The Rising Cost of Customer Acquisition - III

In our last article, we visited the importance of Ad positions in managing customer acquisition costs. This time we discuss the relevance of your website content; it is an element which you can control tightly and its importance is frequently underestimated by many advertisers.

The Rising Cost of Customer Acquisition - II

In our last article, we touched on the impact of unmonitored competitor activity. This article looks at another possible contributor to the rising cost of customer acquisition.

The Rising Cost of Customer Acquisition - I

Like the internet itself, Panalysis has seen online advertisers evolve dramatically in the past decade. Knowledge of best practice is increasingly the rule, rather than the exception and now more than ever, savvy online advertisers seek to extract the maximum return for their online investment.
In this series of help bytes, Panalysis will identify possible causes of Rising Acquisition Costs and we’ll be sharing a virtual shopping list of management techniques which we’ve found can temper the impact.

Diving into Data Visualisation

When is a pie chart the best way of communicating data - almost never.

Whilst I have fought the good fight for the abolition of unnecessary pie charts for many years it was refreshing to hear why from one of the worlds leading experts in data visualisation. For an excellent discussion on why see this article.

Tracking the Effectiveness of On-Site Promotions

The hard work has been done and you've got the visitor to your site, now's the time to sell to them. Google Analytics, Omniture, WebTrends, Unica and other tools can tell you a lot about how the visitor reached the site and whether they became a lead or a customer. But what about the effective are the messages displayed within your website?

eMetrics Sydney - Day 2

How could you predict that different coloured buttons provided different results at different times of the year? This is what Paul Robinson, Marketing and Communications Manager, from the ABC shop found when he conducted multivariate tests to optimise the purchase process on the ABC shop website. Paul is a skilled user of WebTrends and always provides wonderful insights on how to get the most from web analytics in a retail environment. I was definitely looking forward to this presentation and I wasn't disappointed. His insights into the lack of return on investment for Facebook commerce were interesting as was his insights into the decisions that he makes based on the data from WebTrends.

Mark Allison from WebTrends shared the stage with Paul and provided a sneek preview of some of the features of WebTrends Analytics 10 and its ability to merge data from many different sources (more on this to come in my post on WebTrends Engage 2011).

Frank Grasso from e-Channel Online presented an interesting argument in using AdWords more as a distribution system than a pure advertising platform. In essence his argument was based on the efficiencies that can be created by effectively bidding on long tail keywords to close the sale once a user has made a decision on their purchase. His examples of how poorly companies use AdWords were a real wake up call for the industry.

Alan Long has moved away from Hitwise/Experian to set up his own venture Online 1984 which provides reputation management services in the area of social media. His presentation on the difficulties of analysing social media sentiment across a large scale highlighted some of the key issues that the sentiment analysis market needs to solve before they can provide meaningful tools to the industry.

Other speakers included Aiden Beanland, Regional SEO Manager for Yahoo on engagement analytics for publishers, Christian Bartens from Datalicious on cross channel attribution models, Gregan McMahon on integrating mobile advertising data with other campaign tools and David Brigham on the use of web analytics to optimise marketing spend.

Finally I also spoke at the conference on the topic of Measuring the Environment which covered some of the key factors that should be considered when using web analytics tools. I hope to make this presentation available online shortly.

If you are interested in web analytics and optimising marketing, once again, I can't recommend the eMetrics conference highly enough. It will be coming to Melbourne later this year and hopefully back to Sydney in 2012.

Thoughts on E Metrics Sydney - Day 1

What a wonderful treat it was when eMetrics returned to Sydney for its second year this week. Personally I can't thank Jim Sterne enough for bringing this valuable conference to Australia.

With around 50 people attending this conference was far more intimate than the ones that I have attended in Washington. It is a real joy to be able to participate so candidly and directly in such a small group.

Web Analytics is a small, vibrant community in Australia and the chance to catch up with old friends and make new ones should never be overlooked. eMetrics will return to Melbourne later this year so stay tuned and if you are interested in using data to make better decisions make sure that this event is on your calendar.

So what happened at eMetrics Sydney? Well it is too much for one post so here is a summary of day one. I promise to follow up with posts on each of the concepts covered. The key theme of the conference was to examine the human side of marketing analytics. Jim Sterne started the conference with a presentation that urged us as analysts to go beyond the simplistic channel based thinking and look at the big picture. Some of Jim's key messages were:

• Tell stories with the data, otherwise no one cares,
• Tie all analysis to the three primary business needs:
• Increase revenue,
• Reduce costs,
• Increase customer satisfaction.
• The role of the analyst as therapist; "so tell my why do you feel that you need this report..."

Jim relayed some telling stories about the use of data for data's sake. In one of these a new head of the accounting department decided to withhold all of the regular reports until someone asked for them. As the requests came in slowly the requests were prioritised and the reports delivered based on the priorities. The net result was that the 14 or so days that were required to produce all of these reports was significantly reduced, freeing up valuable time for the analysts to do what they do best - analyse.

Marty Weintraub quite simply blew us all away with his talk on social metrics KPIs and the use of Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn etc to find markets to sell services and products. I would have never thought that identifying groups of people with certain opinions could result in marketing divorce lawyers, chocolate, pizzas and much more to them. Marty gave excellent examples of how you can use the Facebook advertising system to estimate audience size and then how you can target them. If you get the chance to see Marty speak it is worth going, his energy level is amazing.

Lauren Vaccarello from Salesforce.com provided insight into how Salesforce uses its own systems to calculate actual return on investment from its campaigns across all channels. Tying in the offline sales process using the company CRM system with the online advertising data from AdWords and other channels provides a powerful way of checking the actual cost of acquisition of a customer. Without this data we are just left with a best guess on whether a campaign actually converts where the sale is completed outside of the website.

Speakers covering social meda included Ciaran Norris from Mindshare Ireland who discussed how to measure buzz from social media and James O'Toole from Social Media Chief who discussed how to track ROI and measure engagement from social media.

James Dixon from Atomic Search provided a way for companies to self assess where they are positioned in regards to the marketing optimisation maturity model and Will Swayne covered the analysis of display media across a number of different providers.

More to follow on day 2 later.