Who is tracking your site? And what are they doing with the data? If you are reading this you probably answered “Webtrends, so I can get useful metrics on my site that help my business”. But are you sure that this is the only one? I am not talking about spyware, but tracking placed on your site for (not necessarily your) business purposes.

My job as a TAM (Technical Account Manager) is helping customers tag sites, configure profiles, and create reports. For those unfamiliar with the Webtrends TAM service this is sort of a combined consultant, admin, and analytics expert that you contract for a period of time rather than per project. But what does this have to do with who has your site data?

I got a request from a company who wanted to get more information on their social marketing efforts, starting with a series of Blogs. We were developing a strategy to track a long list of blogs done by their employees. Some were hosted on their company site but many were hosted on various other sites and platforms including personal domains.

What surprised me was the variety of tracking already implemented on the sites. Much of which I doubt the site owners knew about. I am not taking about spyware but actual tracking tags embedded in the page code that send data about their site somewhere else. Tracking included:

• Tracking from the CMS software
• Google tags, some of which seemed to be dropped in with other sections of code
• Hosted blog site tracking (e.g. blogengine.com)
• Site Host tags (You’d think that server hosts would do server side, not page based tracking)
• Tracking implemented by, with data going to, a consulting company who built the site
• Ad tracking tags

In some cases there were already 2 to 3 tracking tags on the site – before the Webtrends tag was added! Are you sure these types of tags aren’t on your site?

Is a site developer/hosting service/IT staff/banner ad/CMS software/etc. tracking your site for “quality control”? Where is this data going? Is your marketing data going to someone outside your company? Are they open about what they are doing with the data? Is it even your data even though it is coming from your site?

Ways to tell if your site is being tracked:

• Use a tool such as HttpWatch or Fiddler. These track requests coming from page loads. Watch for Post and GET requests to domains other than yours. This means data is going somewhere besides your domain.
• It is often easy to copy and paste a convenient function without realizing you are including a tracking code. When implementing outside code watch for calls using 1×1 transparent GIF files. This is a common method of sending tracking methods using an image not visible on your page.
• Check if your host and CMS have built in tracking and if so what information is being tracked and where does it go.
• If you have outside content on your site (e.g. a frame with ads) find out what they are tracking. Is it just ad response or is it including data on your site.

Even for your main site tracking – where does the data go? Can you see it or does it go into an unknown pool that you can pull some reports from. Do you have access to all the data being taken on your site? Who else has access to your data?

Some people worry about Big Brother watching them. While most of the companies that put tags on the sites were probably meaning well (“Let’s see how people are using our CMS product!”). They seemed more like a little brother. Not a benevolent “Watching you for your own protection” big brother. But the kid brother hiding behind the couch when his older sister brings home her new boyfriend – just to see if he can hear anything of interest. Occasionally, check behind the couch.

Learn How the Webtrends and Teradata Integration Solution Paints the Whole Picture

There is little doubt of how highly critical the importance of integrating online and enterprise data is. It is necessary to analyze both types of data in order to get the whole picture in a customer’s buying habits and satisfaction, and to improve conversion rates. Knowing when a customer connects with sales staff, knowing which direct mailings and catalogs the customer received, and knowing if the customer is chatting in social networks about the company or its products – all of these are tiny pieces to the whole picture. Unifying this information helps a company fine-tune their marketing strategies, reduce their marketing costs, and helps gives the customer a more personalized shopping experience and an incentive to purchase again.

This is a marvelous idea in theory, but very challenging to achieve in practice. Unless, that is, a company is using Webtrends’ enriched online data and Teradata’s Integrated Web Intelligence (IWI) solution, a partnership that is part of Webtrends’ Open Exchange program.

On December 2, 2009, in a live, interactive webinar, guest speaker John Lovett, a Senior Analyst for Forrester Research, Inc., will discuss why bringing online and enterprise data together is crucial. Next, Webtrends and Teradata will demonstrate their collaborated efforts solution of integrating online and enterprise data, and then will facilitate a question and answer session at the end.

Sign up today for the Integrating Online and Enterprise Data webinar and learn more about Webtrends’ enriched online data and Teradata’s Integrated Web Intelligence (IWI) solution for painting the whole picture to your customer’s purchasing experience.

Integrating Online and Enterprise Data Webinar
December 2, 2009
10am PDT / 1pm EDT

For marketers managing paid search and online campaigns, data is paramount. They use data to make campaign adjustment decisions, to determine budgets, to pay channel partners and affiliates, and to justify advertising spend to their management.
 
Once in a while, a new Webtrends Ad Director customer asks us about a seeming discrepancy in their data. Our reporting may have numbers which are higher or lower than those reported by a previous vendor, or the cross-channel reporting in their Analytics UI may not match our data for the paid search channel. When this happens, our customer will frequently ask which system is wrong and how they can fix it.
 
The ability to measure the success of search marketing campaigns and effectively compare them over time is mired in how performance is tracked and how metrics are defined. As many companies change paid search tools, outsourced vendors and the internal staff who manages their search marketing campaigns, understanding and leveling the data becomes increasingly important. Even when campaign goals remain the same, changing reporting parameters or outsourced providers can lead to dramatically different perceived results.

While sometimes the discrepancies are due to tracking not being set up correctly, frequently they are the result of vendors using different tracking and attribution methods.

Examples we frequently see include:

1  First-Party vs. Third-Party Cookies

Many anti-spyware applications and default privacy settings block third-party cookies and increasing numbers of users are manually blocking third-party cookies or regularly deleting them. This cookie rejection can result in loss of and less accurate tracking and conversion information. In contrast, first-party cookies are not blocked by anti-spyware software or privacy settings, and are the preferred method for more complete and accurate data collection.

2 Cookie Windows

Setting a same-session, one week, or 90-day cookie window will lead to different reported performance.
 
If you carry high price-point products which will require careful consideration and price comparison shopping, the conversion latency may be a week or more. By limiting your cookie window to same-session or one-week, you will miss the conversions which would otherwise be attributed to your search campaign.
 
It is also important to consider the portion of your customers who are single or repeat. If you carry products which will be replenished at regular internals (such as make-up), consider if you want to end up attributing each repeat sale to the click which drove the initial sale. If users restock their supply at regular one month intervals, by keeping a 90-day cookie window open you will effectively be seeing a “lift” in how many sales are generated by your search campaign over time.

Note that your paid search tool or vendor may also have attribution window settings which determine over what period they will take credit for conversions. If their attribution window is shorter than the cookie window, they will not take credit over the entire cookie period. If the attribution window is longer than the cookie window, they will only be able to collect recorded data until the cookie expires.

3  Methods of Conversion Attribution

It is possible to use many attribution methods and rules including last-click, first-click, multi-click, same-session-only, or anytime within the cookie window. Depending on the tools and tracking systems used, each one may have a separate cookie and may take credit for the same conversion event.
 
While businesses have different reasons for selecting a particular attribution method, the most important thing is to maintain the same or similar attribution method over time and to recognize that conversion data will look different with a change in method used. It is also important to recognize how the changes in attribution will impact reporting.
 
Examples of attribution methods can include:
·        Last click in: attribution is granted to the last channel and/or paid search listing which brought the user to the site prior to conversion
·        First click in: attribution is granted to the first channel and/or paid search listing which brought to the user to the site and eventually resulted in conversion
·        Multi-click: attribution is split across all channels and/or paid search listings which the user interacted with prior to converting

4  Definitions of Metrics

When speaking internally or with an outsourced search provider, make sure you have the same definitions of performance metrics.
 
For instance, is ROAS defined as (ad revenue – ad spend)/(ad spend) or as (ad revenue)/(ad spend)? Do these metrics include or exclude agency fees, if applicable?
 
Establishing these definitions ahead of time can prevent incomplete data later along with setting correct expectations for campaign performance.
 
 
It is important to determine early on how you plan to track your campaign metrics and maintain these settings to get the best picture of campaign performance over time. If you choose to outsource your paid search management or change reporting providers, make sure that your prior settings are maintained or kept as close as possible to how you are used to seeing reporting. If it is not possible to maintain all your settings, make sure to keep these adjustments in mind before analyzing the final data for performance.
 
By determining how you will be collecting metrics and performance internally, externally, and over time, you will have the clearest picture of how your search investment has changed over time and how it can be maximized in the future.

We will be discussing reporting and attribution methodologies, best practices, and the future of ROI-driven marketing in an upcoming webinar.
 
Please join us. Register here: True ROI-Driven Marketing Webinar

During the previous four parts of this series( intro, paper prototyping, design, and web standards), I focused on the redesign of Tag Builder that we completed in the spring. While authoring these posts, I didn’t have the liberty to disclose the application we launched just last week, Webtrends Analytics 9 Insight. However, these posts were not unrelated as the methodologies and principles that guided the redesign of Tag Builder were also core to the genesis of Analytics 9 Insight. In the final post in this series, I’ll introduce Analytics 9 Insight features that were inspired by working directly with our users as we progressed through designing, building and testing.

Stories

For the past year, we have been collecting stories from our customers. While listening to what is currently working for them, we paid special attention to what isn’t. We found that our pro users spent a majority of their time creating dashboards and reports for other users in the organization, from executives to marketers. These other users greatly outnumbered the pro users and found that the Webtrends interface was difficult to navigate and had too many options. We incorporated this feedback into stories that guided our design and development.

Some of the stories that guided Analytics 9 Insight

Prototyping and User Testing

Working from these stories, we prototyped the new application completely on paper, using a process called paper prototyping. A cross-departmental team made up of designers, developers, writers, testers, and others “built” the application with markers, paper, scissors, and tape. We then took the paper prototype on the road to our customer conference in Las Vegas. There, we had multiple sessions where our customers attempted to accomplish tasks derived from our stories. When they succeeded, we knew we got it right. When they didn’t, we broke out the markers and paper and designed new solutions. In the end, the paper prototype became a blueprint for our design and development efforts.

David working on some paper prototypes before testing with users

Beta

We developed the application in just nine weeks. We wanted to get it in the hands of users as soon as possible, initially releasing it into a private beta so we could gather feedback and address issues before releasing it publicly. It was a great thing to do because it gave us the opportunity to fine tune the performance and remove many issues before launching the application to the entire On Demand user base.

White board used to track key issues during the private beta

Launch

We were all a bit nervous as we launched the product. It was exciting to see the activity on Twitter and the early reviews pour in. Our goal was to make the most intuitive, useful analytics application in the industry, but because the stories that guided our design efforts came directly from our customers, we were also confident. To keep the dialog going, we included a Get Satisfaction link right in the product. We want to continue to hear from our users.

Get Satisfaction feedback built into the product

New Features

The main features of Analytics 9 Insight have been fairly well documented by now. Web Services URLs ready to embed in Excel, Story View, and RSS overlay among others. The following are features that you may not have heard about that come directly from listening to our users.

1. Shareable URLs

The original version of share included an email option. Then we thought about how people communicate in the office today and realized with corporate IM, intranets, message boards, etc, email was just one way in which users would like to share reports. We took a step back, removed the email option, and created a URL system that would allow anyone to copy and send the link to any other user. This makes sharing reports extremely easy.

URLs reflect choices in interface. Great for sharing.

2. Dimension and Measure Auto Suggest and Search

Creating custom reports in Webtrends allows for endless possibilities. Unfortunately, it can also create endless reports. When considering many different options in which a user could categorize reports, we discovered that most users could remember which reports they were looking for by identifying which dimensions and measures that the report is made of. In the profile dashboard, below the fold, is a list of all reports available to you for that profile. If you start typing a measure or dimension in the search box, the auto complete will kick in at three letters. Choosing one of the measures or dimensions will filter the list to only include reports with that measure or dimension.

Auto-suggest for dimensions and measures across reports

Filter by measure or dimension

3. Copy and Pasteable Content

Sometimes, when scanning through analytics data, you run across a bit of data here or there that you need to copy and paste into a spreadsheet or report. We prioritized this ability over almost everything else. Whether you are in the profile dashboard and click on table view or are in a report, you are able to select the data directly from the interface. Very handy.

Trend view

Switch to table view for easy copy and paste

4. Weekend Indicators

Insight uses 7-day, 28-day, and 91-day date range shortcuts. The first is typical but the second two are a bit peculiar. There is a reason why we chose them instead of the standard 30 and 90 day range options—weekends. You see, both 28 and 91 are divisible by 7. This allows us to display data ranges in compare mode where the weekdays align. Interesting patterns emerge when you show one date range compared to another and the days of the week align perfectly. This is extremely useful as most businesses see a difference between weekdays and weekends.

28 day compare view with weekend indicators

91 day compare view with weekend indicators

5. Date Range Options

The default date range options, as mentioned, are 7-day, 28-day, and 91-day ranges. However, if you click on Custom, you are able to select any range of days you want. After you make a selection, the compare default is to choose the same number of days just before the selection. To change your compare range, all you have to do is select the starting day and the application will automatically select the range equal to the same number of days as the main range. There are also other shortcuts available in the custom option. The year, quarter, and month are all selectable as shortcuts. You can also use one of the numbered week selectors, just to the left of each week.

Custom date range allows for day, week (shown), month, quarter, year, and custom ranges

6. True Visitor Metric

If you select one of the calendar shortcuts mentioned above (year, quarter, month, week, or day), the Visitors key metric will appear in the profile dashboard. Because Analytics is tuned to scan across these standard date ranges and produce a true visitor count, we added this when those ranges are selected.

True visitor count when date selection is set at standard report period

7. Pivot

When you drill into a report and have a specific date range selected, the last thing you want to do when switching reports or profiles is set up the date range all over again. We know that many users switch profiles when viewing similar reports. We added a dropdown to the right of the profile and report selection that makes this extremely easy to jump from profile to profile or report to report. This saves quite a bit of time.

Click on pivot dropdowns to change account, profile, or report

8. Adaptive Account Dashboard

Every customer is different. Some have many profiles. Some have just a few. And some just have one. We wanted to make sure that each customer/user had an interface optimized for them. If a user only has one profile, then they never see the account dashboard and jump right into the profile dashboard. This eliminates unnecessary steps after login. If the user has less than 25 profiles, they see the standard view which features a single table of profiles that can be sorted by any of the available measures and embeds a sparkline of page views. If the user has more than 25 profiles available, they are presented with the compact view which features four columns and reduces the visible metric down to one. In this view, the user can choose a different metric to display by clicking on the metric dropdown at the top of the screen. They can also hover over any profile to get a multi metric and sparkline view. Interesting tip. A user can force the standard or compact view by adding a query parameter to the URL. ?mode=standard or ?mode=compact will change the views.

Account dashboard in standard mode

Account dashboard in compact mode

Inspiration

There are many more customer-inspired features in Webtrends Analytics 9 Insight. If you are a current user, we hope you enjoy Analytics 9 Insight. After all, you helped create it. If you are a customer and haven’t been an active user, we encourage you to login and give it a try. When you do, don’t be shy about sending us feedback through the Get Satisfaction widget in the product (hover over Help and click Feedback). We will also be conducting some user testing next week, August 17 – 21. If you are in the Portland area and would like to test some prototypes of what we are designing next, let me know in the comments.

One of the features that got me really excited about Analytics 9 is the RSS overlay. Being in charge of social media marketing, there’s not much that I care about more than how offsite activity translates into website analytics, which then connects to our sales funnel. RSS overlay makes it easier for me to report the ROI of our social media activity. Anyone involved in social media marketing knows what a challenge it can be to demonstrate the ROI of our work, so anything that makes it easier is my friend.

I use Webtrends Social Measurement to track a variety of topics around the web, including our reputation. I wanted to share how I use our WSM reputation tracking data to quickly understand the impact of our offsite work.

Recently, we launched a social media campaign that had strong results. Using Analytics 9, I was able to get a visual on what social media caused an impact on our site. Below is the screenshot from that campaign in Analytics 9 using the RSS overlay view:

Seeing that data allowed me to send an informed request for a deeper dive on analytics to Elizabeth, who is in charge of Measurement and Optimization here. I was then able to use the RSS overlay graph and Elizabeth’s stats to report our campaign’s success to the company. I looked good. The company benefited. It was a win win and here’s how I did it:

Steps to pull WSM feed into Analytics 9’s RSS Overlay

1. Select the “Configuration” icon on the River of News (RoN) widget you want to use and note down the “wiid” number found at the top left hand corner of the widget.

2. Send an email to Webtrends Technical Support with the subject of “Requesting RSS Feed” and the body of “Please enable a RSS feed for the RON of this wiid:_____”.

3. Webtrends Technical Support will reply back with a RSS feed URL for them to use.

4. Within Analytics 9, select the RSS view, then add in your new RSS feed URL.

NOTE: Any configuration changes made to the RoN widget will create a new wiid. This will need to be passed back through the above instruction chain to ensure that the RSS Feed will continue.

More RSS Goodness

This is the first post about the cool stuff you can do with RSS overlay. We’ll be releasing weekly tips and tricks including:

• Places to find cool RSS feeds such as weather, stocks, coupons, and more. These outside forces can lead to onsite impacts that would be difficult to impossible to correlate without the RSS overlay.
• How to combine feeds, such as you blog, Twitter, Digg, and other accounts into a single master feed.
• How to filter feeds using whitelists and blacklists to get at just the data you want to overlay.
• How to use authenticated feeds so you can pull in data like your offsite marketing calendar from your project management software.
• How to create feeds from scratch.

In the 1981 documentary “Vernon, Florida” by Errol Morris, there is the following joke…

Two sailors are looking out at the ocean. First sailor says, “That’s a lot of water out there.” The second sailor responds, “Yeah, and that’s just the top of it.”

That is how I feel about web standards. What you see in the browser, is just the final rendering that is a combination of html, css, and javascript. So much care and detail can go into these elements to produce the final result. Often, as I browse the web and stumble across a nicely designed site, I will turn off styles and/or javascript to enjoy the simplicity of the plain html and then scan the css and javascript to see how it was constructed.

In the previous article in this series, I walked through some of the more significant design changes we made to Tag Builder. In this article, I will walk through the changes we made just below the surface, to the client-side architecture (html, css, and javascript) to create a new user experience.

1. Web Standards

Web standards is nothing new. It is usually the term used to describe a web application or web site that uses basic HTML elements for marking up content, css for presentation and layout, and javascript for interactivity and dynamic content updates. Web standards typically avoids using unnecessary browser plugins to do the heavy lifting. With advances in javascript libraries and browser performance boosts, web standards based web applications are approaching native OS level quality. To build a world class user experience with our web applications, building in web standards is key.

Tag Builder

Our goal for this revision of Tag Builder was to strip down the HTML to its bare essentials. Divs, classes, lists, paragraphs, headlines, and form elements are the basic building blocks we rebuilt it with. All of the layout, styling, and behavior is achieved using CSS and javascript. You can see it for yourself by turning off styles in your browser (use these instructions to turn off styles in Firefox, IE, and/or Safari). By taking the time to separate these layers and let the rendered html, css, and javascript to do the heavy lifting, it frees up the server side code to be much simpler. This dramatically improves performance and reduces server side complexity.

Tag Builder with styles turned off

2. Accessibility

One of the major benefits of working with web standards is accessibility. In my previous experiences with developing web applications, accessibility is often thought of as an additional task like multilanguage support. By staying true to web standards, many accessibility considerations come automatically. Our attention to detail created one of the most unusual challenges we have experienced with web standards. We wanted to ensure that the Tag Builder form could be navigated by keyboard. When the elements tabbed down into the Additional Options, we found that the browser would jump the view to each field as it was highlighted. This seems normal, but what was surprising was that the javascript or CSS was unaware that the page had moved and so we saw that fields would just show up in odd parts of the interface and destroy the multi-slide effect of moving from one section to another. We eventually found a way to trigger a call to javascript just before the field was in focus so that all things were ready when the tab action occurred. We were able to keep the javascript sliding effect and the ability to navigate the form by keyboard.

3. Javascript for Helpful Behavior

There are many javascript libraries available today to add a bit of slickness to web interfaces. These can often be overdone and to the detriment of the user experience. For Tag Builder, we had a few areas in which javascript behavior was considered to be beneficial and we used it sparingly.

Tag Builder is one long form with many options. We wanted to make sure that users could access the many options but not be overwhelmed by them nor did we want to split the form into many separate forms as many users like to hop around the options when configuring their tracking code. The solution we came up with was to collapse the options using javascript and then as the user clicks on the options they are interested in, those options slide into view. As a user fills out the form fields, light gray dots turn dark indicating how much of the form is filled out.

Indicator Dots

Another way in which we leveraged javascript for behavior was to use it to surface help topics.

4. Integrated Help System

In the previous version of Tag Builder, each form field had companion help that explained what the option entailed and exposed the details associated with each option. This was met with praise from users but left the form littered with little question marks and reduced the readability. To solve this challenge, we used javascript and css. If you turn off styles, you’ll see that the quick help is part of the html. When you turn styles and css on, you’ll see that only when you rollover a form field, will the quick help appear. This quick help provides enough information to address the basic implication of each form field. We also added a link at the end of each quick help for more info. When a user clicks that, a simple modal window pops up with the related content, explaining the option in further detail.

Rollover Help

With the focus on web standards, the redesigned Tag Builder is much cleaner, simpler, accessible, friendlier, and ready for future expansion. With the launch of the Webtrends API, we also developed a simple web standards based interface for developers to generate and test various web services.

REST URL Generator

I hope you’ve enjoyed this series but you are probably thinking, “How much can this guy write about a simple one page form web application?” This is the last article. For the 5th and final part in this series, I have something much bigger than Tag Builder or the REST URL Generator to detail. Our team has been very busy over the last couple of months. I’ve been trying to pace myself with this series on our new user experience as we wrapped up development so that I could end it with some exciting news. I’m happy to say that next week is it! Follow us on Twitter to find out as soon as we announce and stay tuned to this blog to learn more following the announcement.

I am very pleased to announce the launch of a market-leading data collection capability for Webtrends. The addition of this API to our capabilities is another example of why Webtrends is the most powerful, open and elegant solution in the industry.

Keeping with our commitment to gather your feedback and deliver the most relevant of tools, we are making this new capability available in Beta for all of our customers and partners to use now.  Please help us help you by getting involved today. Push the limits! Get creative! Then let us know where we can improve on the capabilities. We will continue to evolve the API. Anything that connects to the internet is fair game.

As you, our customers, continue to expand your online presence beyond your web sites, it is our responsibility to grow our own measurement capabilities ahead of your evolving needs. Our data collection API is a critical addition to your arsenal of tools for collecting new data. The primary purpose for the API is to track behavior across various media that access the internet where traditional site tagging isn’t possible or an optimal fit.

Interested in more details? A full overview is available on our Developer Network. Please feel free to reach out to me with any questions, comments, or to explore opportunities to leverage this exciting new capability.

Hi there everyone – it’s been a while since I last posted. We’ve been head’s down working on a Digital Marketing Maturity Model (a.k.a. DM3) that we unveiled during eMetrics in San Jose.  We released a draft of the model and are currently in the process of collaborating with industry influencers and practitioners, gathering feedback on the model and collecting real-world sample maturity profiles from organizations across multiple industries.  Details of the model and the quick maturity assessment can be found by clicking here.

We have already met or exchanged with folks from Gartner, Zaaz, and other industry influencers (inlcuding Sean Power, Stephane Hamel and Jacques Warren – THANKS GENTLEMEN!) to talk about the model and how we might be able to collaborate moving forward. We’ve also started initial discussions with Jim Sterne on how we can turn this over to the WAA and have it truly become an industry-wide standard. I am looking to continuing the dialog with the community, provide interested folks with the background and thought that went into the model and to solicit feedback from experienced analysts and marketers.

In each of a series of blog entries I will discuss a different aspect of the model and provide readers with details on the progress being made.  So be sure to come back often and comment. In today’s entry I’m going to provide an overview of the model and discuss some of the history and thought that went into it.  I’ll also talk briefly about our near-term plans for the model and how we’ll integrate public feedback into it.

As I mentioned in a prior post about our automated, interactive digital marketing scorecards, Brandon and I started the Digital Marketing Optimization practice here at Webtrends at the end of last year.  Since joining we have brought several new products/services to bear, the aforementioned Digital Marketing Scorecard, a services framework that we now use to guide all of our client engagements, an easy migration process that converts a customer’s historical data (when switching from a competitive solution) over to Webtrends so *no* information is lost, and now the DM3.  We have other offerings in the works that I’m just as excited about – but will write about those in other post.

During all this time we’ve had the opportunity to work in multiple roles across multiple verticals with some of the largest brands in the country, including Microsoft, Coke, Expedia, Orbitz, Toshiba, Disney, Dell, and NBC.  Throughout the experiences we’ve had with these clients from different perspectives we were able to develop the services framework, which ultimately led us to the maturity model.

Now that you know what got us here I’d like to provide an overview of the model itself.  We identified the need for a maturity model when we realized that we were pretty much informally assessing all of our client’s maturity at the outset of all the strategy projects we have done.  In order to establish successful digital strategies for our clients we need a way to understand their current competencies and opportunities for improvement.  As said by someone much more intelligent than myself, “the best map in the world is useless unless you know where you’re starting from.”  The same holds true when setting strategies and developing road maps to meet those strategies.

Once we understood the need for a maturity model we started doing research to see if there was already a proposed model that was gaining traction that would work for our needs.  We found a few proposed models but couldn’t find examples of how they were actually applied.  In addition, the models we found and researched scored an organization on a continuum where we felt what was needed was to score organizations across 6 distinct maturity pillars in order to create what we call a Maturity Profile.

Using our experience and research we landed on the six maturity pillars currently in the model with an assessment to understand ranking within each of the pillars.  We then visualize the results on a radar diagram which we did for several reasons (with an example output below):

1. The actual shape and area of the radar diagram becomes an organization’s maturity profile
2. These can then be overlaid on top of industry averages, competition, or ideal-state profiles
3. It allows for a very quick understanding of maturity deltas between a client’s organization and others

Example Maturity Profile

I’ll wrap up today’s post by briefly speaking to our near-term plans for the model and our next steps.  It is important to note that everything we do with this model is public domain – we strongly feel that the only way to even have a chance at industry adoption that it couldn’t be something that we dictate and hold close.  Also, we purposefully built this model to be completely agnostic of any tool or specific discipline within digital marketing in hopes that it could be adopted more broadly.  That said, we released this first version for a few reasons:

1. To solicit feedback from industry influencers and practitioners
2. To have organizations fill out the quick online maturity assessment in order to start building a database of maturity profiles across multiple verticals – this data will be used in aggregate to allow users to compare their current level of maturity against that of others in their industry

Our next steps will be to collect feedback and tweak the model as dictated by those who participate with us.  We will continue to actively search for individuals who would like to participate so please reach out to me directly if you’d like to be included.

In my next post I’ll go into detail about how we came up with the pillars in the model as well as how we use the assessment tool to develop a maturity profile. In the meantime please comment below or reach out to me at dm3@webtrends.com Thanks!

One of the most complex reports we have available in Webtrends is the scenario analysis report.  It’s also one of our most robust, and can provide you with worlds of good information to help you optimize scenarios on your site.  But I’ve found that a lot of people aren’t exactly sure what the report tells them.  They see the information, but they don’t understand what insights are being given. 

That’s what this series of blog posts is about: demystifying the scenario analysis report and making it work for you.

Let’s start by talking about a concept that’s bandied about a lot when talking about conversions:  abandonment.  In a lot of conversion funnels, abandonment equates to visits that did not “funnel through” to the following step in the scenario.  Not so with our scenario analysis reports; we focus, instead, on fall-out.

Here’s a sample scenario analysis report (click on it for a clear image):

At first glance you may think that this scenario has a 73.51% abandonment rate on step one, since that’s the first percentage to appear on the right.  On this, you’re right, but it’s not quite what it seems. Here’s what that number tells you:  Of the 38,232 visits to the “Product Page View” step in this scenario, 28,264 (or 73.51% of) visits did not on to the next step, but also did not entirely abandon your site.

From there, we get more detail on what happened with those 28,264 visits:

• · 619 (2.19% of the 28,264) visits did actually abandon the site entirely. The product page view was the end of their visit, hence the “End of Visit” label.
• · However, a full 27,645 (28,264 – 619) did not leave your site. Instead, they went elsewhere on your site. In the case of the first number (27,082, or 95.82% of the 28,264), they went to the Video Recorders page. How do I know this? I hover my mouse over the little blue name, and voila!

So, only 619 people from step one actually abandoned your site altogether; the others got distracted and did something else on your site, so they’re not completely gone yet.

How do I know what they did?  Well, if they went elsewhere on your site, this view of the scenario analysis will tell you, and will provide you with truly actionable information.  Here, for example, I see that the vast majority of people leaving my scenario on the very first step are looking for video recorders, so why not promote those video recorders on your home page?  Or maybe you could set up a bundle:  your most popular products with a video recorder at a reduced cost.  Upsell! 

Now, let’s shift to the Step Transitions view.  I do this by clicking the “View Step Transitions” button above the report (again, click for clarity):

This view provides us with completely different information.  Instead of telling you whether a visit ended or continued someplace other than the scenario, this process shows you two things:

• · The number of visits in which the visitor did not continue directly on to the next step, yet remained within the scenario process as a whole, and
• · Where that visit went when it left that step.

So, let’s look at what the numbers on this first step tell us here:  6,733 visits did not convert to the “Cart Add” step.  However, they still interacted with the scenario:  6,731 (99.97% of the 6,733) viewed another product page (so, they were still shopping), and 2 (.03%) actually started checkout (which probably means they’d already added something to their cart and decided not to buy what was on the last product page they viewed).

So, we can say that, of the 28,264 visits that did not convert from step one to step two, 6,733 did not leave the scenario entirely.  Instead, they either skipped a step or stayed on the same step; they didn’t abandon.  That’s almost a quarter of the visits that didn’t convert to step two – and that’s a great opportunity to ensure that, now that they’re in the scenario, they stay there.  Note, for example, that 317 visits went back to the “Product Page View” after they started checkout.  Is that a result of your efforts to offer them similar items or accessories on your checkout page?  Or, if you’re not making such offerings, could you increase that number by doing so?

Of course, these opportunities may seem fairly obvious; after all, we’ve been tracking shopping carts for a long time on the web.  But imagine tracking your three-step application/registration process, or your five-step “Give me more information” process, and you can see how this information becomes useful quickly.  You might be able to reduce the number of steps and increase conversions, or note where people are getting distracted and provide them, within your scenario, the information they need to stay on track.  That’s so much more helpful than just tracking abandonment, isn’t it?

I’ll discuss the left side of this report in an upcoming post – stay tuned.

The analytics world is abuzz about the new changes to Google Search coming this week. No need for concern as these changes won’t interfere with any of your Webtrends products.

Just two months ago many of us thought we saw smoke rising from what looked like Google’s new design for their search results display page. The initial concerns rooted in the fact that new page, built in Ajax, completely annihilated referrer information that all of us online analytics providers rely on to identify the source of organic traffic to a web site. The ramifications would have been huge, but it turned out that they were just doing some testing.

Yesterday, Brett Crosby, group product manager with Google Analytics provided us with a very considerate preview of the changes coming in his blog . Thanks Brett!

Key excerpt describing the nature of the changes:

Starting this week, you may start seeing a new referring URL format for visitors coming from Google search result pages.

Up to now, the usual referrer for clicks on search results for the term “flowers”, for example, would be something like this: http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=flowers&btnG=Google+Search

Now you will start seeing some referrer strings that look like this: http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&ct=res&cd=7&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.example.com%2Fmypage.htm&
ei=0SjdSa-1N5O8M_qW8dQN&rct=j&q=flowers&usg=AFQjCNHJXSUh7Vw7oubPaO3tZOzz-F-u_w&sig2=X8uCFh6IoPtnwmvGMULQfw

The key difference between these two urls is that instead of “/search?” the URL contains a “/url?”. If you run your own analyses, be sure that you do not depend on the “/search?” portion of the URL to determine if a visit started with an organic search click.

What does this mean if you use Webtrends Analytics?

• All the insight we provide about the Google engine, phrases and search type remain completely unaffected by this change.

• We provide a number of different views of the referrer, including domain – google.com, site – www.google.com, and page- www.google.com/finance. The only difference will be the introduction of a new Google page in your referring pages data. So now you may see both www.google.com/url and www.google.com/search.

• Other WebTrends products (Ad Director and Marketing Warehouse) are not affected by this change.

Is there gold in the stream of query parameters?

We are panning through this new information to see what additional insight Google is sending you. Check out what others are saying about this. But you don’t need to wait for us to publish new reports before being able to take advantage of this data. If it is in a parameter, you can build a report on it today.

Let us know what you would like to see or what you have customized yourself. We’re always working hard to improve your experience with Webtrends and keep you abreast of industry trends. Let us know how we’re doing – provide feedback from within the products, comment here on the blog, user forums, Twitter or contact any of us directly.