Tealium is proud to have accomplished the Google Analytics accreditation process to become a Google Analytics Authorized Consultant (GAAC). This is in addition to our recent accreditation as a Google AdWords Consultant.

The combined certifications allow us to extend our web analytics and online marketing expertise to clients of Google Analytics and Google AdWords.

You can find out more information about our Google Analytics services via this link.

A while back we published a post on using Google to predict elections. A similar post has recently been submitted by Jeremiah Owyang on the use of social networking stats for similar analysis. Obviously, in both cases, one cannot heavily rely on these numbers to predict elections, as they’re a reflection of interest and one cannot guarantee that interest turns into votes. But in both cases, there’s a great deal of entertainment value associated with the data.

However, a recent article in New York Times reveals a much more powerful side of Google Trends. In this case, Google is using its search data ot track the spread of flu within the United States. More specifically, deta from last year revealed that Google saw a spike in number of searches for terms such as “flu symptoms” about two weeks before the CDC (Centers for Disease Control) reported regional outbreaks. The graph below shows the comparison between the two data sources.

I must admit this is one of the most clever uses of Google Trends as it captures real data in a manner that can be used to actually predict trends. Congratulations to the folks at Google.

Google recently announced a major upgrade to Google Analytics. The new version now includes features and functionalities once available to high-end solutions. Among these new features is the Advanced Segments functionality which lets users create complex segments using a drag-and-drop interface. In order to help users get started, Google has already included a number of pre-defined segments such as “New Visitors”, “Returning Visitors”, “Search Traffic”, “Direct Traffic”, etc.

The pre-defined segments should greatly increase user adoption of this functionality. At the same time, users will be able to further extend the value they get from the tool. We’re going to outline some additional segments that can further add value. For this post, we’re going to concentrate on lead generation site types, whose goal is to generate leads for the sales team that are eventually closed off-line.

Note: These segments are also applicable in other web analytics solutions, even though the examples are provided for Google Analytics.

Some quick win segments that you can get started with are:

1. Form Page Visits
2. Form Abandonment Visits
3. Engaged Visits
4. Highest Value Conversions

Form Page Visits: One of the pre-defined segments in Google Analytics is “Visits with Conversion”. As long as you’ve defined your site goals in Google Analytics, this segment will filter out visits where a goal event has occurred. The segment will let you identify your most effective acquisition sources for example. However, you can take Google Analytics to the next level and define a segment based on visits where your site visitors hit the form pages (just before the conversion). Why? People who make it to the form pages are also considered as qualified visitors, even though they don’t fill out the forms. This segment will also let you identify your best acquisition sources, whether a conversion occurs or not. This segment can be created by selecting the dimension “Page” from the “Content” list and typing in the name of your form pages. If you have multiple form pages, you can add them by adding an “or” statement.

Form Abandonment Visits: This segment will filter out visitors that make it to the form pages but do not complete the process. This segment is valuable because it lets you identify where you’re leaving money on the table. This segment will consist of two filters. The first one is similar to that used for the “Form Page Visits” segment. The second filter is using the metric “Total Goal Completions” and setting the value to equal zero. The relationship between the two filters should be an “and” statement.

Engaged Visits: Regardless of whether your visitors convert or hit the form pages or not, you’re still interested in how they consume your content. The “Engaged Visits” segment lets you filter out the site visitor that are engaged in your content. An easy way to do this is to start by your average number of pages views per visit and time on site. You can then build a segment with two filters. The first filter is by selecting the “Pageviews” metric and making sure that it is set to a value greater than your average. The second filter (“and” statement) uses the “Time on Site” metric, as shown in the figure below. You can take also this segment to the next level by adding recency into the equation. Eric Peterson has recently posted about this very topic, and we recommend his approach for media sites. For lead generation sites a simplified engagement approach should suffice.

Highest Value Conversions: Not all web leads are created equal. For companies that offer only one product or service, this may not be an issue. But for many lead generation sites and companies that offer multiple products, this will be of importance. For example, you may have a free and a paid version of your product. In that case, you would be more interested in visits that result in a lead for your higher-end products.

In some cases, this may be an easy segment to build if your conversion pages for your various products are different. Often times, you’re using the same form page to capture leads for all your products. In such cases, we recommend that you allow visitors to choose which products they’re interested in form within the forms and capture the user selection in Google’s User Defined variable. By doing so, you can then build a segment based on the “User Defined Value” dimension under the “Visitors” group. The new segment will then allow you to determine where to target in order to capture leads for your highest value products.

We’re all looking forward to the eMetrics conference next week. This is the premier event for everything and anything web analytics and with all the changes happening in the industry, this event is a must.

We’re specifically interested in connecting with other industry experts and see how organizations are tackling their analytics challenges.

If you’re also attending the event, please drop us a note.

Ever come across reports that make you scratch your head and wonder “what can I possibly do with the data”?

Apparently, this is not just isolated to web analytics. An analysis of the VP debate by a language monitoring service shows that the phenomenon also applies to the world of politics. Here’s a link to the story.

Highlight KPIs from the VP debate:

Sentences per paragraph: 2.7 for Biden and 2.6 for Palin.

Letters per word: tied at 4.4.

Ease of reading: Biden, 66.7 (with 100 being the easiest to read or hear), versus 62.4 for Palin.

Number of words spoken: 5,492 for Biden and5,235 for Palin.

There is definitely entertainment value in the data, but not much value beyond that.

Why do we bring this up? Because we’ve seen many web analytics practitioners fall into the same trap. Yes, you can measure just about everything online: detailed user interactions, mouse movements, etc. But just because you can measure it doesn’t mean you should. Rather, you should always start with the question “what would I do with the data”.

One of the most popular KPIs for lead generation sites is “Cost per Lead”. It lets marketers know whether they’re spending the right amount on marketing campaigns. However, a better KPI for such customers is “Cost Per Qualified Lead”. It provides a more accurate picture of the campaign performance.

The following is what a customer has recently shared with us regarding their use of WebToCRM.

Note: the numbers have been revised in this post.

After running a number of online campaigns, they were able to use their web analytics solution to determine high-level performance metrics such as campaign clickthroughs, conversion rates and cost per lead. The sample data is shown in the first graph below.

The campaign conversion rates are mostly within the same range. However, because of the higher conversion rates and lower cost per click (CPC), newsletters end up generating a much better cost per lead (CPL). Based on this data, it would make sense to take some budget away from search engines, which have the highest cost per lead and put that money towards more newsletter sponsorships.

However, the customer did not stop there. Thanks to WebToCRM, they integrated their online campaign data into their salesforce.com implementation and decided to break down their leads into two classifications:

• Qualified leads: these are defined as leads with complete and accurate information, including the person’s full contact information, job title and decision making timeline.
• Unqualified leads: these are leads with incomplete or inaccurate information such as fake email addresses, etc.

How do the numbers hold up when you look at qualified leads instead of just the raw number of leads? The picture turned out to be quite different and is shown below.

With a simple “Cost per Lead” KPI model which is what many web analytics practitioners use, the company would have diverted money from search engines into newsletters. However, the more relevant “Cost Per Qualified Lead” KPI shows that the customer would be well served doing the exact opposite. Although search engines provided fewer leads per click than newsletters, they also provided a far higher percentage of qualified leads. The client is therefore going to continue its investment in search engine marketing.

Still wondering about the value of cross-channel analytics? Think it’s expensive? Take another look at WebToCRM. It lets you integrate your online campaign data into your CRM application, regardless of what web analytics or CRM tool you use. Best of all, the Free edition give you the same level of data that you see in this example.

Ever tried measuring the return on investment of your press releases? Although seemingly simple, the process turns out to be more complex than one might think.

Recently we published a press release announcing the WebToCRM product. For those of you interested, it can be found here.

The purpose of the press release was to introduce WebToCRM, but also to generate traffic and leads to the tealium.com Web site. So how did the press release do? It turned out to be quite successful as shown in the chart below. It ended up generating a tremendous boost in traffic.

The site traffic on May 20 increased exponentially on the day of the PR launch. Given the fact that Tealium is a startup and the site does not get much traffic today, clearly the increase can be attributed to the press release.

But drilling down into the data reveals a hidden value of PR that cannot be detected by web analytics solutions. To analyze this more, we’ve broken down the traffic by source. The categories analyzed are “Bookmarks or Directly Referred” (typically direct traffic to the site or emails), “Search Engines”, “PR Sources” (compilation of referring URLs associated with the news stories), and others (not fitting any of these mentioned categories). The results are shown in the figure below.

We’re analyzing two seven-day periods, one before the release and the other after the release. The results are definitely revealing. Obviously, the PR traffic increased since there was no PR the previous week. But more interesting is the fact that both the bookmark and search engine traffic increased dramatically as well. In other words, there’s a hidden value to PR that previously hasn’t been mentioned in the Web analytics world. Because of the press release, more people came to the site directly and more people searched for “Tealium” on search engines.

If you’re a marketing veteran, the results make sense. Press releases are a great medium for generating awareness. Also, by creating a marketing mix that includes multiple touch points (PR, search, banners, trade shows, etc.), you’ll get an overall result that exceeds each one of the touch points combined. In other words, 1+1+1=4.

However, it also reveals the challenges associated with PR measurement. It shows both the effectiveness of online PR, as well as the difficulty of measuring it. In our case, this was not a difficult task, because of the reasonably low traffic that we were getting before the press release. But if you’re a high traffic site, measuring the effectiveness of PR becomes much more challenging and certainly an area that has not been addressed by Web analytics solutions.

The field of PR measurement today consists of understanding your Outputs, Outtakes and Outcomes. Outputs and Outtakes are fairly simply to measure, but Outcomes (the business results of the PR – site visits and conversions in the online world) are much harder to measure, and ironically more valuable. We’d love to hear back from you about your experiences in this field and what you’ve done in your organizations to solve this problem.

The Tealium team is proud to bring closed loop marketing to the masses. Once an undertaking feasible only to large organizations with deep IT investments, WebToCRM lets you integrate your online marketing and web behavior data into your CRM solution – for free. That’s right: free.

WebToCRM works independent of your web analytics or CRM platforms and requires no integration between solutions. It is a JavaScript based solution that lets you push your online campaign parameters into your CRM solution in real time.

WebToCRM comes in three editions:

• The Free Edition lets you capture your online marketing campaign parameters (up to four) and pass them to your CRM or internal database once a lead capture event occurs.
• The Plus Edition provides what’s available in the Free Edition, plus session referrer, page view and time spent during session (aka engagement metrics) upon the lead capture event.
• Finally, the Custom Edition lets you capture custom data points that you can use within your CRM solution for lead scoring purposes.

WebToCRM is completely independent of your web analytics platform: Google Analytics, IndexTools, MS Gatineau, Omniture, Coremetrics, WebTrends, Unica, Xiti or any other provider.
Additionally, it can pass the data collected into any CRM solution including Salesforce, SugarCRM, NetSuite or your own internal databases.

We will be posting additional posts soon on uses and best practices associated with the WebToCRM solution. In the meantime, feel free to configure and download your free version of WebToCRM. What do you have to lose?

In the traditional offline media (TV, radio, print), agencies typically charge 15% of the marketing spend as their fees. So for example, if your company is spending $100,000 on print advertising, the agency that you’ve hired gets $15,000 for their services, which could include ad design and creation, media engagement, etc.

I recently came across a great column by Kevin Lee mentioning that because of all the optimization work that has to be done around SEM, the 15% fee may not be enough and clients should be willing to spend more on agency fees. Kevin is right. There’s a lot of work that needs to be done in the area of SEM optimization. Here’s a few must-dos for an effective campaign:

• Research the list of potential keywords to be targeted
• Select the keywords to be targeted through SEO, those through SEM, and those through both
• Create the right ads for keywords. You simply cannot use the same ad for all your keywords and the rule applies as you go from one outlet to next
• Determine the budget to be allocated to each
• Create specialized landing pages for each ad
• Well, you get the idea …

This becomes especially an issue with smaller clients since they won’t be able to leverage the economies of scale and scope enjoyed by larger clients who spend more money on more keywords.

At the same time, I couldn’t help but notice the disincentive between CPC and agency fees. I understand why agencies use a 15% fee on offline ads – there’s no viable measurement beyond the output. You can only reasonably measure the number of times and the money spent on ads. But in the online world, things are different. You can measure the entire visitor cycle – from impressions, to clicks to conversions.

Think about it: would you rather spend $10,000 and generate 10 leads or spend $1,000 and generate 50 leads? Of course you’d like the latter, but in the world where agencies are paid by CPC, their incentive is to spend more money. They’ll benefit from having you spend $10,000, whether the campaigns are optimized or not, whether the conversion funnels are streamlined or not.

Ideally, agency incentives should be the same as the clients: get the most you possibly can from your marketing budget. This means that their fees should be tied to your conversions – online purchase, leads, registrations or whatever they may be. Don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying agencies should not be paid for all the optimization work that they do. They absolutely should. But perhaps it’s time to introduce more complex pricing schemes that do every body justice: a one-time fee and maintenance fee to cover the work to be done to get the campaign going, and a conversion/engagement bonus that gives the agencies the incentive to outperform.

This way, the agencies will get compensated with all the leg work necessary to get started and will be incentivized to constantly outperform, to constantly work on ways to increase their campaign conversions.

I’d also like to hear about some of the payment schemes you’ve used that have worked for you.

This is the third and final post of a three-part series on top reports for your site search. As a reminder, they are:

1. Search Usage
2. Searches per Search Visit
3. Top Search Terms
4. Top Failed Terms
5. Visitor Segmentation
6. Top Pages Driving Search
7. Search Groupings
8. Success Rate
9. Micro Step Success Rate

In this post, we?re going to cover the last three items.

7. Search Groupings

This practice refers to grouping of search terms into categories that make business sense. These groupings ought to be done by business people and not necessarily managed by the capabilities of your site search tool or content management solution.

For example, an electronics reseller may want to categorize the terms ?ipod? and ?zune? as the category ?MP3 players? and treat ?ipod case?, ?ipod speaker? and ?ipod armband? as the category ?MP3 Accessories?. We find this practice to be manageable when done in a spreadsheet such as Microsoft Excel and using the vlookup function.

Why go through this exercise? The answer is because it reveals information about which categories or groupings are most popular among searchers. The information can be used to build a better navigation menu ? one that supports your visitors? interests. So for example, if you find the category ?MP3 Accessories? to represent a large enough portion of your site search traffic, then you can add the category into your navigation menu.

8. Success Rate

Let?s face it. The whole point of implementing a site search is to enhance the user experience towards your business objectives. So if your business objectives is online sales, then site search performance should be assessed using this objective. And if your site goal is to generate leads, then your site search results should be assessed using that objective. Most web analytics tools today will account for this type of reporting. The goal is simply to understand what search terms are converting best so that you can improve your site-wide promotional offerings. Consider the table shown below.

Simply looking at the search conversion report reveals what products have the better success rate and therefore will provide a higher return when being promoted on your site. So if you?re considering promoting a gaming device on your home page, you can see from the above data that Playstation 3 provides the biggest bang for the buck. Even though its conversion rate is less than Xbox 360, because of its higher price it provides more revenue per search than other products.

The search conversion report will provide you information on what works best ? in terms of conversions and dollar values. However when it comes to providing more insight about the reasons, it can come short. This is why we use micro-conversions so that we gain a deeper understanding into the sales funnel. This is covered in the next point.

9. Micro Step Success Rate

Lets face it. Your visitors don?t buy or fill out a form straight from your search pages. The goal of your site search is not to sell an item, but to help you find it. There is a sales cycle that visitors have to go through. First they have to find the product (this is what your site search is designed to do). Then, they have to add the product to cart, and they?ll have to go through the checkout steps on your site. At each stage, various things have to be accomplished to get the visitor to the next stage.

Let?s go back to the conversion table from the previous example, where the conversion rate for each search term is shown. We can see from the table that the terms ?wii? and ?wii sports bundle? are really underperforming compared to others in their category. Does this means that your visitors are not interested in Wii products? Not necessarily. The best way to find out is to look at the micro conversions for these same search terms. This is shown in the table below.

The micro conversions reveal a very different picture. It shows that in fact the click-throughs from search to product pages for the terms ?wii? and ?wii sports bundle? are higher than those of ?playstation 3? and ?xbox 360?. It is however at the product pages that the Wii products underperform. We therefore need to revisit these product pages, at which point we come across the following scenario, shown below.

These products enjoy a high click-through, but once visitors get to the product page, they?re presented with an ?out of stock? message that stops their progress.

Micro conversions let you see the progress at each step and therefore let you diagnose your site at each step of the way. They make it easier to understand where in your site you should concentrate in order to streamline the site conversion.

Conclusion

Of course, based on your site objectives and site search deployment, you will find some reports more valuable than others, but you should be able to select from the list provided in this series to better optimize your site search. Also, if you need help getting the right reporting dashboard in place, we’re here to help.