This spring we will try to do a fair share of posts around web analytics. Why? Someone has to, since it’s so painfully overlooked in so many digital initiatives.
New Balance will judge the campaign’s effectiveness by measuring unique visitors per month, video views, and time spent on NewBalance365.com. They will look for consumers to talk about the campaign and spread it virally, by seeding video clips on YouTube, Facebook and DailyMotion.
First of all, kudos to New Balance for actually speaking publicly about metrics at all. However. The site is made by Mother (advertising agency). It’s commissioned by the “Integrated Marketing Manager” (marketing department). Which is pretty evident in the metrics.
Metrics such as page views, unique visitors and time spent are all advertising metrics. Looking for reach and impact. Not market expansion or business development. Some call them Vanity metrics, you could also just call them useless metrics.
At 10.2 million customers, FedEx’s small-business segment grew 13 percent year over year, more than its usual 9 percent growth rate. The company cannot tie the increase to “1-2-3 Succeed!” but it will add more definitive metrics to track conversion rates from the videos to website business(...)Since the spots began running, searches for “FedEx” are up 6 percent year over year while searches for “FedEx small business” are have risen 10 percent.
Ignoring the silly name and the quality of it at all they have at least gone beyond useless metrics. Instead they look at business driven data points. Such as growth of target segment (Small business) and behavior change (number of searches).
Why is this a better way?
The effort has a clearly stated objective – grow the small business segment
That objective is not measured by number of art directors and copywriters that watch the video but in customer growth.
Instead of Reach measure how it changed behavior.
So start your next digital initiative by stating a clear objective that ties to your business goals and measure the impact in sales and growth.
Fun fact of the week: The music app Shazam drives 13% conversion rates from users tagging tracks and sells 300 000 tracks per day.
Andrew Fisher, CEO of Shazam, made this interesting comment on the business side of their app at MIDEM earlier in the week.
13% is an insane conversion rate. And very interesting to see the power of context. My own usage of Shazam is often when I’m in a department store, in a restaurant or any other noisy environment just hearing parts of a song that sounds really good. The curiosity problem that Shazam solves also makes the selling of tracks in that context very engaging. An economic proof of concept of apps living in the hybrid space of digital and physical.
It really was a Nextopia moment last night. Expectations were basically met, every spec besides a camera were essentially there. And no one was happy. Screw that. I'm starting to belive it's magnificent. So I'm going to mention three quotes that represent the possibilities. Not the limitations.
Now, the iPad. The fact that people are spending so much virtual ink about “do we need this, do people need this?” misses the point. People didn’t need a better phone. A phone was a phone. And yet, people need and covet their iPhone. The iPhone has transcended what people judged it on: a PDA and a phone. It has become a general purpose device more in line with the usage of netbooks than phones. The iPad likewise will transcend what people are judging it by.
Verizon launched a Droid ad two months ago that essentially let the world know how doomed they were. The ad showed a bunch of “iDon’t”s. iDon’t have 5 megapixels. iDon’t have multitasking. Item after item of flaws in the iPhone that this new technology could solve.
Apple, meanwhile, showed a phone that could speak foreign languages at you, identify birdcalls in the wilderness, guide you through cities. They weren’t selling technical features. They were selling you magic. Real magic. The kind of magic where, thanks to world-class designers and programmers and marketers, it actually comes true.
It is SO SIMPLE. It is basically a highly responsive capacitative piece of glass with solid state memory and an IPS display. Just as a book is basically paper bound together in a portable form factor. The simplicity is what allows everyone, us, software developers, content providers and accessory manufacturers to pour themselves into it, to remake it according to the limits of their imagination.
Developers are preparing. Just a couple of hours after the keynote we see a prototyped comic book experience on the device. Imagination will turn it into magic.
Basically it comes down to that Facebook has made a decision that supports their business model. More public data will drive interest, engagement and in the end revenue.
The best way to maintain privacy as a public figure is to give folks the impression that everything about you is in public.
Which is exactly what people arguing the case for public data is doing. It's easy to play transparent. "I'm uploading pictures to flickr, tweeting what I'm doing, checking-in on Foursquare, hence I'm transparent". No you're not. You're creating a narrative about yourself. About how you want to portray your life, your persona.
Bud Caddell argues that privacy is a method of control over identity creation and management. Which results in our ability to have polymorphic identities - different personas in different networks. Dating - business - friend - musician - etc.
As danah argues in her post it's about having control over the situation. Knowing what is public and not is. Which is why we really do need better controls regarding privacy. Public or private default is not the main issue. Having control is. And Facebook does a very poor job at explaining what is public, to whom and when. (Well explained in Clay Shirky's "Facebook Break-up"-story - in the end of this post).
Public data is something that suits Facebook perfect. More pageviews, more dineros. However, it will also teach us the value of privacy.
Privacy literacy will be an increasingly important skill as the default shifts from private to public.
I och med säsongens mörker fyller vi enligt tradition biografernas salonger för att njuta av påkostade äventyr. Och i biosalongens mörker möts man av de obligatoriska annonsminuterna innan filmen brakar igång. Under reklamen distraherar man sig antingen genom att påbörja godisätandet, avslutar en diskussion man tagit med sig in i salongen eller betraktar reklamfilmerna i tystnad. Eftersom ett biobesök ändå är en passiv och tillbakalutad upplevelse.
Inför mitt egna biljettköp på SF.se upptäckte jag häromdagen att nära på varje sida innehåller Google Adsense-annonser. Oavsett om det handlar om en vägledande sida som hjälper användaren vidare eller en destinationssida vars syfte är att driva till avslut. Till och med startsidan har annonser som Google tyckte passade mig, exempelvis "Gratis varuprover", "Jobba hemifrån" och "Rabatt med CSN-kortet". Helt utanför min fokuserade sammanhang. Men...varför?
Under årets stora bioperiod ökar antalet sidvisningar per besök jämfört med hösten med ca 30%. Ett ökat engagemang innebär ofta en högre intention till köp. Med andra ord, kan användaren stanna längre och/eller besöka fler sidor så ökar chansen till ett köp.
SF.se har över 30 000 besök om dagen till SF.se och över 32 000 sittplatser framför en bioduk med intäktspotentialen mellan 90-150 kr per stol. Google Adsense-annonserna har en potential på 7 500 kronor per dag (1), vilket motsvarar försäljningen av 80 biobiljetter. I detta läge är det sista man vill göra att distrahera användaren med annonser.
Annonser som en kompletterande intäktsmodell står i en uppenbar konflikt till försäljning av biobiljetter. Ju bättre annonserna fungerar desto sämre blir försäljningen av biobiljetterna. Om annonserna "lyckas" distrahera användaren till att lämna köpflödet och istället påbörja det nya flödet, som klicket på Adsense-annonsen innebär, så missar man en försäljning med högre intäkt (100 kr) till förmån för en betydligt lägre intäkt (5 kr, minus Googles andel på 40-75%).
Istället för att urskillningslöst upplåta de bästa ytorna på SF.se till annonser, en direkt motverkande intäktsmodell, borde SF bättre borde ta hand om och stödja biljettköpet. Om min vilja fick råda skulle jag göra följande:
Om det nu verkligen finns behov av en sidointäkt i form av annonser, skulle jag placera dessa på sidor som ligger efter avslut, exempelvis efter stora och små konverteringar (anmälan om nyhetsbrev, bevakning eller genomfört köp). Men undvika de sidor som syftar till att stimulera användarens intresse eller driva till avslut.
Ett ökat engagemang ökar mängden avslut. Därför jag låta de mest attraktiva ytorna på SF.se hjälpa användaren att snabbt få relevanta alternativ som bjuder in användaren till fördjupning. Både genom en ämnesorienterad navigation (med utgångspunkt i filmerna), platsorienterad navigation (med utgångspunkt i var man befinner sig) och genom social navigation (exempelvis andra användares rekommendationer, mest populära, osv).
Trafiken till och från de sociala nätverken talar sitt tydliga språk. Bioköpet är en social köpprocess - Vilken film ska vi se? Vilken tid ska vi gå? Vad ska vi göra innan/efter etc. Vilket styrks av att 20% av trafiken till och från SF.se går till och från sociala nätverk, däribland Facebook. Idag integrerar användarna mer eller mindre manuellt mellan SF.se, Live och Facebook. Jag skulle behandla filmerna mer som de sociala objekt de är och öka integrationen mot platserna där användarna idag når sina nätverk, var den sociala köpprocessen till stor del sker.
Det luktar som om man inom SF skapat en resultatenhet kring webbplatsen med krav på egna intäkter. När de kraven flög in, flög rimligheten ut. SF, med all respekt, det här är galenskaper.
Nej, nu får det vara slut på skrivandet och räknandet. Nu måste jag hasta iväg till Rigoletto och Avatar 3D.
Do you remember that time when you drove a little too fast, when the road got a little too narrow and it felt like you relied way too much on luck? That’s the feeling I often have when I see companies digital initiatives. Which is the exactly the feeling I and they should be having. Speed is both daunting and necessary. Pushing things out the door, see how they work and measure them are crucial. Noah Brier describes it well, why you should be making prototypes, experiments and real products.
It’s easier than ever to prototype something and to get feedback on that prototype. What once took years of planning, now takes months or days and often it is cheaper to just make the thing than to figure out whether it’s worth making.
How quickly can I execute a very, very small nugget of my curiosity? Just to see what it will turn into. Can I build it from there, and that’s exactly what I tell my clients to do as well. Find that speck of dust that could turn into a pearl and just see what happens, meaning measure the hell out of it. Instead of aligning every bit of resource that you have in your agency and your brand to execute a single idea; Do a thousand tiny small experiments, and the ones that actually start to catch on fire, start putting wood on them and see where that goes.
Organizing and performing based on not knowing the correct answer to Will this be a success?
There has been an avalanche of posts predicting this year’s breakthroughs, themes and challenges. One that stood out for me was JP Rangaswami's concluding post. Which brings up the value of platforms. And more specifically the value of being a platform. As a foundation it's interesting to look at his definition of what a platform is:
So just what is a platform? A place. A device. A company. An everyday item. Bits of software. All of the above.
When I say “platform” I mean:
Something that is a foundation, an enabling environment, upon which others can build things, make things
Something that exists for a specific purpose (or set of purposes), and which invests in capabilities related to those purposes
Something that then makes it easy for people to use those capabilities
Something that does all this in a commercial model that facilitates the creation and development of new products, new services, new markets, new marketplaces
Something that can coexist with other platforms and ecosystems
Stewardship in a purposeful environment based on a set of guiding principles. A role that is available and creates value in a network economy. A role that few companies have, even fewer understand they can have it. So the question for 2010; how would the value creation of your company change if described and functioned as a platform instead of as a company?
One of the most recurring discussions we’ve had this year has been around the value of data. Why have we had this discussion so many times? In a network economy, data is the glue that ties it all together. In such an economy the relationships are the front-end and data is the back-end. And there is value to be found in both ends.
However, the public discussion tend to focus on the front-end, the social media part of it all. Which is fine. Although, the back-end stuff, the data, contains lots of value that is too often forgotten about. Let’s talk a bit about this.
Yesterday, news arrived that Twitter will be profitable in 2009. Wait, the same company that has beenmockedfor two years because it doesn’t have a business model? Yes, that company. So, how did they do it? They identified and exploited value found in the back-end; they sold access to their data. It’s as if data just made it past the chasm. The proof of concept just got delivered.
So why is Twitter profitable? Reportedly they’ve made deals with Google ($15 million) and Microsoft ($10 million) that allows both search engines to index real-time results from Twitter. With expenditures expected at $20 million it’s all good times (although it’s not clear whether they are one-time payment, annual fees or something else).
So, the data from around 58 million users is worth $25 million annually (if that’s the hypotheses). The value is primarily based on the intensity of usage, the speed of updates and the semantic content.
Umair Haque points out that we’re living in an interaction age. Where we interact more than ever with digital things such as our iPhone apps, connected devices and the internet as a whole. The post-digital age, where everything is digital, makes us interact with much more intensity than earlier. The by-product of this intense interaction is…wait for it…data. And loads of it.
In order for data to be valuable, someone or something has to analyze it. Or even better, mine it. Data mining tools helps you slice and dice data, learn more about your users. It’s possible to become friends with your users really fast. Knowing what they like and how they like it. It’s as if you know that they want their stake medium-rare, french fries on the side and lots of BBQ sauce all over it. Without even asking.
The everyday tool Google Analytics has taken a big leap this year and incorporates functionality which transforms the tool from a simple web analytics tool into a easy to use data mining tool. This represent a shift not only in the tool but in how creators of these tools value data.
At the same time the data mining and analysis market is maturing. Fast. Increasingly we will see that these tools are becoming commoditized. However, access to unique data is not.
When the analysis of data is being commoditized, access to unique data is and will be an increasingly important scarcity. Just the type of scarcity that creates value. Which makes data a haystack in which you should be looking for new revenue streams in 2010.
In the beginning of Cory Doctrow’s novel Makers a two-person team get assigned a business manager in order to commercialise their innovation. The business manager name name is Tijan, and he introduces himself with letting us know why he has chosen to belive in their product innovation.
If you were making staplers I wouldn’t be here, because there’s no profit in staplers. Too many competitors. Toothbrushes are a possibility, if you were making something really revolutionary. People buy about 1.6 toothbrushes a year, so there’s lots of opportunity to come up with an innovative design that sells at a good profit over marginal cost for a couple seasons before it gets cloned or out-innovated. What you people are making has an edge because it’s you making it, very bespoke and distinctive. I think it will take some time for the world to emerge an effective competitor to these goods, provided that you can build an initial marketplace mass-interest in them. There aren’t enough people out there who know how to combine all the things you’ve combined here. The system makes it hard to sell anything above the marginal cost of goods, unless you have a really innovative idea, which can’t stay innovative for long, so you need continuous invention and re-invention too. You two fellows appear to be doing that. I don’t know anything definitive about the aesthetic qualities of your gadgets, nor how useful they’ll be, but I do understand their distinctiveness, so that’s why I’m here.
And also his view on how production today differs from yesterdays.
That’s the point: any moderately skilled practitioner can build anything these days, for practically nothing. Back in the old days, the blacksmith just made every bit of ironmongery everyone needed, one piece at a time, at his forge. That’s where we’re at. Every industry that required a factory yesterday only needs a garage today. It’s a real return to fundamentals. What no one ever could do was join up all the smithies and all the smiths and make them into a single logical network with a single set of objectives. That’s new and it’s what I plan on making hay out of. This will be much bigger than dot-com. It will be much harder, too—bigger crests, deeper troughs. This is something to chronicle all right: it will make dot-com look like a warm up for the main show.
And now, if you have some time, listen to Matt Webb’s talk at Web Directions. Where he discusses why you should “outsource everything you’re not passionate about”. One of my favorite lines from this year. And one that I’ve used over and over the last couple of months. It’s simply a nicer way to appraoch evolution mechanisms.
