Customer Listening Blog

Happy New Year... for Web Analytics...

Web Analytics Market Set to Defy Recession

January 9 2009

In the US, a survey conducted by the Web Analytics Association (WAA) has found that more than 96% of respondents plan to increase or maintain current spending on web analytics during the year. While the survey of more than 650 marketing and analytics professionals highlighted that more than 40% of respondents see funding as their biggest challenge, WAA says that the investment outlook is positive. Around 8 in 10 (81%) plan to invest in consulting and staffing to help make the most out of their existing analytics tools, and take action on the data they provide to improve web site performance. Also, 41% say they will be investing in add-on tools, such as those for behavioral targeting and paid search. Results also reveal a demand to have business decisions driven by analytics, with 65% of respondents claiming this as their top web analytics initiative in 2009. Other top priorities identified include best practices implementation, KPI development, process development and getting executive management awareness and support on web analytics. Both WAA members and non-members took part in the survey, and respondents represented a wide range of job functions from the US, Canada, Europe, the Middle East, Africa, Latin America and Asia Pacific. The full results are available at: www.webanalyticsassociation.org .

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The disturbing truth about metrics

I just read a great article from Susan Kuchinskas on ImediaConnection.com.

Indeed, as I am currently wirting an article about using web data to predict market share and sales, I found Susan article useful to put things in perspectives when it comes to understanding internet audience measurement... It was said at the beginning of the Internet that you could measure everything on the Internet, the truth is that you can count everything rather than measure everything because as Susan explains, the different methods to measure provide different results...the truth is probably an hybrid approach using both panel and site centric approaches. At the end, what I usually say is make up your opinion using different sources to understand dynamics then you are smarter thanks to the data gathered...indeed, as marketers we should not complain too much about different results, for years we cried to get more data, now that we have a lot just let's use it and make sense of it...At this stage both Analysis and Intuition are keys to make the right decision...Clearly, the game is different for media owners that make their living on audience mesurement... The future still holds passionated debates and innovations in this area...

To read the full article from Susan Kuchinskas.

Emetrics San Francisco Conference: Impressions

I was at the emetrics conference last week in San Francisco, crmmetrix was indeeed a bronze sponsor and I must say that the conference was really good for us.

First and foremost, clearly continuous listening on websites is really taking off and very encouragingly for us, our postionning around the 6 Dimensions of Website Effectiveness goes a long way to both differentiate ourselves from competition (that mainly and only focus on measuring satisfaction) and get client attention and interest. This was cleraly and nicely supported during Tim Goudie keynote speech on the wednesday. Tim is Group Manager, Interactive Marketing, The Coca-Cola Company and largely mentioned our work to support the Coca-Cola Company to measure and manager the ROI of Interactive efforts (with SiteCRM).

Obviously the conference will not be a success if the people that make the web analytics space were not engaging, passionated, entertaining and fun to hang out with. This is exactly the type of people we had teh chance to meet with at the conference. So congratulations to Jim Sterne and the organizers at large, and see you soo!

technorati tags: emetrics sitecrm tim goudie 6 dimensions website effectiveness crmmetrix

US E-TAIL SALES PREDICTED TO SOAR BY 17% IN 2008

NEW YORK: Cocking a snoot at the recession-beset US economy, internet shopping spend is predicted to rise this year by a healthy 17%, according to Forrester Research's survey for Shop.org, the online arm of the National Retail Federation,

Excluding travel purchases, retail sales online in 2008 are set to grow to $204 billion (€129.82bn; £102.74bn) from $174.5bn last year, fueled by sales of apparel, computers and autos.

Although forecast growth lags last year's 21% increase, NRF officials attribute it to the maturing of the business, not the sluggish economy. E-commerce "is clearly the bright spot in retailing," says Shop.org executive director Scott Silverman.

Data sourced from Business Week (online) /Associated Press; additional content by WARC staff, 09 April 2008

Crmmetrix Sponsor of the eMetrics conference - San Francisco - May 4-7 2008 -

Come and meet us face to face at the eMetrics conference - San Francisco - May 4-7 2008.

We will have a booth and will be able to discuss our latest development and technology including the release of our SiteCRM 6 dimensions website effectiveness solution. Come and meet us face to face!

For more information, to register for the eMetrcis conference

technorati tags: emetrics conference san francisco SiteCRM 6 dimensions crmmetrix website ROI website satisfaction web analytics

Online Marketer's Resolutions for 2008

As the new year starts, every marketer should have on his/her agenda simple resolutions to grow its customer equity:

Mine are simple, and stick to what I strongly believe in :

- Think Strategically and Act Tactically : Vision without execution is hallucination. The quote often attributed to Thomas Edison is worth remembering at each step of your planning stage, planning is necessary, tactically implementations of strategic plans is the way to go. Some people might even add that execution without vision might be "masturbation", but too often, we are too involved in the day to day to deliver on execution and do not take the time to think before acting. Take a step back, think about the oevrall goal, evaluate, decide, act and control throughout to make sure you are on track strategically and timing wise. This specifcally applies to website management. For exempe, website measurement tends to be tactical, tracking clicks, counting traffic is tactical nature what really matters is to define a set of metrics to benchmark your strategic directions, some type of a balanced scored card for the website mixing both quantitaive and qualitative metrics. Easy to do? No, not really depends on your site overall objective and importance within the company.

- Learn as much as you can from your customers by Listening. Again probaly not a surprise, but in a customer driven world, the customer is king. As such, the growth of e-commerce will continue in 2008, the size of its growth year to year will mathematically slow down...the challenge is now more than ever a challenge of planning and acting for customer loyalty. Online, Loyalty rules. Again, quantitative website metrics are good but will fall short at understanding what really drives customer loyalty. The only way to know is to converse an listen to your online visitors continuously. Through our SiteCRM website continuous listening solution, we' ve seen that since 2001 the higher the value of site experience, the better is loyalty towards the site and the brand. So let's be humble and lets' listen to our online customers.

See you in 2008 and happy to Listen.

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Join the Web Analytics 2.0 Group on Facebook

As you know I've been measuring websites from a customer standpoint for bearly 10 years now and always believed that beyond "counting" Web Analytics should measure the why of "People", "Customers" on wesbites, so here it is join teh discussion and share your experience on the topic and on Web Analytics at large join us on www.Facebook.com

Web Analytics 2.0: "Web Analytics 1.0 was about data and machines, Web Analytics 2.0 is about People! Come inside to share insights about the "Why" and not only the "What" of web analytics. If you want to know if you website works, simply ASK the People that visit it! Simple, Obvious, too many times overlooked!"

See you there, come and comment share your experiences!

Consumers search CPG products online and Land on Brand Wesbites!

An interesting in Ad Age today that indeed show that consumers of cpg products act for cpg products as they do for other more durable goods...They Search Online! As such, the winners will be the one that provide what they want on their brand wesbites... So measuring the site experience is again key to drive the site experience up and close the loop with consumers... We've been preaching this for over 6 years now with SiteCRM continuous qualtitaive measurement solution on brand wesbites...

The article from Ad Age below (Jack Neff)

Study Finds Large Audience Online for Package-Goods Brands
Published: October 23, 2007

BATAVIA, Ohio (AdAge.com) -- Research released today by ComScore defies long-cherished beliefs that people don't care enough about package-goods products to do online search about them or go to their websites.

According to ComScore, people who visited package-goods sites via search rather than other means tended to be higher income, better educated, more female and bigger category spenders.

The study found a majority of U.S. consumers visited at least one package-goods website during the three months ended in April, with search driving a substantial proportion of those visits.

Food, baby-care sites
Food product sites drew 93.7 million visitors collectively during the three-month period, 47% of them coming from search, according to ComScore. Baby-care sites got an even bigger proportion of their 26 million unique visitors from search at 60%.

Collectively, those audiences are huge -- bigger certainly than the vast majority of TV programs or print media plans for most package-goods marketers. Those 26 million visitors to baby-care sites compare to only 20 million children under 5 years old as counted by the 2000 U.S. Census, indicating some grandparents, expectant moms or baby-shower shoppers may be swelling the ranks, too.

Ironically, the data would seem to indicate that search, along with brand websites, could be the mass-reach vehicle package-goods marketers have found lacking since media began fragmenting in the 1970s.

"Search really can be thought of as a reach vehicle, and even more powerfully, reaching people who clearly are engaging with your product," said James Lamberti, a former Clorox Co. executive who's now senior VP-media for ComScore.

Under-spend in category
Yet the surprising traffic comes despite the fact package-goods marketers continue to under-spend many other industries online, with most industry marketers, including study participant Procter & Gamble Co., spending low-single-digit percentages of their measured-media outlays on the internet, according to TNS Media Intelligence data for the first half of 2007. P&G spent 2.1% of its $1.6 billion outlay online, up from 1.4% a year ago.

The measured data doesn't include search, but research firm Jupiter estimates search currently accounts for less than 20% of overall package-goods online media spending.

Even so, P&G, whose partners in the study include Yahoo and the Search Engine Marketing Professionals Organization, sees the data as a sign of the power of search marketing.

"I think there's this mentality that 'This is package goods. Sure they're going to use search for a car or a mortgage, but they're not using it for deodorant or skin care,'" Mr. Lamberti said. "But in fact they do."

"P&G wants to increase our spending on the marketing elements that have the best return on investment for us," said Randy Peterson, search innovation manager for P&G. "It's increasingly looking like search is a good way to spend marketing dollars. Is it a panacea for us? No."

One of the most interesting aspects of the study, he said, was the extent to which it showed people are using search to find information in their daily lives.

"It started in the technical world, moved to books, DVDs and travel," he said. "Now people are realizing, 'I can even look up information about coffee and laundry detergent online.' It's become a natural way people use to get information of all kinds."

Of particular interest, Mr. Peterson said, was that searchers who came to package-goods sites were much more category-involved and bigger spenders (by 20%) than non-searchers. "That tells us something about how we should spend our marketing dollars," he said.

Gaps in search buys
But the study also found huge gaps in search coverage by major brands on key terms in their categories. Even though ComScore's survey of online searchers found 71% expect to see major brands come up in the results when they do a search. For example, searches on the term "anti-aging" returned nothing in the top organic or paid listings for the biggest media spender and leading brand in the segment, P&G's Olay. But Johnson & Johnson rival Neutrogena has bought the top paid listing on Google and Yahoo.

Lack of significant paid search by most major brands is a key reason why only 2% to 3% of clicks for package-goods-related searches go to paid listings, compared to 12% to 13% overall for search, Mr. Lamberti said.

Among other surprises in the research, coupons and promotions play less of a role in driving traffic to package-goods sites than he expected. Only 40% of searchers and 47% of non-searchers said they went to brand sites to seek promotional deals, compared to 73% and 58% respectively who went there seeking information and help.

Overall, people who visited package-goods sites via search rather than other means tended to be higher income, better educated, more female and bigger category spenders, also underlying the relative value of search advertising, Mr. Lamberti said.

Matt Wilburn, senior category director for Yahoo on package goods, does see a trickle of movement of industry marketers toward search, which he believes could turn into more of a flood within a few years.

"As we've gone into planning meetings with clients for '08, search consistently is being asked for," he said. "CPG companies tend to be like battleships. They're slow to make big turns."

technorati tags: sitecrm cpg brand websites roi crmmetrix adage cpg search marketing

Communication Corporate online: Principaux Enseignements

Comme vous le savez, en tant que société spécialiste de l'écoute client, nous avons commencé à nous intéresser au ROI des sites corporate dès 2003. Au travers, d'un partenariat avec Bernard Tavernier, nous avons décliné une version de SiteCRM en l'adatant à la problèmatique des sites corporate: le Baromètre E-Corporate.

Nous avons organisé un petit déjeuner de présentation des principaux enseignement de l'efficacité et du ROI des sites corporate le 27 Septembre dernier. Benoit Meli du Journal du Net en fait sa une aujourd'hui (merci).

Je vous invite en à découvrir quelques enseignements: Article Baromètre E-Corporate

Pour plus d'informations, n'hésitez pas à contacter Georges Mao au 01 41 05 90 10

technorati tags: ROI site corporate Barometre e-coporate crmmetrix SiteCRM

Why make things complicated when they are simple? An example about Web Analytics

This morning, a simple, yet interesting article from Jason Barby on Clikck Z about the troubles that the Web Analytics Industry faces to make things "simple" enough for marketers to understand what they need to understand about web analytics. Jason is using the example of asking his 6 year old son, this made me smile, as I do so often with my kids as well to get their understanding about things and make sure that I am able to communicate properly as well... Trust me, not easy at all, try it, if you do not have kids ask someone that does not know anything about the subject and you will see.

In addition, I also liked Jason's son reactions, rather than inducing things from what people "do", sometimes, directly asking them what they think and what they have to say is better to get the insights from the source. In fact, the two are complementary...So use more feedback surveys to LISTEN to your website visitors rather than to "watch" them only. You will make their online experience only better and you will develop a stronger relationship with them.

technorati tags: attitudinal web analytics brand website website roi WAA website effectiveness web site analytics