My Other Blog is Spam?

A few days ago, as I found myself writing here, and trailing off in to other subjects, I decided to set up another blog on a favourite subject of mine: offer strategy.

I went and set up the url http://offerstrategy.blogspot.com, and over the next few days, wrote a total of three articles on the subject of creating sales premiums that make sense. Designing offers that help to close sales.

The blog has a total of three external links:
1 to this blog.
1 between two articles
1 to an article on my company's website about the mortgage crash in the US (which is topical to the article, since I think it can be argued that the crash is the result of flawed offer strategy)

This morning I receive mail from blogger informing me that my blog has been flagged as a potential "spam blog"

I went and read about the defininitions of a spam blog, and it cited pirated content and volumes of nonsensical links as the general offenders. I am a little stunned to discover that my three little articles, and three little links could somehow have set off alarm bells someplace. I am curious to know how it could possibly fit the criteria, and if so, do the criteria make sense?

Anyways, I have put the blog up for review by the humans at Google. At least someone will be reading it now, as I hadn't gotten around to publishing it in any way...I was going to wait until there was a little more content.

Has anyone else had their blog unjustifiably locked as potential spam? Please share your story with me. Meanwhile, I'll climb back down off my soapbox now. Sorry for having strayed from the subject matter. To get back to analytics...I am currently working on an article for the WAA Blog about User Generated Content. Hope to share that next week.

I'm Trying out Hittail

A couple of days ago I installed the the Hittail real-time search hits application on this blog. You can register and get the code for your own site at http://www.hittail.com. I am running the freebie version of the application, for now.

I learned about Hittail on the Web Analytics Association site blog. If you are not a member, and you are interested in Web Analytics, I suggest you join the Association.

• the community is very helpful and supportive
• they organize educational events
• the forums are very active, and provide a good mix of practical information along with insights on where the industry is heading

Anyways, I installed Hittail here on this blog, and then, when everything seemed to go well, I also installed it via the wordpress plugin on http://www.moneyweekes.com. So far...no data on that site. Now, I am not panicking yet, because it took a couple of days for the stats to register for this blog. But when they appeared, all the historical data was there.

As a surprise bonus, in addition to reporting keyword traffic, the system informed me that my blog had been stumbled (I had been meaning to submit this blog to stumbleupon, but I'm delighted that someone else found the site and gave me the thumbs up), and received linkedin visits and traffic from the WAA today.

While all of those are great to know, I'm not sure how they will play in to the software's stated objective to help me identify which longtail keywords I should be optimizing for.

Ambar Shrivastava from Hittail described the primary benefit as follows:

"The idea is to provide actionable data that helps webmasters and bloggers better connect with their existing readers as well as attract new readers interested in similar topics to what you already have on your website. This differs from other analytics tools that mainly describe what is happening on your site with little information on how to improve it."

I ran into a couple of snags along the process of installing (what can I say, I'm tired...it's easy, but I was firing on half cylinders). And I can tell you that the team over at Hitbox fairly jumped at the chance to help me out. They get double thumbs up for customer service.

I have shared the application around the office, so I'll have more to report back shortly, I expect. We are all anticipating good things. I work for a publisher, so our sites are very original-content rich, which seems like a good fit for Hittail. However, the moneyweekes.com site is i Spanish. Not sure how the application will handle other languages.

One of our programmers looked unimpressed and muttered "um, you know you can get that data from your log files, right?"... Yeah, I know. But Hittail does digest the information for me and highlight key points...and theoretically it provides optimization suggestions based on my words. I say theoretically, because my search volumes don't merit any suggestions as yet. . And most exciting of all....it does it in almost realtime. So I can start getting a sense of when people are visiting the sites...what is the best time of day to publish my newsletter? How often should I be posting here? I read on their website that I should have about 100 pages minimum.

So if you found me through a searchengine (or maybe even if you didn't) chances are tomorrow I'll be thinking about your keyword search, and how I might better address the issues you seem to be searching for online.

Anyone else out there installed the Hittail code on their site? How is it working for you?

Knowing When NOT to maximize your ROI

I was just reading a fascinating discussion over on Jim Novo's blog about the effectiveness of social media sites versus chatrooms as channels for advertising.

One commentator made a suggestion that Jim could "do a bad job" with his cpc campaign...as in design ads to attract fewer, but more targeted clicks, as a means to better optimize his ROI. Of course, it makes perfect sense. It is like designing incentives that are only of interest to the audience that would buy your product.

Don't give away a palm pilot - everyone wants one of those. give away a demo version of your product, or a discount on purchase, or a whitepaper that compares and contrasts the features of your product versus the competition - something that removes barriers to purchase.

The advertiser is happier. The respondent is happier - because you are speaking to their specific needs. Can anyone tell me which stakeholder loses out in this equation? The publisher.

In my opinion, this is a relationship that must be considered when measuring ROI, that hardly ever makes it into anyone's calculations.

The supply of quality publishers depends on their ability to generate revenues from ads. I have had the experience at times in the past of negotiating so hard with a publisher, that they refused to renew the contract when it had run its course. So, ok...I got the client the best possible deal in the short term, but what were the long term effects? I had "used up" available channels to access my target audience.

A client runs SEM campaigns on Google and also a very successful Affiliate program.

They pay their affiliates 5% of revenues.

SEM on a cost per click basis that works out to roughly 20% of revenues.

Each represents approximately one third of sales.

I suggest to the client that they could afford to pay their affiliates 8%.

The first response is, of course,

Why pay 8% when their affiliates were doing it for 5%?

The most important step in the process is to recognize affiliates as an important stakeholder in the sales process. That one can "create" more lower-cost inventory by taking care of a particular stakeholder group, or encouraging its development.

So then the questions
1. how many more affiliates can be attracted at 8%?
2. how much can SEM campaigns be reduced in response? and what is the expected cost per acquisition at the new, presumably optimized (and therefore more cost effective) volume.
3. what is the associated cost of marketing to this stakeholder group to bring them on board in sufficient volumes?

It is a step...or rather a leap of faith, that requires some careful calculating, careful planning, and total commitment - that stems from the recognition of the multiple stakeholders that make your organization work.

Can you share stories of when it made sense for your business to pay MORE for customer acquisition?

SCRUM and Freedom from Preformatted Reports

A little girl watches her mother prepare a roast for Sunday dinner. Her mother lays out the piece of meat, rubs spices across the surface, and then carefully cuts the two ends off with a sharp knife, and sets them aside.

"How come you cut the ends off?" asks the little girl

The woman smiles knowingly, and explains that her mother taught her the process when she was a little girl, and it makes the tenderest, most flavourful roast.

The woman later asks her own mom why, cutting the ends off the roast makes it taste so much more tender, and her mom responds that she is unsure of the science involved, but that she was taught the technique as a young woman by her own mother.

At which point, the mystery having taken on more significant proportions, the woman makes a call to her grandmother and asks "Gran, why does cutting the ends of the roast make it come out more tender?"

The grandmother, who is approaching ninety, seems disoriented by the question, so the woman explains futher "You taught mom, and she taught me to prepare a roast by rubbing salt and spices into the surface, and then cut off both ends before putting it into the pan."

The grandmother, when she hears this begins to chuckle, "No dear, I cut the ends off so the roast would fit in the useless little roasting pan my mother-in-law gave me for a wedding present."

I am often reminded of this cautionary tale when I examine the institutionalized reporting structures in place in many organizations. With the competitive pressures of business and the volumes of data available, organizations often develop "institutional blindness" around their analytics. Reports become entrenched, and we forget the urgent needs that fostered them in the first place.

I recently stumbled across Marianina Manning´s blog Web Analytics Princess when reading an article about measuring User Generated Content by Judah Phillips of Web Analytics Demistified. On Marianina´s site, there is an article about Virtual Worlds London 2007 in which she relates comments from the CEO of of Habbo Hotels Timo Soininen. He is describing his implementation of SCRUM project management techniques in developing the virtual worlds in response to user metrics and player feedback. For those of you who are not rugby fans, the SCRUM refers to the team huddling together and moving as a unit in a tightly knit formation, allowing the collective to jointly determine speed and direction.

And I started thinking about applying SCRUM Project Management techniques to web analytics. Not just the design of systems, but actual report generation too.

I was struck by a sudden vision of a future of Web Analytics unfettered by pre-formatted (canned) reports. Today Application Developers shape our focus and our perception of our websites by pre-supposing what kinds of reports we will need. Google´s Conversion tracking shystem recognizes only 4 possible types of conversions: sale, lead, signup and pageview. Management measures performance success primarily by focusing on comparisons against historical data. Many web analysts have made the point that historical data is rendered more and more irrelevant the faster things change on the web.

Almost a decade ago, I worked on a project to develop an analytics tool that essentially stored all the data in its raw format, and allowed the analyst to specify all of the input fields to customize the report. The system had ZERO preformatted reports. It was totally flexible...(and also often crashed the database and the site, because that was before we´d caught on to batch processing or staging the data, or protecting against system overload).

The project was shelved. People couldn´t wrap their heads around the idea of total report freedom. It required a certain intimacy with the data and facility with the stats that proved a barrier to adoption. ....at least that's what I think happened :)

...but I think that, in the fast-changing world of web2.0, where user audiences are SO fluid, and their usage patterns are SO dynamic, a free-format reporting system, combined with a SCRUM approach to analytics, that seeks to identify the emerging patterns without presupposing the answers, may be the path to effective optimization.

I know this is a little out in left field. But the neural networks geniuses of the worlds are creating these capabilities....we just need to create the management practices and reporting/visualization tools to follow suit. What do you think? Is this a possible future direction for the next generation of WA? or am I totally out to lunch?

Why is Adwords King?

Why is Google Adwords so popular as an advertising channel? I have had many people tell me that it is because it is so effective at targeting, and generates a higher return on investment.

It stands to reason...people are out searching for what you're offering at the very moment that you reach them. I could certainly make that argument to a client with confidence.

But then again, where else could the searcher find so many of your competitors all in one place? Does this swim against the stream of relationship marketing at all?

I've had clients tell me that they focus on Google Adwords because its scalable. Someone told me the other day that he could quadruple his registrations overnight with Adwords, if he wanted to.

Really? He could come up with four times as many targeted, traffic-generating keywords and maintain the Return on Investment he has acheived up until now? Does that mean he is currently missing out on optimization opportunities? Or maybe he operates in a world without competitive pressures of supply and demand.

Here´s my theory

We all hunger for instant gratification and total control that Adwords gives us.

We chronically require the soothing gratification of being able to control our actions and rectify our mistakes...because the capabilities of Web Analytics hold our bad Media Placement decisions up for scrutiny.

No more worrying about having to ride out a long-term advertising contract with a third-party supplier that is underperforming

No dabbling in the mysteries of SEO and the hoped-for results that MIGHT materialize at some time in the future. Even if their is compelling evidence that organic traffic is cheaper and more loyal.

Has anyone out there been doing this long enough to remember Flycast?

Well, in the early days of the Flycast ad network, I could manage my own placements site by site, control the cpm I paid on each site, the volume of impressions I was willing to accept (yes, we still paid cpm back then). All through my own handy management application. That was back before Google even took ads.

I loved it. I pitched it to all my clients. Here was a place that I could measure and optimize performance, and demonstrate the results. I could easily demonstrate to my clients how we were saving money. Making them money. Improving their performance all the time.

In those days, keyword advertising was mostly sold on a cpm basis. You signed long-term contracts, and someone else was in control of the level of optimization. Paid search represented a relatively small segment of the market.

OK, so if its all about controlling your ROI in real time, why don´t affiliate programs rule the ad revenue universe?

Again, it´s the risk of exposure. When you get 40 or 50 thousand affiliates signing up for your program, it can be difficult to police their advertising practices. And cleaning up the messes created by overzealous affiliates can be a lengthy process. Not that I recommend avoiding affiliate programs. I love them.

Nor would I recommend avoiding adwords. Now don´t get me wrong. I like Adwords. I love Adwords. Google repeatedly makes me a hero to my clients because I can exercise tight control over advertising, test effectively and scale spending up and down easily in response to the changes in the business climate.

They have done an excellent job of developing tools that are valuable and functional, and their success reflects that.

But I think it is important not to have blinders on about the specific value of Adwords, and SEM in general and its place in the Internet Marketing spectrum. Throwing all of your eggs into the Adwords basket can mean passing up on more lucrative advertising channels in favour of more immediate control.

The powerful analytics applications available on the market increasingly allow us to take the "lifetime value of a customer" view in measuring ROI, and to develop and refine a variety of channels to optimize our returns.

Thoughts on Measuring User Generated Content

I have been reading a lot lately about measuring user generated content, in preparation to take on the role as Moderater for the UGC group of the Web Analytics Association. I keep coming across discussions about measuring audience engagement. People publishing alternative formulas for quantifying audience engagement using bounce rate, recency and frequency as proxies for different aspects of engagement. They are all informative discussions of the alternative means of establishing a metric. They introduce potentially useful new paradigms. And yet, I find myself continually asking - why?

I have to admit that the "audience engagement" metric smells to me like one of those marketing-championed, artificial, qualitative-concept-as-performance-statistic labels like "brand awareness"... Sorry, I am a direct marketer at heart, and I´m all about the conversion ratio - It´s why I love analytics. Brand awareness is mostly a happy side-effect of maximizing sales, or some other desired "transaction" in my world.

When I first enrolled in a graduate business program, I was majoring in nonprofit administration, with a focus on the administration of arts organizations. I remember during my first year, I was taking a Policy course, in which the prof stood up and asked everyone "What is the manager´s primary responsibility?" I figured this was one of those broad discussion topic questions, and people around the classroom were piping up with all kinds of answers about efficiency, facilitation, training of their reports, clarifying vision and mission and so on.

The professor just stood looking grim and dismissive, subtly shaking his head. It began to dawn on me that this was not a topic for discussion. There was a right answer, according to him. Only one, and here it is:

The primary responsibility of management is to maximize shareholder value.

This event particularly stands out in my memory because, as a young and idealistic nonprofit-administration major, I had to wade into the fray, and start arguing about whether the point held true when there was no profit motive. No profit? Inconceivable. My classmates largely decided I was idealistic and naive.

But when I think about it, the statement does hold true for me. Where there is no profit motive, the constituents are the shareholders. The responsibility of governments is to maximize value for its citizens. My responsibility as a Marketing Manager is to maximize the value for the shareholders in the company where I am employed.

Add to this two other things that I have come to believe about designing analytics systems.

1. For an interaction between two parties to be useful and measurable online, there must be a "transaction" - an exchange of items of value, whether it is email address in exchange for whitepaper, or dollars in exchange for box of chocolates (more on this in an upcoming article).

2. The objective of a performance metric is to track expected or predicted progress towards a specific, measureable goal, based on historical performance.

And so, with this in mind, I come back to the question of measuring User Generated Content, and the audience engagement metric. And I just want to present the idea in the following framework.

I am a Marketing Manager. My responsibility is to maximize shareholder value. In that context, how does measuring audience engagement serve my objectives, constitute a transaction, and track predicted progress towards a measurable goal? The answer to these questions will, I believe, serve as a framework to lead me to the appropriate metric for audience engagement.

Of course, it is obvious that the development and contribution of user generated content constitutes a significant, and valuable transaction on a website (in most cases, excluding spam, and other like content that subtracts, rather than adds value). I don´t think any marketer would argue this point in the world of web 2.0. But the measurement of this contribution must be placed in the context of a specific a measurable goal that serves towards the objective of "maximizing shareholder value", in order to constitute an applicable metric.

What do you think? Should measuring user generated content be subjected to a more rigorous framework, or is there perhaps value in an organic approach, to identify possible future goals, metrics or trends opportunistically? I propose that such activities are usually a distraction for upper management, and breed misunderstanding, wrong assumptions and distrust of the analytics process. Do you agree or disagree?

Social Networking, User Generated Content and Designing Analytics

I have, for several years been a subscriber to Christopher Knight´s free newsletter www.ezinearticles.com. This morning, I received an invitation from him to connect via:

Linkedin
Myspace
Facebook
Twitter

I accepted his invitation to connect on LinkedIn, because of their handy notification system which tells me when he adds new connections...and as a metrics junkie, I am really curious to know what kind of conversion rates he gets. I wrote in my invitation to connect and asked him to let me know how many invitations went out, so I could get some kind of ballpark idea of the response rates. Of course, I have no idea where I fall in the response curve, so whatever I can observe is suspect as an indicator of what Chris actually experiences in terms of response.

Hopefully he´ll write and tell me what kind of response he got. Now that we´re linkedin buddies.

I recently joined the Web Analytics Association, and volunteered to help coordinate an online special interest group on "measuring user generate content". So, of course, faced with the pressure of writing some stuff to contribute, I´ve been looking at everything through the UGC lense the last little while.

I have to admit, UGC and Social Networking to me spill over into eachother´s swimming pools a lot. I have no idea where to draw the lines. I mean, here is some UGC spawned by Chris´s mailing this morning (look at me, calling him Chris, now).

So, like always, when puzzling with this kind of fuzzy area, I go back to what for me is "first principles".

"What am I trying to acheive?" defines how I approach measuring. How well does the UGC serve my objectives? and what proxies can I construct from within the available data to represent the milestones in moving toward my objectives?

So...connecting to someone I have never met or worked with on linkedin.com presents all kinds of interesting questions.

Have I in some way established a closer relationship with Chris Knight by connecting to him on linkedin? He surely will get a better idea of who his readers are. I checked, and he has 500+ connections (we were already 3rd level connected via 7 or 8 other people). Now, the UGC of his contacts, their profiles, their relationships, has been brought into my field of vision. I wonder how the Web Analytics guys at linkedin interpret that data.

How do they measure UGC?

What defines success for them? If each of their members has a higher average number of connections, can they take that stat as indicitave of business success? Or could it possibly be indicative of a dilution of the primary objectives of linkedin? which for me, as a user, is at least partially to establish some level of prequalification or trust among new contacts. If everyone is a contact, how do I differentiate?

How do other people decide who to connect to via various social networking channels, and how do those decisions to connect define their perception of the channel, its usefulness, and their propensity to generate UGC for the channel? And most importantly for the analytics junkie...how can we extract and interpret data that will accurately inform us about these things...and serve our objectives?