Recent Entries
Apr 27, 2010 Industry News
While news stories abound about the gradual and imperceptible movement of the U.S. economy toward recovery, it is apparent to me that there is one niche which is taking off ahead of the general recovery: services related to evidence-based marketing.
What is evidence-based marketing? It is an approach to marketing that attempts to make marketing decisions and manage marketing activities – as much as possible – based on evidence: measurements, information, facts, data. This is being fueled, I think, by two factors:
1. The data-rich experience that advertisers have had as they have immersed themselves in the world of digital marketing
2. The tremendous pressure that a down economy has placed on marketers to provide evidence that the money they spend is well-spent
As an evidence-based marketer myself, I would not have arrived at this conclusion without… well, evidence. As someone who does independent consulting between “real jobs”, I try to stay close to the job market for marketing analysts and digital marketers, in what I would call a perpetual passive job search. The number of hiring inquiries I have gotten from recruiters in the past three weeks has been amazing and is significantly greater than I observed earlier in the year – 3 to 5 contacts per week (versus 3 to 5 per month in January).
Let’s hope this leading indicator is followed by some serious actual growth!
Some other interesting facts:
- I took a look at the Google Trends data for the keyphrase “marketing analytics” and it showed a strong uptick between the end of 2009 and the beginning of 2010. This came substantially ahead of my anecdotal increased job inquiries, but maybe it is a leading indicator. It would seem that prospective clients might research vendors and taxonomy within the field prior to actually meeting with agencies about it, and I would imagine that, as people began planning their hiring for the year and contacting recruiters, there were more searches for this phrase because recruiters want to understand the fields they are hiring for so they can market them effectively.
- Prior to this year, I have only once ever been contacted about a job at an ad agency. This was in 2005, and the agency was one known for direct marketing. Otherwise, almost all the jobs people have reached out to me about prior to this year were with either companies doing a lot of online marketing, marketing services firms, consultancies, or firms selling marketing data and market research. In the last two months, however, I have been contacted about more than eight positions with ad agencies. Most have been digital agencies, but I have had two interviews with full-service agencies known for their creative. Neither resulted in a job, but I went more out of curiosity than out of a realistic sense that they would know how to integrate someone like me into their organizations. In any case, it seemed like it would be fun to try to bring ideas from the world of analytics and measurement into a strongly creative-centric group. Who knows, maybe I’ll get another chance.
Anyway, I would love to know if any other marketing analytics practitioners out there have been experiencing anything similar. Leave a comment. Let’s discuss.
Mar 25, 2010 Statistics, TV and iTV Analytics, Web Analytics
Draft Marketing Analysis Checklist
After reading Atul Gawande’s recent book “Checklist Manifesto”, I was thinking there should be a checklist for marketing analysis. One point that Mr. Gawande makes in his book is that highly-trained specialists shun checklists because in their minds only dummies need lists. However, a majority of surgeons, while rejecting lists for their own use, would want another surgeon to use one if operating on them. This is because they know how easy it is to forget one detail in hundreds.
In marketing analysis, there are a lot of steps and a lot of things to think about, and even a smart person might drop a stitch here or there if they are not following some kind of list. I have included a rough one I dashed off quickly, in hopes that others might offer refinements, altogether better lists, or more specific versions for types of marketing programs. Here it is, have at it!
DEFINE
• SET goals/ hypotheses for program
• SELECT metrics
• CREATE a measurement plan
EXECUTE
• EXECUTE program and measurement plan
• VALIDATE raw data
• PREPARE dataset for analysis
ANALYZE
• VISUALLY EXPLORE dataset for patterns and problems
• SUMMARIZE dataset statistics
• SCORE performance vs. goals/ support for hypotheses
• LIST likely conclusions
• IDENTIFY unexpected or surprising findings
• VALIDATE likely conclusions with numerical/statistical support
• SELECT final findings
COMMUNICATE
• REPORT findings for future activity
• REVIEW findings with user community
• CAPTURE questions &issues from user community
FOLLOW-UP
• INVESTIGATE user-identified questions & issues
• IDENTIFY impact on original findings
• REPORT findings of follow-up analysis
What do you think?
Mar 21, 2010 Optimization, Statistics, Web Analytics
Optimizing your website to maximize the number of page views or visitors, while sounding reasonable, may unwittingly have you wasting marketing dollars and effort on people who won’t buy anything or participate on your website (or your advertisers’ websites) in the foreseeable future.
When you spend time and money on your site content or on audience development for your site, you want to make sure you are measuring the impact of those changes in terms of number of desired actions taken by visitors to your site, in terms of the efficiency with which you are spending resource. The key measure you are tracking on the cost side is the ECPA, or effective cost per action. If you have a small site and are passive about audience development, perhaps it makes sense to optimize to Actions Per Visit (APV), or Actions Per Daily Unique visitor (APDU). But if you are spending serious time and money then you need to track these costs and what they generate.
Lights! Camera! Actions!
Before this kind of thing makes any sense at all you have to define and start measuring the on the kinds of action you are trying to get visitors to take. Are you selling things? Are you getting paid for advertising shown on your site? Are you trying to develop leads for your business? Are you trying to get people to download something? Are you trying to get people to register or sign up? Whatever actions you want people to take on your site, they need to be measured if they are going to be the basis for your ECPA (or APV, APDU). Most of these things can be measured using Google Analytics.
In any case, once you have tagged or otherwise instrumented your site to capture your desired actions, then you can track ECPA (or APV, APDU) associated with your site.
Then when you make big changes, you can see whether they improved your site’s performance. You can measure the effectiveness of your SEM, your CPC campaigns on search engines, your affiliate programs, and your efforts to publicize your site.
Measuring Dollars Out per Dollar In
ECPA is a pretty good measure, but, it only measures efficiency on the cost side. You also want to measure the return you get in dollars and cents. You can do this (or approximate this) if you can come up with a dollar value for each of your site’s target actions, either using an average value per action type or actual value per action, then you don’t need the oversimplification that focusing only on ECPA imposes. Simply put, all actions on your site are not worth the same amount and it actually makes sense to spend more on actions that are worth more. What you really ultimately want is an ROI. I’ll talk about that in a later post.
Mar 15, 2010 Industry News, Marketing And Advertising Analytics, Optimization, Statistics, Web Analytics
Dimitri Maex is the Managing Director Marketing Effectiveness at Ogilvy & Mather, and the author of a fantastic white paper that is posted HERE on the WPP website . What is so great about it is that it presents exactly what most companies need to know in order to get started in harnessing the full power of quantitative marketing methods, in a package that only takes about 15 minutes to read.
He starts with the history of quantitative marketing, gives a sense of the place of “math marketing” in the current business landscape, describes the types vendors with which a company can ally, and the wraps up with how a company should organize and hire to around the new skills and challenges peculiar to the coming era of quantitatively-driven marketing.
Some nits:
I don’t like the sound of the name “math marketing”. It’s just that the math doesn’t do any marketing – people still make the decisions and integrate the insights into their work, they just use data-based metrics and statistical techniques to assist them in getting a coherent picture of what is working and what isn’t, and formulating what might work in the future. It is probably also a terrible way to brand something you are selling to execs who mostly sucked at and avoided math in school. It’s like calling it “eat your vegetables marketing”.
The section on vendors is far from exhaustive. He leaves out SEM/SEO agencies in particular, and provides only the massive brand names in most of the categories he is describing. I guess Maex works for an ad agency – so he’s not responsible for selling you on his competition – but I’d look elsewhere for a buyer’s guide.
Whatever, he is right on the money about the current state of affairs and where most companies need to go.
He wraps with a couple of lists: Seven Steps to Increased Accountability, and Seven Steps to Increased Accountability to Transformational Consumer Insights.
This is a great document for business folk who want to understand the big picture of marketing analytics and quantitative marketing techniques, and want to understand how to manage them to best effect.
Mar 5, 2010 Industry News
Mike Reynolds’ article in Multichannel News reports 190 million US viewers for the full 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver. This is 3 million more than watched the Salt Lake City Olympics in 2002, 6 million more than watched the Torino Olympics in 2006. This year’s Winter Olympics was second only to the 1994 Olympics in Lillehammer – which had 204 million US viewers, in part because of the attention drawn by the Nancy Kerrigan/Tanya Harding incident.
According the Vancouver Olympics website, 3.5 billion viewers worldwide watched this years’ events. That’s billion, with a b.
This kind of viewership flies in the face of claims by emerging media that TV is growing irrelevant. This kind of massive simultaneous experience is in the middle of the TV’s wheelhouse, and the smaller screens seem to play a more of supporting role in them. TV is best at the while-its-happening experience where you want to see every detail and experience it all as if you were sitting in the crowd, but were somehow omniscient and capable of flying to whatever angle showed the action best. This strength is leveraged to best effect when there is a live broadcast such as the final Sunday night when the US v. Canada hockey final was battled to an overtime Canada victory. People watched on their TVs, and used their computers and smartphones to tweet about it.
Did You Play With Your TV? (a shameless plug for my #1 client, Ensequence)
If you saw the Olympics via Dish Networks or Verizon FiOS, then you could access weblike interactive content on your TV screen alongside your favorite Olympics events on MSNBC, CNBC, or USA – if you clicked and interacted, leave a comment and tell me about it. What did you like about it? What did you hate about it?
Feb 26, 2010 Industry News, TV and iTV Analytics
Per this story by Steve Donahue in Light Reading Cable, Canoe is setting expectations for measured, steady progress in advanced advertising via cable. Interactivity is beginning to be rolled out now, but targeting at the individual household level is 4-5 years away.
Seth Haberman of Visible World is quoted in the article as estimating that 60-70 million households will be interactive and addressable and interactive during that 4-5 year timeframe.
Between now and then, the story will be all about EBIF deployment and steady increase in the sophistication of interactive capabilities offered. EBIF households should reach upwards of 20 million households by the end of 2010. DBS operators Dish Networks and DirecTV already offer substantial interactivity in programs and advertising to 29 million households. You might be wondering what the heck EBIF is. It stands for Enhanced TV Binary Interchange Format, but really all you need to know is that it is a set of standards that will make it possible to deploy the same interactive code across all platforms that have implemented the standard. It looks like that will eventually be most Cable MSOs and IPTV providers.
What does this mean? Well, it means the long-awaited promise of TV interactivity is going to be gradually fulfilled. For programming, that means enhanced content and audience participation. For advertising, it means addressability, interactivity, and response built into ads. Finally, it means T-Commerce, which will make shopping on TV as easy and ubiquitous and easy as shopping on the web, and that will be available in programs and in ads.
The question is this: Will the internet absorb the functionality of TV (“Over-The-Top” delivery of TV programming) before TV absorbs the functionality of the Internet? We will have to wait and see. I think both will continue to exist, but will morph and mutate differently because they essentially serve different different viewer purposes and usage occasions.
The winners will be marketers and advertisers who crack the code about the right division of labor between the Internet, television, and mobile, delivering brand experiences that take advantage of the unique strengths of each available channel.
Feb 24, 2010 Industry News, Web Analytics
If you were to go to the Scout Analytics website dig into the info about their offerings, you’ll find that they tested their patent-pending technology for the last six months on hundreds of thousands of users (see the Press Release entitled “Scout Analytics(TM) Quantifies the Inaccuracy of Cookies as a Measure of Unique Users‘) The two techniques they cite as the basis for this study: biometric signatures and device signatures. The release is more revealing about the biometric approach than it is about the device signatures. The biometric signature is essentially an identifiable pattern in a person’s typing style. The device signature is something they are vaguer about, saying only it is based on “data elements collected from the browser to eliminate errors in device counting such as cleared cookies”. The test was meant to see not only how much overcounting of unique users there was, but how many unlicensed users there were of subscription content via multiple use of the same user account.
I wonder if they got the explicit permission of the subscribers to have their keystrokes and machines profiled? If this kind of approach were to spread beyond detection of licensing violations, I wonder how much sympathy regulators and legislators would have for it?
Feb 24, 2010 Industry News
For most of us, the recent Amanda Knox murder case was our introduction to the Italian justice system. Well, according to today’s New York Times article, several Google executives have gotten acquainted with some further nuances. For example, if you host user-generated content, you can be convicted of violating someone’s privacy if an upload to your site violates it – even if you cooperate with Italian authorities in the removal of the objectionable content and identification of the culprits.
This is a serious threat to the open sharing of information that has driven the web’s rapid adoption and growth. To force sites like YouTube to do prior filtering and checking would impose a huge burden on such sites, and could alter the viability of their business model. Worse, though, legislation purporting to protect the citizens of Italy could instead result in robbing them of free access to the web and all its unpredictable and messy usefulness. If the world ends up divided between net-freedom-haves and net-freedom-have-nots, Italy could end up on the same side of that line as China. That is not the side I’d choose to live on, no matter how good the wine and cheese are.
Feb 18, 2010 Industry News, Web Analytics
Here’s a question that savvy web users were being asked by their parents 10 years ago:
What the heck is a cookie, and why do I have them on my computer? Do I need to delete them? How do I delete them?
Don’t be surprised if the question starts to come up again, in a new form:
What the heck is an LSO, and why do I have them on my computer? Do I need to delete them? How do I delete them?
The issue is emerging again because of the people in the business of targeting ads or offers are trying to do their job better, and cookies are not doing the job advertisers want done. So, some web programmers are exploiting a feature of Flash to create “stealth cookies” called LSOs, in hopes that you won’t delete them because you probably don’t know how.
Remind me: What is a cookie again?
A cookie is a small text file that is created via your browser to keep track of session “state” and historic entries and site activity.
What is a cookie for?
The connectionless protocols used by the web do not automatically keep track of any history. If there is no state or history information provided with a page request, then the page will have no idea who you are, even if you just entered that info on a different page in the same site.
What’s so scary about that? Well, people just don’t like their activity being recorded without their permission or awareness. It annoys them. That said, there are useful things that this kind of snooping makes possible:
remembering your site settings and preferences
remembering and auto-entering your userid in the login screen
automatically logging you in when you arrive at a site
not showing you ads for things you don’t care about and would never buy
remembering the contents of your shopping cart from your last visit
remembering the contents of your wish list
.
At the same time, it makes possible:
targeting you for ads based on prior site searches
targeting you for ads based on prior site surfing
snooping and prying for evil reasons
.
Cookie Deletion
When many people figured all this out it became a big kerfuffle, and this led to user behavior such that 23% of all cookies are deleted when they are one week old, and that less than half of all cookies (43%) live to be more than eight weeks old (click here to see Microsoft research about cookie deletion). Users can use functionality in their browsers to delete cookies and to control cookie-related policies within the browser.
So who cares? What problems does cookie deletion cause?
If you are an internet advertiser, it adds one more layer of complexity to the already difficult problem of tracking internet ad campaigns. You’ll have tracking pixels in ads to capture views and clicks, but knowing how many times someone has seen an ad during a campaign (frequency) and how many distinct individuals have seen an ad (reach) is pretty critical to understanding what is going on in a campaign, especially as more brand advertising comes online. Measurement is made difficult in internet advertising by these factors:
1. The same person will browse from multiple computers
2. The same person will see the same campaign on screens other than computers (smartphones, etc.)
3. The same computer can be used by multiple people who may or may not have separate logins
4. Many machines have multiple browsers installed, and a person might not always use the same one – cookies belong to a specific browser
5. Some people severely restrict cookie functionality using browser security settings
6. Many people delete the cookies from their computers, with different people doing so at different intervals
.
Net/Net: Bad Measurements
On balance, these issues push the measurements in the direction of overcounting reach and undercounting frequency.
Some of the other deficiencies of cookies from an advertiser point of view are that cookies don’t store very much information (4KB), and there can only be so many cookies related to a given domain (20). Privacy considerations additionally limit how much cross-site behavior can be captured in cookies (and banner campaigns are cross-site, mostly).
LSOs Addess Some of These Shortcomings For Advertisers (Yay!), But Create New Ones for Users (Boo!)
An LSO (Local Storage Object) is a cookie-like file that Flash uses to store information for Flash applications. Except that they are used by clever web programmers for far more than that – they are used by some sites just like really big cookies (as much as 25 times bigger than a cookie) that you don’t know about and so won’t delete. In addition, the same LSOs are accessible from all browsers. Your browser security controls have little or no impact on these things.
You Might Want To Check Your Computer For LSOs Right Now
If you don’t believe me, go to the Macromedia page that lets you see what LSOs are on your machine (it also lets you delete them, enable/disable them, and control their behavior).
It is located here: http://www.macromedia.com/support/documentation/en/flashplayer/help/settings_manager07.html.
While you are there, delete the ones for sites you don’t want your boss to know about.
As for where this is all going, all privacy loopholes on the web are temporary, and there are already browser add-ins that let you control and delete LSOs, and at some point the browsers will absorb that functionality to make it easy for you to use. If I were you, I’d worry more about the things you can’t see: The new keystroke dynamics technique for identifying users announced by Scout Analytics (here) and backend ISP- and CDN- based tracking – all these are fodder for more paranoid posts in the future.
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