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Wow, this is amazingly useful for reviewing the effectiveness of your SEO AND your marketing messages within the Google SERPs.

On April 14 Google has introduced a new facility within Google Webmaster Tools to help search marketers review click through rates within the natural search listings.

Here is an example for a “brand search” on my name:

So if you, or your agency aren’t signed up to Google Webmaster Tools, then is a good reason to get started.

Implications of new SEO Clickthrough data

For me, the most obvious applications of this are that you can use this new tool to:

1. Track your rankings for target terms – the position in search results is clearly displayed.

2. Show whether you have the best landing pages for your SEO – above you can see it’s the “About” page which I deliberately included for mis-spellings of my name. Of course Google Analytics and others will show you this better  since you will see the bounce rates.

3. Review clickthrough rates for different terms which helps you..

4. Review the effectiveness of your copy in encouraging clickthrough from the SERPs. If it’s below average for a position, then you know you have a problem.

5. Compare clickthrough rates for natural terms compared to different paid search / Adwords terms to help determine the relative effectiveness of copy and terms.

6. Review overall SEO effectiveness from the headline figures of impressions (how many you could reach) against clickthrough – how many you are attracting to your site.

7. Review marketing campaign effectiveness – how does variation occur through time

8. Review seasonal demand variations for products/services. This will work best for brand/navigational searches where you are likely to be top.

What do you think – how else could you use it?

What you can’t do?

For some other information you will have to turn to other data sources / analytics sources and maybe export this information to integrate. For example, this SEO clickthrough data doesn’t show you:

• Bounce rates?
• Value of visitors – how many convert on site and how much do they spend?
• Review competitor data – Google may be introducing this tool to reduce the need for SEO rank checking software, but marketers will still use it for this purpose.

Related Posts:

• Search marketing essentials
• Keyphrase Market Potential Tools
• Econsultancy Online Marketing Masterclass liveblogging summary – Nov 2009
• SEO : Link analysis best practice
• Update to SEOMoz SEO Ranking Factors

Digital marketing strategy topic: Traffic-building / customer acquisition
Digital marketing tactic: Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)
Digital marketing technique: Customer behaviour, Online copywriting, Web analytics
Advice type: Best Practice, Latest developments
Expertise level: Expert

Ignoring the power of LinkedIn to drive new business and build relationships is missing a big opportunity for companies small and large alike.

LinkedIn is the first place many larger businesses check out potential suppliers and new hires. Using LinkedIn makes you more visible to existing and potential clients as well as your peers. These reach and growth figures are undeniable:

• LinkedIn has over 65 million members in over 200 countries.
• A new member joins LinkedIn approximately every second, and about half of our members are outside the U.S.

My ten practical tips are aimed at helping you to get more out of LinkedIn.

1 – Complete your profile

Improve how people can find and connect to you by adding past places you have worked, details of your higher and further education (leave out schooling  before 18), activities and professional memberships.

You have 1895 characters to create your LinkedIn profile. Do include:

• BACKGROUND
• HOW WE CAN HELP YOUR COMPANY
• CONNECT WITH ME AND MY COMPANY

To make elements of your profile stand out use block capitals and plenty of spaces between sections.

2 – Add a photo

A photo is a great visual prompt to remind your contacts who you are. Profiles with photos look less interesting and without a photo you become a grey head and shoulders. People sometimes ask “I had a professional shot taken a few years ago is that ok?” Yes it is! Ensure the photo is decent if not recent. A decent photo can be used in many social networking spaces whereas a recent photo of you on the beach may not be what your clients want to see.

Photos can be up to 4MB in size and need to be common file formats such as JPG, GIF, and PNG. You can preview your photo before saving and sharing with your contacts.

Once your photo is in place, it’s part of your personal brand, so stick with the same image, rather than changing on a regular basis!

3 – Professional Headline

You can use up to 120 characters in your Professional Headline. Most people’s headline is ‘Owner, ABC Ltd’ and if I’m searching through several hundred contacts, that doesn’t stand out, whereas ‘Dave Chaffey, Expert Digital Marketer – Consultant, Author and Speaker’ jumps right out from the page.

Find your Professional Headline at the top of your profile directly below your name.

4 – Get recommended

LinkedIn makes it so easy to seek recommendations. These are mini case studies that will get reviewed and are a great way to showcase your talents.

Every six months seek newer recommendations from different people. This builds up the number of recommendations which features in your public profile as well as keeping your profile fresh. Simply click on the profile / recommendations / request recommendations button.

If you’re not happy with a recommendation, you can always choose not to display it in your profile!

5 – Make recommendations

Where you are happy with a service, product being sold, company or person, do make recommendations. This only needs to be a short paragraph about their best qualities.

If someone recommends you, wait a month before returning the favour. Otherwise on the updates page it looks like you were obliged to make the recommendation.

6 – Join groups

Joining groups gives you access to a wider pool of contacts, allows you to display group membership on your profile and enables you to network with a more targeted group of people. Some groups are very sales orientated, others require membership or professional qualifications and their focus tends to be different.

The great feature about groups is that you can belong to the same group as someone without being connected to them. This means you can see what your competitors are involved with (and they can see your activity) but they can’t access your connections.

You can currently join up to 50 groups in different categories: alumni, corporate, conference, networking, non profit and professional.

There are over 500,000 groups on LinkedIn and if you can’t find the group you’re looking for, you can always start your own!

7 – Ask and / or answer questions

Inside the LinkedIn community you can ask and answer questions. If you’re exploring new markets or wanting to know the latest software tool in a specific industry, you can ask questions and within a few hours the answers will appear.

Answer questions to share your knowledge or expertise or to recommend others to help.

Even better, Google seems to love LinkedIn questions and finds them within a few hours.

8 – Update your status

LinkedIn status updates are a maximum of 141 characters. Use this to talk about your new blog posts, share what you’re reading or comment about your day.

Think about your updates – LinkedIn is a professional network not Facebook!

You can add your Twitter account to LinkedIn, so that when you post a LinkedIn update it tweets at the same time.

9 – Build connections

LinkedIn is not a business card competition! If you add connections to your network, each person can see your connections, unless you hide your connections, which isn’t in the spirit of the network – unless you’re a recruiter.

You can build the number of your connections by:

• Finding people in your address book that are already on LinkedIn and importing these contacts.
• Sending invitations to people you’ve met at an event – it’s a great way to stay in touch and find out more about someone.
• Using the ‘company search’ tool to find colleagues or reconnect with people you’ve worked with in the past.
• Sometimes you may find your connections know someone you’d like to meet. You can ask for an introduction, in the same way you would do at a face to face networking event.

Think carefully about adding connections and only click the ‘add connection’ button if you’re happy to share your address book with that person.

10 – Personalise emails

LinkedIn provides a range of template emails to add someone to your network and request recommendations. It’s a good idea to personalise these templates and say why you’d like to be connected to someone, rather than sending the ‘I’d like to connect with you on LinkedIn’ email. If it’s someone you haven’t met for a while, this breaks the ice and you’re more likely to generate a positive response.

And finally, treat LinkedIn the same way as you would face to face networking. You need to work at it to get results.

I’d love to know more tips on how to use LI effectively. Please share your belows.

Thanks, Annmarie.
Related Posts:

• The Strategic Imperative Of Remarkable Customer Service
• 10 essential requirements for Digital Brand Building
• Post-digital marketing. What is it and do we need it?
• The six senses of social media marketing
• Web-user feedback tools – our interview with Kampyle

Digital marketing strategy topic: Brand-building, Traffic-building / customer acquisition
Digital marketing tactic: Social media marketing
Digital marketing technique: Customer communities, Linked In marketing
Advice type: Best Practice
Expertise level: Intermediate

“The purpose of a business is to create and keep a customer” - Peter Drucker

With digital marketing in mind, I’d add the word “inspire” to Peter Drucker’s quotation. We must create and inspire customers – since inspired customers have a reason to be loyal, to spend more and to talk about your brand, products or services to other potential customers. Customers that feel positively about their experience of interacting with your brand, product or service is paramount to success in a heavily connected digital age – here are a few significant reasons why:

• “Birds of a feather flock together”, and never before has this mantra been so true, your customer are participating within the audience that you wish to connect with
• We’ve all understood that prior to the Internet an unhappy customer will spread more messages about you to their friends than a happy one – today an unhappy customer gets to tell a whole network of “friends” (connected strangers)
• If happy, your customers are ready and motivated to promote you in their worlds – assuming that it’s easy and rewarding for them to do so
• People spreading positive stories about you is way more powerful than bland banner ads or Adwords listings (though the latter certainly has its tactical place)
• And of course, we want those very customers to buy again

With this in mind – delivering an amazing experience beyond the first sale is surely a huge strategic play for marketing and a significant way to differentiate and grow your business – certainly if you’re in a stale or commoditised market. In turn, customer service is arguably the biggest and most important component to improve the brand experience that you deliver, and the hardest for competitors to copy.

Joseph Jaffe’s new ten point manifesto

As Joseph Jaffe comments in his Customer Service Manifesto – “Never in the history of business and marketing has customer service been as front and center as it is today. So much so that it is being transformed and reborn in front of our very eyes as arguably one of the most mission critical components that can make or break a business.”

Customer Service Manifesto

View more presentations from First Ten.

I believe that a customer centred approach to digital marketing is common sense, if only because every brand is visible, 24/7 online. And, it’s getting more so due to the way we, as consumers, use the Internet to share, vent, search and research. So, how about instead of thinking that web technologies are a tool to “target” customers, how about using technology to add a disproportionate amount of unexpected value to customers – sales will inevitably and (very) measurably come from doing that.

How can you start on this today? Start by creating a more powerful feedback loop with something like User Voice or the other user feedback tools we list here. Use this to prove part of the concept and work with your customer service teams (assuming you have one, if not then it’s probably easier to progress) to incorporate something like Get Satisfaction, and if needed Zen Desk, into customer service itself. From here you have the momentum and the evidence to bring the customer voice to the heart of the business and create real change.

Be sure to check out Joseph Jaffe’s Customer Service Manifesto – he goes into way more detail and it’s well worth reading – and don’t forget to add any comments you have to this post.
Related Posts:

• 10 essential requirements for Digital Brand Building
• 10 Practical tips on using Linked In for businesses
• How can content management enhance customer engagement?
• 2010 Internet marketing predictions and trends roundup
• Best practical social media book?

Digital marketing strategy topic: Digital marketing strategy
Digital marketing tactic: Customer experience, Customer service
Advice type: Best Practice
Expertise level: Intermediate

I don’t have to explain to you that a big part of human communication occurs without us even knowing it. We smell and sense fear, affection, tension, pressure and even love.

We “read” body language and we have a gut feeling about the person we are communicating with. First impressions, a sense of attraction, trust or maybe disgust.

And of course there is the way we have learned to look at the world and people, ages ago. Education, culture, early experiences, you name it. We often call all these abilities and ways of interpreting the unconsciousness, “that what we cannot explain”, the unreadable, allow me to call it the sixth sense.

How you call it depends from your way of looking at the world and life. Are you religious or an atheist? Are you a sociologist or marketer? Do you prefer the views on mankind of Freud, Jung, Maslow or Seth Godin (the last one was a joke)?

Communication channels are most effective if you use all your (six) senses :
see how the six senses apply to social media marketing

With the six senses there still is no communication, but you need them to be able to “connect”.

A connection is the basis of a dialogue and a conversation. It’s the basis of communication and the start of a possible relationship.

In marketing, we like to call these senses, that enable us to connect, “channels” or “media”. And we wonder if and how we have to integrate them. We are talking about omni-channel, cross-channel, multi-channel, holistic and integrated now. Which is kind of weird.

When communicating and connecting with people I never wonder if I only need my mouth, eyes and ears. I just communicate with what I have.

The same should apply in business. If you want to connect and engage, you use all the “channels” that you have. And of course you combine them: to communicate you need to offer the people you want to talk with, various “channels”.

In fact, in this social media and digital day and age, it’s often the opposite: people decide how and where they connect with you and your business.

Sense and sensibility: the six senses to get and stay connected

Let’s have a look at the six senses and how they apply to marketing and communication in this social media marketing era.

Sight: monitor, track and ‘read’ your customer

Since people are increasingly using online media in the various steps of the buying process, we have fewer opportunities to actually see them, meet them and ‘read’ their needs, attitude and buying signals. In social media marketing your eyes are monitoring and tracking tools: to see those signals of your (potential) customer and where he is in the buying cycle. Furthermore, you will need all your ‘senses’ to see if what you are doing in social media marketing results in value for both, you and your customer, as I will develop further.

Hearing: listen before you start talking

The days of broadcasting in marketing are over. On top of that, people can now broadcast themselves. They have the means and social channels. Sometimes they will shout loud and clear, reaching a large ‘audience’,’ and sometimes they will whisper in a one-on-one conversation. When that conversation happens you should listen to it, even if it’s not with you but about you. Listen and learn how your business is perceived. Listen before you start talking. And when you start talking, listen carefully to the answers.

Taste and smell: what’s in it for your business and your customers?

When you see and hear what people are doing by monitoring, tracking and listening to them, you can start talking. If speech was a sense, this post would have been called the ‘Seven senses of social media marketing’. When interacting with people, (potential) customers, via social media and other marketing channels, you are getting closer and start connecting. You need your eyes and ears here too. But you also need your other senses, taste and smell, to detect the value of those conversations and interactions. Do they taste sweet or bitter? Do you connect or not? Do you smell an opportunity? Is there value for your business and your prospects and customers or are the interactions leading nowhere?

Touch: engage your customers

If the conversations and interactions you have with people taste, smell and ‘feel’ good, it’s time to add an extra layer. “Good” connections become relationships and ultimately new business or, in the case of existing customers, result in increased loyalty. To achieve this you need to ‘touch’ people. You have to give them a tap on the shoulder or shake their hands. You have to put them in the spotlight, engage them and touch them in their hearts and souls by continuing to listen, respond and offer value. Touch and engage your relations and customers, and you will have a community, a ‘fan base’, people who like to share because you do. Ultimately, that’s what social media marketing is about: community, conversation, respect and engagement. And that is something you have to deserve.

The sixth sense: perception and trust

All of us have our past experiences that have determined profoundly how we look at the world and at people. These deep-rooted ways of perceiving reality and relationships often lead to prejudice, a healthy (and sometimes unhealthy) dose of skepticism and a need for certainty and stability. It is that need that often leads to a lack of flexibility and a conservative attitude, inspired by fear of the unknown, regarding emerging media and changes around us. Sure, it is important to measure what you do as a marketer, and it is important to take care of your brand. And, yes, it is difficult to ‘give’ more control to people and let go a bit of your brand. However, in the end, the taste of the pudding is always in the proof. And to integrate social media in your marketing activities, you need to have a strategy but most of all the will to communicate, share and build relationships with your customers and the whole ecosystem of your business.

Respect and you will get respect. Trust and you will be trusted and become a valued voice in the social networking reality. Open the corporate doors and enable people to have a word with you.

Building strong relationships with customers in the social media world is based upon these six senses and communication in the true sense of the word: a two-way dialogue where trust, value and respect are key.

Sure, there will be people saying bad things about your company, and you will need to be more customer-centric and ‘open’ but if you use all your senses to measure and listen, what is the risk?

After all: people are having conversations about your business right now.

So why not join them?

Summary – the six senses of social media communications

In order to communicate with people you need a mouth. Without it, you can’t speak and have no voice. You need ears. To listen. However, you also need a nose to smell, eyes to see and often the ability to touch, to shake a hand, to show your affection with a hug or to motivate with a friendly tap on the shoulder at the right moment.

You can still communicate if you have lost the ability to speak, listen, smell, see or touch. However, unfortunately the communication is less valuable.

Key takeaway: marketing communication should be like human communication. It is about using all your channels – or senses – in an integrated way to build connections and relationships with customers and prospects and to be able to listen to them when and where they want to talk to us.
Related Posts:

• 10 Practical tips on using Linked In for businesses
• 10 essential requirements for Digital Brand Building
• Social CRM Strategy – definition and implementation guidelines
• 2010 Internet marketing predictions and trends roundup
• Giving your digital campaigns momentum – the McDonald’s Flavourhood example

Digital marketing strategy topic: Brand-building
Digital marketing tactic: Social media marketing
Digital marketing technique: Marketing communications theory
Advice type: Best Practice
Expertise level: Essentials

Gaining direct, real-time feedback from customers and site visitors is one of the most exciting areas of digital marketing for me, which really takes advantage of the real-time interactions available online.

A few months back I created a post giving my recommendations on the categories and examples of feedback tools that marketers should review to help them understand their customers’ needs better.

Of course, Kampyle, was one of the tools featured since this is commonly used as a tool to gain feedback, so it wasn’t a complete surprise, when I got a mail from Eran Savir, the co-founder of Kampyle. He said that he sees the categories of tools slightly differently than me, so I thought it would be useful to setup an interview to understand how he sees the market, in order to help site owners and managers review their options.

Categories of web customer and user feedback tools

Q1. How do you see this  for digital marketers and the benefits it can offer them?

[Eran Savir, Kampyle] There are two different approaches to online data collection.  The early one was objective collection.  This category includes tools like Web analytics, behavioral targeting products and other marketing mechanisms that track the user’s activity on the site without actually interacting with him or her, and usually answers the questions: “what”, “when”, “where” but not the “why”.

The more challenging, and in many cases more actionable, approach is subjective data collection, which if done correctly, can answer the “why”.  In this approach, the business is interacting with the user and the user is submitting data.  There are various levels of depth in subjective data collection depending on how interactive the tool is, how free the user is to lead a discussion and how viable it is for the business to manage that discussion in real time.

We see five categories of subjective data collection, from the broadest view of customer actions to the most specific:

1. Enterprise feedback management – These tools merely measure the brand and the people that are interacting with it using surveys.  This method best fits large companies that want to understand internal and public perception in a general way.
2. Usability tools – These tools are specifically created to prompt users to respond to a single usability or design issue of a Web site.  They are built so users can point to a specific problem or typo, but that’s it.
3. Surveys and polls – These products collect data on a site level.  Users can answer pre-crafted questions but cannot initiate a more authentic conversation.
4. Crowdsourcing/forum community management /idea management – This approach may be useful for businesses looking to use their customers to publicly vote for their next development steps or help each other to solve support issues. However, it does not offer the direct and personal connection many users seek, and a public option can be potentially harmful to brands when users report complaints in a community forum.
5. Feedback analytics – In our view, Kampyle is the only company providing this option, which answers the who, what, when and where of customer behavior, as well as the elusive why.  “Why are users abandoning my shopping cart?” “Why do users from certain countries search for hotels but never book?” “Why don’t users complete a software registration process?”  Because users can submit feedback forms in the critical site areas they choose, businesses can collect process-level data and engage customers in real time to improve conversions and increase customer satisfaction and loyalty.

Benefits of user feedback tools

Q2. Tell us more specifically about the benefits of Kampyle – what do users gain from using your services?

[Eran Savir, Kampyle] Kampyle Feedback Analytics delivers Web sites, online retailers and companies a powerful software-as-a-service (SaaS) platform to collect, analyze, measure and manage online user feedback on services, products and customer experiences. We allow companies to generate user feedback on web sites, for software and applications.  Our customers are opening brand new communication channels with their users that enable them to answer complex questions behind user behavior online.

Kampyle offers a centrally managed application that provides analysis of customer feedback using a company’s business logic and data metrics to highlight important issues and pain points.  Detailed reports, real-time alerts by email and rules notify businesses when a critical feedback is submitted, enabling companies to quickly and personally respond and remedy problems that negatively affect conversion rates and sales.

Kampyle provides users with process-level feedback, which provides unique input based on a certain process or area within a Web site such as the shopping cart, resource center or online solution area.  This process-level view can then be tied with Web analytics and CRM applications to provide a complete view of user behavior.  Kampyle is bilaterally integrated with all major Web analytics platforms such as Omniture and Nedstat. It is also integrated with Salesforce.com and Google Analytics.

Businesses using Kampyle attribute their ongoing success with customers to having the ability to generate actionable process-level feedback based on key performance indicators and feedback metrics, providing them with user insight that goes beyond an individual site or software installation step.

Web analytics integration

Q3. I think integration with analytics systems is particularly powerful for these types of tools. Can you explain how that works?

[Eran Savir, Kampyle] Kampyle Feedback Analytics increases the value businesses derive from more quantitative Web analytics by infusing customer feedback with Google Analytics, Nedstat and Omniture. These integrations let businesses and Web site owners combine unique customer feedback with their numeric data for a complete view of their users, including site interactions, behaviors and thoughts.

By integrating with Web analytics, customers receive real user feedback tied to business logic based on the data and their individual requirements.   Viewing the data in this way lets companies synchronize the data and view it in correlation to each other, bringing together the “what” and the “why.”  For example if a user sees that site visits have lowered, he can search for feedback during this same time frame which can probably provide some insight into why users are leaving.  Users can create feedback alerts based on this type of data.

Other user case examples include:

• Feedback based on specific countries or browser type
• Internet Explorer 6 issues have increased compared with overall users
• There was an increased bounce rate yesterday and users provided lower grades
• User feedback suggests that a page is inefficiently located in the navigation path

Examples of analytics integration

Q4. …and can you give examples of how companies are using this feature?

[Eran Savir, Kampyle] As an illustrative example, a full house may indicate that a stand-up comedian is funny, but he won’t know which jokes work best unless he hears the laughs.  Whereas analytics systems tell businesses what is happening on their Web sites, Kampyle Feedback Analytics explains the why. Our integrations with Google Analytics, Nedstat and Omniture enable our joint customers to access all the data they need – both numeric and human feedback – from one centralized dashboard in a report format that facilitates decision-making and leads to improved conversion rates and better relationships with users.

Our integration with Web analytics solutions provides a holistic view of all customer behavior.  Combining real-time customer feedback with Web analytics lets you create actionable results based from your Web analytics data.  How effective is knowing that a user from California abandoned your shopping cart after spending 12 minutes on your Web site if you never know why? Feedback analytics gives you this answer and lets you respond directly to users and customers to potentially win them back.

Examples of insights you can learn from integrating this data include:

• A complete view of shopping cart abandonment numbers and why users leave
• Why users from certain countries search for hotels but never book reservations or are leaving the Web site
• Why users fail to complete a software registration process, and more

The future of web feedback and interaction tools

Q5. How do you see this category and your product evolving in the future.

[Eran Savir, Kampyle] We’re looking forward to continuing our expansion of Feedback Analytics as a real-time communications channel with users. In this day of social media and 24×7, customers expect their brands to engage and respond to them immediately, so we’re helping our customers achieve this customer service initiative in real time.  One of our customers, InkJetSuperstore.com, has had great success in immediately following up on user feedback to ease pain points and close deals with prospects that had initially clicked off the company’s site. Since using Kampyle, InkJetSuperstore.com has seen an 8 percent increase in site conversions and reduced customer call support by 5 percent.  InkJetSuperstore.com has embraced the value of Feedback Analytics as instantly actionable data collection, and we expect that experience will proliferate across our market. Our online resource center provides a number of ROI and customer case studies.

We also see the product evolving to seamlessly connect with more business applications. Users will have a choice of interface into a completely integrated solution that provides feedback analytics and Web analytics and all the online activities important to businesses.  It is our goal that marketers have a unified option for viewing their customers’ behavior and needs, and we are progressing quickly towards achieving that objective.
Related Posts:

• 10 Practical tips on using Linked In for businesses
• The Strategic Imperative Of Remarkable Customer Service
• Website Feedback Tools review
• 10 essential requirements for Digital Brand Building
• Why we need to focus more on customer engagement

Digital marketing strategy topic: Digital marketing strategy
Digital marketing tactic: Customer engagement, Customer service
Digital marketing technique: Voice of customer, Web analytics
Advice type: Digital marketing software reviews, Emarketing Essentials Interviews
Expertise level: Intermediate

Web analytics tools such as Google Analytics are used by nearly every company since they provide valuable quantitative data on site visitor behaviour. No surprise there.

But web analytics systems don’t give direct qualitative feedback from site visitors and customers and the surprise to me, is that relatively few companies use these, although their popularity is increasing rapidly.

We believe that qualitative website feedback tools are also essential to take the pulse of your website, but surprisingly they are less widely used despite paid services such as Opinion Labs being available for many years and some incredible free tools such as the much lauded 4Q Survey.

This is our recommendation on the different types of online customer feedback tools and web services:

• 1. Website Feedback Tools
• 2. Crowdsourcing product opinion software
• 3. Simple page or concept feedback tools
• 4. Site Exit Survey Tools
• 5. General Online Survey Tools

These tools are based on our review over the last year or so. If there are more feedback tools which you think would be helpful or you have positive opinions on these – please let us know.

Thanks, Dave Chaffey.

Voice of Customer Website Feedback Tools and Software

These provide a permanent facility for customers to feedback by prompts on every page.

They are run continuously to enable continuous feedback including ratings on page content, products and services:

• Kampyle A tool popular with bloggers and smaller sites for which it’s free (single form and 50 comments). Paid service for higher volumes. Integrates with Google Analytics well for Feedback Analytics.
• OpinionLab Higher-level tool which tends to be used on large-scale, corporate sites.
• CS Site Manager CS stands for customer satisfaction and this is one of the main benefits of this tool – the capability to continuously research customer satisfaction and benchmark against others using the ACSI methodology.
• PollDaddy Enables surveys to be added as widgets, so good for blogs and custom surveys – includes API

Crowdsourcing feedback tools and Software

• Uservoice A different form of feedback tool from the others since it focuses on innovation, for example product and site suggestions. It positions itself as a crowdsourcing tool. The free version allows for simple votes on ideas and sharing ideas within a forum.
• IdeaScale Offers structured feedback within customer communities also.
• Google Moderator Google Moderator can be used for a similar purpose and can be embedded within a site or intranet. Here is a simple crowdsourcing example for practical tips.

Some customers will also feedback on the website experience or customer experience offsite in a forum of which the fantastic GetSatisfaction is the best known. So feedback on relevant third-party sites should also be monitored.

Simple page or concept feedback tools

• Five second test Email or Tweet link to get instant feedback on a page
• Ask500People Gain feedback from 500 people targeted on their demographics within less than 12 hours.
• Userlytics Target a particular profile of customer to get mystery shopper / focus group type feedback on a web site or prototype

Site Exit Survey Tools

• 4Q Survey Free exit survey tool rating intent (reason to visit site) and satisfaction. Some companies use for redesign, others as permanent tracking

A couple of higher-end enterprise servives less suited to the small business that can be used for this purpose are Confirmit and Forseeresults.

General Online Survey Tools

Of course many companies use generic low-cost or free survey tools to research audience opinions.

The three most popular are:

• Survey Monkey
• Zoomerang
• Survey Gizmo

Related Posts:

• Best marketing book for 2010?
• Engagement Analytics
• 10 Practical tips on using Linked In for businesses
• The Strategic Imperative Of Remarkable Customer Service
• Web-user feedback tools – our interview with Kampyle

Digital marketing strategy topic: Brand-building
Digital marketing tactic: Customer engagement, Customer service, Online customer research
Digital marketing technique: Voice of customer, Web analytics
Advice type: Digital marketing software reviews
Expertise level: Intermediate

This month I had the opportunity to attend the very first, UXPeople event (@uxpeople). UXPeople is predominantly pitched at User Experience (UX)  Designers however, I felt as a conversion specialist that I would definitely gain insights from an event whose speakers came from a different stream than mine.

I was interested to know whether there would be discussions about fitting together teams from different disciplines to achieve project goals and whether ‘quantitative user data’ was part of the evidence used to form an effective user experience that acheived a clients business goals.  I was also interested to know what I could carry through from this discipline to use in my projects as a conversion specialist.

The Morning

The ‘Masters’ of User Experience, speaking at the event were, Jason Buck, Jason Mesut, Darren Evans and Robert Fein. Between them, their clients include The National Lottery, BBC, BT, KLM, Ford, Reuters, Orange, HMV, Logica, Multimap, Universal Music, Becta, Cisco, RBS, The Financial Times and DirectGov.

Unfortunately, I was unable to attend the very first session with Jason Mesut speaking on developing ‘Beautiful User Experiences’ where he discussed the aspirations and challenges of user experience specialists working together in harmony with designers and developers.  But I was in time for Darren Evans speaking about ‘Digital Trends’.  This was a summary of technological predictions and actualties that have happened in the last ten years. For example, Alta Vista was predicted to become the No.1 Search Engine and Apple Computers was predicted to go bust! And in the next 10 years – the development of Mobile Payment Systems (nr field communications) and the start of physical personal devices?

Then we enjoyed the session from Robert Fein, ‘Communication is the Key to Effective User Experience’. Robert described the creation of a digital design as something usable, useful and engaging and for a project to succeed, there needed to be value for all parties involved in the project based upon personal/group goal fulfilment.  For example, employees need to be able to reach their targets, which can gain them promotion, which will make them feel good.  He also explained perceived value in terms of quality.  If a client is paying for a £30,000 project then let the quality of the reporting reflect this and don’t let yourself down by delivering your hard work in a shoddy looking state.  The best insight for me was given by the phrase, ‘Physician, heal thyself’.  By this Robert meant that you should apply User Experience principles to your presentations and documents with total regard for the audience of
this collateral.

Jason Buck’s session began with a lively quick-fire quiz to get us all thinking. Jasons session was about giving value to clients in terms of being well-planned, organised and generous.  If a client wants something achieved in 3 days and you know it will only take 2 days, then deliver it to them in 2 days.  They will surely find something else for your to fulfil with the third days quota PLUS they will see high VALUE in your services and establish TRUST with your BRAND.

A concept I hadn’t heard of before, which I enjoyed was the idea of a ‘war room’. A room where you can use the space to be creative about ideas and processes without filing in a linear fashion. Jason suggested that these rooms, with certain clients, can prove evidential to the degree of work in terms of creative juices that have gone into the actual physical project deliverables.  I love this idea – perfect excuse for a messy office!! Jason’s take away thought was
about timeliness vs. utility. Which is time as a resource vs. how you are going to use it and making sure that where you maybe speedy, ensure that you are also accurate and effective at the same time.

The Afternoon

After lunch, we chose between sessions that we would be interested in. I forsook ‘Pitching UX’ by Robert Fein and ‘Futuristic Business Challenges’ by Darren Evans, instead to partake in ‘Story Telling – Communicating the Project’ run by Jason Buck and ‘Wicked Worksops’ run by Jason Mesut.

True to form, Jason Buck’s workshop was fun and mentally fulfilling.  We are told of the worlds shortest story that had to contain an element of surprise,  religion and suspense…
“Oh my God – I’m pregnant! – Who’s the father?”
…and stories of beer-filled steins being swilled by little piggies with blue trousers and ‘pink’ T-shirts?
and how over time, these stories become adapted and embellished in their iterative communications which led on nicely to how stories have been scribed and stored through history using varying techniques and technologies to preserve them.  Even if you can’t read, they are stored as stain-glassed windows, or jokes by comedians etc.
He explained that great stories are immersive and ‘bring things to life’ and gave us an exercise as a group to come up with a tabloid headline for a ‘factual’ paragraph we were given.   Jason Buck’s take away point was to make sure that you communicate effectively with your clients. Make sure that your story has a beginning, middle and an end and that it is useful and engaging.  Be aware that as projects get passed between varying stakeholders, the ’story’ maybe adapted or embellished and prepare for such eventualities by keeping it simple.

The last event of the day for me was the Wicked Workshop taken by Jason Mesut which is one that I had been particularly looking forward to because of the project management techniques we were going to see in action.

Jason Mersut gave us some great tips and showed us how to perform Six Thinking Hats….

and paired comparison analysis….
…as well as…
Dot sticking,
Sunset Reviews and many more…

These techniques are fabulous for organising a group of people and pushing them into addressing problems in ways that are progressive and constructive as opposed to being filled with closed-minds.  I will definitely be learning the application of more of these techniques as I felt that they would really aid design decision-making between all stakeholders of a project whether internally on the agency-side or between client and agency particularly as the client then has a very active role as a creator of the design.

The Learnings

Having really enjoyed this day (kindly sponsored by ZebraPeople) and really enjoyed talking and learning with members of the UX community what could I take back to my role as a Conversion Analyst? To be honest, what I learned should be carried through to all disciplines but it is mostly about:

• Giving Clients Value in terms of what they perceive for example, I know that I spend hours pouring over analytics accounts and data, so how can I present my report to reflect this?
• Communicating your work clearly and effectively for example will my clients prefer face-to-face presentations or training or written reports.  What works best for them rather than me?
• Being timely in your project management for example using workshops to manage decision-making processes and reduce attempts at procrastination.
• Think of yourself as a brand for example everything you say and do can be used to affect/disaffect your reputation and relationship with your client.

The bottom line – Consider the User Experience of your Clients in terms of your working relationship.
Related Posts:

Digital marketing strategy topic: Conversion optimisation & customer experience
Digital marketing tactic: Customer engagement
Digital marketing technique: user experience
Advice type: Best Practice
Expertise level: Basic

Marketers are hungry for information on how best to manage the reputation of their organisations online as shown by the popularity of our review of buzz monitoring software and services.

So, when I saw Antony Mayfield of iCrossing was publishing a book on reputation management with an intriguing title, I was keen to see his recommendations. I know Antony from his visionary advice on social media marketing at Econsultancy  masterclasses and via his blog.

What I like about the book

I think it’s…

A book for to enhance your career

As the title shows, this book is mainly intended to help you manage your own online footprint which had become vital to an individual professional success – particularly if you work “in digital media”. This point was brought home to me from hearing Dell describe how all new senior recruits are now reviewed across all the main social networks as part of the filtering process. No surprise maybe, but it brought the point home.

A manual to help you manage your reputation online

Antony gives practical steps and checklists to review and improve your online presence. So it will give you a process and a checklist to think through and manage over the first few months and then making it part of your routine.

Helpful in defining  your social media strategy

The book helps you prioritise what you need to do for success. The ones I took away are:

“Be useful. The best way to grow your web shadow is to do useful things to improve your network”. This is my mantra, which he acknowledges is tricky saying: “the best way to attract attention is by graft, by being genuinely useful”.

“Be the first and best source of information about yourself on the web”

“Understand networks and which ones are important to you”. In my books since we have to give definitions, the Internet is defined simply as a “network of networks”.

The straightforward way he explains the implications of this in the new world of social networks changed my perspective on web topologies and how companies should manage networks.

What don’t I like

And my criticisms? Well, as Antony acknowledges in his intro, this isn’t a book for digital specialists who have a well-established personal presence. It’s actually quite basic and brief – it’s a book you could hand to the HiPPO in your organisation who doesn’t get “it” and they will thank you for that.

You should know it’s focus is deliberately not managing company reputation, although you can read it and apply the techniques to a company, particularly an SME.

I thought at first, that there wasn’t specific advice on setting up a presence, on individual networks or as a site. But Antony has “saved the best ‘till last” and there are useful mini-chapters on setting up your presence on Linked In, Facebook, Twitter, or your own blog.

There is a useful listing of other tools to help you manage your reputation at the end of the book.

Perhaps surprisingly given the agency he works with there’s limited advice on SEO principles, but I don’t think this book is the place for that.

But overall, it’s a useful, enjoyable read and I throughly recommend it, particularly if you’re concerned you’re falling behind in establishing your personal presence online.
Related Posts:

• Online brand reputation or social media listening software – a review of 30 tools in 7 categories
• Twitter Lists for marketers

Digital marketing strategy topic: Brand-building
Digital marketing technique: Reputation Management
Advice type: Book review (best books), Digital marketing careers advice
Expertise level: Essentials

I recently read a great document, Brand Trends for 2010 (PDF),  by Brand Keys with sound principles that can be applied to many business. It got me thinking how brand development has really come to the fore in digital marketing, likely because of the rise of social media, after the long obsession with all things direct response. I think this is a good thing and in line with what matters to us, as customers.

So, for my first post on Smart Insights I wanted to explore some of the Brand Keys predictions further, share my thoughts and see if anyone else had things that they wanted to share on this subject given that “branding” and “brand development” have so often being misunderstood.

First – It’s important to recognise that building a strong brand has always been important if differentiation and avoiding having a commoditised product or service matters to you. It’s not new, and yet the Internet has significantly changed what it means, and how crucial it is to business growth today.

The broadcast and print media era was about broadcasting a consistent brand image or message, but it’s now about fostering trust through authenticity, dialogue and innovation. Creating a name or logo is not creating a brand, a brand is a product or service that is trusted so much by consumers that they will pay more for it, talk about it and see it as different to the competition. To gain a consumer’s trust we need to understand them, their buying habits and their online behaviours.

So what should we be thinking about to build our brands online?

I’ve paraphrased several of the Brand Keys points here and added my own observations as well:

1)   Value is the new black: Customers need the “reason to buy at all”, it’s obvious that that any product has to be great value but the point here is the meaning behind the brand, to “me” as a the consumer. Answering the “why should I” at an emotional level. For digital marketers, that means you need to give your audience an amazing reason to visit, to remain on your site, to return, to refer and to give you their contact details. So – think about your web content, web services or web functionality and if you create lead tools for data capture then ensure that they add value to the intended recipient rather than do the bare minimum. Imagine the impact if you aimed to give 10x the value to visitors, leads and customers at every touch point?

2)   Brands are a surrogate for value: The value of goods and services will increasingly be defined by what’s wrapped up in the brand and what the brand stands for. Though not new, it’s more important when there are potentially thousands of people sharing stories about your brand online. “…true brands provide meaningful differentiation in a world over-run by commodities” notes Robert Passikoff, Brand Keys founder and president

3)   Brand differentiation is brand value: The unique meaning of a brand will increase in importance as generic features continue to plague the brand landscape. Awareness as a meaningful market force has long been obsolete, and differentiation will be critical for success – meaning sales and profitability. Differentiation online could be centred on simple, tangible things such as creating a rich, considered and personal online experience, promising security and adding value at each touch

4)   The days of “Because I Said So”, tugging at consumer emotions and marketing trickery are over: This has been the case for some time, but I feel 2010 is where it will hit home, partly because of the financial debacle we face. There is a huge void of trust that’s compounded by boring commoditised markets – consumers face a mass of undifferentiated brands that they don’t trust. So, go figure what you can do differently!

5)   Smart brands will exceed customer expectations: This is difficult since those expectations are being driven higher by the latest technologies and innovations. How do you identify and capitalise on these unmet expectations and exceed them? Listen, participate and interact with existing and potential customers online – add value where they’re searching and researching. In a digital age it’s never been easier, or cheaper, to do it

6)   They won’t need to know you to love you: As the marketing and buying space becomes even more online-driven and international (and uncontrolled by brands and corporations), front-end awareness will become less important. A brand with the right street cred can go viral in days, with awareness following, not leading, the conversation. Think of brands that have done and are doing this – a huge example being Google in the 90’s of course, but what about e-retailers Zappos in the US and ASOS in the UK, web services such as Facebook, Twitter, Basecamp and Flickr, and the much referred campaigns of Mentos, Blendtec, Burger King and Compare the Meerkat (admittedly the last 2 were well known anyway!)

7)   It’s not just “buzz”: Let the consumer play a part in developing the brand by creating a place for them to do so. Conversation and community is all: ebay thrives based on consumer feedback, as does the newer Dell, Starbucks and IBM. If consumers trust the community, they will extend trust to the brand. Not just word of mouth, but the right word of mouth – and within a relevant context. This means the coming of a new era of customer care, and expectation of what customer care actually is. Check out tools like Uservoice to help you start doing it!

8)   Give Back: My personal belief is that forward thinking brands today give something back to communities (digital or local) through sponsorship, donations or time. This creates word of mouth and helps people justify their brand loyalty, re-enforcing that you really are a ‘different’ business, a business “for me”

9)   Foster trust: Trust is the result of the points above, it’s fostered through doing these things well and maybe not something that you actually set out to achieve. We all have experiences of trusting some brands over others; they tend to be memorable experiences in their infrequency! There are tangible things that foster trust – security, online experience, even site navigation – and there are the intangible things where brands have made a real effort to understand “me” and what I value as the consumer. Done well it seeps out in everything a brand does because they’re not trying, they’re being genuine

10)  Measure it!: If we’re monitoring, participating in and adding value to markets in a digital age, there really is no excuse for not getting the basics right to measure the result of your efforts online, on-site and around customer satisfaction. What you measure depends on what you’re doing – and we’ll make that a post for next time
Related Posts:

• 10 Practical tips on using Linked In for businesses
• How can content management enhance customer engagement?
• 2010 Internet marketing predictions and trends roundup
• Best practical social media book?
• How to achieve audience participation – 2010 Customer Engagement Research Report

Digital marketing strategy topic: Brand-building, Digital marketing strategy
Digital marketing tactic: Customer engagement
Digital marketing technique: Online customer value proposition
Advice type: Best Practice
Expertise level: Essentials

Google Analytics Intelligence is a useful new feature introduced in the October 2009 Google Analytics update which looked helpful to combat the “information overload” from web analytics through alerts intended to “provide automatic alerts of significant changes in the data patterns of your site metrics and dimensions over daily, weekly and monthly periods”.

While many blogs commented on the launch, I haven’t seen much since on how to use it in practice, so I wanted to write this tutorial to show it can be used in practice. I would like to know what others think / how they have used it.

This post mainly describes how to use custom alerts and how I’ve found it so far. I’ve presented it as a Q&A / step through of the features. I’ve discussed this feature with my colleagues at ClickThrough Marketing, and we’re using it more on client projects where we’re using Google rather than Yahoo! Web Analytics for tracking.

Step 1. Where do I find Google Analytics Intelligence?

It’s given pride of place in the top left of Google’s sidebar nav, suggesting it is going to be a major feature in the future. The announcement said this was only the first stage.

Step 2. Which mode should I use to help me?

Simply put, Intelligence highlights problems or opportunities in your digital marketing indicated by relatively big fluctuations in metrics you’re tracking.

GA Intelligence works in two modes currently:

First automatic alerts mode where an algorithm built by those clever Google PhDs shows a fluctuation which is significant within a confidence interval. These are shown by the green bars, when you click on those, you see further info on the nature of the fluctuation.

I have found automatic alerts not so intelligent in practice, since the daily alerts are, in my experience (typically) not earth shattering – simply fluctuations you would expect, as shown here in traffic or incredibly granular info such as “visits from iPhones in North London up by 500%” (I made that one up).

The weekly / monthly alerts don’t seem so good at picking up significant changes.

I haven’t given the automatic alerts an exhaustive trial, so would like to know if / how they help you.

Reducing the sensitivity is one tip I would make – you do this from “My customisations”.

The second mode, custom alerts is what I’ll concentrate on here showing how they can be used for SEO. For me these are more useful than the Automatic Intelligence and agencies and clients should set them up to show big fluctuations in traffic. These are some alerts I have set up for one client:

Step 3. How to setup custom alerts for SEO

The steps here are :

• Choose Create New Alert on Right via the button on the right.
• Brings up ‘Create an Alert’ dialogue as shown below.
• Choose a detailed, meaningful name like the ones above
• Apply to a profile – this will normally be the profile you are viewing
• Choose period – weeks and months work best generally since there are significant daily fluctuations, e.g. from Friday to Saturday.
• Set alert conditions – for SEO we are mainly interested in conditions of medium matches organic, keyword matches a value, or better keyword contains a value to aggregate traffic across values.

You are limited in the alerts compared to custom segments since you can only chose a single condition, not boolean currently.

Step 4. Setup PPC alerts

I’m more of an SEO person, but a similar approach can be used for top-level PPC reviews. However, the most useful metrics for Pay Per Click such as cost-per-click or cost-per-acquisition aren’t available as you can see on the right. You can still set up alerts on Pay Per Click traffic for:

• Bounce rate increasing above threshold
• Conversion rate falling below threshold
• Revenue dropping below threshold

So, if you’re not using the intelligence feature, I hope this encourages you to trial it, and if you are, it would be good to know what you have found works best? Thanks.
Related Posts:

• Book review – Customising Google Analytics
• Best marketing book for 2010?
• Most popular software tools and statistics to help Online Marketers in 2009 and into 2010
• Conversion Optimisation – become an ATC
• 5 Steps to using Bit.ly to track your Online and Offline PR

Digital marketing strategy topic: Traffic-building / customer acquisition
Digital marketing tactic: Paid search (Pay Per Click), Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)
Digital marketing technique: Google analytics
Advice type: Tutorial
Expertise level: Expert

Social media marketing essentials are our weekly round-up of what’s new if you’re looking to apply social media in your   marketing. We select the best posts from the many we scan each week so you don’t have to.

We include updates about new services from the main forms of social presence, i.e. Facebook, Linked In and Twitter and also best practice articles advising how to develop and implement social media marketing strategies.

Do let us know any developments that you think we’re missing by tweeting @SMARTinsights. Sign-up to our enewsletter if you’d like a reminder through the updates each Friday.

Latest social media marketing updates from this week starting 1st March 2010

• Trick question: are you a publisher or a media owner – my post for The Marketer

Value: ★★★

Commentary: A summary of one of my main points from my Keynote last week at the Technology for Marketing and Advertising conference

Implication: To engage your audience in the short-term (to convert) and to engage in the longer term (to develop brand engagement) all organisations need to think like a publisher to create quality content to help them compete.

• The 10 Social Media Metrics Your Company Should Monitor – Social media today
  

Value: ★★★

Commentary: A straightforward introduction of what you could or should be measuring through an analytics tool such as Google Analytics.

Implication: Although it’s not explained in the article you need to setup a custom segment or filter in Google Analytics as explained in our post on how to setup Google Analytics for your business.
Related Posts:

Digital marketing strategy topic: Branding
Digital marketing tactic: Online PR, Social media marketing
Digital marketing technique: Facebook marketing, Linked In marketing, Twitter marketing
Advice type: Best Practice, Latest developments
Expertise level: Essentials, Expert, Intermediate

In my interview with SEO specialist Kevin Morley of Internet marketing agency Search Path we discuss an interesting perspective on link-building.

For SEO success is competitive markets (aren’t they all?) your approach to linkbuilding simply has to be better than the competitors. To review how you successful you are, I recommend using one of the two most established link-building tools Majestic SEO or Linkscape which I covered in my interview with on how to compare link analysis tools.

Of course quality of links is more important than quantity when it comes to links, but as a starting point to benchmark against competitors, try this backlink history comparison tool.

Q1. What is value added link building?

The techniques used to increase the number of inbound links pointing to a given site can be broadly organised into two groups: on one hand, there are traditional, basic techniques, many of which have been used by SEOs for many years, but have been seen to have a decreasing effect on a site’s ranking, especially for competitive keywords. On the other hand, there are the newer, more innovative value added techniques that gain freely given, editorial links, links which stand the test of time, and can really positively affect a site’s ranking for competitive keywords. I’m calling these two approaches “Old” and “New” link building.

Q2. Can you give me some examples of “Old”, traditional techniques?

Traditional techniques include such things as submitting articles to article sites; writing press releases and submitting it to low quality free PR sites; submitting ads to classified sites; or arranging mass link swaps. Because these techniques are so well understood and practiced, their effectiveness has decreased in recent years. In the early days of the web, all it took to get a page one ranking was well optimised keywords meta tag. In the years after Google came online in 1997, this was no longer sufficient. In the late 90’s and early noughties, the techniques familiar to the average link builder became established (see above for examples), and these were all that were needed to get to the top spots for competitive keywords. However, in the last couple of years, these techniques have declined in importance due to familiarity in the SEO community and Google improving its algorithm, and new methods needed to be found.

Q3. Can you give examples of innovative value added link building?

If “Old” link building was about gaming search engines, and manipulating the PageRank algorithm to one’s own advantage, then the “New” link building sees a return back to traditional marketing principles of brand building, user engagement and customer loyalty. “New” link building sees its primary function as marketing; its maxim is the marketing slogan of “make a great product, and tell people about it.” Links will naturally follow on from the web-based brand building activity, if done correctly.

So the first and most powerful value added technique is to make a great product i.e. a great website, with outstanding content. To be fair, I’m not the only one to hold this opinion: building great content is Google’s Matt Cutts’ favourite link building technique. This technique holds onto two slogans: “Build it and they will come”, and “Content is King.” On the web, this last one is doubly true: if you write informative, interesting, engaging content on whatever your niche is, then people will want to link to you. Make your content catchy, funny, shocking, useful; anything that differentiates you from your competitors and makes you stand out, and that encourages people to link to you.

A great example of top content leading to links is Wikipedia. This user edited encyclopaedia is the King of content on the web; it is seen as being authoritative on a wide range of topics, and often ranks highly in Google because people have seen the various topic pages on the site as useful informative and worth linking to. The links that the site has gained as a whole has boosted the individual pages ranking.

Q4. Can you give us any more examples of value added “New” link building?

The number of techniques that can be employed by a “new” link builder is virtually limitless. The main aim of “new” link building is to establish and engage a community of loyal customers and fans that will hopefully see linking to you as a natural outgrowth of their engagement with your brand. Anything that establishes a relationship between your brand and the customer will go some way to achieving this.

Places you can do this include Facebook. Forget the image of Facebook groups as just where people show their interest for a cause; instead check out what big brands such as Vodafone and Marks and Spencer are doing on the site. They have established comprehensive groups with blogs, content, user engagement and special offers in a interesting way that is undoubtedly going to attract links for the main sites.

Twitter is another social site where great strides are being made on the value added link building front. The upcoming social site is a great place to brand build and engage customer and prospects not only with news and views about your organisation, but also as a chance to get your personality across. This is a fundamental part of building a brand; you need to have a voice, an identity, and hopefully something to say. Its all about getting noticed, and rising up the “hubbub” of noise on the web to be distinct and valuable. If you can achieve this identity, people will start to take notice of what you say, and what you represent. This increases the likelihood of people linking to you and boosting your site’s ranking in Google.

Q5. So what is the main benefit of “New” link building techniques over “Old”?

The main difference between the “New” link building and the “Old” is that the “New” link building treats the gaining of inbound links to a site as a side effect of other marketing activity, whereas traditional link builders sees the gaining of links as a direct result of the work they do. This difference signals the change in approach, and results: the links gained by value added link building are generally better quality, freely given, editorial links as opposed to the low grade, contrived, easily achieved links by the traditional link builders.

Because the “New” approach is long term and value added, the ranking results it will achieve will be longer lasting and more profound. If done correctly, the results achieved with a value added, “New” link building campaign will be even better than what the “Old” techniques achieved in their heyday. Try it for yourself. See how the linking landscape is changing, and take advantage of the new opportunities that are presenting themselves everyday.
Related Posts:

Digital marketing strategy topic: Traffic-building
Digital marketing tactic: Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)
Digital marketing technique: Link-building
Advice type: Emarketing Essentials Interview
Expertise level: Expert

My keynote at the 2010 Technology for Marketing and Advertising event covered these topics:

1. The UK Digital Landscape in 2010
2. Do we REALLY understand our customers?
3. How much budget should we invest in digital?
4. What should our online mix look like?
5. What’s hot? What does everyone want to do?
6. What’s not? But should be?!
7. Key campaign ingredients
8. Summary

Optimising Your Digital Marketing Mix

View more presentations from Dave Chaffey. Related Posts:

Digital marketing strategy topic: Digital marketing strategy
Digital marketing tactic: Customer engagement, Digital media planning, Social media marketing
Digital marketing technique: Google marketing, Web analytics
Advice type: Latest developments
Expertise level: Essentials

In this talk I look at the opportunities for combining one of the newest digital marketing techniques with one of the most established. It’s structured around 5 key questions to make your email more engaging:

• Q1. How engaged are our email subscribers? Suggestions for measuring and goal-setting for engagement
• Q2. How can we increase relevance? Recommendations on email engagement strategy
• Q3. What will make our campaign more engaging? 5 ingredients of an engaging campaign
• Q4. How can we make our email templates more effective? Practical tips for an engaging template
• Q5. How can we integrate email and social media? Examples of email and social media integration

I was asked to deliver this talk by Smart Focus who I have worked with for over 5 years as an adviser and to collaborate on developing whitepapers on email marketing best practice.

Integrating email and social media

View more presentations from Dave Chaffey.

Related Posts:

Digital marketing strategy topic: Loyalty
Digital marketing tactic: Customer engagement, Email marketing, Social media marketing
Digital marketing technique: Event-triggered email marketing, Personalisation
Advice type: Best Practice
Expertise level: Intermediate

Dave Chaffey’s summary of the most significant postings and developments giving guidance on Google Analytics Setup and configuration which I think all digital marketers need to be aware of. I have given a star rating of the importance ★★★★★ of the updates based on their importance to the average small-business business installation of Google analytics. Analytics Ninjas or power users may well rate more highly.

As well as my take on the major updates, you will also want to check out the Google Analytics Update page if you don’t know about – it’s tough to find. I also track the Google Analytics Blog which is great for analytics folk, but not most general marketers.

Retweets previously
recommending this post
on Marketing Online wiki
before new site:
//
Major developments in Google Analytics Setup and new features

• Google Analytics Annotations now available in all Accounts (Importance: ★★) Updated January 29th 2010. This featured was announced in December – see below, but frustratingly only available in some accounts.

Google Analytics Annotations Launched (Importance: ★★) Add text annotations for campaign launches, landing page redesigns, etc on your trendlines – a handy tool for businesses of all sizes, but especially where several people are involved. Update added 7th December 2009.This announcement also includes:

• • Facility to use custom variables as Advanced segments
  • Launch of setup Wizard for multidomain tracking

• New Google Analytics Asynchronous Tracking Code (Importance: ★★★★) A new method (1st December 2009) for tagging with Google Analytics designed to reduce page load times and page view volume accuracy since it is included within the top <head> section of an HTML page rather than the more conventional foot of page.

Note, a side effect of this new tracking method is that site engagement will appear to decrease since more shorter visits to the site will be included, i.e. bounce rates will increase.Detailed technical instructions on setting up Asynchronous Tracking – it still use ga.js tracking but requires new code in a new position in the HTML page.

• Setting up Google Analytics Accounts and Profiles for a marketing team Update November 2009 – This is one of the best explanations I have seen for how to give different levels of access for different members of a sales & marketing team concentrating on different products and markets

• Setup for Multiple domains By eNor for Google Analytics Blog Posted 30th September 2009

• 12 step guide to Google Analytics setup Last update August 2009 I have developed this as a summary and gradually update / add the additional links below

• New custom variables (Importance: ★★★) October 2009 feature – useful for applying content groups idea through Page Level Custom Variables” – here they give the example of a newspaper site section

Conversion Goal and Event Tracking

• Significant GA feature update (Importance: ★★★★★) October 2009 – - my summary on new Google conversion goals and Intelligence features

• Google Analytics announce final release of Event tracking (Importance: ★★★★) June 2009 – Event tracking often uses the example of Flash and video events, but can used for other events shown below

• 10 Must Track Google Analytics Goals March 2009 – Ran Nir’s posting has great ideas for tracking customer participation and engagement on a site

• Event tracking in Google Analytics Jan 2009 – This recipe uses Event tracking to assess conversion goals such as PDF downloads and Outbound links

Using Google Analytics Intelligence

• Review of Google Intelligence feature November 2009

Custom variables in Google Analytics – example of applications (New Feb 2010)

These are probably the least used feature, but offer the ability to segment according to customer / non customer and even by profile using cookies.

• Google Analytics Custom variables –  Google Conversion Room Blog explanation and examples of using custom analytics – Updated 18th February 2010

• Using custom variables in Google Analytics – Examples of applications of custom variable

Tracking search engines in different countries with Google Analytics

• Method 1. Tracking different Google country versions with a filter

• Method 2. Brian Clifton Javascript added to page Uses _addOrganic Javascript function

Related Posts:

Digital marketing strategy topic: Digital marketing strategy
Digital marketing tactic: Evaluation
Digital marketing technique: Web analytics
Advice type: Latest developments
Expertise level: Expert

Learning from how other companies have adopted and managed Ebusiness and digital marketing is a must for students and professional E-business experts.

This is a compilation of case studies to act as an update to Dave Chaffey’s books.

New case studies added since last edition of books

• Crowdsourcing example Penguin Books Spinebreakers

Intranet case studies

• Example Intranet case studies 2009 From .au company Step Two Design Awards

Ecommerce strategy case studies for large organisations

• Ecommerce strategy case studies – My collection of Ecommerce case studies including Amazon, Dell, eBay Facebook, Google

• The Times business case studies These are general business case studies but for some Ebusinesses such as ASOS. A Search on “Internet” will narrow them down.

Social Media Case Studies

• UK retail brand using Facebook and Twitter

• Facebook case studies Ten examples of different types of Facebook usage

Web analytics maturity models and measurement approaches

• Toyota Case Web analytics study Excellent description of how Web analytics is used to support business strategy

• Interesting review of NPS – Net Promoter Score at Lego Including online application of NPS that is relatively rare

Related Posts:

Digital marketing strategy topic: Digital marketing strategy
Advice type: Case study
Expertise level: Essentials

Google Analytics is a fantastic tool from the moment you arrange to have the tracking code installed and you experience the thrill or anxst of your first reports appearing showing how real people are interacting with your business.

Every business now needs a Google Analytics customisation strategy

You can certainly get a lot of value from reporting and analysis using the standard setup, but to really drive results for your business, you’re better off spending some time on customisation.

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With each passing month there are more customisation options available in Google Analytics, so I believe you really need a strategy of what to customise, particularly if there are several team members using the account. This post gives my ideas on a customisation strategy based on consulting work I have done and typical usage of Google Analytics by attendees on  Econsultancy training Site  Optimization with Google Analytics – the length of the post shows that there are lots of customisation options available.

I’ve published it as the pre-read for marketers attending the training course and hope it’s useful for others who pass this way. I plan to update it as the need for new customisations appear.

If you’re on my next course, “Hi and I look forward to meeting”. Don’t worry if you don’t have time to go through all the links(!), it’s just intended to give you a flavour of some of the main concepts we cover so you can ‘hit the ground running’. It will also provide a reference after the course.

We’ll cover each of these concepts on the course, but  we spend most time on using analysis of reports to get better results rather than configuration and setup – that’s what I find interests people most!

Customisation options for Google Analytics

From several years experience of using GA, I recommend reviewing these six types of setup or configuration for Google Analytics to customise the reports you view. Some may need some tech assistance, but most can be completed by any business user, if you know where to look!

From easiest to hardest, the six customisation options are:

1. Working with reports in a smarter way

2. Segmenting your audience by setting up advanced segments

3. Creating custom reports and dashboards within Google Analytics

4. Setting up marketing campaign tracking

5. Modifying profile setup within “Google Analytics Settings”

6. Customisations that require server modifications

Resources for finding out more about Google Analytics customisation

Most Google Analytics users will have used the Google Analytics Help System which is functional, but I find that many don’t know about the excellent “Google Conversion University” which as the name suggests is a much better way to learn.

The Google Conversion University is designed to help analytics specialists take the Google Analytics Individual Qualification.  I worked my way through the GAIQ back in September 2009 and I can recommend it if analytics is a big part of what you do. But even if they’re not, I can recommend some of these lessons as a great way to learn about Google Analytics. I’ve highlighted the most useful ones here. Here’s an example:

I’ve also linked to relevant posts within Avinash Kaushik’s Occam’s Razor blog. Avinash is analytics evangelist for Google and thinks deeply about how GA can be best applied to benefit businesses. As well as his recommendations, suggestions of other users about customisations make this an excellent place to learn.

There will naturally be future updates as Google enhances it’s Analytics services. To help here, I’ve created a Google Analytics update wiki where I add a short note on the latest, most significant, changes as they happen.

1. Working with reports in a smarter way

The most basic customisation you can do is to change the way default reports are displayed. For example, changing or comparing time periods or variables or the number of results displayed. Most readers will be doing this already because the system is intuitive and you have to use it for basic analysis.

But it’s worth checking out this lesson on Interface Navigation in the Conversion University since it also shows how to compare different metrics to review correlation and how to do a quick segmentation within a report to drill down to the detail.

There are also some newer features in Google Analytics to help with report analysis which aren’t included yet in the Conversion University, so here’s the low-down on these:

Google Analytics Intelligence

What is it?

The Intelligence feature of Google Analytics currently gives you automated or custom alerts of changes in visitors from different sources like an individual country, search engine or another site.

• Read more about Google Analytics Intelligence (GA Blog)

Annotations?

Ideal for overlaying a reminder of the start of new marketing activities to jog your memory or to share with colleagues. Annotations are overlaid on the graph on each report. For instance, you can show new campaigns, new content or new publicity and relate it to changes in traffic or conversion.

• Read more about Annotations (GA Blog).

2. Setting up advanced segments

Using Advanced segments is one of the most powerful features of Google Analytics which is used routinely by analytics ninjas. But when training, I find that many marketers haven’t tried clicking the magic “Advanced Segments” button you will see at the top of right of the Google Analytics screens or in the section on the left.

Using Advanced Segments is essential if you want to find how different groups of visitors behave and then work out how well your content, messaging, offers and navigation is appealing to them.

The most useful standard segments to apply are:

• Paid and natural search traffic
• First time visitors or returning visitors

I’ll write more about custom segments in a later post, but for me, the most useful are:

• Visits from brand and non-brand searches
• Visits from social media
• Visits from key markets or country
• Visits involving different conversion types
• Engaged visits, etc

Read more Advanced segments:

• Advanced Segment lesson from Conversion University
• Advanced segments from Google Analytics help
• Introduction to Advanced Segments from Avinash Kaushik

3. Creating dashboards and custom reports within Google Analytics

When you first log-in to Google Analytics, you start with the dashboard screen for your selected profile. This is arguably less easy to configure than dashboards in other analytics systems. You can move, add or subtract reports. You add additional standard report widgets through using the “Add to Dashboard” option.

With the addition of custom reports, these can now also be incorporated in the dashboard through clicking the “Add to Dashboard option” button at the top of the screen.

Motion charts can be customsied in reports where the “Visualisation” option is available at the top of the screen.

Tip: Add additional standard or custom reports to your dashboard and then add then schedule a daily, weekly or monthly email.

Read more on custom reports:

• Quick Start Guide to Custom Reports from Google Analytics Help
• Avinash Kaushik ideas on custom reports

Read more about Bubble charts and motion charts

• http://www.google.com/support/googleanalytics/bin/topic.py?hl=en&topic=16275

4. Setting up marketing campaign tracking

These changes are different to the other setup changes mentioned in this post in that changes aren’t made within Google Analytics, rather they are made through Google AdWords or when placing advertising or sponsorship on third-party sites.

Many companies will track AdWords because of it’s automated integration enabled from Google AdWords, but they may not track other codes or have a standard notation which needs to be defined and then added to all links involving media placements.

Google Analytics uses 5 standard dimensions for a campaign which need to be incorporated into the query string of the URL for each ad placement as this example shows:

http://www.domain.com/landing_page.php?utm_campaign=spring-sale&utm_medium=banner&utm_source=handbag.com

The campaigns report in Google Analytics will then enable you to compare media.

The table explains each of these 5 dimensions which refers to this example:

Variable Explanation utm_campaign
Recommended The name of the marketing campaign, e.g. Spring Campaign. utm_medium
Required Media channel (i.e. email, banner, CPC, etc).

What is the ‘distribution method’ that is used to get our message out to our clients? utm_source
Required Who are you partnering with to push your message. A publisher such as handbag.com, or for paid search, Google, Yahoo, Live Search, etc utm_content
Optional The version of the ad (used for A/B testing) or in AdWords. You can identify two versions of the same ad using this variable. This is not always used and is NOT included in the above example. utm_term
Optional The search term purchased (if the link refers to keywords).
This is not always used and is NOT included in the above example.

The Google URL builder can help with creating these links.

Note that in the major Fall 2008 upgrade to Google Analytics, Advanced segmentation provides some standard source codes for campaign types such as paid search.

• Google Analytics Help on Campaign Tracking

Tip: Defining a standard set of online marketing source codes is essential to determining the value of different referral sources such as ad campaigns or email campaigns.

Tracking offline campaign referrals

Many companies will reference promotional URLs or so-called vanity URLs (we hate that term) in offline Print ad, Direct Mail and TV campaigns to make it easy for the customers to fulfil the offer.

Of course, they also want to track the effectiveness of different promotions.

Best practice in such offline or multichannel tracking has been explained well by Avinash in his post: Multichannel Analytics: Tracking Online Impact Of Offline Campaigns.

The core technique is to use a 301 redirect which appends a campaign code. He gives the example of http://www.dell.com/tv which redirects and appends a (non Google Analytics) tracking code referencing TV:

http://www.dell.com/content/topics/segtopic.aspx/tv?c=us&cs=19&l=en&s=dhs&keycode=6Vc94&DGVCode=TV&dgc=TV&cid=11510&lid=985367

As with digital campaign tracking, offline campaign tracking should use standard codes for medium, source and campaign name.

5. Modifying profile setup within “Google Analytics Settings”.

The Google Analytics settings section is more likely to be used by analytics specialists who have experience of previous setup, but some of the changes are quite straightforward. We we will cover the 4 main types of settings changes most businesses will need to make:

A. Setting up conversion goals.

Visitors to a site do not have equal value to a company, they engage to different degrees as indicated by the types of pages they visit.

A visitor who has visited a product page, registered for an e-newsletter, bought a product or visited the contact page is clearly more engaged – in web analytics we call these “value events”.

Within Google Analytics these value events are known as “conversion goals” and they can be setup for an individual page such as the thank you page for an enquiry form or for a folder such as product pages or downloads. 20 goals are available, which is only a limitation if you have many lead types or want to track individual PDFs. You can apply Ecommerce tracking to non-e-commerce sites to monitor additional value events through tagging individual pages with a call to the Javascript function getOrderID().

Tip: Setting up $Index Value

This is another really powerful option I find isn’t used much. But it has great value since you can compare how successful different pages and referrers are in influencing conversion goals and generating value.

In Ecommerce sites, value from sales are used to automatically populate $Index values.

Even for non-transactional sites, you should set a nominal value on each value event such as a newsletter signup or lead-generation form since you can then see which traffic sources or pages influence success.

Many non-transactional sites which use the web for brand or relationship-building struggle to identify relevant goals beyond email signups or leads. With engagement goals you can now set thresholds for time on site and number of pages viewed.

The Breeze Learning example has been updated for the October 2009 introduction of site engagement goals which are here called Threshold Goals: http://services.google.com/analytics/breeze/en/goals/index.html

Arguably the best use for this is to exclude visitors who are not engaged at all i.e. poor quality traffic which isn’t well targeted. I suggest greater than 10 seconds  and greater than one or two pages per visit.

Avinash Kaushik has a great post on the rationale and examples of conversion goals.

B. Setting up conversion funnels

Funnels representing the different steps in a checkout process are an essential piece of configuration for retailers. After these have been setup up you can then visualise the drop-off or attrition at each stage. But you can set up funnels for most types of site.

Tip: Setup Higher-level conversion funnels. They can also be setup for sites showing how many people engage with different parts of the site such as browsing or searching for products, viewing product content which then contribute to a lead or a sale.

• Google Analytics Help on Goals and Funnels

C. Setting up on-site search

On site search is not setup as often as you would expect  in my experience, but is usually easy – you simply specify the search parameter which is a text string used to tell the search engine what the query term is. For example, my sites use the Google custom search engine which like Google.com uses the search parameter ‘q’.

Analysing the volume and types of searches completed by site visitors can pay dividends to find the type of content visitors are looking for and whether they can actually find it or leave the site frustrated!

These types of insights are available:

Google Analytics Search

If you are using a Google appliance for search or Google custom search for providing on-site search configuration is straightforward. But other search engines can be integrated through specifying the query string parameters to Google Analytics.

• Google Analytics Help on-site search setup.

D. Setting up Filters and profiles

The granularity with which you collect and report data should be consistent with the way the organisation is structured since different people in the organisation will likely NOT want to review the results for the entire site, but instead you will want to separate out data for part of the company or a particular product, service or audience they are responsible for. Common options which you should consider to report separately on include:

• Distinct domains – Many larger companies will use different domains for different services or audiences, for example using a different Country code top-level domain (ccTLD) such as .nl or .de as well as .com or .co.uk.
• Sub-domains – For example, you may have a blog on a subdomain, for example fashion retailer ASOS has http://blog.asos.com.
• Sub-folders – Alternately you may want to report separately on content in a subfolder, for example if your blog is configured this way,http://www.domain.com/blog.

To report separately on domains, sub-domains or sub-folders you need to apply the concepts of profiles and filters within Google Analytics. You may even want to have different accounts with different unique tracking codes for different countries, particularly if they operate as separate entities and you want to apply different currency and time zones to the report. Each account will use a different unique tracking code, but you will need to remember to include an aggregrate tracking code to report all the sites together.

A Google Analytics profile will typically be used to produce reports for different sites , subdomains or subfolders. Google Analytics Help on Profiles.

So, on my site I have a master profile that is unmodified for the entire site other than a filter for excluding my IP address together with other profiles for particular types of content such as blog content or visitor segments such as returning visitors. You should specify your default page for the profile, e.g. index.html.

Google Analytics Profile

A Google Analytics filter is applied to modify data from a particular profile so that it shows a subset of data within the profile. A filter will often be used to show visitor interactions with product information stored in a sub-domain or subfolder. Google Analytics Help on Filters.

In this example I have a filter which is applied to my Right Touching blog which only includes visitors who go to that sub-folder.

Google Analytics Filter

For example, a filter could restrict results to first time time visitors or returning visitors. With the Advanced Segmentation feature in Google Analytics you are effectively provided with several default filters, such as all visitors from

So you can see this is complex! You need to get this right from the outset of collecting data since profiles and filters cannot be applied retrospectively, applying filters incorrectly will introduece errors and introducing new profiles will lead to employee confusion.

• Google Help on Domains and Sub-domains
• Google help on tracking across/links between separate domains

Excluding employees from report.

This configuration is relatively simple! You don’t want visitors from a company skewing the results, so these should be excluded unless you want to artificially boost your visitor numbers and have difficultly understanding visitor behaviour.

A filter should be created to exclude a range of IP addresses for company employees and contractors working in different offices.

Alternatively, if staff have a range of IP addressses or dynamic IP addresses then using the _setVar function call on a page used by staff only (e.g. Intranet home page) to update a cookie to filter staff out. Both strategies are explained below:

• Google Analytics Help – Excluding internal traffic / Employees

6. Customisations that require server modifications

There are 5 main types of customisation that may be required which involve changes to the tracking code that will need to be configured or coded within the content management or Ecommerce system.

A. Ecommerce Tracking

E-retailers will need to enable E-commerce tracking for their Profiles since this isn’t enabled by default. Ticking the tick-box will be straightforward.

The reports summarising E-commerce transactions and revenue within require inclusion of additional tracking code on the checkout completion page specifying order and product information.

Including the transaction information about the order and product(s) will be less straightforward, but many popular E-commerce systems will support this.

If you are coding this or inserting manually (e.g. for event tracking), in addition to the standard tracking code, the _addTrans() and _addItem() Javascript functions need to be included as in this example from Google:

<script type="text/javascript">   var pageTracker = _gat._getTracker("UA-XXXXX-1");    pageTracker._trackPageview();   pageTracker._addTrans( "1234",                                     // Order ID "Mountain View",                          // Affiliation     "11.99",                                    // Total     "1.29",                                     // Tax     "5",                                        // Shipping     "San Jose",                               // City    "California",                               // State    "USA"                                       // Country);    pageTracker._addItem(     "1234",                                     // Order ID     "DD44",                                     // SKU     "T-Shirt",                                  // Product Name     "Green Medium",                  // Category     "11.99",                                    // Price     "1"                                         // Quantity  );  pageTracker._trackTrans();

Google Analytics E-commerce Help Documentation

B. Event Tracking

In Google Analytics, Events apply to interactions with content made by visitors, so if they are setup, they are found within the Content reports section of Google Analytics.

Event tracking allows you to track additional types of events other than page views. The most important are:

• Video or rich media interactions
• PDF downloads or emails from mailto: links on pages
• Outbound or external links.

Usually an additional script is required for tracking downloads and outbound links. This was originally implemented through generating additional or “virtual” page views, but care has to be taken that these don’t contribute to the overall event title.

This is a good example of a link/downloading tracking script:

• http://blog.immeria.net/2009/01/google-analytics-script-to-track.html

For video tracking an additional script isn’t required, see Google announcement of final rollout of Event tracking June 2009:

• http://analytics.blogspot.com/2009/06/event-tracking-now-available-in-all.html and this technical description from Google code: http://code.google.com/apis/analytics/docs/tracking/eventTrackerGuide.html

This shows that Event Tracking can be specified with these parameters to the _trackEvent() method values of which then appear in the Analytics Reports interface under content:

• categories
• actions
• labels
• values
• implicit count

This is an example from Google help:

• <a href=”#” onClick=”pageTracker._trackEvent(‘Videos’, ‘Play’, ‘Baby\’s First Birthday’);”>Play</a>

In this scenario, the reports for Events would display Videos as the Category, Play as the Action, and Baby’s First Birthday as the Label. The rest of this document describes these components in detail. Bear in mind that when you implement Event Tracking, you can use this data model as a guide, or you can simply use the _trackEvent() method to segment user interaction in any way that works for your data.

C. Custom variables for visitor segmentation.

Custom variables apply to Visitors, so they are found within the Visitor reports section if specified.

Custom variables were originally specified through a call to _setVar, but are set through _setCustomVar. They are most often used for defining specific segments based on the profile detail identified through a form or consuming particular content.

Options for setting custom variables including:

• Customer vs non-customer
• Different customer segment (or demographic profile variables like male or female). For example, Econsultancy has Bronze, Silver, Gold and Platinum member segments
• Segmenting visitors according to landing page
• Recording referral source attribution
• Categorising different content types

Read more: http://code.google.com/apis/analytics/docs/tracking/gaTrackingCustomVariables.html – this example shows how different content groups can be reported on through the example of an online newspaper and explains the difference between Visitor, Session and Page based custom-segments.
Related Posts:

• Best marketing book for 2010?

Digital marketing strategy topic: Digital marketing strategy
Digital marketing technique: Google Analytics Setup, Web analytics
Advice type: Best Practice, Tutorial
Expertise level: Intermediate

This in-depth case study of Boo.com features in Dave Chaffey’s book Internet marketing: Strategy, Implementation and Practice text book is based on coverage in the excellent book “Boo Hoo – a dotcom story”

// //

Boo hoo – Learning from the largest European dot-com failure Context

“Unless we raise $20 million by midnight, boo.com is dead”. So said boo.com CEO Ernst Malmsten, on May 18th 2000. Half the investment was raised, but this was too little, too late, and at midnight, less than a year after its launch, Boo.com closed. The headlines in the Financial Times, the next day read: “Boo.com collapses as Investors refuse funds. Online Sports retailer becomes Europe’s first big Internet casualty”.

The boo.com case remains a valuable case study for all types of businesses, since it doesn’t only illustrate the challenges of managing E-commerce for a clothes retailer, but rather highlights failings in E-commerce strategy and management that can be made in any type or organization.

Company background

Boo.com was a European company founded in 1998 and operating out of a London head office, which was founded by three Swedish entrepreneurs, Ernst Malmsten, Kajsa Leander and Patrik Hedelin. Malmsten and Leander had previous business experience in publishing where they created a specialist publisher and had also created an online bookstore, bokus.com, which in 1997 became the world’s third largest book e-retailer behind Amazon and Barnes & Noble.

They became millionaires when they sold the company in 1998. At boo.com, they were joined by Patrik Hedelin who was also the financial director at bokus, and at the time they were perceived as experienced European Internet entrepreneurs by the investors who backed them in their new venture.

Company vision

The vision for Boo.com was for it to become the worlds first online global sports retail site. It would be a European brand, but with a global appeal. Think of it as a sports and fashion retail version of Amazon. At launch it would open its virtual doors in both Europe and America with a view to ‘amazoning the sector’. Note though that in contrast, Amazon did not launch simultaneously in all markets. Rather it became established in the US before providing local European distribution through acquisition and re-branding of other e-retailers in the United Kingdom and England for example.

The boo.com brand name

According to Malmsten (2001), the boo brand name originated from filmstar ‘Bo Derek’, best known for her role in the movie ‘10’. The domain name ‘bo.com’ was unavailable, but adding an ‘o’, they managed to procure the domain ‘boo.com’ for $2,500 from a domain name dealer.

According to Rob Talbot, director of marketing for Boo.com, Boo were “looking for a name that was easy to spell across all the different countries and easy to remember … something that didn’t have a particular meaning”.

Target market

The audience targeted by boo.com can be characterized ‘young, well-off and fashion-conscious’ 18 to 24 year olds. The concept was that globally the target market would be interested in sports and fashion brands stocked by Boo.com.

The market for clothing in this area was viewed as very large, so the thought was that capture of only a small part of this market was required for boo.com to be successful.

The view at this time on the scale of this market and the basis for success is indicated by New Media Age (1999) where it was described as “The $60b USD industry is dominated by Gen X’ers who are online and according to market research in need of knowing what is in, what is not and a way to receive such goods quickly. If boo.com becomes known as the place to keep up with fashion and can supply the latest trends then there is no doubt that there is a market, a highly profitable one at that for profits to grow from.”

The growth in market was also supported by retail analysts, with Verdict predicting online shopping in the United Kingdom to grow from £600 million in 1999 to £12.5 billion in 2005.

However, New Media Age (2005) does note some reservations about this market, saying “Clothes and trainers have a high rate of return in the mail order/home shopping world. Twenty year olds may be online and may have disposable income but they are not the main market associated with mail order. To date there is no one else doing anything similar to boo.com”.

The Boo.com proposition

In their proposal to investors, the company stated that ‘their business idea is to become the world-leading Internet-based retailer of prestigious brand leisure and sportswear names’. They listed brands such as Polo Ralph Lauren, Tommy Hilfiger, Nike, Fila, Lacoste and Adidas. The proposition involved sports and fashion goods alongside each other. The thinking was that sports clothing has more standardized sizes with less need for a precise fit that designer clothing.

The owners of boo.com wanted to develop an easy to use experience which re-created the offline shopping experience as far as possible. As part of the branding strategy, an idea was developed of a virtual salesperson, initially named Jenny and later Miss Boo. She would guide users through the site and give helpful tips. When selecting products, users could drag them on to models, zoom in and rotate them in 3D to visualize them from different angles. The technology to achieve this was built from scratch along with the stock control and distribution software. A large investment was required in technology with several suppliers being replaced before launch which was 6 months later than promised to investors, largely due to problems with implementing the technology.

Clothing the mannequin and populating the catalogue was also an expensive challenge. For 2000, about $6million was spent on content about spring/summer fashion ware. It cost $200 to photograph each product, representing a monthly cost of more than $500,000.

Although the user experience of boo.com is often criticized for its speed, it does seem to have had that wow factor that influenced investors.

Analyst Nik Margolis writing in New Media Age (1999) illustrates this by saying: “What I saw at boo.com is simply the most clever web experience I have seen in quite a while. The presentation of products and content are both imaginative and offer an experience. Sure everything loads up fast in an office but I was assured by those at boo.com that they will keep to a limit of 8 seconds for a page to download. Eight seconds is not great but the question is will it be worth waiting for?”

Of course, today, the majority of European users have broadband, but in the late 1990s the majority were on dial-up and had to download the software to view products.

Communicating the boo.com proposition

Early plans referred to extensive “high impact” marketing campaigns on TV and newspapers. Public relations were important in leveraging the novelty of the concept and human side of the business – Leander was previously a professional model and had formerly been Malmsten’s partner.

This PR was initially focused within the fashion and sportswear trade and then rolled out to publications likely to be read by the target audience. The success of this PR initiative can be judged by the 350,000 e-mail pre-registrations who wanted to be notified of launch. For the launch Malmsten (2001) explains that “with a marketing and PR spend of only $22.4 million we had managed to create a worldwide brand”.

To help create the values of the Boo.com brand, Boom a lavish online fashion magazine was created which required substantial staff for different language versions. The magazine wasn’t a catalogue which directly supported sales, rather it was a publishing venture competing with established fashion titles. For existing customers the Look Book, a 44 page print catalogue was produced which showcased different products each month.

The challenges of building a global brand in months

The challenges of creating a global brand in months are illustrated well by Malmsten et al. (2001). After an initial round of funding, including investment from the JP Morgan, LMVH Investment and the Benetton family, which generated around $9 million, the founders planned towards launch by identifying thousands of individual tasks, many of which needed to be completed by staff yet to be recruited. These tasks were divided into twenty-seven areas of responsibility familiar to many organizations including office infrastructure, logistics, product information, pricing, front-end applications, call centres, packaging, suppliers, designing logos, advertising//PR, legal issues, and recruitment.

At its zenith, boo.com had 350 staff, with over one hundred in London and new offices in, Munich, New York, Paris and Stockholm. Initially boo.com was available in UK English, US English, German, Swedish, Danish and Finnish with localized versions for France, Spain and Italy added after launch. The web site was tailored for individual countries using the local language and currency and also local prices. Orders were fulfilled and shipped out of one of two warehouses: one in Louisville, Kentucky and the other in Cologne, Germany. This side of the business was relatively successful with on-time delivery rates approaching 100% achieved.

Boo possessed classic channel conflicts. Initially, it was difficult getting fashion and sports brands to offer their products through boo.com. Manufacturers already had a well-established distribution network through large high street sports and fashion retailers and many smaller retailers.

If clothing brands permitted boo.com to sell their clothes online at discounted prices, then this would conflict with retailers interests and would also portray the brands in a negative light if their goods were in an online ‘bargain bucket’. A further pricing issue is where local or zone pricing in different markets exists, for example lower prices often exist in the US than Europe and there are variations in different European countries.

Making the business case to investors

Today it seems incredible that investors were confident enough to invest $130 million in the company and at the high point, the company was valued at $390 million. Yet much of this investment was based on the vision of the founders to be a global brand and achieve ‘first mover advantage’. Although there were naturally revenue projections, these were not always based on an accurate detailed analysis of market potential.

Immediately before launch, Malmsten (2001) explains a meeting with would be investor Pequot Capital, represented by Larry Lenihan who had made successful investments in AOL and Yahoo!

The boo.com management team were able to provide revenue forecasts, but when unable to answer fundamental questions for modeling the potential of the business, such as “How many visitors are you aiming for?” “What kind of conversion rate are you aiming for? How much does each customer have to spend? What’s your customer acquisition cost. And what’s your payback time on customer acquisition cost?” When these figures were obtained, the analyst found them to be ‘far fetched’ and reputedly ended the meeting with the words. “I’m not interested. Sorry for my bluntness, but I think you’re going to be out of business by Christmas.”

When the site launched on 3rd November 1999, around 50,000 unique visitors were achieved on the first day, but there were only 4 in 1000 placed orders (a 0.25% conversion rate). Showing the importance of modeling conversion rate accurately in modeling business potential. This low conversion rate was also symptomatic of problems with technology. It also gave rise to negative PR. One reviewer explained how he waited: “Eighty-one minutes to pay too much money for a pair of shoes that I still going to have to wait a week to get?” These rates did improve as problems were ironed out – by the of the week 228,848 visits had resulted in 609 orders with a value of $64,000.

In the 6 weeks from launch, sales of $353,000 were made and conversion rates had more than doubled to 0.98% before Christmas. However a relaunch was required within 6 months to cut download times by 6 months and to introduce a ‘low-bandwidth version’ for users using dial-up connections. This led to conversion rates of nearly 3% on sales promotion.

Sales results were disappointing in some regions with US sales accounting for 20% compared to the planned 40%.

The management team felt that further substantial investment was required to grow the business from a presence in 18 countries and 22 brands in November to 31 countries and 40 brands the following spring. Turnover was forecast to rise from $100 million in 2000/01 to $1350 million by 2003/4 which would be driven by $102.3 million in marketing in 2003/4. Profit was forecast to be $51.9 million by 2003/4.

The end of boo.com

The end of boo.com came on May 18th 2000, when investor funds could not be raised to meet the spiraling marketing, technology and wage bills.

Source: Prepared by Dave Chaffey from original sources including Malmsten et al (2001) and New Media Age (1999).

Malmsten, E., Portanger, E. and Drazin, C. (2001) boo hoo. A dot.com story from concept to catastrophe. Random House, London, UK.

New Media Age (1999) Will boo.com scare off the competition? Author Budd Margolis. New Media Age. July 22 1999. Online only.

Questions 1. Which strategic marketing assumptions and decisions arguably made boo.com’s failure inevitable? Contrast these with other dot-com era survivors who are still in business, for example, Lastminute.com, Egg.com and Firebox.com

1. Using the framework of the marketing mix, appraise the marketing tactics of boo.com in the areas of Product, Pricing, Place, Promotion, Process, People and Physical Evidence.
2. In many ways, the vision of Boo’s founders were “ideas before their time”. Give examples of e-retail techniques used to create an engaging online customer experience which Boo adopted that are now becoming commonplace.

Related Posts:

Digital marketing strategy topic: Digital marketing strategy
Digital marketing tactic: Value generation
Digital marketing technique: Business models, Revenue models
Advice type: Business-to-consumer (B2C), Case study, Examples of failed digital strategies, Startup business
Expertise level: Intermediate

Tools to determine target keywords are well-established. But new tools – see Market Potential / Market Demand Tools – provide a lot more analysis of market potential or customer demand for products than the established software/systems. Many of these query the excellent Google research database available direct from Google as the Googlr Keyword Tool or Google Insights for Search.

This list is an update to my established SEO keyphrase analysis tools list.

Most popular keyphrase analysis tools

The three best known and longest established keyword tools are:

• Google Keyword Tool – comprehensive with filtering by country

• Word Tracker US and UK versions available

• Keyword Discovery US and UK versions available

Market Potential / Market Demand Tools

These are the newcomers to the field and often offer more sophistication in estimating the customer demand in terms of volume and types of searches.

• Market Samurai Integrates data from several sources including Google, Microsoft and Yahoo! to find out potential market size. Impressive.

• Keyword Examiner Windows-only Tool using Google Keywords database. Useful in that finds true competition based on quotes, title, backlinks.

Keyphrase behaviour visualisation

• Concentrate Good for analysis analysis of search behaviour including long-tail keyphrases. Juice Analytics also have an excellent free tool if you log-in to Google Analytics – theKeyword Tree for visualising search behaviour – combinations of keyphrases. Description of two analytics visualisations.

• Wordstream Another new tool for Keyphrase analysis brought to my attention by Bill Hunt. I’m not clear what it’s differentiating features are?

Rank tracking tools for SEO

• SEO Rank Monitor Ranking Tool launched in November 2009. Combines rank tracking of your keyword groups against competitors combined with access to your Google Analytics with the Google API. Read good review at Yoast.com

• 5 SEO focused webanalytics tools 2 of these tools listed by Blogstorm are also useful for rank tracking

Other Google Tools

Google has a series of other tools which show seasonality in demand. Market Samurai uses many of these:

• Google Insights for Search Great for regional analysis and particularly useful for “Hot Trends”

• Google Trends Seasonal Trends

• Google Search-based Keyword Tool Good for gap analysis against advertised keywords in Google AdWords

• Google Adplanner

• Full compilation of Google Tools for Agencies The Agency Toolkit

Related Posts:

Digital marketing strategy topic: Traffic-building
Digital marketing tactic: Search Engine Marketing (SEM)
Digital marketing technique: Customer demand analysis, Keyphrase analysis
Expertise level: Intermediate

Question.

So, we know title tags and alt attributes are good to have for keyword density etc … but are they as good as body text? Is it still better for SEO to provide some actual body text that uses the words – and include image based keywords as well? Any thoughts … ?

Answer.

Success in SEO is down to knowing the ranking factors that matter most to the search engines and then implementing in a way that the site is still usable for human audiences – we need to avoid SEOO – search engine over-optimization.

Of the factors you mention, their order of importance is <title> tag (keep them them focused on 2 or 3 keyphrases only); then body copy (particularly towards the top of the document), then image tag alt attributes (these are most important when it is an image that links elsewhere).

For the other on-page factors, I would also recommend including keyphrases in headings <h1> and <h2>. Finally remember that off-page factors, in particular the link anchor text and content of pages linking to the page you are optimizing, are most important of all.

Related Posts:

Digital marketing strategy topic: Traffic-building
Digital marketing tactic: Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)
Digital marketing technique: On-page optimisation
Advice type: Best Practice
Expertise level: Essentials