One of the important features of the "Emetrics Summit" (24-26 May, Four Seasons Hotel) http://www.emetrics.org/summit604 is that we spend a great of time in group discussions.

Yes, there are plenty of speakers (Amazon, Argos, MSN, HP, etc.) but the focus is on people meeting and conferring with their peers on the issues they face on a daily basis. Suggestions for topics are requested from the audience and I like to seed the creative process by offering up some options.

Therefore, I'm turning to the participants of e-consultancy for ideas. What's bothering you in the area of measuring website success? What would you like to ask your web analytics peers?

Yes to all of those. Here are 3 more issues I am interested in:

A. Diminishing returns from conversion optimisation
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The design-offers-messaging-navigation of many established e-tail sites have been well optimised to maximise conversion rates. What are the future options for further increasing conversion? For example personalisation according to behaviour on site plus existing profile information.

B. Customer scoring.
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Given that maximising the lifetime value of purchasers should be an aim of all e-tailers, I am interested to discuss different techniques companies use to model customers to help better target them to improve LTV. I think it is useful to score customers individually according to their activity / interaction levels on site and to e-mail i.e. not only look at their responsiveness to individual e-mail campaigns but across the whole year, which customers engage with e-mail and the web site and then follow-up communications according to responsiveness. Recency-Frequency-Monetary value/FRAC are the well known ones, but what other approaches are used?

C.Process and Six Sigma.
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This is similar to Ashley's first one.

What is best practice for the big-picture process of improving a site's contribution to the business. For example, take the DMAIC Six Sigma tool of Define, Measure, Analyze, Improve and Control.

What are the cycle times for this process for different types of metrics and who is involved - particular marketers outside the e-commerce core?

How is this linked in to business objectives?

Also how are the metrics from different analytics tools and channels reconciled and consolidated? What sort of dashboards are people using?

It would also be interesting to see who is planning / using the Six Sigma approach.

I hope that helps. I'm looking forward to the event - you have lined up some great speakers.

Dave Chaffey
============
Internet Marketing trainer, consultant and author
eResources and Books: www.marketing-online.co.uk

On 13:03:00 4 May 2004 Ashley wrote:
>Hi Jim
>
>The 3 questions which we'll be discussing at our
>roundtable on web measurement and analytics at the end of
>this month (details at http://www.e-
>consultancy.com/about/roundtables/680/web-measurement-
>analytics.html) are:
>
>1. How do you ensure you actually act on what web
>analytics tells you?
>(e.g. internal business processes, optimisation, resource
>and skills requirements, turnaround times)
>
>2. How do you integrate web analytics into multi-channel
>measuement?
>(e.g. CRM integration, avoiding channel silos,
>cross-channel tracking)
>
>3. How do you combine user-centric data with site-centric
>data to optimise ROI
>(e.g. customer profiles vs. traffic data, usability vs.
>path analysis, surveys vs. web stats)
>
>These are based on feedback we've had from the attendees
>as to their key challenges at the moment.
>
>I think you're coming to the roundtable anyway aren't you?
>If you could figure out the answers at the Emetrics Summit
>in the preceeding days it will save us some time at the
>roundtable... ;)
>
>Ashley

I disagree that the broader issues you mention are "chronically overlooked" by practitioners - particularly e-tailers - they have to look at the big picture.

But I agree in that the term 'web analytics' is often used narrowly to refer to the detailed analysis of clickstreams, customer segmentation and behaviour, etc rather than the bigger picture of how e-marketing contributes to achieving business objectives. I think the problem is with the term - I run workshops on 'Improving E-marketing Peformance' which is all about increasing channel contribution through using web, e-mail and underlying databases to support all marketing activities. Similarly Jim talks about 'Channel Performance Management' which suggests the big picture and the contribution.

By chance I just received my copy of Eric Peterson's 'Web Analytics Demystified' and I think you would argue that this supports your argument - it concentrates on the detailed metrics to improve performance (but does this well). Eric gives a host of analyst definitions and his definition is:

'Web analytics is the assessment of a variety of data, including web traffic, web-based transactions, web server performance, usability studies, user submitted information [i.e. surveys], and related sources to help create a generalised understanding of the visitor experience online.'

You will be pleased to see that usability is in there and I think researching customers views in various ways need to be in there too.

To me the definition seems to have a fatal flaw - it suggests analysis for the sake of it. My definition is (slightly) more succinct:

"Web analytics is the customer-centred evaluation of the effectiveness of Internet-based marketing in order to improve the business contribution of online channels to an organisation.

Dave Chaffey
===========
Internet Marketing trainer, consultant and author
eResources and Books: www.marketing-online.co.uk

Yes, good point Debbie - I was jsut thinking within my marketing interest, but of course, IR, employee intranets and buy-side interactions are part of it. I think most of the books on the topic concentrate on the sell-side though, with maybe some mention of intranets.

Dave

I have been following this thread with keen interest. Many of the posts have valid comments, however isn’t “key intelligence still missing”, part of the problem in driving online success and aligning online activities to off line business goals?

The fundamental value of the online process is the generation of interaction and the value of individual interactions as it relates to achieving business objectives. If the goal is to understand the value of each interaction (or lack there of) and respond accordingly (treat individual visitors differently in order to maximise profitability), then we need to ask ourselves one simple question:

How will we achieve this online if we cannot identify our customers’, investors and other known business stakeholders online actions independently from other visitor activity? The inability to differentiate between visitors and understand their value or motivation to interact with the website or email is a fundamental online business development stumbling block.

Broadly speaking, we simply continue to “blindly date” our customers and other stakeholders with minimal intelligence being available to improve the business process. Each visitor, visit, page impression and click generated is treated equally in the intelligence gathering process, when in reality they are far from being equal, based on varying customer value, the stage of the sales cycle, their response to a campaign and if they are a first time visitor or returning visitor etc.

Companies developing online communication and business channels need meaningful intelligence that goes beyond “nice to have” stats and provides “real actionable intelligence” which can be easily related to objectives, whether it is new customer acquisition, stakeholder retention, improved sales, improved return on investment from campaigns etc.

To achieves this, I believe three significant changes need to take place in order to bring web analytics/ intelligence in line with business management goals and objectives, namely:

- The ability to effectively segment and differentiate between website visitor groups based on each website owner’s requirements, rather than treating all traffic as being equal.

- Be able to identify and track known business stakeholders’ web interactions over defined periods of time, such as customers, channel partners, investors etc. Website owners need to be able to translate visits and page impressions generated into potential business value and assess this against objectives.

- Visitor interaction tracking and reporting over extended periods of time. This is a move away from visit, click and page impression counting and comparing traffic numbers month-by-month and a conscious decision to focus on the individual visitor and their interactions over extended periods of time.

Comments would be appreciated.
Steven Liversedge