Integrated Online Marketing and measurement / analytics

From all that we see, and those we talk to, measurement and analytics is an increasingly hot topic. Not really surprising as we all seek to maximise ROI. However, increasingly the challenge is how to bring together all this measuring and reporting into a single, useful view – you’ve got your ad servers, your PPC analysis, your e-mail marketing, your site activity tracking, your affiliates, and that’s just the online channel. Woven into this is also a marked trend towards increased personalisation / targeting / segmentation.

As marketers seek to understand the bigger picture of how they are attracting, converting and retaining customers – and which segments are the most valuable over time, which sources offer the lowest cost per acquisition etc. – all this data and reporting becomes a bit of a morass. The ‘sweet spot’ that everyone seems to be after is bringing this all together into cohesive and actionable business intelligence.

From a technology point of view there are few organisations that can really offer the full range at the moment – companies like DoubleClick, ValueClick and Deal Group Media coming closest with many parts of the jigsaw but not yet the full picture (though I’m sure they’re working on this). But technology aside, is there any conceptual or process approach that helps make sense of achieving the sweet spot?

My own experience tells me that the key is to put the user profile at the heart of everything you do. Make the user profile the ‘unique key’ and wrap all your measurement around that. This is by no means a new argument, and is central to good old ‘CRM’ – “the 360 degree customer view” – but many companies seem to focus on tools, products, campaigns, content and so on when they approach measurement and analytics and forget the user. Much analytics thinking seems to be based around measuring actions in isolation as opposed to understanding what a particular user is doing.

[Before proceeding I’d throw in 2 caveats – firstly that though I’m addressing online here, of course the next Holy Grail is integrated marketing across ALL channels both online and offline; secondly, that what I say currently most applies to sectors such as retail, financial services and so on where customer information is fundamental to the business, whereas other areas like publishing may be more concerned with reach than specific user profiles (I believe this will change but that’s another story). ]

Conceptually (and indeed from a technical and information architecture point of view) you should put your user profile database at the heart of your web operations. You should own that customer database and all marketing and measurement activities should ultimately tie back to unique customer profiles. This, of course, throws up the problem of user identification – what if the user isn’t registered and is unlikely to? What if they are registered but don’t log in? What if they are registered but their data is out of date? Multi-channel user identification is indeed a challenge and how you do it varies according to device/channel (more on that in the thread at http://www.e-consultancy.com/forum/761-uniquely-identifying-customers-across-wireless-web-and-itv.html). However, in the end we have to live with what we’ve got and that means accepting certain margins of error. For the web, crudely speaking, I believe that puts your site users into 2 camps: those you don’t know who they are and those who are registered (varying levels of this…) and logged in. For the former group the best way to track them is using a cookie, and once / if they then register/buy you can reconcile the data you have for that cookie to a real person. (As RedEye’s recent research highlights - http://www.redeye.com/case_data.html?nolnktyp=newsbox - this is by no means 100% accurate but it’s ‘good enough’ and the best we have).

With your user profile database at the centre of what you do (some of those users more ‘known’ to you than others) you can then layer your various analytics and measurement tools around it. Some will not ever interact directly with that data (many of the web analytics tools only look at anonymous site interaction data) which is fine – you can use those to understand more macro-level site usage patterns to optimise the site performance. Other tools will interact directly with your user data – feeding off it, adding to it etc. If all inbound and outbound activity is tied back to the user profiles then you get your holistic view because you see things from the customer, or segment, ‘outwards’ not the other way round.

The important thing is that you are not tool-centric, content-centric, campaign-centric or product-centric but user-centric. The fundamental building block for getting to that integrated marketing measurement / optimisation sweet spot is user data. And not any old user data – not pools of user data dotted about, some from transactions, some from newsletter subscriptions, some from competition entries and so on. Rather it must be user data that complies with a central, standardised, user information model (which can include stated/explicit and inferred/implicit user data). User data must be captured in a coherent manner, it must be properly managed and there needs to be a contact strategy governing how that data will be used (not to mention all the legal compliance requirements). Furthermore, the individual users themselves should be able to see and edit their own data and manage their own contact preferences.

As I say, none of this is new thinking, but I just wonder whether, as everyone stampedes towards campaign-tracking or buying site analytics tools, they have first properly got their user profile house in order? Surely to hit that integrated marketing sweet spot the user profile must be King? The content management system may work with its master to deliver personalisation, the e-mail marketing platform to deliver segmented communications, the campaign tools to deliver users that then, retrospectively, become user profiles, but no one tool or marketing channel governs the user profile. Only the user can do that.

Integrated online marketing campaign metrics/tools

I am going to violently agree with the two previous posts too.

Following up on Jim's list of systems. If we're talking customer acquisition (and the two previous posts are wider than acquisition) its still a challenge understanding the cost/effectiveness of different referral sources i.e. what is relative cost of visitor/customer acquistion between different search engines/keywords, affiliates, rented e-mail lists, online ads, etc.

However, I was surprised about the number of offerings available from vendors which give an integrated view to evaluate effectiveness of online acquisition tools as listed in this thread:
>> http://www.e-consultancy.com/forum/100356-the-best-tracking-solution-for-online-campaigns.html

I agree with Obi's two challenges that retailers are grappling with.

Regarding your second point about customers moving between channels for researching a product and then buying it....this is something that I've given thought to. We have a few automotive clients where the number of actual sales leads (test drive or brochure requests) is relatively small and the total number of resulting sales is low compared to total sales. There are some exceptions to this - for example the Mazda RX8 selling it's entire first year's production online before launch through a £1,000 deposit application - but in general manufacturers underestimate the impact of online because the metrics they have access to tell them only half the story at best.

We also know the visitor numbers for the dealer locator pages, for example, and added to this we have research by the likes of CGE&Y suggesting that 28% of consumers are likely to be influenced by manufacturer websites when choosing a vehicle, compared to only 18% that are likely to be influenced by TV.

So we're left with a situation where we are 100% confident, given all the supporting research, that manufacturer websites are contributing far more in terms of ROI than they are being given credit for using quant analysis of leads and subsequent sales, but we can't show this first hand. Manufacturers regularly run money off promotions, so it should be possible to use a cash offer on the website to be redeemed at dealerships, for only a short(ish) period of time to get an understanding of how many people taking test drives are influenced by the website. And when they redeem dealers can then ask about other media that has influenced their decision. But there seems a reluctance to do this which we're yet to overcome.

I'm sure though that there can't be the same reluctance to run something similar in other industries? There must be retailers out there who have a good idea which mediums purchasers have been influenced by, and in particular whether they have been influenced by the website but not given any personal details?

Anyone...anyone...anyone?

Ed Lamb
Account Director - syzygy UK
www.syzygy.net

Yes, I also see that a number of major retailers have “free traffic” but I think that this is only inevitable. Big brands can use their equity to acquire traffic at relatively lower cost. Usually even if you look at the traffic coming from (natural) search engines, most of the search terms are the retailers name or some variation of it.

So, why bother with any form of online advertising? Well, as with offline advertising, it can keep your brand “top of mind” and in someone’s consideration set for a particular purchase, ie you are essentially looking for branding effects as well as providing a direct response. This is certainly a challenge in terms of measurement but again the “offline world” has been trying to calculate the effect of advertising on sales for years! So the ability to understand the softer effects of online marketing is another requirement I see in the web analytics world over the next couple of years. This will require a fusion of hard behavioural response data with attitudinal data – combining the “what” with the “why”.

On 15:27:31 3 March 2004 Obi Felten wrote:
>I came across a good article by ex Philips marketer on
>tactics/measurement methods of how measuring the effect of
>online marketing on offline sales.
>
>Excerpt below, link to full article:
>http://www.imediaconnection.com/content/2892.asp

Great article and thanks for posting the pointer.
One fly in the ointment, however.

Derek Hewitt writes:

So, in sum:

+ Get your databases working together
+ Ask your retailers to cooperate
+ Link POS and Online: Use "As Seen on the Internet" as a benefit
+ Continually give reasons for consumers to come back online
+ Use pure online promotion plays to determine ROI effect.

One at a time then ...

+ Get your databases working together

A huge undertaking except for those companies larger than 100 people and smaller than 10,000.

+ Ask your retailers to cooperate

You'll have to provide some sort of motivation (dosh) or they will not, uhm, be motivated.

+ Link POS and Online: Use "As Seen on the Internet" as a benefit

Again, this requires the retailer to play ball. Even if you own the distribution chain, getting floor managers to place the POS placards and the clerks to take names...

+ Continually give reasons for consumers to come back online

Good, classical marketing that. Well done.

+ Use pure online promotion plays to determine ROI effect.

Not sure what this means aside from - as a comparison.

Don't get me wrong - I'm in agreement with the author. It's just as never as easy as it sounds.