How Walmart Uses Web Analytics

As customers continue to surge toward online media and channels, marketing spend is fast following. In fact, the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) has reported that 62% of marketers will migrate TV ad dollars to digital video, believing it to deliver more positive return on investment (Kaur & Jain, 2012). While research shows that digital ad spend is still a relatively small percentage of overall marketing mixes, its share is growing at a fast pace and the market leaders are moving very quickly. It is clearly not just a part of the “experimental budget” anymore. And Forrester forecasts that by 2016 advertisers will spend as much on interactive marketing as they do on TV advertising today (Kaur & Jain, 2012).

CMOs need to be steadfast in their pursuit of accuracy and accountability for each dollar spent. Now is the time to start building the infrastructure and analytical precision to measure digital. CMOs cannot afford to wait. Building effective digital measurement takes time and it will become an increasingly critical competency. Marketers cannot just wake up tomorrow and expect to have the capabilities in place to deal with it as it grows. It is time to build an intelligent and privacy-friendly strategy for bringing key customer-level digital interactions together in one place with offline interactions and transaction data. The only way to break down the silos is to connect the data. It is that simple. And that complicated.

“Web Analytics is the science and adeptness that leads to drive change for websites to increase their profitability by cultivating a customer’s online experience. It is science because it uses statistics, data mining techniques, and a methodological process. It is an art because the analyst has to draw from various pallets of data sources to find the impeccable synthesis that will yield actionable insights” (Kaur & Jain, 2012).

Walmart.com has used Omniture Inc.'s SiteCatalyst service to study the relationship of merchandising to sales on the site at www.walmart.com. They currently generate roughly 60 million unique visitors (Site Analytics, 2012). They rank number 2 in the competitive rank, with Amazon.com being 2,Target.com right behind at 3, bestbuy.com at 4 and kmart.com at 5 (Site Analytics, 2012). With the use of SiteCatalyst, what Walmart was trying to determine and influence is product conversion -- what kind of merchandising translates to the largest conversion (Khan, 2004). SiteCatalyst mined data in real time to quantify and visually reflect the effectiveness of Walmart.com and its marketing objectives. Accessed online and customized, it required no hardware or software installation (Khan, 2004). For Walmart.com, the two main issues under analysis were product placement or exposure and merchandising. Unique to Walmart.com, SiteCatalyst used data points like history activity and current activity to compare and find similarities. This custom insight identified factors about site visitors, generating customized reports on such online activity (Khan, 2004).

Walmart.com was also able to use similar custom insights to analyze information on a campaign basis. Walmart’s online marketers wanted to know how a product sold by category and by campaign, and correlating all this data for numerous items let Walmart.com place a value on each campaign variable like "How well did the promotions work the week after Thanksgiving?" and "How well did my 150-by-90 banners convert? " (Khan, 2004).  The goal is always to deliver analysis in a way that makes the data understandable to Walmart.com executives including daily access to SiteCatalyst (Khan, 2004).

When it comes to SEO, Walmart generates a lot of traffic via inbound links. In 2011, Walmart averaged about 48,000 inbound links per month, 10 of which were from highly authoritative pages like the New York Times and oracle.com (Kaur & Dain, 2012). Walmart wins the SEO award with its varied and detailed descriptions for each subpage. To maximize effectiveness, pages' meta descriptions should be both keyword-rich and informative about what visitors will find on the page. Marketers should also be aware that it is important to remember to stay under the character limit in these descriptions so search engines like Google do not cut them off prematurely.

One downside to Walmart's SEO strategy is that there is no official blog. Studies show that companies that blog get 55% more website traffic on average than those that do not (Kaur & Dain, 2012). If Walmart is searched in a search engine, the reader is met by a slew of third-party blogs and negative posts about Walmart and competitive retailers. Having a well-maintained blog that helps rank in search engines could offer these businesses a way to downplay negative, third party reviews and fuel goodwill. Walmart has also comfortably embraced the "social commerce" since people have been talking about "social", but it is fast becoming a reality. Referrals to ecommerce sites from social networks are quickly increasing, and traffic is money. People are turning to social networks more and more to decide on what to buy, and the businesses that are on the forefront of that trend will reap a windfall.

Walmart has quite of bit of growth potential in the generating ecommerce from social media sites. Walmart recently launched a new analytic strategy that included the addition of an enhanced semantics search engine, Polaris, for both of its ecommerce and m-commerce channels. The objective of Polaris is to deliver more meaningful results when Walmart.com shoppers enter keywords in the site's search field, and it does so by using a constellation of methods that consider the shopper's relevant interests and thereby intuit his or her intent in doing the search (Ross, 2012). The system does not merely match keywords to terms in a static index. Rather, it attempts to decipher the meaning of queries. For example, a search for "denim" would return ecommerce listings for jeans because "denim" and "jeans" are related concepts. Items that other consumers have searched for and clicked on, as well as items generating buzz on social media sites, are all considered before the results are returned. The software infrastructure allows for the search engine to determine based on a shopper's social media interactions that they would be more apt to purchase a gourmet brand of coffee if just entering the keyword "coffee" (Moss, 2012).

References

Kaur, P. & Jain, D. (2012). Web Analytics — The Soul of Digital Accountability. Retrieved on December 9, 2012 from, http://www.sapient.com/assets/ImageDownloader/1380/WebAnalytics.pdf

Khan, A. Wal-Mart Measures Factors in Web Sales. Direct Marketing News. Retrieved on December 10, 2012 from, http://www.dmnews.com/wal-mart-measures-factors-in-web-sales/article/83178/

Ross, R. (2012). Walmart.com’s Improved Search Engine Powered by Social Genome. Retrieved on December 10, 2012 from, http://www.retailwire.com/discussion/16260/walmart-coms-improved-search-engine-powered-by-social-genome

Site Analytics. (2012) Walmart.com. Retrieved on December 10, 2012 from, http://siteanalytics.compete.com/walmart.com/

Google Analytics' Goals and Funnels

Google Analytics gives business owners and marketers alike the ability to measure, track and analyze trends seen during visitors’ experience with their website. A goal conversion speaks for itself. It is the actual completion, the desirable outcome; of the goal business owners have set for their sites. An example would be obtaining subscribers to a weekly email newsletter. The conversion of this goal would be to get users to the “Thank you for signing up for our email newsletter” page. Google Analytics can track visits to this page (a page only accessible by signing up) and will translate them into a goal conversion rate—the percentage of visits to a site that resulted in a conversion to one of the set goals. Using GA to set this goal will not only track the number of goal conversions, but will ultimately bring business objectives to life.

For the Web Metrics for Dummies blog, the best Google Analytics goals to implement and analyze are: a) page visits, b) visitor duration and c) video views. I not only want to know how much traffic is being generated to my blog, but I want to know how long they are engaged on a post or all posts. I am also interested in seeing if the video clips are providing any incentive for people to watch and stay on the blog longer. These goals are newly added so only time will tell just how well the work for understanding visitors. 

Setting up such goals will allow me to measure conversions on this blog. A conversion occurs when a visitor accomplished a desired goal on a website. Goals can vary and can be as simple as viewing a specific page on a website or completing some type of process such as signing up for a newsletter or purchasing a product. By defining specific goals for a website or blog, the reach can be measured as well as the influence it has on people who come visit.

Once traffic is generated to an e-commerce website or a blog and measuring, managing and optimizing the traffic sources is in progress, attention should then be focused to the website or blog content. What page do site visitors arrive? Do they find the information they want when they get there? What steps are taken to measure this and improve site performance? Content should be changed based on results to better engage visitors.

Google Analytics’ funnels can go hand in hand with setting goals for conversion. Funnels may be implemented to capture the path that visitors are expected to take on their way to converting to the goal. Defining these pages would allow me to see how frequently visitors abandon goals, and where they go. This may help determine why people are exiting off the funnel and allow for changes to keep them on track. Multi-channel funnels imply a funnel that is entered from one of several different sources. This is much the way a visitor arrives at a website. They may get there via an organic search (on Google, Bing, Yahoo, etc.), a paid search (clicking the paid ads on a page somewhere), or a referral from another source that links to the website (which could be a directory, a chamber of commerce, local association, or other source). The visitor could also come directly to the site (by typing in the address, clicking on a bookmark, etc., a link in an email, etc.).

“A website has a funnel, or perhaps a bunch of funnels, where you can measure what enters the top and leaves the bottom of the funnel. Entering your funnel would be your site visitors who, we’ve learned, come from search, referring links, emails, etc. What comes out of the funnel are leads, sales, newsletter registrations, v-card downloads or whatever you’ve created to advance your business proposition” (Salchli, 2012).

Perhaps, as owner of the blog, goals and funnels may reveal the following reasons for low RSS or email subscriber count: 

·               Slow loading time of the blog

·               Low frequency of fresh content

·               Badly positioned RSS subscribe button

·               No call to action for subscribing

  

The important thing here is that goals give numbers and values, so that businesses and/or bloggers can precisely measure the percent increase or decrease of the given business objective of concern. Most website goals are to generate more leads; however, visitors that become leads typically spend more time on a site and view more pages than those that do not. Businesses should think of time on site as a precursor to a lead. The more visitors hanging around a site for longer and longer periods of time, the better.

After goal values have been running for a number of weeks, there are nice graphs showing in the analytics package, but what can be done with the data? What would be the best thing to change first? Should it be testing a call to action since that has a clear connection to the bottom line?

If a rounded analytics strategy does not exist, then a business leader will not have a solid understanding of how campaigns perform.  In addition, if the important mechanisms are not in place to easily see how visitor segments perform, then important questions could go unanswered.  That is not good for enhancing website business. It is important to recognize that anything goal-related within Google Analytics involves the strategic direction of business objectives. Leveraging goals and conversions well with Google Analytics will lead to greater understanding of how people are experiencing a site and will help leaders make informed decisions on how sites should communicate. After all, it is not enough anymore to just have a website.

References

Salchli, F. (2012). Achieving Business Results With Google Analytics. Retrieved on December 3, 2012 from, http://www.duoconsulting.com/whitepapers/achieving-business-results-google-analytics. 

Content Reports in Google Analytics

With the Content Reports in Google Analytics, one can find their site’s top content and hidden gems. The content section contains reports designed to help improve the content on a site to meet the needs and expectations of visitors. A great video tutorial can be found here.

The overview component gives a quick overall view of all content. It displays metrics such as page views, unique page views, average time on page and bounce rate. By using the date range option on the top right corner, the date range can be selected and also easily compare to past dates. In the overview, there’s the option to click on page, page title, search term, event category or Adsense page. There’s a summary option of the report and with one click it will display the full report.

Find out how often people visit each page of a site, how long they stay, and how often they convert. The Site Content > Pages report shows how frequently each page on a site was viewed. Look for high bounce rates on the Landing Pages report to identify landing pages that need to be rewritten or redesigned to be more effective. If there is a search box on a site, use the Site Search reports to display how successful visitors are when they search the site. If Flash, Ajax, or other kinds of interactive elements are incorporated on a site, it may be desired to know how users interact with them. The Events report provides a non-page view based approach to tracking interactivity.

The landing pages option, displays which pages are the most popular landing pages for a website and their performance. Each page can be clicked by choosing secondary dimensions. For example, a company may want to know which traffic sources are bringing the most traffic to their homepage, just click on the homepage and select source. Great thing about this report is that E-commerce data is included, so the pages that bring transactions and revenue are displayed.

The Site Speed option in the Goggle Analytics interface measures just that by simply adding the line “_trackPageLoadTime();” to a tracking code. In this report, the average page load time of pages is shown. After all, nobody likes slow loading pages so a company can fix errors or remove content that may be causing people to quickly leave a site. This may affect lead generation and quite possibly e-commerce (if that’s the goal).

If there’s a search engine on a website which visitors can use to search the site, the Site Search category in Google Analytics can measure its usage and effectiveness on a site. In the overview section of Site Search, the percentage of visits with and without site search is displayed for comparison. Also, some other metrics such as percentage of search exits, percentage of search refinements, time after search and search depth. The Search Term component of Site Search gives the search terms people use to search a website. It’s a great way to find out what people are searching for. With this information, top search terms can be analyzed. For example, a company can compare the percentage of search exits for a particular search term to site average. If it’s very high, maybe the search engine is not giving the best results for the query.

With the Events component enabled, one can measure all kinds of activity on a website such as PDF downloads, printing pages, interaction with a slidehow, watching videos and much more. The entire Content category provides so much information about the performance of a website to keep people busy analyzing it for a long time. It’s a great place to find new insights and take action on it.

The Content section is not only a valuable tool for websites, but for blogs as well. This report shows the most popular posts on a blog. The popular content gives insight into why readers visit a blog. The topics of these posts indicate what people like, even when they don't comment. Content reports are important because they can define a blog for both readers and advertisers. A blogger can say, “My readers come to me for great quilting tutorials” or “My readers come to me to discuss the political issues important to parents of disabled children” or “My readers come to me to find out about digital marketing successes and failures.” Content reports will reveal over time that occasionally the posts people think will be extremely popular will flop, and other posts that seem like an afterthought become readers’ favorite content. This is incredibly important feedback that should guide a blog's content strategy.

The Content Report also allow for testing various content styles among various posts or pages of a blog. Testing pictures, graphs and video to see if it spikes site visits and site duration. It can also be compared to other posts or pages without such pictorial content. Every day somebody clicks the dreaded ‘back’ button without exploring a site. This “Bounce Rate” is something bloggers want to minimize. Instead of focusing on why they are leaving, focus on the things that people stay for. Do visitors immediately head to the blog? Do they click on offers or sales notifications? The Content reports can indicate where on a page visitors go, and more importantly how long they stay there. This is content that is already engaging customers, so if it’s not easily accessible to first time visitors then it is time to put it in front of them. By focusing on what is already working and making sure that new visitors can find the most compelling content bloggers will see their Bounce Rate drop and interactions climb.

Google Analytics is an effective way to not only monitor how customers find a site or blog on the internet, but also what keeps them there. Using the insights allows for focusing on efforts to build up parts of a site that need more focus, or strengthen what people are already looking for. Instead of merely maintaining an internet presence with a little work and knowledge, people can make their online businesses and presence thrive.here

Google AdWords vs. Facebook Advertising

When it comes to deciding to choose a social media and online advertising channel, a company must consider their goal. There are a few similarities between Facebook and Google AdWords, such as their massive potential audience, and the fact that both are basically PPC (pay per click) advertising channels. However, The web audience uses Google and Facebook differently – they check their Facebook accounts and they search Google, not the other way around. Depending on what the company wants to achieve in their marketing campaign, one or the other will be a better fit.

Both advertising channels use systems that are mostly self-service for the smaller advertiser, and they both have the ability to target very specific market segments, which is where the major differences lye between the two platforms. Futhermore, Facebook does not allow for mobile advertising options, retargeting options, partner sites, and keyword-based contextual targeting options (Meredith, 2012). If a customer is driving through a town and needs to pick up a prescription or other items, chances are they will use their phone to locate the destination. An effective local SEO campaign and mobile-specific ads can help customers see a particular pharmacy first (Meredith, 2012).

Google still dominates the search game with nearly two-thirds market share, according to Experian HitWise while Facebook is The Social Network--it seems just a matter of time before they announce 1 billion accounts (Meredith, 2012). However, one can assume that Facebook sessions lasts much longer than a typical Google Search, so Facebook Ads are perhaps better if companies want to build brand awareness or get a specific message across. Facebook Ads may also be better if the said message is targeted towards a certain audience, such as fans of a specific movie or TV show, or an alumni group. It’s not impossible to achieve the same targeted people-centric campaigns through Google’s AdWords, but it would be more difficult to do. With Facebook ads, companies can target their ads by age range. Offering a special on make-up or hair products? They can create campaigns by gender. There are a number of demographic categories that can be combined to reach a specifically targeted audience.

However, when it comes to pure web searches, Google is the clear leader. Google Adwords is more suited to driving actual clicks and conversions around specific services and products. It all comes down to intent – while Facebook users are only checking up on status updates and posting photos, Google searches are specifically searching for keywords and have a clear goal.

Basically, Facebook Ads are better suited to building brands or delivering a message to a target group over a longer period of time, while Google AdWords provides an easier way to capture consumers that are dead set on buying specific products or services. Let’s check out this brief video of how one local real estate agent use Facebook Ads to grow her business (Elias, 2012).

In summary, if the question is which channel to use, think of Google and Facebook as venues. Either venue is capable of achieving your objective whether that be awareness building or driving purchase, a company just has to be sure it’s advertising in the right spot and in the right way. Companies should advertise for awareness at the entrance (generic keywords on AdWords or unaffiliated users on Facebook) and for purchase in the back (specific keywords on AdWords or existing fans on Facebook) (Elias, 2012).

References

Elias, H. (2012). YouTube Video: Better Than Google AdWords - Why Facebook Ads Are All You Need. Retrieved on November 12, 2012 from, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3-Zub5MRGx4

Meredith, A. (2012). Show Me the Money – Google AdWords and Facebook Advertising. Retrieved on November 12, 2012 from, http://scalablesocialmedia.com/2012/10/google-adwords-facebook-ads/

Content Marketing vs Starting the "Conversation"

Marketers can argue that there are many pros and cons deeming content marketing or conversational marketing as the better choice to implement. Truth is, they work together.  However, companies have stopped (and more should) thinking only in terms of “creating content” and started thinking about having conversations. The ultimate focus should be putting messages in motion—helping clients become meaningful members of relevant communities and creating content those audiences will find compelling, useful—and spreadable.

Why? What do I want to achieve by writing this bit of content? Who? With whom am I conversing? What brings those people to my site or app? What are their top tasks? Top questions? Conversations they want to start? Companies should start by surrounding their customers with thought provoking content that is buzzworthy, posting content at the right times, making content useful and easy to find, targeting influencers and structuring content with brand advocates in mind (Fay, 2012). Good storytelling is less about “telling” and more about starting a conversation in your audience’s head.

Content without conversation is just broadcasting, or just advertising because it goes to the listener/reader/viewer/visitor and stops there. It’s one way. A well thought out content strategy is two-way and may result in a message getting lodged in a person’s consciousness and becomes something they want to talk about and share. That message then gets a whole new burst of energy.  The energy behind the message is what gives it meaning, and a life of its own.  Thus the conversation begins. In order to decide which conversations are right, brands need to understand how conversations can be used to achieve a wide range of goals.

As content is shared to start a conversation, companies should then work to stimulate soft conversions, which includes viewing a video, reading a blog or magazine article, or subscribing to a blog or magazine. To trigger hard conversions -- when customers go through a registration page to obtain content – a company should offer white papers and e-books. Drawings at trade shows also drive hard conversions. It’s also important to have an in-house semantic search engine that crawls the network on a regular basis and categorizes every single piece of content against scores of different conversation tags. Basically, that will identifies what a piece of content is talking about and what the comments attached to that content are talking about.

Fostering conversations help humanize brands. Consumers want to have a conversation with a company. They don’t want to be told just how awesome the brand is or that if they don’t drink your Kool-Aid they won’t get to play with the cool kids. Your clients and customers want to feel like they are important. They want to feel engaged.

In summary, as a company moves ahead with the conversation marketing tactics, they should keep in mind their marketing fundamentals:

• What are the campaign goals?
• What segments do customers naturally collect into?
• Which segments will be targeted for marketing success?
• What message content will best resonate with target customers?

References

Fay, B. (2012). How Online Marketing Can Fuel Offline Conversations. Mashable. Retrieved on November 12, 2012 from, http://mashable.com/2012/07/18/online-marketing-offline-marketing/.

Novak, C. (2010, July 27). Why conversation, not content, is king. SocialMediaToday.com. Retrieved April 12, 2012 from http://socialmediatoday.com/wordspring/152636/why-conversation-not-content-king

Making the Most of Web Analysis

Understanding metrics can help enable companies identify big problems such as poor timing, inconsistent search phrases, incorrect prospect definitions and flawed audiences. Most importantly, it can help avoid wasting time and money due to poorly executed websites or marketing campaigns.

The tricky part is knowing the different types of metrics and how they can affect a business. There are four basic ways to break down web metrics: Traffic, Conversion, Performance, and Maintenance.

As it pertains to traffic, “visitors” tracks the overall traffic to a website. It’s important to know who the repeat visitors are and who they unique visitors are. “Page Views” refers to the number of pages requested from a site. Pageviews are used to convey the popularity of a website or page. They are usually what someone means when they say their site gets "a lot of hits" (Kyrnin, 2012). The “length of time” a visitor stays on site may determine the level of interest in a company. The busiest or slowest times can help figure out if certain campaigns or times of day tend to bring about more traffic. Most popular pages are reported also to what visitors to a website are interested in finding (Kyrnin, 2012). Search engine rankings, referrals, and Keywords show how a company ranks within top search engines, the traffic coming from search engines, and the keywords used to find the website. Traffic is just the first step in understanding and using web metrics.

Goals should help to separate valuable visits from less valuable ones and should reflect an organization’s goals and reason for having a website. A goal is worthless if a visitor can accomplish it accidentally. Conversion rates are based on how many times the desired goal was reached. What are you asking in return from your visitors as they move toward the goal? Do you ask for an email address? A credit-card number? Are visitors filling out a form or watching a video?

Regular maintenance to a website can have a positive impact on web metrics. A sites needs updating with fresh, accurate content. As this is done, companies improve their search engine rankings, increase the number of visitors to the site, and strengthen their online presence. If the site is not updated regularly, visitors will assume there’s nothing new to share and they will not bother to return. Without occasional new information or resources, visitors will not have a reason to come back.  What's worse, companies may lose them as a potential customer.  No matter how well designed and well publicized a site is, if it’s not maintained, it will decline in popularity and eventually in search engine rankings.

This ties hand in hand with performance. Tracking a websites performance can make companies aware of possible errors, long download times, problematic data, broken links, etc. Errors can drive visitors away from the website. A company would  also want to know if their website is functional across many platforms. A non-optimized website can have a low conversion rate because the customer was unable to complete their desired function due to poor mobile functionality.

References

Kyrnin, J. (2012). Web Analytics Basics: Learn to Measure Your Web Site. About.com. Retrieved on November 5, 2012 from,http://webdesign.about.com/od/loganalysis/a/aa092605.htm.  

Understanding Web Metrics

If you haven’t been paying attention to how your website is performing, you are losing valuable information. Paying attention to your web metrics can help you figure out exactly what is and isn’t working on your website. Who should be using web metrics (P.I. Reed School of Journalism: Lesson 1, 2012)?

·      Marketers who recognize the relevancy of electronic trading and the importance of applying Internet marketing tools but have no measuring instruments available to calculate their campaigns’ return on investment.

·      Marketers who are dissatisfied with their number of online user registrations and order placements.

·      Marketers who notice a satisfactory response to their ad campaigns but don't see a lot of follow-through on the part of the customers.

If you want web analytics to actually make a profitable impact on your business, you need to start from the beginning with business objectives. Business objectives are a way for a company to define its goals and direction. Good objectives will tell a company how to allocate its resources based on its strengths, weaknesses and opportunities at every level, including the website. A company can't really start using web analytics until they have determined business objectives. Otherwise, they are just shooting in the dark. 

This decision about business objectives for the website should come from the top. What is the business purpose of the website? It could be to generate leads or build awareness. How do you know which tool to use? Well, Google Analytics is a free analytics program provided by Google. All you have to do is add a small snippet of code to every page of the Website and in less than 24 hours you will be able to your Websites statistics.

Pulling the information from web analytics software is less than 10% of the work, with an overwhelming 90% of the time being dedicated to deriving insights that your organization to use to drive change (Przyklenk, 2012). Such change includes (Przyklenk, 2012): 

·      Comparing Trends

·      Analyzing the Significance of Data

·      Digging Deeper with Segmentation

·      Correlate Trends with Business Objectives/Impact

·      Make Insights Actionable

Web analytics can also assist in developing a highly effective marketing strategy based on the captured user data. Your marketing plan can precisely reflect what your customers want, targeting the exact keywords they use when looking for it, and build landing pages that convert visitors into customers, subscribers or repeat visitors.

Popular Tools that can be used for web/online (or social media) analytics include:

·      Google Analytics

·      Compete.com

·      Alexa.com

·      Webalizer

·      Facebook Insights 

References

P.I. Reed School of Journalism. Lesson 2: Basic Web Analytics. Retrieved on November 5, 2012 from, https://ecampus.wvu.edu/webct/urw/tp0.lc5116001/cobaltMainFrame.dowebct.

Przyklenk, G. (2012). 5 Ways To Make Web Analytics Data More Insightful. Search Engine Watch. Retrieved on November 5, 2012 from, http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2217270/5-Ways-to-Make-Web-Analytics-Data-More-Insightful