a live person will know to get in touch with this client.
In either case your customers receive advice from their peers by leveraging the entire community’s social intelligence. I don’t know about you, but it’s this social intelligence aspect that gets me most fired up about web 2.0. I hope you build that into every one of your web 2.0 initiatives.
That’s the power of Unica’s Affinium suite of Enterprise Marketing Management products.
Just a few words on Unica if I may. Unica provides a whole range of pre-integrated marketing software solutions that include NetInsight for Web analytics as well as for example Affinium Campaign for campaign management and many other marketing modules.
Has this ever happened to you? Is this a common thing? You bet it is. Online and offline are two sides of the same coin.
For example, there have been multiple studies over the past years from Forrester and also Comscore showing that when people search online and purchase something, …. In 60 to 90 percent of cases, depending on your industry, that purchase may actually happen offline rather than online !!!
So clearly you want to capture this effect when assessing the ROI that you get from Search Marketing. And clearly you want to take this into account before blasting discounts out to people.
There are over 400 enterprise class customers that depend on Unica. Among these there are 100+ enterprise-class Web analytics customers and 1000s more Web analytics customers at the SMB level .
We would love to hear from you about your Web analytics projects. Come to talk to us.
There are over 400 enterprise class customers that depend on Unica. Among these there are 100+ enterprise-class Web analytics customers and 1000s more Web analytics customers at the SMB level .
We would love to hear from you about your Web analytics projects. Come to talk to us.
There are over 400 enterprise class customers that depend on Unica. Among these there are 100+ enterprise-class Web analytics customers and 1000s more Web analytics customers at the SMB level .
We would love to hear from you about your Web analytics projects. Come to talk to us.
And most importantly we enjoy the trust of leading marketers at companies from many different industries. A number of case studies are available on unica.com if you would like to have a look.