Kris

Mobile marketing – Only few marketers have strategies set

August 21, 2016 By Kris

I wanted to share some of these stats around mobile, to get marketers thinking and improve mobile moment. Very few marketers are investing in mobile marketing while the whole world has moved on to mobile as every data indicates. It has already surpassed desktop in terms of time spent, being the key first touch point in shopper’s journey, etc. Here are some basic stats:

1) 50-60% of emails are now opened on a mobile device. source

2) United State’s mobile time spent on in-app is growing and expect to grow while mobile web is flat. source

3) 84% of smartphone users who used the device while watching television did so on a daily basis. source

4) 65% of online searches begin on a mobile device, yet only 16% of marketers have developed a mobile strategy. source

Since what’s going on on the internet as well as what we do in digital marketing, things move fast and change a lot, I chose these stats given that they reflect data including 2015 onwards.

These stats signifies a lot of things, and what we all know for sure is mobile is real and marketers aren’t doing enough to win mobile moments.
I wonder why… We already know from our own behaviors that when we turn on TV, 100% of our attention or eyeballs are really not focused on TV, yet marketers still spend tons of money on TV ads.

We also know customer journey already begins before desktop, even maybe before people are searching online for a mobile device. What are smart brands doing to win that moment?

A bit of an old data from Think w/ Google, but already in 2012 they noticed how mobile played a key role in early part of the path to purchase. Earlier HubSpot data indicates more percentage of shoppers are starting from mobile.

: Source: 2012 Think with Google Path to Purchase

For example, in this Google’s customer journey tool, you can see that for this specific segment of the industry in Japan, Social plays a key channel in the first touchpoint before making a purchase. I’m guessing the channels on the earlier stage of the funnel are likely going to be on mobile. Hence marketers need to plan to win those moments by getting in front of the target audience.

: Source: Mobile Customer Journey Path to Purchase

These are my own thoughts, but maybe we all can share some learnings or thoughts, but definitely I see these as some rudimentary areas where marketers can win the mobile moment.

Facebook, both messenger apps, and mobile ads are winning, and marketers should not ignore it
Where are the conversations taking place? Brands got to be there.
Don’t just acquire, but also engage after you acquire beyond e-mail, and take into consideration of how your target users are using mobile in their daily routine.
Videos and syndicate it. How many of you click the video play button on FB and just watch those content your friends shared? If you do that on a mobile device, then I see that as a moment to get in front of your target audience.
Champion the timing. If you look at your analytics and user access to your site by device type, I bet you, you may see some interesting differences like mobile users are accessing your site more after work, at night, or in morning during a commute. Check your data, and make your ad dollars more effective by targeting at the right timing.

Also, it is important to understand the macro issues if there are any, given you may have no full control of it, but you may be able to be part of the change. Meaning, a lot of the reason why marketers don’t have mobile marketing strategy could be:

Due to organizational issues. You may be too busy getting your major project out and it is all due the needs and desire of the highest paid person’s opinion and their priorities.
Systematic issues. Project kick off, insights, media planning, all the way through to tracking are structured from how we do marketing from 10 years ago. Hence how you operate is basically designed and aligns to how content/product/services are launched through the desktop web.
Fear of its complexity
No management visions that connects the dots. HiPPOs…
Don’t know what to track and what to measure and report on. Tracking marketing outcome on the mobile app or mobile web? Don’t know and don’t get the right tools in place to track attribution.

Take a hard look at your mobile strategy or even why there are no plans if nothing is really going on. It is time to start asking marketers wtf they’re doing to win mobile moments.

How embedded forms within content increase content reads

August 4, 2016 By Kris

I came across this article and read the research Microsoft did with Contently’s Document Analytics, thought it was insightful findings.

Here is the part that caught my attentions, quoted as:

Microsoft discovered that landing pages requiring email addresses in exchange for downloadable content were 25% more effective at capturing email leads, but that embedded email forms within freely accessible content were more effective at capturing content reads. Subscribers who entered their emails in embedded forms were 51% more likely to read the entire piece of content, according to a Contently case study.

Here are the images of the difference on where and how the email address was asked by the site.

In the first example, it is a standard deployment you usually come across where you land on the page, provide an email address, and then you get the PDF file.

The second example is the delayed gate, where you download the PDF file or the material of interests, then after few pages in, you’re asked to provide your email address in order to access rest of the material.

delayed-gate-082016

As stated in the quote above, it’s fascinating how human psychology plays into different outcome just by asking the email address in different timing.

It might not be surprising to some people, but it is interesting from a standpoint where this may give more ideas to how we A/B test and optimize landing pages to drive results that match certain business outcomes.

It is common to find marketers obsessed with putting out content to capture more traffic and leads, but in many cases, the value of the material is really within the file and what’s written.

A lot of money could have gone into the research, write, and distribute. What good is an email address if people are downloading and not reading it because that’s how end users understand the positioning and value of the companies who provide these materials.

That doesn’t mean every marketing objective is to make people read the entire thing. Capturing user attention and gain volume of quality leads as you get in front of your audience are not a bad marketing objective. So if you can pull it off with the standard landing page and gating it, then that’s fine.

I guess this opens up more ways for us to test ideas beyond CTA, creative, message, but also “timing” of how we capture leads or reach our audience.

I thought I’d share some interesting read that I came across. Enjoy!

Here is the original article, check out.

source: http://www.mediapost.com/publications/article/280860/contently-launches-document-analytics-for-tracking.html

Top 5 Things to Consider When Building Marketing Analytics Stack for Marketing

August 2, 2016 By Kris

How you manage data on the website and its analytics stack is super critical to your marketing success. More data are leveraged in marketing to better improve various digital marketing strategies, including but not limited to the user experience on the site, test user behavior, improve conversion rate, optimize ad targeting to your key audience, etc.

One of the challenges I’m realizing is that data are all over the place. If you have tons of data, then that is a pretty nice problem to have as we live in a world where data is never enough. However, as we track many ads and obtain all the behavioral activities through the tag on your website, unorganized and siloed data will cause more issues for analysts. You may also have web analytics tag independent from the media ad pixels, such as Google Analytics, Mixpanel, KissMetrics, etc. Multiple trackers collecting different data and having it sit on various environments or databases are not going make analyst lives easier.

Marketing automation tools allow further tracking and segmentation on its own platform enables a marketer to be robust on how they reach their users without web analytics tool. That said, it’s important to understand where your marketing data sits and managed, especially when various stakeholders are accessing data and acting on it from siloed sources.

Data could be either centralized or decentralized. Data could be even owned by different departments and even owned by media agencies. So my first top consideration point is:

#1 Know your marketing technology stack end to end.

I really love this mobile analytics stack framework because it shows you different areas of marketing efforts, and how various marketing tactics and analytics stack co-exists in the marketing ecosystem.

#2 Align marketing technology tools to your business priorities

One of the rookie mistakes you can do as analytics expert is to invest in a tool that doesn’t meet business needs. People over rely on tools to solve their problem and what could be worse is you end up buying a solution to a temporary problem marketers have at the time. First thing first, understands your business priorities and plan for the year, and look ahead beyond the first year as well. Some tools require some good amount of time to onboard and calibrate before you start taking advantage of its features.

If you do plan to run A/B testing, and conversion rate optimization is your priority, then you might want to assess what’s needed beyond tools. Keep in mind, tools aren’t the only thing. It’s also people, process, and technology. That said, need to assess if you got the right people and process in place to drive marketing, and not to rely on tools too much.

#3 Plan for near future and help solve problems

A lot of the analytics tools that go on the website require certain amount time for it to collect data and report on. So when you commit on a certain availability of data for analysis and reporting, keep in mind that it will not be another month to start using those new capabilities. That means you have to set the right expectation on the analytics stack you manage.

Many businesses rely on year-over-year analysis to take into consideration of seasonality, or capture growth in general. So the analytics tools and tech stack you chose, make sure you’re planning ahead, so you know exactly what you’ll be looking at on a year-over-year basis.

In my recent experience with the marketing attribution tracking tool that I implemented, marketers were dying to know how digital touchpoints were contributing to lead generation, pipeline, and the deal closed. Immediately the desire to know how it worked month-over-month, quarter-over-quarter emerged, but the data collection was only available from when it was implemented.

Google Analytics is another great example, understand your business needs well and make sure you got great profiles, filters, customer dimensions, and other possible data structures are in place. This is to assure great data quality for reporting and insights.

Another important point would like to make is, turn your challenges into something you want to solve as a project for next year, and the key is to ask for the budget or do plan for the requests. In many cases, it takes some time to build a case, because everything should be based on data right?

#4 Communicate your plan

One of my favorite thing my prior manager told me, “People, Process, and Technology” are key elements in the successful organization. Applying this thought to digital marketing, I think “People” piece really defines how every marketing analytics analysts and managers really need to step up and communicate the marketing stack clearly. It’s background on what, how, why, and who it was designed to solve the problem for can build a sense of trust in between analytics and marketing folks.

I never like tools to dictate the conversation, but it never hurts for people know context around the data collection and reporting sources.

Also if marketing has a roadmap, then analytics should have a plan as well. Example, mobile app marketing is going to be key in upcoming quarters, then analytics needs to be ready to track and report on it. Same goes for any other marketing strategy and tactics. Get you plan out and communicate your plan.

#5 Use it or lose it

Marketing analytics tools usually don’t come by cheap. Enterprise-grade tools could cost you a great amount of money and time starting from evaluation all the way through to completing the contract. It involves a lot of people and their time. We should respect everyone’s time and make sure these tools are leveraged and answering important business questions.

A lot of the major software vendors who are doing well in their space has great community and training programs. Also, it’s important to leverage their documentations and really read through to learn it. Sooner or later those knowledge gained will become part of your expertise. As an analytics person, you should take every opportunity to learn the tool you’re exposed to.

Multi-device attribution analysis and how it works

December 20, 2015 By Kris

Several years ago, the topic of mobile was huge. If you look at this data, it may indicate that marketers are not excited about mobile as an opportunity area, when compared to last year. I wonder why. Is it because the data is so bad, marketers and analytics folks couldn’t accomplish getting the mobile marketing right?

eMarketer Exciting Opportunity 2014

This research by Google (a while back in 2012) shows that in eCommerce purchase journey, multi-device touch points play a key role in how consumers navigate digital content to get to that final decision point to buy. “90% of customers use three different devices to complete a single task”.

Sequential Screening Between Devices

What does your analytics say about your users? It is very likely that your mobile traffic has grown from prior years, but how significant is that traffic volume?

I also find it interesting that if you look at different acquisition channels, you might see a different mobile traffic distribution. This particular image shows, overall site traffic from mobile and tablet is X%, but when you look it by Google CPC (paid search ads), mobile and tablet visitors accounted for X% of its traffic.

20151220-mobile-traffic-cpc

Some of the key questions we need to be asking from this data are:

Is your landing page optimized for mobile visitors or desktop visitors
What does it mean to see different traffic volume in desktop Vs? mobile. Are mobile visitors exploring the product and desktop visitors are existing customers? Customers are in different part of their moments/journey so content should be optimized for that different moments.
What kind of mobile ads is resonating with your users? Is it any different from the desktop ads? Mobile has a very small screen for users to view and recall the content within the banners. Are your users responding to the text or actual creative, are few key things to check if you want to optimize for the mobile visitors.

In order to attribute conversion of a user to its original touch point, you’re going to need to plan it well to capture the right data. A common tactic to do this is to make sure you’re able to stitch back your converted customer ID back to its original source or touch points, which could be either a campaign id, content viewed, etc. This visitor stitching technology is probably unique to various analytics vendors you work with, but you would want to make sure you have a strategy to do this right.

Tealium said this right in one of their product description:

“Typical analytics data often shows multidevice visitor interaction as coming from three visits and three different people, but, in reality, it is likely that those visits are from just one visitor using different devices.”

Once you’re able to normalize your data to be able to track your customer level data and stitch to user’s historical touch point data, then you apply whatever model you please to allocate conversion credits. First click, last click, linear, U shape, W shape, etc.

Would like to hear what you guys are doing to make multi-device attribution analysis better.

Measure Engagement, Gain Insights, and Optimize

September 8, 2015 By Kris

We always hear about marketers stressing to drive better user experience, and measure engagement on the website.

Have you ever wondered what that means?

I think in digital marketing it means several things. Note that, ultimately, you and your team will need to decide what engagement really means for your business.

Following are a list of basic measures that could classify as ‘engagement’ metrics. Instead of just listing it out, I thought it’d be interesting to ask possible questions where these measures could fall under.

Are people staying on the site or with your app, Yes or No?

Bounce Rate

How long are people staying on your site or app?

Time spent on site

By how much do people love your site?

Net Promoter Score (NPS)
Customer Satisfaction Index (C-Sat)

Are your users going to come back, and how many people are coming back?

Visits per Unique Visiters
Returning Visitors

How soon or frequently users are coming back to your site?

Days since the last visit
Count of sessions within a given reporting period

By how much content are being consumed by your users?

Pageviews / Visit
Page depth
Where are users dropping off in the marketing funnel?
Funnel measures

These metrics that could describe ‘engagements’ are pretty basic stuff, a lot of them are standard measures straight out of Google Analytics.

These metrics alone probably doesn’t mean much without additional context. What do I mean? Let’s take one of the questions as an example by adding additional questions to “By how much content are being consumed by your users?”.

Let’s add these two additional considerations to this question: “for those who converted on your website”, and “for those who don’t convert on your website”.

Engagement Segmentation in Google Analytics

As you can see from this basic measure Pageviews per Visit, and the segmented views comparing people who converted Vs. people who have not converted. This immediately tells you the amount of content or pages accessed consumed by the users are very different. Basically, the engagement level is different from these two different segments.

Now you can do further analysis to determine the actual differences and try to understand what that means.

What’s next? You have to know what is good or bad, by setting up a target or goal. By setting a target, you’ll know if your marketing or optimization efforts are moving in the right direction or not.

To set a goal is no easy task as you have to gain alignment from the team, business partners, and managers. Even if you and your team can’t commit to a target you want to hit, at least you can find a line to aim for as something to improve too. The assumption here is that you’d like to improve marketing performance. Example, improve conversion rate from last year, or 3-month average, etc.

So what are the good segmentation points to track that ties well with engagement measurement? [Example only]

by Page accessed
by certain outcome events like form submits, shared on social networks, sign ups, purchased, not purchased, etc.
by Geo locations, like your region Vs. other regions
by traffic sources: Organic Vs. Paid
campaign programs (acquisition, loyalty, referral program)

In the marketing funnel it is common to view in three steps: acquire, engage, and convert.

So from that perspective engagement metrics are key to understand what’s working or not working in the middle. Very common for marketers to report traffic and conversions figure, and engagement metrics tends to be the fluffy one. It has to be the measures that tell you where are the leaks are happening and understand the things that are driving the experience leading to a conversion.

That said, when you couple the engagement segments and tie it to people who converted and didn’t convert, then you’ll likely going to get some pretty good insights into the differences. Differences between what people engage, in that, leads to conversions Vs. that don’t.

2015 09 engage segment landing page google analytics

This image is a cut out of landing page segmented by people who spent over 60 sec and viewed pricing page Vs. didn’t view pricing page. You can see that the difference in new users count and % of traffic hitting the key page is quite different on certain pages. What does this difference mean? And what does this user behavior indicate? What would you do more to gain better insights and dig deeper?

Hopefully, you’re getting some ideas around how to look at engagement measures and see how you can use that to gain insights on user behaviors the allows you to generate better hypothesis against the problem you’re trying to solve for business. Engagement measures could be very powerful if you combine it and use it right.

The difference in the engagement and behavior outcomes will be a great start to help you generate more thoughts and ideas for your digital analytics analysis exercise.

By getting the data and insights, you just have to analyze your way so you’re tackling the problems that allow you to hit your business goals. Remember to set that goal!