I spent most of this past week on the road – first in Indianapolis for ExactTarget’s Connections 2012 Conference and then in Philadelphia for the annual DAA Symposium. Unless I’m missing something on my calendar, it’s pretty much the end (for me at least) of the fall Conference season.
It was my first time at ExactTarget’s Connections and I was surprised at its scope, scale and ambition. It seems about as big as the NEW, BIG Adobe Summit – I think around 4,000 people attend. It’s parked in a city chosen, obviously, because of the parent company’s location – not to cater to a traditional convention audience. But it makes up for that with a whole lot of fun stuff and glitz. Michael J. Fox and David Blaine were both keynoting – which is pretty cool – and it seemed like the parties were pretty extensive. I have to go word of mouth here since there’s pretty much no chance of me ever going to a party larger than two-dozen without a compelling reason (like wife insisting), but they sure sounded pretty epic. Indy may not have Vegas beat for party opportunities, but I have to believe (though maybe this is just my native Hoosier pride showing) it beats Salt Lake City hands-down.
For me, it was pretty nice to be at Conference that’s not measurement focused. The attendees at ExactTarget's Connections Conference are almost all trying to build real programs, with analytics just another tool to help out. It’s kind of refreshing to have an audience whose only interest in measurement is what it can accomplish and I thought it made for a more content rich vendor Conference than I’ve come to expect.
Segmentation for Targeted Marketing
There’s a great deal of buzz these days about integrating Web analytics data with eMail Marketing Systems to do better targeting. There’s nothing wrong with that; it’s a great idea. But most email marketers struggle to know what to do with a Web analytics data feed. To simplify their life, they tend to adopt one of two targeting strategies with the data: funnel re-marketing or last-product viewed targeting. There’s nothing wrong with either of these strategies. Both can actually work pretty well.
However, they both suffer from the same problem. With funnel re-marketing and last-product viewed targeting strategies, the quality of your targeting ages remarkably quickly. It’s great to market funnel fall-out on a next day basis. It’s not so useful a month later. The same thing is true of product view information. The utility of this data for targeting ages very rapidly. That makes this type of targeting ideal for trigger campaigns but almost useless for personalizing full-list, regular drops.
With broader behavioral techniques like Two-Tiered Segmentation, you get a much richer and more comprehensive segmentation. Not only does this allow you to effectively personalize messaging to segments without recent product-view information or funnel abandonment, it allows you to personalize effectively on a continuing basis over a considerable period of time.
I showed several examples of visit-based segmentations along with case-studies on how they were used to target out-bound email including this example from the travel industry:
The grid on the left is the behavioral segmentation. One segment (Snake-Eyes – which happened to be very Las Vegas focused) is detailed in the upper right. These propensities show the index-weighted likelihood of visitors in this segment having the characteristic. So, for example, the Snake Eyes cluster is highly likely to purchase air-travel (Plane tickets) but quite unlikely to rent a car.
By coding offers along the same propensity dimensions, it’s fairly easy to build rules matching segment to offer even when there is a large set of possible offers.
This type of visit-based behavioral segmentation is deeper, more robust, and has a much slower decay cycle than simple remarketing.
If you’d like a copy of the complete presentation, just drop me a line.
Website Topology for Advanced Analysis
At the DAA Symposium in Philadelphia (A terrific program, by the way, and if you weren’t there I STRONGLY SUGGEST you check out Dr. Peter Fader’s truly excellent presentation on a methodology for optimizing allocation decisions within a test. Another fantastic example of the work the Wharton Customer Analytics Initiative is producing.), I presented a short (20 minute) talk called “The Taming of the Shrew – The Marriage of Web analytics and Statistical Analysis”.
Have you ever wondered why statistical analysis techniques aren’t more common in classic site analytics? It’s something I’ve been thinking about quite a bit lately. Lots of folks tend to assume that it’s a problem with Web analysts and our tools. And it’s true that Web analytics tools don’t have built-in statistical capabilities and that very few Web analysts have any statistical training.
Still, I think it begs the question. Because if statistical analysis techniques worked well when applied to site analytics, I think our tools and practitioners would reflect that.
What’s more, I find that when you do give Web behavioral data to statisticians, they often come back with the most banal analyses imaginable.
The problem, I believe, is that Web sites have a strong built-in structure. This structure has a profound influence on navigation patterns and tends to swamp other correlations.
There are, fortunately, techniques for mapping Website structure so that you can create objective measures of distance between pages and control for structure when doing statistical analysis.
I have a webinar this Thursday with Barry Parshall of iJento and Kelly Wortham of Dell in which I’m going to be showing much of the same material. I’m going to cover the underlying problem and the techniques we’ve been developing to do topographic analysis. Barry is going to show how you can extend those techniques to do deep content attribution (particularly if you have a platform like iJento), and Kelly is going to show how some of the same intellectual concepts have driven successful testing paradigms at Dell.
Click here to register – it should be pretty great stuff!
Webinarmeggedon
Awhile back I posted on a the "Perfect Storm" of Whitepapers Semphonic is releasing. Over the next month, that’s resulted in a Perfect Storm of Webinars. So I’ve just put together a handy little list with links to everything…enjoy!
- Advanced Analytics for Site Optimization & Testing Webinar with iJento & Dell - this Thursday at 9AM Pacific
Whitepaper(s) to follow...
- Effective Measurement of Multi-Channel Marketing with Anametrix - Tuesday, October 30th at 9AM Pacific
Download the Accompanying Whitepaper
- Choosing a Big Data Technology Stack for Digital Measurement with IBM - November 8th at 9AM Pacific
Download the Accompanying Whitepaper
- How to Build a COMPREHENSIVE Digital Measurement Strategy with Cognizant - November 15th at 10AM Pacific.
and while the webinar may be past, you can still read the very recent Whitepaper on Digital Merchandising for Multi-Product (List and Aisle) Pages with Cloudmeter.
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