Elizabeth Robillard
Your Own List is a Goldmine
Tuesday, August 18th, 2009
Over here at the Open Campaign we are trying a variety of different communication methods to get people interested in this campaign. We’ve had banner ads on New York Times, Linked in, Ad Freak and others. These have driven nice spikes in traffic (quantity) as people clickthrough to see what we are all about. But, I have to say our email send to our own list has driven the highest quality traffic.
Here’s what I’m seeing in the data.
First, the email send data:
As you can see, our emails drove the right kind of engagement. About 3.5 pageviews per visit (which is higher than the site average of 2.9 for the same time period) and those pageviews count – they are datasheet downloads, email sign ups, and contact sales conversions. These are our target audience. They are digging deeper into the site and they want more.
If we contrast that quality of traffic with the quality we’re getting from our paid ads that launched this week, you can see quickly from one of our key KPIs that the site conversion rate is much higher for email.
Those email responders are in our sweet spot. Now, not all conversions are created equal (contact sales is worth more than datasheet downloads), so we can definitely do some weighting on those conversions to get to an even better conversion KPI. But this is a good start in letting my team know that email is a solid channel for us and we want to continue communicating with our email followers and driving deeper engagement.
Posted in Email | No Comments »
Voice of the Customer with Behavior of the Customer
Thursday, July 30th, 2009
I love Foresee Results data. They are able to capture valuable customer input about the visitor experience on our site and provide me and my team with concrete data that helps us make the site better.
What we have to remember as we evaluate customer feedback is that what we say and what we do are not always in synch. The power of the integration between Webtrends and Foresee Results is that it lets us look at what people say AND what they actually do. We can evaluate and make decisions based on survey responses in combination with visit behavior.
Examples:
• Suppose the Webtrends report data shows that everyone who ranked us above average on information architecture/navigation questions also happened to use on-site search in the session. This could tell me that site search is a critical piece to their experience and that maybe my navigation isn’t as intuitive as I thought.
• Or let’s say that everyone who ranked us high on site content saw a higher than average page views in their session compared to those who ranked us lower than average on content. This might mean that you have to click around to understand the site. Correlating that depth of visit with their purpose for visiting helps me understand how visitors are actually using my site and can help me tailor my message to their goals.
Both examples provide interesting pieces of additional data that help to round out the voice of the customer data provided by Foresee Results. Over the course of these next few weeks, we’ll be mining these datasets for interesting tidbits and publishing what we find here.
System Integration Synopsis:
We use inline code on our site to pop the survey invitation during the visit and on-exit. We provided Foresee Results with our Webtrends Javascript tag (that we built with Tag Builder) to embed in the survey thank you page. In addition, we instructed Foresee Results to insert Foresee data into Meta tags on the survey thank you page.
These pieces of data passed to Webtrends the surveyID, the respondentID and other variables. We can then build custom reports in Webtrends that correlate those dimensions with various interesting data points. We’re looking at referring source, number of pages viewed in visit, contact sales forms submitted, to name a few.
If you want more specifics about integrating systems, shoot me an email and I’ll follow up with you directly.
Posted in Online Surveys | No Comments »
Access the Data
Thursday, July 23rd, 2009
For me, this campaign is about getting access to the data – freeing the data from the analysts domain and pushing out to the public. Too often we rely on the analyst to make sense of the numbers in dashboards and scorecards and weekly reports. But, in a marketing team, these are all OUR numbers. From the creative director to the marketing manager, the numbers are the measure of our work and the more we can all own and understand them the better we’ll do as a team.
Here, we lay bare the measure of our work and we collectively will make sense of these numbers. I am the one responsible for the accuracy and relevancy of the data (tagging, report design and configuration). But I am also responsible for making my team care about their performance based on the numbers we can collect with our tools and our partner’s tools.
Going into this campaign, we’ve had internal debates about site architecture, button colors, banner creative and survey design. Throughout the next 27 weeks, all of these questions will be answered. More importantly, you will be able to see the questions, the data, the answers, and our next move.
If you are an analyst like me – bring your co-workers to the party. Let’s see if we can convert our teams into data junkies. We’ll have numbers about views, visits, visitors, time on site, email sign ups, contact sales conversion rate, tweets, blog comments, button performance, site satisfaction rate, banner conversion rate and more.
Help me out – what numbers do you want to see?
Posted in Analytics | 4 Comments »
