This article is a summary of Matthew Tod's presentation during the Omniture Summit in London on April 21 2009. Matthew is Chief Executive at Logan Tod & Co
Key messages:
- 3 elements for successful optimisation: technology, process and people.
- Setting the right objective: PROFIT.
- We've got to look beyond the traditional web analytics metrics: traffic and conversation rate, and to focus on profit.
- Gross Profit Optimisation Drivers:
1. Direct income : traffic, conversion rate, items per order, average item value
2. Relevant costs : product cost, shipping costs, promotional discounts, marketing costs and return& charge backs.
- It is possible to configure SiteCatalyst to capture / import the data you need to look at Gross Profit in your reports.
- A Gross Profit model to aid optimisation: you have to understand the revenue levers and cost levers, if you want to start to do the right thing.
- Plan for good data to enable the process:
1. doing the initial deployment is just the start, if you fail to keep up with changes in your infrastructure or business needs you won't have the data,
2. review your deployment and upgrade the tags,
3. there is significant managment ressource needed to train and coach people (internal and external),
4. there needs to be some budget to maintain data quality and integrity.
- Plan analysis based upon how people consider your offering before engaging / buying: last click is credited with the goal while there may be multiple campaigns that create the initial engagement. It is much bigger and longer than the single session on the web site.
- Campaign roles change with engagement: campaign usage changes with consideration. It is essential to look at campaign types (paid search, advertising, etc.) over time.
- Case-study on Kitbag, Europe's leading online sports retailer:
1. First implemented HBX in 2005 as the first step to really understand what was happening across the sites.
2. Training was done on several occasions, but it had no impact as it was too remote from people's day job.
3. The solution was to implement standardized reports emailed to account managers daily/ weekly / monthly.
4. A single calculator was also implemented in Excel in order to ensure profit focus.
5. A 1:1 mentoring program was implemented with higher satisfaction, real action and benefit. The plan goign forward is to continue this program to develop the skills of the account managers further.
6. Automation is the way to scale further: Mercado (now Omniture Merchandising) was implemented in 2008, and it is planned to link Mercado to SiteCatalyst to drive merchandising automation.
- And in injury time:
1. Link analytics to Gross Profit
2. Consideration is rising fast and you need to adopt your analytics processes to reflect this change.
3. Work on optimization by focusing on the key constraints and testing them to find and deliver improvement. Repeat.
4. People make things happen, so don't settle for basic training, figure our what it really takes to get people using analytics every day and execute a program to make it happen.
Note: this post has been written live. Please excuse any typos and brievety.
