Web Analytics & E-commerce (En)

State of the Nation for Web Analytics in France

Happy new year to everyone! To celebrate the new year and the first birthday of this blog, I would like to share with you what’s going with Web Analytics in the country so famous for its wine and cheese.

 
When I moved from Canada to France 18 months ago, there were only a couple of players in the Web Analytics field. While more and more Web agencies are now trying to grow their Web analytics knowledge, the leadership has been taken over by Hub’Sales, a Paris-based company specializing in Web Analytics and Web TV consultancy. Led by Eric Dumain, a former executive at Macromedia Europe, Hub’Sales has managed to attract senior talent like Julien Coquet (formerly at OX2 and head of the Web Analytics Association in France), Nicolas Guillard (formerly at Aposition / Isobar) and myself (formerly at Oracle in Silicon Valley and at Videotron in Montreal).

Although major US Web Analytics vendors have at least a sales presence in France (Coremetrics, Google, Omniture, Unica, Yahoo and Webtrends), they face significant competition from local solution providers in a market where business, consulting and support is mainly expected to be performed in French and under French laws. Of all French solution providers (AT Internet, Eulerian Technologies, eStat, Piwik, Weborama and Wysistat to name a few), AT Internet is now ahead of the pack with a world-class solution and offices in the UK, Germany, Spain, Canada, Brazil and China. In addition to this, two European solution providers: NedStat (Netherlands) and WebTrekk (Germany) have a presence in the French market. Regarding the attitudinal analysis, Paris-based CRM Metrix has become a global player with offices in Europe, the United States and Asia-Pacific.

On the corporate side, the interest and awareness with Web Analytics have highly improved over the last 18 months. Most companies have a Web Analytics solution installed on their web sites and they are now wondering what insights they can get with all the data collected. Three months ago, Jacques Warren and myself published a book in French on Web Analytics, the first of its kind, and we were both surprised to see our book ranking #1 in the e-commerce category of Amazon.fr for several weeks.

This interest for Web Analytics by the French public has also been confirmed by the success of the Web Analytics events that I’ve organized in my hometown of Lille (Northern France, in the heart of the Mail Order Valley of Europe). During the last event featuring Jacques Warren and Matt Bailey at the VAD E-commerce trade show, 140 people showed up in a 120-seat conference room (videos available here).

To go back to the wine and cheese, France is a country where tradition and time are key to ensure long-lasting quality and reputation. So, little by little, the French are growing their Web Analytics expertise, and you should see more and more innovation coming out of France in the coming months. Stay tuned!

Building bridges between mass, online and direct marketers is critical to ensure multichannel success according to Akin Arikan

I have been very fortunate to attend Akin Arikan’s conference on “Managing online and offline to fuel interactive marketing” in Paris yesterday.  The small conference room was packed with over 50 attendees. Akin is Director Product Marketing and Strategy at Unica in San Francisco, a blogger and author on multichannel metrics marketing.

Multichannel tracking may seem an overwhelming, if not impossible, task to accomplish because there are many online and offline combinations to buy a product today.

According to Akin, we should not give up, because there is an overall pattern with the multichannel buying process:

• Mass marketing is the best channel to generate awareness about a product,
• Online marketing is the best channel to engage and to persuade prospects,
• Direct marketing (including E-mail marketing) is the best channel to grow and retain customers.

The main issue is that “online marketers have a treasure chest that direct marketers hold the key”. Without detailed customer information, you can only get 50 % of the value of your Web Analytics solution. In most companies, customer information is owned and managed by Direct Marketing.

With detailed customer information, your advertising can evolve from mass marketing to behavioral targeting. Navigation on the web site, like browsing a specific car model section, can trigger a request for contact (if the user is anonymous) as well as a contextual Email with a special offer (if the user is authenticated).

At the end of his presentation, Akin emphasized how different the points of view of mass, online and direct marketers regarding measurement can be.

In order to succeed with multichannel optimization, it is therefore critical to build bridges between off-line and on-line marketers and to develop a common measuring culture and methodology in order to improve the overall Marketing ROI.

Akin Arikan, author of "Multichannel Marketing: Metrics and Methods for On and Offline Success" will be in Paris on March 25th!

Akin Arikan, one of the world's thought leaders of multichannel analytics, will be in Paris on March 25th and will be giving a conference at 6 pm on "Integrating Web Analytics with your online and offline campaigns".

Akin is the author of the "Multichannel Marketing: Metrics and Methods for On and Offline Success" book, which has brought a lot of interest in North America. Akin's blog, Multichannelmetrics.com, is on the top of the web analytics blog lists.

To register to Akin Arikan's conference, click here.

There will also be a very interesting Web Analytics Wednesday Belgium on "applied customer segmentation & targeting" with several case studies in Ghent on March 25th (75 km from Lille).

Thoughts on "the new metrics that really matter for E-commerce"

Jonathan Levitt, Vice-President of Marketing for iPerceptions, caught immediately my attention with his article on “the new metrics that really matter for E-commerce”, since it summarizes very well the philosophy and concepts behind the “attitudinal approach”.

In spite of the increased sophistication of Web analytics solutions, with amazing new functionalities, we are still missing two important parameters for the performance analysis of a web site :

• Intention (why did the users visit the site in the first place?)
• Task completion (was their visit successful, if not why?)

 Without this information, we can only guess why visitors are exiting the site at a specific step of a process, or why a section has more traffic than an other one, etc.

iPerceptions (Canada), ForeseeResults (USA) and CRMMetrix (France) provide extensive solutions to measure intention and task completion, with sophisticated methodologies for data collection and segmentation.

There are often methodological biases when a feedback survey is suggested at the end of a funnel, since unsatisfied customers are the most likely ones to respond. In the case of the 3 solutions mentioned before, the feedback survey is suggested to only a sample of the persons who first enter the site. Consequently, the final sample  will be much closer to the actual audience of the site.

Another aspect to mention is that these solutions provide benchmarks with companies in the same industry (aggregated and non-personal data, of course), which helps to compare one’s results with others. This feature is very convenient when being inevitably asked by management: “how do we compare with others ?”.

In order to ensure consistency of methodology across all customers, these tools are not available on a self-service basis, and each survey is worked on and validated with in-house market research analysts.

Consequently, a significant investment needs to be planned, both on the financial and organisational aspects, in order to prepare the surveys and to analyze the results on a regular basis.

To get started with this approach, iPerceptions has released a free, self-serve and multilingual tool, called 4Q, which enables to ask 4 fundamental questions to your site's visitors:

• How satisfied are my visitors?
• What are my visitors coming to my website to do?
• Are they completing what they set out to do?
• If not, why not?
• If yes, what did they like best about the online experience?

This tool does not provide benchmarks with other companies, but it is a nice and easy way to get started with the attitudinal approach.

Set up is quite easy. You just need to add a few lines of Javascript on your homepage, and that’s it.

It has to be expected that your management will get hungry for additional information from your attitudinal survey. In this case, it will be much easier to sell a broader approach, which requires purchasing a more complete solution.

New year, new start! Launch of the "Web Analytics & E-commerce" blog

I have been thinking about it for a while, and new year's time is the perfect moment to get started with one of my resolutions: to launch a "Web Analytics & E-commerce" blog.

Why a blog on Web Analytics and E-commerce? Since my relocation to France from Canada in June 2008, I have been quite surprised to notice how the Web Analytics adoption is behind in France compared to North America and Northern European countries, while France is quite ahead regarding E-commerce usage.

I will use this blog to share my findings and thoughts about Web Analytics and E-commerce, with a specific focus on what is going on in France.

I strongly believe that 2009 is going to be a great year for Web Analytics, since the economic crisis will accelerate the current transformations in the economy:

• the systematic usage of Internet to search for information and prices before any significant purchase in order to find the best deal (online or offline),
• the decreasing efficiency of traditional advertising (TV, press and radio) compared with the new online models (search engine optimization, pay per click, affiliate network, social web, etc.),
• the development of multichannel behaviors (navigation on web site and purchase in store, product trial in store and purchase online, etc.).

In this context, the winners in 2009 will be the ones measuring and optimizing the performance of their promotion, acquisition and retention actions, with whatever media or distribution channel used. Consequently, as we can already assess in North America, Web analytics is becoming a tool to overcome the economic crisis by optimizing the marketing and technological budgets, according to the business objectives and the users' needs on the web sites.

Happy new year!