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Integrated Online Marketing and measurement / analytics

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Subject:  Integrated Online Marketing and measurement / analytics Ashley Friedlein - Favourite
Author:   Ashley :   view profile | all posts by this author | add to favourites
Date:   11:56:46 4 February 2004
 
From all that we see, and those we talk to, measurement and analytics is an increasingly hot topic. Not really surprising as we all seek to maximise ROI. However, increasingly the challenge is how to bring together all this measuring and reporting into a single, useful view – you’ve got your ad servers, your PPC analysis, your e-mail marketing, your site activity tracking, your affiliates, and that’s just the online channel. Woven into this is also a marked trend towards increased personalisation / targeting / segmentation.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

As I say, none of this is new thinking, but I just wonder whether, as everyone stampedes towards campaign-tracking or buying site analytics tools, they have first properly got their user profile house in order? Surely to hit that integrated marketing sweet spot the user profile must be King? The content management system may work with its master to deliver personalisation, the e-mail marketing platform to deliver segmented communications, the campaign tools to deliver users that then, retrospectively, become user profiles, but no one tool or marketing channel governs the user profile. Only the user can do that.
 
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  • Integrated Online Marketing and measurement / analytics, Ashley , 4 Feb 11:56
    From all that we see, and those we talk to, measurement and analytics is an increasingly hot topic. Not really surprising as we all seek to maximise ROI. However, increasingly the ...
    • Integrated Online Marketing and measurement / analytics, Jim Sterne, 4 Feb 15:45
      First of all, Ashely and I are in violent agreement here. But rather than posting a "Yeah, what he said" message, let me add the transitional component. In an ideal world, all t ...
    • Integrated Online Marketing and measurement / analytics, Obi Felten, 5 Feb 12:01
      Fully agree with Ashley that a customer-centric view is the ultimate goal. Direct retailers have had the concept of customer lifetime value for years, but it is now slowly filterin ...
      • Integrated Online Marketing and measurement / analytics, Ed Lamb, 6 Feb 12:30
        I agree with Obi's two challenges that retailers are grappling with. Regarding your second point about customers moving between channels for researching a product and then buyin ...
      • "Free traffic", NeilM, 8 Feb 20:32
        Yes, I also see that a number of major retailers have “free traffic” but I think that this is only inevitable. Big brands can use their equity to acquire traffic at relatively lowe ...
    • Integrated Online Marketing and measurement / analytics, NeilM, 8 Feb 20:17
      I completely agree with a “customer centric” approach and this is where I think that web analytics is ultimately headed. I don’t think that there is a single system on the market w ...
      • Measuring online driving offline sales, Obi Felten, 3 Mar 15:27
        I came across a good article by ex Philips marketer on tactics/measurement methods of how measuring the effect of online marketing on offline sales. Excerpt below, link to full ...
        • Measuring online driving offline sales, Jim Sterne, 3 Mar 16:04
          On 15:27:31 3 March 2004 Obi Felten wrote: >I came across a good article by ex Philips marketer on >tactics/measurement methods of how measuring the effect of >online marketing ...
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