From web analytics to Experience Analytics. Quality over quantity: Prioritize business value over web page views

Transcription

1 From web analytics to Experience Analytics Quality over quantity: Prioritize business value over web page views BY SITECORE BUSINESS OPTIMIZATION STRATEGIES

2 Contents Executive summary... 2 Experience Analytics... 3 Measuring quality with Engagement Value... 4 Engagement Value in action... 5 Example 1: Overall marketing effectiveness... 6 Example 2: Evaluate content... 7 Example 3: Understanding which visitor groups contribute most to your business results... 8 Example 4: Understand diminishing value... 9 Example 5: Optimize to increase the business results Accelerating marketing effectiveness with Experience Analytics How to find out more About Sitecore Revised 3/ Sitecore Corporation A/S. All rights reserved. Sitecore and Own the Experience are registered trademarks of Sitecore Corporation A/S. All other brand and product names are the property of their respective owners. This document may not, in whole or in part, be photocopied, reproduced, translated, or reduced to any electronic medium or machine readable form without prior consent, in writing, from Sitecore. Information in this document is subject to change without notice and does not represent a commitment on the part of Sitecore. 1

3 Executive summary Today, marketers face the same problems online as they did at the turn of the century when one of America s great business innovators, John Wanamaker, made the oft-repeated statement: Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don t know which half. This is of course highly peculiar since in the digital world everything is measurable in the most excruciating detail. So what is wrong? First, we should be measuring quality, not just quantity. But current web analytic tools aim to measure and increase the quantity of people coming to a website or other channel on which they re engaging. Web analytics is all about measuring aggregate average quantities; for instance, number of visits, percentage of new visitors, page views, bounce rates, top assets downloaded, most popular entry pages, most visited pages, and so on. Second, we are not connecting the dots. is tracked independently from the web which is tracked independently from the mobile web, social media, and About SBOS Rather than focusing on the technical aspects of implementing and using the Sitecore Experience Platform, the Sitecore Business Optimization Strategies team (SBOS ) is a best practices resource that helps establish the digital maturity of your organization and identify where you want to be and then provides practical plans for getting there. Learn more about SBOS, and drill down into the details of how the team helps customers get results. 2

4 Conversions over time An active digital marketing strategy can involve hundreds of campaigns, like these shown here. Tracking conversion rates for so many campaigns can be overwhelming Sept Nov Jan March May July Sept Nov mobile apps. Third, we are comparing apples with oranges with bananas, and none of the quantitative measures say anything about how each piece of fruit is delivering against business goals. When you meet with a customer online, you are essentially engaging in a conversation. An exchange of communication and commitment is taking place. The level of commitment exhibited by your customer is the secret ingredient of quality that we call the Engagement Value. And it is the very basis of Experience Analytics as it is built into the Sitecore Experience Platform (XP). Experience Analytics gives marketers the power to answer Wanamaker s question. Marketers can now understand what drives engagement and produces bottom line results, not what attracts crowds and burns money. Experience Analytics Experience Analytics measures quantity, quality, and the relationship between the two. Quantity is everything you know from web analytics today. Quality is the level of commitment your customers have made and its influence on your most important business objectives. Digital marketing analytics tools somewhat express quality as conversion percentages, such as visitors having signed up for a newsletter. The trouble with this is that when you have more than three conversions, the complexity gets overwhelming as the chart of multiple campaigns above clearly shows. Marketers need this barrier of complexity distilled down to a simple measure of quality, which is why we created the Engagement Value. Marketers using Engagement Value can learn exactly which part of their marketing mix creates the greatest impact, which parts of their channels draw the highest quality visitors, and where they should spend their marketing dollar. Value per Visit is another important measure for Experience Analytics. Say, for example, that you run two identical AdWord campaigns on Google and Bing, and the latter delivers twice the Engagement Value. You can conclude that the ad running on Bing has more Value per Visit for the customers it attracts. 3

5 Measuring quality with Engagement Value Every website has critical points of engagement where your customer makes a commitment (e.g., fills out a form) in exchange for receiving something (your s or a newsletter, for instance). The more trust visitors have with your brand, the more inclined they ll be commit to the engagement. For example, just visiting a web page requires little trust and is a one-way transfer of information. However, registering for a newsletter requires a modest amount of trust between the visitor and the brand. And the information exchange that comes from that newsletter in turn increases trust and communication, eventually leading to more commitment. Most websites have multiple critical points of engagement along the ongoing conversation that s carried on between visitor and brand. Each of these critical points has an Engagement Value based on the level of commitment. It s a little like dating. A smile across the room is nice, but there s only a modest amount of engagement involved. However, taking a two-week trip to New Zealand together implies a much higher level of engagement. What constitutes commitment will vary for each kind of business: For a commerce site, the sale of goods is a straightforward commitment. The Engagement Value could simply be the dollar amount sold. The more you sell, the larger the commitment. For many sites, commitments such as signing up for a newsletter, requesting a sales call, asking a question, creating an account, or revealing your purchase What do your executives care most about? Getting more web page views or driving business outcomes? Your Engagement Value should be aligned with executive priorities. Lead score vs. Engagement Value Lead score, as known in B2B nurture flows, is very different from Engagement Value. Lead score is what you use to identify customers you believe are showing signs of wanting to commit, but not yet having committed. Lead score is commonly only of interest in B2B settings and is used to surface prospects to the sales force in combination with GeoIP information. While Sitecore can capture lead scores, they are not related to Engagement Value points. Lead scoring indicates propensity to commit, whereas Engagement Value is a measure of which outcomes are most effective at delivering against business goals. timeframe all constitute undeniable commitment on behalf of the customer. We call these transactional commitments. They require a deeper commitment than just viewing a page or downloading an asset. In the commerce site example, signing up for a newsletter or subscribing for product updates are also transactional commitments that should be given an Engagement Value. Some sites may not have engagement indicating a deeper transactional commitment. On those sites you may need to place the Engagement Value on a specific page being viewed or a specific asset being downloaded. These points are called referential commitments. Use them cautiously. Referential commitments can lure you into faulty conclusions about your website s effectiveness. Only use referential commitments when your website has no points that require the deeper transactional commitment. Two examples where referential commitments cause faulty conclusions are book bestseller lists and top hits song lists. Just being on either list guarantees greater visibility and a perception of desirability and quality. Gaining a spot on the list creates a self-fulfilling prophecy. Once a book or song is on the list it s guaranteed more sales, which keeps its sales 4

6 high. The books or songs only fall off the list when the sales potential is saturated or the audience becomes bored. This same effect can happen by putting an Engagement Value on an asset and then giving the asset more marketing effort because you believe it has more value. With more marketing effort it gains more Engagement Value and becomes a selffulfilling prophecy. There is far more we can do with Engagement Value than identify visitors who accumulate value. Engagement Value is key to increasing and identifying the effectiveness of your marketing channels, e.g., your website, campaigns, mobile web, landing pages, and more. For a website with occasional transactional commitments, you might assign Engagement Value as follows: Newsletter registration 25 EV points Engagement Value in action Sitecore s Engagement Value makes it straightforward for any marketer, not just web analysts, to identify how and where to improve marketing effectiveness and customer engagement. Let s take a look at a few examples on the following pages. How is Engagement Value created and tracked? As a feature woven through every website and mobile application built on Sitecore XP, Engagement Values are easily assigned to important goals, with no coding required. Online pricing quote 50 EV points Request for demo 100 EV points Even with just three such transactional commitments, Engagement Value works wonderfully well. The number used as an Engagement Value is not of importance, but the ratio between them is. Here the marketer has established that four newsletter registrations have the same value as one demo request. Often you will have evidence to help you easily come to such conclusions. In a worst case scenario you will at first have to use your intuition, and later you can validate and refine the Engagement Value through analysis. How is Engagement Value created and tracked? As a feature woven through every website and mobile application built on Sitecore XP, Engagement Values are easily assigned to important goals, with no coding required. Engagement Values are like currency, which when allocated properly can be converted into real currency. There is an exact correlation in your website between where there is a high Engagement Value and where revenue is generated. This makes Engagement Value an excellent tool for forecasting revenue and comparing effectiveness of cross-channel marketing initiatives, e.g., apples to apples. 5

7 Example 1: Overall marketing effectiveness Most digital analytics dashboards track the number of visitors over time. That means success is measured by visits, regardless of whether those visits produced any actual value. However, if we also consider the Engagement Value of those specific visits, we can see whether a digital marketing effort that drives a spike in visits also increases value to the business. In Figure 1, weekly visits increase over time, but Value per Visit, the green line, is dropping. Figure 2 Based on the above, there are two initiatives to pursue: 1. Optimize the experience that brought many visits but low Value per Visit, so that your higher traffic results in better conversions or value. 2. Increase audience acquisition for efforts that brought the higher-value visits, so that those effective campaigns get the traffic they deserve. Figure 1 Value per Visit helps focus your efforts to optimize your marketing. It lets you understand what works, and what really delivers value to the business. Rather than replicating the efforts that got you more visitors in weeks three through seven above, you can optimize those experiences to raise the Value per Visit. Looking at different campaigns, illustrated in Figure 2, you can see which campaigns bring the most visits, and which are most effective in converting visitors to your critical goals. 6

8 Example 2: Evaluate content Traditional digital analytics focuses on understanding which channels and campaigns bring the most visitors to your site. But visitors are only a proxy for value, on the hope that more visits roughly means more sales or conversions. Using Engagement Value and Value per Visit, you can take a more precise look at which content is actually contributing the most to your business objectives. In the table below, you can see different content pages on a website, along with the name of the page and such typical analytics measures as visits, average duration, and bounce rate. Additionally, Value per Visit is listed at the right and it tells a different story than the traditional metrics alone. effectiveness, with a Value per Visit of The most effective page is Benchmark (highlighted below), with a Value per Visit of 19.51, meaning it s seven times more effective in closing the deal than the home page. With those insights, there are again two things to do: 1. Optimize the home page, using testing or personalization to increase value from this hightraffic page. 2. Recognize the high value of the Benchmark page and steer more traffic there, to ultimately increase conversions. If you want further details, you can look at segmented reports, which show how your content performs for key segments. In the below example, the home page, with highest number of visits, might be taken for the best-performing page. But it also has the lowest 7

9 Example 3: Understanding which visitor groups contribute most to your business results Using built-in profiling in the Sitecore Experience Platform, you can easily segment visitors on your site based on which content they consume. Profiles are typically based on Site Interest, Product Categories, Lead Score, and Personas. With the built-in reports using profiling intelligence, you can easily see how many visitors on your site match the different profiles. Figure 1 shows visitors matching different personas, and reveals some key information about the segments, including the size of each, and traffic over time. Figure 2 Another way to dive deeper into persona behavior is to use Sitecore Path Analyzer to create a segmented map, which shows behavior based on a selected persona. In Figure 3, Engagement Value is used to illustrate the effectiveness of a car dealer s website. Understanding which pages contribute to your goals (the green circles) and which detract from them (the red circles) helps better optimize and target content for key personas. Figure 1 Figure 2 shows the same personas, but instead of visits, it measures the Value per Visit. This helps you better understand which of these personas are converting most to your digital goals and which aren t converting at all. Notice how Susan the CEO is most effective in converting, while Everyday Elizabeth B2C is very low on Value per Visit. This is not good, since we saw above that your Elizabeths outnumber your Susans three to one. With that in mind, the experience can now be further optimized toward those different personas, particularly to drive more conversions from your large number of Elizabeths. Figure 3 8

10 Example 4: Understand diminishing value Sitecore s Path Analyzer lets you see which pages and paths lead different groups of visitors to conversions (and which don t). A good way to use Path Analyzer is to understand where your site is losing value, as those would be quick wins for optimization. If you select paths with little or no value, you can see the most trafficked paths that are not converting visitors to your critical business objectives. For instance, the map below highlights such a path. Notice that the 5,000 visitors who click to the search function are producing zero value toward business objectives. With this insight, you can further diagnose why these visitors disengage with the site and work to optimize this path, perhaps by optimizing your search function, or creating a home page more likely to give people what they re looking for. 9

11 Example 5: Optimize to increase the business results With built-in testing and personalization, it s easy to go from insights to action. In a few clicks you can enable a new A/B or multivariate test, or use personalization to optimize experiences. Engagement Value is the default measure of success. The figure below shows a simple A/B test in which a home page hero component was tested with three variants. Optimizing for Engagement Value makes the most sense from a business point of view, especially compared with more traditional testing for general click-through or a certain conversion. For instance, what if the variant with the highest clickthrough or targeted conversions was cannibalizing another, more important conversion? Then your tests would be optimizing for behaviors that decrease business results. Engagement Value assures that you re optimizing for what produces the best outcome for your organization. Notice how each variant is measured based on Engagement Value and that the leading variant scores 10.09% better than the original version. 10

12 Accelerating marketing effectiveness with Experience Analytics Every marketing department needs to know exactly how and where they engage the high-value visitors that are most likely to become customers. If you can t determine how and where to engage high-value visitors, then you are doing shotgun marketing you are wasting money by broadcasting campaigns across a wide swath in the hopes of hitting something of value. In the high-speed world of digital marketing you can t survive with this approach. To accelerate your marketing effectiveness you must know how to engage customers in the context of their interaction with your brand. Only then are you communicating with customers where they expect and want to be engaged. And you must coordinate that across multiple marketing channels. Experience Analytics is clearly the way to make your crosschannel marketing more engaging and effective. John Wanamaker would have loved digital marketing and Sitecore s Engagement Value. But, his quote about wasting half his marketing budget would become: I know why I spend each marketing dollar and I know exactly where to get the best impact with my next marketing dollar. About Sitecore Sitecore is the global leader in experience management software that enables context marketing. The Sitecore Experience Platform manages content, supplies contextual intelligence, automates communications, and enables personalized commerce, at scale. It empowers marketers to deliver content in context of how customers have engaged with their brand, across every channel, in real time before, during, and after a sale. More than 4,900 customers including American Express, Carnival Cruise Lines, easyjet, and L Oréal trust Sitecore for context marketing to deliver the personalized interactions that delight audiences, build loyalty, and drive revenue. Many companies spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on Google AdWords for their own brand. With Engagement Value you can quickly determine if these funds might be better allocated to other areas. How to find out more We d be thrilled to hear about your insights from measuring Engagement Value and prioritizing quality over quantity of digital engagements. You can reach us via: sitecore.net/contact-us Phone: sitecore.net/phone Chat: sitecore.net/chat Or request a demo here. If you need further help with Sitecore s Engagement Value, visit Sitecore Documentation, give your account manager a call, or check out Sitecore training to book an online or inperson training session. 11