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A couple weeks back I'd requested the nice folks following me on Google+ and Facebook to submit their most important digital marketing and analytics questions.

The questions reveal a bunch of things we used to worry about, and continue to, like data quality and creating data driven cultures. They also reveal things that starting to become scary (Privacy! EU Cookies!) and others that are already delivering nightmares (a multi device world!). Finally there were questions we can always count on: setting goals and tracking conversions, justifying analytics and wanting to track the absolutely impossible (why can't I track people across all devices and all websites?).

I'll answer those questions, and more, in this post. Just the questions total up to 1,353 words. I'm going to try, really hard, and be cogent in my replies to ensure this does not end up being a super long post.

I've categorized the questions and answers into four distinct categories: The "really difficult," "oh that's not so bad," "omg that's easy" and the "unknown unknowns."

While reading the entire post will be of value (and ensure world peace), you're welcome to jump to the section that sounds most appealing.

Let's do this!

The really difficult questions.

Yehoshua Coren:

Best ways to measure user behavior in a multi-touch, multi-device digital world. Some tools do pan-session analysis better than others, and there are a number of relatively new analytics solutions on the market today. What tools / methodologies do you use to answer pan-session sorts of business questions? What can analysts do, if anything, to overcome the multi-device challenge

Yehoshua I've covered this topic in detail in this blog post: Multi-Channel Attribution: Definitions, Models and a Reality Check

I explain three different models (Online to Store, Across Multiple Devices, Across Digital Channels) and for each I've highlighted:

Please read the post in detail with you have ten peaceful minutes.

If I were to summarize. Incentivising your visitors to log into their account with you is the only clean permission based way to track them across devices. Then you build a massive data store that you can query for data to analyze. Web Analytics tools in the market are not the answer (especially across multi-channel and multi-devices). Even "specialized tools" are not the answer because they rarely have the end to end data or the analytical capabilities you'll need.

If you can't incent people to log in, you are out of luck (except for MCA Across Digital Channels – for that see post above and also GA MCF). Simply because you are going to bump into privacy and government regulations.

So accept what you can do. Accept what you can't. Then do what you can do and move on to making decisions, even if they are small in some scenarios.

Please see the post for all the details.

Bjoern Sjut3:

My main issue at the moment: How will multi-channel funnels and ROI calculations work in a multi device world? We all have smart phones, laptops, tablets and soon Smart TVs – but most of our measurements are usually done in Cookies that are device/browser specific. That means: All of these metrics are off. How can I e.g. determine the ROI of my mobile traffic acquisition, when people regularly convert on their laptops later….

What would be the current best practice to move towards a proper cross-device attribution, while maintaining or improving on privacy standards at the same time??

See the above answer Bjoern, and do please read the post because there are still things you can do.

If your wish in the second part is to track effectiveness of advertising (how to determine ROI) then please see this post: Measuring Incrementality: Controlled Experiments to the Rescue! That is the solution. The only challenge is that it is not easy, and everyone wants easy. It takes effort and time, but if you are a large company it works like a charm.

I wanted to include your question in this post because of that last part. What you are asking for is impossible. Being able to track the person across all devices necessarily means you have to relax privacy because… well you want to track a person. How will that go with, as you put it, improving privacy standards?

This is not a problem for Marketers or Analysts to solve. This is problem for governments, privacy regulators and the public to solve. We will adapt to whatever they decide.

My perspective on this multi-channel multi-device multi-visit multi-campaign challenge is best summarized by the Serenity Prayer:

I assure you that for your business there are still a massive number of solveable challenges when it comes to being smarter with digital, I'd take those on for now.

Jeroen Hesterman:

My biggest challenge is this: I've created a data platform which captures all campaign (paid) traffic and can attribute a conversion to each based on whatever model I choose. Now… how do I create actionable insights from this data which are going to help me decide where to spend my budget? What report would you want to see on conversion attribution that would help you decide where to spend??

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I believe that attribution modeling is not the path to the smartest decisions for multi-touch multi-visit digital campaigns. This is practically heresy in our industry, but it's what I've learned from my experience.

A lot of people buy tools and consulting and go love crazy with attribution modeling. Yet at the end of all that money and all that love, they struggle to make even a single decision about shifting media spend (from Facebook to Email or Google to Bing or whatever).

That's simply because the ecosystem we live in is insanely complex, "path analysis" on campaign data is just as much of a waste of time as path analysis for, well, website path data, and every attribution model has built into it biases and opinions that often struggle to stand any intellectual scrutiny, or the simple laws of common sense.

If you want to make the smartest decisions about your budget allocation then leveraging the time tested methodology of media mix modeling (at its core powered by controlled experiments) is the only way to go. It is hard, it is time consuming, but it also allows you to test your hypotheses on possible optimal allocations, test them in the real world, find the best answers and be brilliant with your marketing spend mix.
[/context]

(That said…) If you would like to make smarter (not the smartest decisions, beyond simplistic last click, then you can just build what Google Analytics has built into its tool.

Sorry I meant to say, be inspired by what they've built.

Ignore the patently bad models like first click attribution, linear attribution, daily planetary alignment etc. Start with models like Time Decay and Position Based to understand what the conversion portfolio might look like (last two columns above) and create hypotheses about what a better budget allocation might look like. Roll that out to your entire portfolio (or to a subset as a controlled experiment) and measure conversion improvements. Rinse and repeat.

Without a doubt with a cyclical process like above you'll be better than you were in a last click world.

If you want to go one step further you can build into your tool, again just providing inspiration , the capacity to allow your users to leverage their unique business knowledge to create hyper customized models, like the one I'm creating here using the Google Analytics custom attribution modeling feature…

Go back and scroll through the image again, slowly, and infer the knowledge, leaps of faith, sophistication and knowledge of my business that I'm able to put into the model. I'm valuing different positions differently, with a heavy emphasis on the converting touch points. Then I'm using data from the standard Days to Conversion report to limit who gets credit (no one beyond 27!). The credit distribution is proportional to content consumption (I like page count and not time) and finally apply the rules based on position in the path.

Pretty cool right?

Remember, this may or may not work for you. That's simply because this model is unique to my business and my understand of our data. The nice thing is that my custom attribution model will give me a unique view of the conversion path on MY site (a new column to look at under "% Change from Last Interaction"). I can use that to hypothesize what an optimal budget allocation might look like.

You could consider something like this in your tool, your users will like you a lot.

Attribution modeling is a feature available only in Google Analytics Premium, a paid version.

Remember at the end of the day attribution modeling is just a bit smarter than last click, it brings the benefit of knowing that one should optimize portfolios and not a silo (which last click pushes). For the smartest portfolio allocations the answer is media mix modeling (powered by controlled experiments).

Mark Tollerman:

I've often observed insights to be the sole responsibility of analysts rather than designers, PMs, engineers and execs resulting in fear and lack of understanding of data and therefore increased use of opinion over fact. How does one go about changing a corporate culture to make data driven insight an implicit demand of an organization frightened of data?

There are 19,276 books on org design on Amazon right now, so you can imagine how difficult it is to answer your question in just a few words. If you really want help here, hire a very very good business (not analytics) consultant.

But here are some quick thoughts…

Insights can only come from a cohesive team that is responsible for qualitative and quantitative analysis. It is very hard to bring these two camps together, but when we managed to do that in my last job it worked magnificently because there was renewed understanding of what's important, where to go for the best data and how to bring left and right brain thinking to solving customer problems with unique solutions.

Optimal ownership of the analytics team inside the company will increase the likelihood of data and not faith will drive decisions. Here's a post you might find valuable: Who Owns Web Analytics? A Framework For Critical Thinking.

Finally, you'd referenced boss/exec issues, here you go: Six Rules For Creating A Data Driven Boss!

Christian Rose:

How the hell do I eek out goals out of web authors that could hardly care less about them.. (other than the fact that they are authoring content that happens to fall on our website?) and the baby-boomers C-levels in charge of the company that have little to no attention for web stuff, other than the fact that they inherited this website when they started to work here?

Boy do I have a post for you to read, it is written to solve the precise problem you are running into.

Check it out: The Biggest Mistake Web Analysts Make… And How To Avoid It!

It outlines a six step process you can use to:

Success won't come overnight Christian, but the above way is the only one I know of ensuring consistent scalable success.

Johan Johansson:

My question got to be what kind of organization structure you recommend to support data driven culture and decision making? And what key functions/roles do you need in that structure?

See my note to Mark above about how hard this is. And please do read the post on who owns web analytics .

Org design is hard, and there is no perfect answer…

(Source: Manu Cornet)

But here are three thoughts in a digital analytics context from my many failures:

If the organization is young and resource strapped then a centralized org structure is very effective, and efficient.

As the organization rapidly explodes and is growing across divisions and countries, a decentralized model makes the most sense. A centralized structure for analytics in this case will end up being a traditional worst case "IT mental model" roadblock. Eww!

In mature organizations a centralized-decentralized model works best. The central team is responsible for analytics frameworks, centralized contracts (tools, consultants), for aggregated company level analysis, complex project execution (experimentation, media mix models etc) and for setting standards. The decentralized teams understand the difference between reporting and analysis, and simply focus on fast, hyper-relevant analysis!

(This is not a pitch but if you are interested my book Web Analytics 2.0, in addition to other goodies, has an entire chapter on how to create data driven organizations.)

Good luck Johan!

The oh that's not so bad Questions.

Francisco Meza (and Faiz Sheikh):

(not provided) in organic and (not set) in Paid. It's just missing information I can't use?

Yes and no.

You'll only see (not provided) in your organic search keywords report. It represents the queries done on Google by folks who were logged into their Google.com account or using https (secure) search. Google does not pass those queries to the website in the referral string. Hence none of the web analytics tools are able to report that data so they bucket them in a "not provided" bucket (the name may be different in SiteCatalyst, Yahoo! Web Analytics etc).

The size of this unknown bucket will be different for each site. For my site it is currently 50% of the search traffic…

Learn more about how I analyze (not provided) data to get some understanding in this post: Smarter Data Analysis of Google's https (not provided) change: 5 Steps

(not set) is a completely different issue, and you can fix it.

You'll see (not set) in many places in Google Analytics (and other tools as well, though it might have a different name), including your paid search reports. That label is applied when data is not available for the dimension you are looking at in your reports.

In the Search reports it might be there because AdWords auto-tagging is broken, in the Campaign reports it indicates that the UTM parameters were not properly coded (or are completely missing), in the Matched Query report it might indicate you are looking at "content targeting" were you use content and not keywords to do the targeting.

(not set) just needs you to dig deeper, identify the problem and fix it. If you are using GA and you need help then hire a GACP (http://bit.ly/gaac ), if you are using Adobe, WebTrends, IBM et al then please hire a consultant with experience in those tools.

Jacob Funnell:

The company I work for sells writing courses. We have many course pages. The idea is that they generate leads. I have these leads tracked in Google Analytics as goals. I can see which pages end in conversions if they're taken as landing pages. But how can I see which pages merely assist conversions?

This is exactly why the Page Value metric (in the past called $index value) was created.

It helps you understand the "contribution" of the pages that are viewed in converting visits (using conversions for ecommerce websites and goals values for non-ecommerce websites, like this blog, or both).

Here's a helpful blog post: Understanding And Using Page Value

I'm imploring the Google Analytics team to make this metric available in custom reports where it would be multiple times more helpful. Hopefully soon!

Edward Cowell

"Was the data correct?" No matter what the stats actually say, I always go back to asking did we track it correctly, maybe miss something, not tag all the pages etc.?

Dealing with data quality doubt is every day and, sadly, very complex challenge for many, if not most, of us. This is compounded by the fact that a whole lot of analytics implementations are incorrect and incomplete. My recommendation is that you follow the virtuous data quality cycle…

Here's the blog post that describes each of the six elements in greater detail: Web Data Quality: A 6 Step Process To Evolve Your Mental Model

If your responsibility is on the analytics side, and not the data collection side where the above process applies 100%, and the challenge is purely the leaders in the company then please review the guidance in this blog post: Slay The Analytics Data Quality Dragon & Win Your HiPPO's Love!

Please pay particular attention to recommendation #4 ("Head" data can be actionable in the first week / month), #5 (Data precision actually goes up lower in the "funnel") and #9 (Be Aware of two upsetting distractions: Illogical customer behavior. Inaccuracy benchmarks).

Remember when it comes to data quality: "An educated mistake is better than no action at all."

Joe Brown:

How will digital analytics be impacted by Do Not Track browser policies and DAA policy efforts? What do you envision the IE10 default DNT impact will be?

Microsoft has evolved its position on the Do Not Track / Default settings in IE10.

Regardless… this is a subject I'd covered in detail recently: EU Cookie / Privacy Laws: Implications On Data Collection And Analysis

To provide a hyper-fast non-nuanced summary… please invest in:

The impact is less than what you might imagine in most cases, and a bit more in other cases. Please see the post for lots of specific detail.

Larissa Martins:

Hi Avinash Kaushik, first of all, thanks for the opportunity!. My questions are 2 (among maaaany others). 1- How can we apply all the web analytics concepts and knowledge in the real world? I mean, we read blog posts, books, go to conferences and consume great WA content. But clients in the real world do not follow us, especially in Latin America where companies, even the multinational ones, are mostly intuition driven and there´s a lack of qualified professionals. 2 – To be simple and direct and I´d really like to hear your honest opinion, GA or SiteCatalyst?

Let's do the second one first, during my looooong career I've yet to interact with a single company where the lack of digital success was due to the web analytics tool they used. I wish it were so, would be great for me and you, but sadly that is not the case. If companies have 15 challenges to deal with, picking the right analytics tool would rank #15. So if you have SiteCatalyst, use it like crazy. It is fantastic at what it does. If you have WebTrends, ditto. If you have Google Analytics, ditto.

Only consultants and internal IT/"Analytics" folks who want to make money/preserve careers obsess about the tool. Then spend 18 months implementing it while the company makes ever more decisions on faith.

If you have a tool from a well established vendor, use it. Spend all other time in solving the other 14 important business problems.

That leads us to your first question… how do we get people to care, what to we do instead of obsessing about tools?

Three things.

The problem is not the HiPPOs or CEOs, the problem is us.

They don't care about data or digital because we, yes you and me, have never worked hard to make them understand the real impact of digital, the real outcomes of leveraging the opportunities of digital. Because we are too busy collecting data and data puking. You fix that problem and you'll have every CEO in the world knocking down your door to have a few more minutes with you.

The omg that's easy questions.

Sudhir Mantena:

Integrating data from AdWords and Google Analytics into single report to help make decisions such as:
- Set of Keywords with best and worst ROI.
- Set of negative Keywords to block
- Keywords with potential to convert in near future
What other meaningful reports should an advertiser care about??

If you use Google Analytics then you have a delightful set of helpful standard reports available to you that pre-integrate the two disparate data sources. Go to Advertising and then AdWords in the interface.

You also have the capability to create some incredible custom reports. You can download some of my favorites here: Google Analytics Custom Reports: Paid Search Campaigns Analysis

If you don't use Google Analytics consider using the AdWords API to get data into the web analytics tool. Or use the web analytics tool's API and the AdWords API to pull data into a data store of your choosing. Then analyze like your life depended on it!

Rob Mclaughlin:

From big cheese to me: "Explain why I should listen to you with you charts and numbers when our customers are shouting their feedback and frustrations at us?"

Simple, people who live in an or world are less effective when making decisions than people who live in an and world.

Customers articulating their problems are an incredible source of issues that should be fixed. But we don't just want to rely on the noisy few.

We want to use qualitative data as well as quantitative data because the latter will allow us to "listen" to all the customers, the latter will be an excellent source of understanding what the reasons might be for the frustration, and it will be the only source of data to understand how much money you are making, why you are making that little (or lot), where is it coming from!

So there.

Marius Pop:

How do I find out exactly what the visitors are looking for on the page? With that I'm looking to reduce the bounce rate.

Exactly is such a hard word. Brings with it burdensome expectations, and an enormous cost.

So we move from exactly to close to exactly. Sounds reasonable?

In your case you'll have to solve this problem:

Here is how you do it: Six Tips For Improving High Bounce Rate / Low Conversion Web Pages

The unknown unknowns questions.

Joe Librizzi:

In lieu of major infrastructure changes, how can the impact of offline campaigns be measured within GA's multi-channel funnels

Sadly in life sometimes there is no in lieu of. There are many conditions in life that might preclude us from doing what's required, but sadly sometimes you have to do the right thing. Even if it is hard.

Here are two posts that cover the complexity of multi-channel analytics: Tracking Offline Conversions. 7 Best Practices, Bonus Tips, Tracking Online Impact Of Offline Campaigns.

Lucas Deibler:

What is the best use of analytics for helping shape a full site redesign, specifically for a content site?

Understanding customer intent. Understanding current sand traps. Understanding the user interaction model.

Hire a consultant with quantitative and qualitative experience in digital analytics and they'll be able to give you a lot more specific detail to suit your unique situation.

Jeremy Kolb:

What are the best tools in the industry for building a social brand?

I'm not sure that there is a tool to build social brand.

But here's the formula that works: Wake up in the morning. Identify the intersection of your competence and passion. From that place deliver something incredible of value to your social audience. Repeat it the next day.

Michael Krupinsky:

I'd like to combine impressions (paid media, organic search and paid search), clicks, lands, and return visits during their purchase cycle. I don't want last click attribution; I want a full view of my prospects as they are exposed to my external messaging and then go through their online decision process. Did they read a review on Amazon after they were exposed to an ad? Did that later lead to a search and a click on a paid brand search term which brought them in to sign up on our email list…which then then bought from after receiving an email offer 2 weeks later?

You can track what people do on your site. You can track what people do when exposed to your ads on other websites. You can't track what people do on sites where your tracking code does not exist, and tie it to what they do on your site or a competitors.

Life's tough.

You still have more data than anyone should legitimately have in this world. If you don't have in-house expertise to pull off most of what you outline above then please consider hiring a consultant who has skills in business intelligence, web analytics 2.0 and hard core quantitative analysis.

Lisa Murphy Carlston:

How do you approach the identification of good leading, or predictive metrics? Are there criteria you use? Any tips for proofing whether there is causation vs. correlation between the potential leading metric and the outcome desired?

Hire a very smart statistician with strong data modeling skills and a very deep comfort level in working with incomplete large data sets with missing variables. She/he will be able to create something for you.

Roni Leibovitch"

With multi-channel funnels and goal conversion GA allows us to build a fairly comprehensive attribution model. This data is usually reviewed in the form of a report. Even if I assess it in near real-time my domain cannot make a real-time decision based on these metrics w/o relying on 3rd party CRM tools. Can I use my Google Analytics attribution model to test UI/UX in real-time, or build a decision engine based on JS queried from my analytics? For example, offer the visitor who is more likely to complete an 'assisted social conversion' based on my model, a different UI than someone entering the site via search.

It looks like you are volunteering to build a new analytics and behavior targeting solution.

When it comes to real time remember that right time is substantially more important (and cheaper and effective) than real time. See point #4 here: A Big Data Imperative: Driving Big Action

Phew!

Did I not say we got some incredible questions? I hope you had as much fun with this post as I did.

I want to close with three very quick macro thoughts.

I wish you all the very best.

As always it's your turn now.

How do you tackle attribution modeling? What strategies have resulted in your organization becoming data driven rather than faith driven? Who owns web analytics in your company? How have you avoided the data quality quicksand trap? Do you know of a company that has solved the multi-device tracking problem? What is your secret to valuing content on your website?

Please share your thoughts, critique, brilliant ideas, and life lessons via comments.

Thank you.

Dear Avinash: Attribution Modeling, Org Culture, Deeper Analysis +++ is a post from: Occam's Razor by Avinash Kaushik

As I've gotten older I've come to appreciate the value of frameworks a lot more.

When we are young, the answers to everything are simpler because, of course, we know everything.

What metrics should I use? Use BR & CV. What digital marketing works? Definitely Y, do that. How can I improve my business? Simple, do A then B and you're done. So on and so forth.

One upside (or is it a downside?) of age is the wisdom of realizing how much you don't know. Suddenly you don't have concrete answers because you realize: 1. You usually lack all the information you need and 2. Even the most mundane and obvious situations are incredibly complex and unique.

So you start answering questions like "What is two plus two?" with "Tell me a little bit more about what you are adding" or "It really depends on the process you use to add them" or … you get my point.

This is the main reason I love frameworks. They don't contain answers; rather, they help place a situation or a process or steps and encourage you to think a certain way. They force you to step back and think. They make you go talk to other people. They force you to say “hmmm …” And if you can make a person think, if you can encourage them to cover all the bases, if you can get them to ask themselves some tough questions, then you have given them the greatest gift of all. Not the pat answers, but rather the way to figure out the best answers for themselves all by themselves.

So, whenever possible, don't ask for perfect answers, ask how to think. You'll thank me.

Two of the frameworks I've built and shared on this blog are the Digital Marketing & Measurement Model (how to pick the best KPIs for your business that guarantee success, using a powerful five-step process) and the Clear Line of Sight Model (to ensure every bit of Marketing and Analytics you are doing is tied to the Net Income of the company).

The DMMM and CLoS are strategic frameworks (you should embrace them right away!), and in this post I want to share a really, really simple framework for structuring web analytics consulting contracts.

The Web Analytics Consultant Quandary

BB sent this query:

If I take on a consulting project then what could be expectations out of me?

From what I understand, I would be creating a Web Analytic Report and giving my recommendations. That would be one deliverable from my end.

What could be the other deliverable for a web analytic project? What could be their expectation beyond submitting the report?

Would I be required to set up various A/B and multivariate tests for that company?

And what if they are at initial stage and have just set up Google Analytics with no goals, events or internal search tracking. Would I be required to implement goals, events or set up internal search tracking as well as exit survey?

What is the timeline of a web analytic project in the above case where there is no tracking and as a consultant I set up tracking for them. When should I start creating reports?

When does this project end? I mean where do I put a stop.

When I get this type of open-ended query my instinct is to figure out how to create a framework that would encourage structured thinking, force for assumptions and flaws and opportunities to rise to the fore.

And it does not have to be complicated, even for something as open and expansive as the query above.

For any web analytics consulting contract, the beginning, middle and end really depend on the contract you've signed, and – you'll be surprised – not the actual amount of work that needs to be done. The contract, and the hourly rate it provides for, will motivate the consultant to do as much or as little as is required to meet the contractual terms.

So, what's the fix?

The Optimal Web Analytics Consulting Framework: DC – DR – DA

Before jumping into any engagement (and signing a contract) I recommend using this simple framework for web analytics consulting contracts: Data Capture. Data Reporting. Data Analysis.

Ask your client: "What is it that you would like to accomplish in these three simple buckets: DC, DR, DA?"

This will force them to think about what they really want to get done, and their reply will be a really huge gift to you because you'll know:

So, what type of work falls into each of these three buckets?

Data Capture:

There are lots and lots of pure Data Capture consulting contracts, and sometimes they'll also include our next bucket…

Data Reporting:

Bonus Pro Tip: If you are going to take a lot of Data Reporting contracts, then you should create for yourself (and your company) a massive bank of the best of breed custom reports for various purposes (types of companies and types of reports requested). Then when you sign a Data Reporting contract you can pick the best custom reports from your bank, simply import them into your client's account, and boom (!) you're already in business. Don't forget to ask for a bonus for finishing early.

Bonus Custom Reports: You can download my favorite Paid Search Custom Reports and my Content Efficiency, Visitor Acquisition Efficiency and Search Micro-Ecosystem reports and get a head start with your own reports bank!

Data Analysis:

So when does the work of a web analytics consultant start or end? How much can they charge for it? Are they required to fix the code or set up experiments? What about customized data dumps?

It all depends. Is it a Data Capture, Data Reporting or Data Analysis contract?

You would be right to state that there are probably no pure DC, DR or DA contracts. They are rare, mostly because when you start doing analysis you'll notice you can't get away from meeting some reporting needs at your client. When you do reporting and analysis you'll discover implementation problems and then someone (you?) have to go fix that.

There is most certainly a symbiotic relationship between the DC, DR and DA.

But it is not uncommon for a contract to be heavily weighted in only one of these three areas. If you use this web analytics consulting framework then you'll be able to identify that upfront and set optimal scope for your contract, charge an appropriate lump sum or hourly rate, and go about working like crazy to become super rich!

A Client Perspective:

If your company is looking to hire a consultant then you should go through this exercise upfront as well. Before you call the blogger you're impressed with, before you sign on the dotted line from a consulting company that's "certified," before you extend a contract to the speaker at an industry conference.

What work do you actually have for the consultant/consulting company?

Is it majorly Data Capture? Data Reporting? Data Analysis?

What is your core weakness in terms of skills inside the company?

Why is it that your organization is HiPPO- or gut-driven, rather than you providing cogent insights to your HiPPOs so that they can mix data and their experience (or gut) to make optimal decisions?

It is never obvious.

But if you take our simple framework, ask the right questions and do some root cause analysis (or just soul searching or at least sleep on it for one night) then you'll be able to better understand what you need, you'll pay optimally for that need to be fulfilled (both contract amount and contract duration) and, I cannot tell you how brilliantly important this is, you'll find the optimal consultant who has the optimal skills you need.

It is not unusual for a million dollars to have been spent and the company to have progressed to zero percent data driven. That's because they thought they were getting a real analyst, they got a superb implementation specialist who's done data reporting but possesses zero actual analytical skills. This person, group of people if a consulting company, then spent a year (charging a million dollars) doing the world's most sophisticated implementation of Site Catalyst / WebTrends / Google Analytics. The company now has 900x more data than it needs, they have 25x more reports than they need. They just don't have any analysis.

That's a big company story.

But if you are a small business you don't have that kind of money. Hence it's even more critical that you go through, even a rough exercise, the DC, DR, DA framework. You likely need all three. Know that it is very, very hard to find the Purple Elephant that will be good at all three, so figure out where you have the greatest need. Hire her. When she's done with her core competence, go out and get the next person to take you to the next level. (And then the next.)

The Data Capture, Data Reporting and Data Analysis framework helps both clients and consultants have an immense amount of clarity on what the needs are (client), what skills are required to meet those needs (consultant) and how much time and money will be required (from the client to the consultant) to deliver glory.

I've created a helpful summary based on my humble experience along four key dimensions that I think you'll find to be of value (regardless of if you are the client or the consultant):

So use our delightful framework. Spread happiness in the world, happiness that only actions based on great data analysis can deliver.

Ok, as always it is your turn.

Do you have an alternative approach to sizing up the opportunity with a client? As a client, do you have a specific set of instructions you send out when looking for consultants? What kind of contracts are most common out there? Why can't we find more fantastic analysts in our ecosystem? What are your secrets to delivering joy to your clients? If you are a client, what secret ingredients did your last DC, DR or DA consultant possess?

Please share your insights, advice, kudos, and critique below via comments.

Thank you.

Web Analytics Consulting: A Simple Framework For Smarter Decisions is a post from: Occam's Razor by Avinash Kaushik

by Mike Fleming

So, when you start out, first get your feet wet. 
Start with a PPC landing page or other campaign that’s fully
controllable.  If you’re worried about the results, you can split your
test into low-risk ratios like 90-10 or 80-20 (this means 90% of your
traffic goes to your control page and 10% goes to your test page). 
These tests will take longer to accumulate enough data, but it lowers
the risk while you build your confidence.

Six simple steps are all you need to launch your test, so you really have nothing to fear.

1. Name your test.
2. Choose your test page and the action you want visitors to take after coming to the page.
3. Tag pages and elements (or sections) with code generated by your testing tool. (Get IT help)
4. Enter test variations into your testing tool.
5. Launch your experiment.
6. Analyze
   data after a suitable length of time, resulting in high-confidence,
   statistically significant differences in variation results. 

Start with important elements, like headlines.

Another thing that really helps with confidence when you first start is testing page elements that have significant impacts on conversion. 
For example, headlines are extremely important because readers use them
to self-organize the information you present and decide whether or not
they want to engage more seriously with your page. Good headlines
persuade visitors to read deeper.

But headlines aren’t the only
thing you can test. You can test any element on your page. Granted,
different elements will have different effects on conversion rate, so you’ll want to make the more important elements higher priority sections.
Also, you don’t want to test too many variables in too many sections at
the same time, or you’ll have too many different combinations to
complete the test in a reasonable amount of time. And, time is very
important at the beginning of your testing journey because it keeps
momentum going, increases motivation once you see results, and builds
confidence as you move forward.

There’s multiple testing options for your needs.

A/B
and multivariate tests aren’t the only options available for the
website tester.  Here are all of the options available to you…

• A/B Test
  – Test two pages or two variations of a variable against each other.
  You use this to test large-scale changes like page designs, layouts,
  etc.  These are good to start with because you should see big
  differences more quickly.
• Split-Path Test –
  Split traffic among different linear paths.  This would only be good for
  linear conversion funnels like checkout because visitors navigate sites
  in a non-linear fashion.
• Multipath Multivariate Test – Test combinations of elements across groups of pages (i.e. a checkout process) to see which ones work best.
• Do Anything Test – You can specify more than one conversion goal.
• Linger – The conversion is time on page.
• Click – Target a specific event or click.

Technology
alone won’t give you optimal results. With today’s tools, you easily
drown in possibilities and data.  But, if you have the right talent
available, you can understand what to test, how to test it and how to
interpret the results for actionable insights on how to meet your
customers’ needs - and confidently report profitable news to your
investors, shareholders and employees.

Be sure and visit our small business news site.

by Mike Fleming

Most companies don’t test their sites.  Their main justification for
this tends to be that they don’t have the budget to take it on.  But,
this is clearly a misunderstanding because free tools (like Google’s Content Experiments) make it VERY cheap. When you put that together with the logic that testing is just going to help you improve conversion on your site,
not doing it is costing your more than doing it. Not doing it is like
telling your investors, shareholders, employees or other stakeholders
that you already make enough profit and you’d really
not like to make any more in the foreseeable future. Your site exists to
persuade visitors to take actions, right? Well, you don’t know how good
it is, or how good it could be, until you fully embrace experimentation
and testing with it.

There are no “best practices”

There
is no business quite like yours.  Sure, other business do what you do
and/or sell what you sell, but yours is unique in many ways. So are your
customers. People buy from you instead of your competitors for those
reasons.  Even if you believe you’ve implemented all of the so-called
“best practices” of web design into your site, the fact that you’re
unique means that there could not possibly be such things for all web
sites.  The truth is that what works for one business doesn’t necessarily work for another,
even if they sell the same thing.  The only real “best practices” that
exist are those that you discover through knowing your business and understanding your individual audience. 
Experimentation and testing is the only way to uncover this.  So, when
you hear about “best practices,” the best thing to do is simply use them
as starting points and work to improve upon them for your specific
customers.  You do this by hearing what your customers have to say and creating a system that optimally meets their needs.

Replace opinions with data

In 1923, Claude Hopkins, the author of Scientific Advertising wrote, “Almost
any question can be answered cheaply, quickly and finally by a test
campaign.  And that’s the way to answer them – not by arguments around a
table.  Go to the court of last resort – buyers of your products.“  Fast forward to 2012 and we now have the cheapest and quickest medium for testing
there is – the Internet.  It’s cheap because not only are there free
software tools, but making changes to your site is easy and
inexpensive.  It’s quick because tests are easy to set up and
statistically significant data is accumulated at faster rates than ever
before.  It’s final because you can replace opinions with data that
works as evidence of how changes affected your online efforts.

You
limit your site’s ability to convert when you focus on what you think
your visitors want or what you want to deliver to them.  In the online
environment, you’ve got to give them what they want, when they want it, and how they want it…or
they’re clicking goodbye.  The best way to do this is to simply let
your customers design your site for you.  You’ll never build it better
than they would for themselves.

Be sure and visit our small business news site.

For one day during the holiday shopping period in December, customers could not use a well-known retail giant’s website. Heads rolled. Jobs were on the line. Searchers were puzzled. How is it possible, you may wonder, that a website representing a popular brand could experience a day of lost sales…



Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.

We’ve just experienced another season of roundups in the sports, music and movie industries and throughout it all, I noted interesting things about marketing and human behavior. Super Bowl It began with the TV commercials during the Super Bowl. Usually my favorite part of this final game of…



Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.

This guest post is by Neil Patel of Quick Sprout.

The user is king. That’s what a lot of pundits are saying these days, from usability experts to SEO gurus and content marketing pros.

Actually, it’s always been true, and it’s why the mantra “content is king” has always been so important. Content is exactly what users wanted. Naturally, you should give them what they want.

But content isn’t enough today. Total user experience must be baked into blog content if you want to make it bigger and better so that you stand out and dominate in your space. These five elements of user experience are essential to doing just that.

1. Navigation

When it comes to a site heavy with content like a blog, navigation is essential. The primary job of navigation is to lead the user around the site. When it comes to a blog, this is especially important. The goals are as follows:

• New content should be available and obvious to users. They shouldn’t miss out on anything.
• New users should be able to understand in a short period of time what content is exactly available.
• Users should know how to find the content they want. They are looking for answers, and it’s your job to get them to the relevant content.
• Older content should be available to users who liked newer, related content.

In the end, it comes down to putting the content where your users can find it. And the number one navigation strategy rule is this: the navigation should never change even though new content is being added.

Let’s deal with a couple of typical navigation problems: finding old content and keeping users reading.

A blog that is just a few months old will not run into navigation problems. There just simply isn’t enough content. As that blog grows, however, and new content is added, you will begin to run into navigation problems, namely older posts are getting lost and forgotten.

That’s not good.

The common way to handle this is by adding a Monthly Archives widget to the blog. That is probably the worst possible way you can handle this problem.

Instead, put your content in proper categories and use a workable search system.

The Popular Posts sidebar widget is a great place to start. And instead of allowing the plugin algorithm to decide which content should go there, you make the choice. It’s better to choose based upon your experience and what your analytics are telling you, than to let the machine guess.

The same is true for adding older posts as related material at the end of posts. This is how Smashing Magazine does it:

Internal links are also another great way to improve the navigation of older posts. This way you can give them related material that’s immediately relevant to what you are writing about … and may even expand on a point.

There are two ways of doing this correctly. One is to make the links organic to context, so that they flow, like I did in my 8 Things Blog Readers Want More Than Just Content:

Or you can highlight the post by suggestion it as additional reading, like James Aultucher does in his 10 Things to Do When They Don’t Call post:

One way you don’t want to link to older posts is like they sometimes do at Freakonomics:

That is neither helpful for SEO purposes, or to users. It’s bad user experience. You are not giving users any indication of what is behind the link, and that slows users progress.

The goal is to keep them reading. Once someone lands on your site, you want them to stay. Otherwise you have high bounce rates. That’s why a Popular Posts or Recommended Reading plugins are essential.

Categories are useful for navigation when done right, but I don’t use categories because my tests have proven they aren’t useful. But perhaps they make more sense for your blog. If that is the case, you always need to keep three rules of thumb in mind when creating them:

• Keep the number of categories to a bare minimum: Remove categories that have fewer than five posts until you can fulfill your category authority plan and create more content in those silos.
• Use keywords that explain what the site/blog is about: A user should be able to look at your list of categories and understand immediately what the site is all about. Here are some categories I would use: Advanced SEO Techniques, Web Analytics, Digital Marketing, and Entrepreneurs. In fact, your category labels should come from your SEO keyword research.
• Use categories only when you can justify them as being useful to help users find content: They should be intuitive and easy to understand. A confusing category list can sow distrust in your user.

Here’s a poor example of category use by Dumb Little Man:

Copyblogger demonstrates a clean, unique, and simple way of using categories:

While categories can prove useful, you should always test to see if they are helping or hurting you.

2. Speed

In a 2009 Google study, it was reported that a 0.5 second delay in page-load time caused a 20% drop in traffic. Amazon experienced a similar drop in traffic and revenue due to a fraction-of-a-second load delay.

More recently, Google has reported that slowing down search results by as little as 400 milliseconds will actually increase dropped searches from 0.2% to 0.6%.

That’s a huge drop in traffic for 400 milliseconds, so it pays to minimize the page speed. This is usability 101. It forces you to always ask if that new feature you want to embed on your page is worth the drop in load times and traffic.

You might like the flashy features, but they can dramatically slow down site performance. And don’t get fooled by the fact that internet connection is speeding the web up. How much site load speeds impact user experience will always be important. Just look at how it impacted Google.

I’ve covered the topic of speed extensively in How Design Your Blog for Awesome SEO, as have authors here at ProBlogger.

3. Focus

When it comes to creating a user experience that will make your blog better, the focus of your blog is equally as important as any of the onscreen, tangible things we have been talking about.

For example, page load speed and conversion are both actions that can be measured. Focus is less tangible, but highly important.

Let me share some common mistakes people make to show you what I mean:

• Trying to please everyone: A blog that thinks everyone is its target user is going to be a miserable failure.  But you can’t simply pick an industry and then think you are narrow enough in your focus. For example, saying that your target audience is people who love food is still too broad, especially if you want to dominate that space. You have to pick a unique, narrow segment of that broad space. People who love hospital food may be a little too narrow, but you understand what I’m saying.
• Confusing your content with your context: Sometimes you can attract the wrong audience by giving them the wrong content. If you run a social media blog, for example, but write content about postcards, or something totally from left-field, like home-made beer, you might get your user to come to your site, but he or she won’t stay.
• Hiding behind everyone else: Another focus mistake occurs when you copy someone else’s success and provide nothing new or unique to the conversation. Say you love what Seth Godin is doing, and think you have some worthy things to share. Your blog will flounder if you don’t define some way to make you different than Godin. You just simply can’t compete.

A good, focussed blog strategy has the following elements:

• Narrow definition of what you are trying to accomplish: As I mentioned above, your blog should be focused on delivering content that fits into your definition of cornerstone content.
• Narrow definition of your target user: Your defined cornerstone content should fit perfectly with your defined target user. These should really mirror each other.
• Unique selling proposition: Next, your focus should be on something that your competitors don’t provide. And this should be a focus that you regularly highlight. The harder you can make the focus uncopiable by your competitors, the longer you will be able to dominate the space.
• Cornerstone content creep: A narrow focus will also help keep you from straying too far off topic when it comes to creating content. A warning sign that you may be experiencing cornerstone content creep is that your category list keeps growing.

Creating a focused strategy begins with user research and analysis of your competitors. And as you do your research, you’ll come up with a lot of ideas. It’s key that you rank these ideas in order of importance. Keeping just the top two will help you keep your focus narrow.

4. Display

You may not think about display too much, but whatever stage you are going through in your design process, you will need to think about how most visitors will see your layout depending on what screen resolution they use. Remember that you want to give users what they want.

This means that you have to take into consideration height and width and line length. But that’s not so easy. High-resolution monitors have a high screen resolution, which means users get in a habit of browsing in small windows in which the browser window resolution is much smaller.

In other words, we want to know the size of people’s browsers’ content windows.

So your first step is to figure out who your average user is.

Look at your Google Analytics and see the average screen resolution of your visitors. This data will also tell you about their preferences and behaviors. Then see which user is staying on your site longer, and start to design user display size toward that average profile.

In an older study in which over 18 million screenshots above the fold on browsers, most users will be able to see content that is located within a 500px by 800px space. Over 80% will see the content in a display that is 1000px wide, while the remained browse in a display that is 1250px wide.

The moral of the story is that you need to design displays for your average user. For most, that means the layout will be less than 1000px wide. To give you an idea of what you can do with that, check out The Big Picture Blog by the Boston Globe.

5. Readability

Readability is all about what your user reads on the screen. And the golden rule to good readability is this: the easier your content is to read, the better.

If you want to see how your blog ranks when it comes to readability, run it through the readability test. In the meantime, here are the basics behind good readability:

• Contrast font color with background color: This is critical, because it’s easier to read font text when its color contrasts with the background on which it appears. Black text on white background is the most basic and easiest to read:

   

  Just so you can see how awful a bad contrast can be, check out this pink on blue page:

   

  Also, check your site with Vischeck to see what colorblind people see when they visit.

• Break your copy into chunks. Large blocks of text will discourage people from reading.
• Use bullets. 
• Keep your paragraphs short. 
• Keep your columns narrow so the eye doesn’t have to travel across the page too far: The best line length is between 60-80 characters. This metric should remain constant across different browsers and screen resolutions.
• Avoid backgrounds that are busy: Think of MySpace and how awful those pages were to read. Talk about distracting!

   

 

• Keep it simple: From your home page to an article page to your contact page, a user should know quickly what the site is about and what the main goal is of that page, wherever they are.

• Keep the font style clean: A sans-serif font is the easiest to read on the web. Serifs are the little hooks at the end of letters in fonts like Times New Roman and Courier New. Helvetica and Calibri are good sans-serif fonts.
• Avoid tiny fonts: That will certainly cause eye strain and frustrate your user. Font size 12 or larger is optimal.

Blog usability means content usability

It used to be that content was king. It still is from the perspective of the user. You need to deliver that. But it’s not enough these days. Your readers want a good experience, too.

In 2012 and beyond the user is king, and so you need to design your blog with these usability elements in mind: navigation, speed, focus, display, and readability. It’s essential to get these right if you want to attract and keep more visitors and create a link-worthy blog.

So, what other elements of usability do you feel are important for creating a killer blog? Share your perspective in the comments.

Neil Patel is an online marketing consultant and the co-founder of KISSmetrics. He also blogs at Quick Sprout.

Originally at: Blog Tips at ProBlogger

The 5 Keys to Blog Usability

Being the owner of a Macbook Pro, iPhone, and iPad, you might consider me an Apple Fanboy. I can tell you I’ve been involved in web development long enough to tell you that the current state of usability on the web is nearing the low point: when, in the late 90′s, browsers had no standardization and we had to design different sites for Netscape and Internet Explorer. The current situation comes mostly from designing sites that don’t render properly or at all on mobile devices like a mobile phone, tablet, or iOS device.

Before you cast me aside as being on the bleeding edge of technology and that I don’t really register as being statistically significant, I’ll share three links with you:

• 91% of business pros use iPads for work, 83% loyal to Apple
• 12% of iPad owners in the enterprise no longer use their laptop
• The iPad has Become the Metric By Which Tablet Traffic is Measured

Recently, I was trying to fix my dishwasher (listen, I cook a lot and dirty a lot dishes…knowing how to do some basic repairs myself saves me a little cash now then). About every 8-10 months, the part of the dishwasher that is supposed to grind up the food that doesn’t get pre-rinsed gets clogged and needs be cleaned. I’ve bookmarked the site with the video for my model in Evernote because I use it so often. However, because the site was using a proprietary flash video player, when I clicked the link, I only got the audio podcast not the video showing me assembly/disassembly (screen shots below).

Laptop Version

ipad-p1.jpg" rel="shadowbox[sbpost-13886];player=img;" title="ipad-p1"> iPad Version

Not a problem. I figured I’d head on over to Sears, get a link to the product manual, and do it the long way. Turns out ManageMyLife.com does such a bad job of user detection that they think I don’t have the Adobe Reader installed and can’t view the PDF for my model number.

Laptop Version

iPad Version

Great. So I had a hard time getting a video on how to fix my dishwasher and viewing the PDF for the instruction manual on my iPad. I had to go upstairs and use my laptop. Boo hoo on me for having first world problems, right? What we really have here is a case of bad site design and usability for not designing in a site that fails gracefully when it gets user agent detection wrong. As a marketer and SEO, these things matter and they are going to matter more in the future …

First World Problems

In most cases, people aren’t going to share or link to you if your website doesn’t work on their platform of choice. They aren’t going to share your link on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, or any other social network, and if they do it will be the way I did: to make fun of you or use you as an example of a McFail. Search engines are getting smarter. They are using lots of signals to determine which sites rank. These days, usability and engagement are two key signals and, as Google gets better at measuring them more accurately, they’ll play an even more prominent role.

So what should site owners do in these cases:

• Avoid using proprietary audio/video/pdf viewers and players. If you need to for advertising reasons, build a more bulletproof system of user agent detection and fail gracefully into a condition that allows users to still get the content.
• Don’t let the same content exist on a mobile subdomain (link) and normal domain (link) as this only leads to trouble when content gets shared across mobile devices and laptops (looks squarely in the direction of Facebook and Youtube). Use one URL improve your user agent detection if you need to do so, but try to design a system that is user agent agnostic.
• The number and kind of devices that people are going to use is only going to increase in the coming years. This is a problem that you will have to deal with sooner or later. If you design systems that are flexible and embrace these platforms, you will have an easier time building links, getting content shared, and improving the on site signals and metrics that the search engines are using.

photo credit: Shutterstock/Jaroslav74

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Why the iPad, Flash, Adobe Products and User Agent Detection Really Do Matter

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Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.

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