“Measure” = Expensive.

Why? Because now, a business is going to have to hire two people, rather than one. One’s going to do the measuring, and then they’ll have to go out there and find someone else to figure out what the measuring means. Maybe they’re just looking for step 1 of 2 for now, but when they get to step 2 (it won’t take long), they feel like they need to go out there and look for someone else. It may not be you they’ll ask to do #2 (that just doesn’t sound right, does it?), it’ll be someone else, because you’ve already told them you do #1 (still doesn’t sound right).

When we describe what we do in terms of input and process, rather than output and value, it appears that the input/process IS our output. And that only hurts us. Yes, businesses need measurement. But they need it not in and of itself, but to do something else. And the great thing is, that something else: answers, decisions, insight, confidence, faster learning and refinement, accountability to business outcomes; that is what we are awesome at.

This is not a war on a hashtag. The hashtag is lovely, and we can and should continue using it among ourselves. But consider eliminating the word “measure” in describing what you do among your clients or colleagues. For them, we are the in the business of feeding the organization insight, not collecting it.

So, to give back to the community who has given me so much, I present my most conversion-optimizing landing pages, ever.

Here’s the page we started with (go ahead, click it):

Super Vacation Cruises – Caribbean Savings Package

First, you’re going to want to make that button more noticeable.

Design 1: Button Enhancement

This ensures MAXIMUM click through rate. Some clients, in very rare cases, experienced slightly higher bounce rates. In those cases, I recommend this:

Design 2: Button Accessibility

MAXIMUM conversion. I am not kidding.

Next, you’re going to want to boost conversion rate more directly

When you’re done with these girly button approaches, it’s time to boost conversion directly:

Design 3: Conversion path optimization

By simply reducing the conversion path length to exactly zero steps, you will see the ROI of your paid search campaigns skyrocket. No, I am not kidding. This takes some tricky programming (I know some good guys in Romania), but it’s totally doable in a weekend.

Testing, for the noncommittal crowd

Finally, for those sissies out there that can’t put a stake in the ground and decide on one design, you’ll want to do some testing. But testing can take forever, especially if you don’t have huge traffic volumes. In that case, you’re definitely going to want to employ this next design:

Design 4: LIVE Multivariate Testing

You no doubt saw that every user is exposed to EVERY test variant on all page views. Bam, problem solved. No more waiting for enough volume for “statistically schtamistically” significant crap. No more worrying about cookies and keeping the test “clean” or any of that crap. Just give them both barrels.

No excuses

If you’re not feeling inspired yet, I recommend you pick up the closest copy of Eat, Pray, Love and a full sheet chocolate cake and go cry somewhere with a bunch of cat owners. Man up and get to optimizing.

Next

For some more silly analytics stuff, check out some horribly-drawn web analytics comics.

Or, if you’re the serious type, just have a look around.

But first, you might want to consider whether a friend could use some maximum conversion tips. They probably have a bunch of actual work that needs interrupting.

I think that our industry will find this is true when it looks back at how we have been “marketing.” Why? Because I think we really need a better understanding what marketing is.

Here’s how I’d define marketing, in the simplest possible terms: Marketing is the process of working with demand.

Marketing is not defined as:

• Creating demand
• Selling
• Advertising
• Messaging

All of these things are a part of marketing, but they do not encapsulate marketing. You wouldn’t say that garlic is cooking. Don’t say that advertising is marketing.

So, what’s the difference between working with demand and creating demand? Knowing the difference between these two is the critical element in marketing well.

I think a great example of the difference between these two things is what happens over at Google. Google is a marketing company, but one primarily focused on the product creation aspect of marketing. Google saw existing demand and worked with it. It provided better solutions for organizing, locating, and understanding the relative importance of information. Better solutions for mapping. Better solutions for email, financial data, news, and many other things (and it bought better solutions to many things, too). For the most part, Google never created demand through the types of channels we think of. In fact, Google never took out a single advertisement until it was a well-established (and already public) company. By creating a product (one of the cornerstones of marketing) that was superior in many ways, Google marketed. Existing demand was enough to build one of the most successful brands in history.

Another great example would be Apple. While Apple does deliver a heavy dose of advertising, the marketing that happens at Apple begins years before the ads roll. The iPod, iPhone and iPad are all devices born entirely out of incredible marketing. Apple studied human behavior with computers and existing devices. They understood existing demand. They understood holes in the market, many of which were not apparent to soon-to-be-consumers (I’m looking you numb-brained tech writers who called the iPad a “big iPod touch”), and created an offering that would consume existing demand, create demand by its shear pace of adoption (people watch other people), and provide a platform for even more demand creation (through more traditional “channels”) and market disruption because of how ingeniously the devices approached a need.

In two of the greatest marketing companies the world has ever seen, the key to marketing was in understanding the demand, not creating it. The key to success was working with the demand.

Be a better marketer

1: Realize the tools you have

Advertising is not your only tool. To be a better marketer, the most potential lies in a better offering. Differentiating yourself from competitors (in your offering, for real, not some story you made up to pretend you’re different) by doing something better is the way to win hearts. If you think it can’t be done, take a look at Zappos. They sell shoes. Better.

Take a good look at whether or not you really add value to your consumers’ experience. Do you present information in a new way that helps your users? Do you support them in unprecedented ways? Do you actually spend the time it takes to come up with a smart solution to a common problem, or do you just slap something up and do the minimum it takes to complete a task?

Bonus: when you create value, Google notices. Offering something better almost always results in more (and better) content. If  you care about SEO, hit two birds with one stone, rather than challenging the smartest people on the planet to a game of chess with your weak SEO gimmicks.

You also have price. If you want to win with price, rather than providing value or using your brain, get the hell off of my blog.

2: Integrate with the right teams

If you are a “marketer” and you aren’t 100% involved with the product, usability, IA, IT, and R&D teams, you are the reason that CMOs last about as long as mayonaise on a picnic table.

3: Stop yelling, start listening

Companies like Zappos, Amazon, Apple, Google, HTC, and Starbucks are successful because they listen. Not in the sense that they go out there and conduct a bunch of case studies (which they do), but even in a more passive sense: they observe the market. They deduce, rather than asking. They truly have their ear on the rail.

Too many companies create something that they are about to shove down consumers’ throats. Microsoft has done this for years with the Zune, various versions of Windows Mobile, new versions of Office, Vista, and many other creations that were probably great until some T-Rex internal stakeholders got a hold of them. They bring these things to market, tell you how great they are going to be, and then you actually experience something different. They took the approach that they knew what you needed better than you did, and lost. They deduced the problem and then went into their private think chambers to come up with the solution.

If you are making something without really knowing it’ll add value to someone’s life and then trying to broadcast to the market that you’ve cracked the code, don’t be surprised when the world comes roaring back with a wave of negativity that will ruin your world.

We have the tools to do the listening. Even if you’ve created crap, we can see the parts of that crap that people like, the parts they don’t, and we can do something about it.

Our job

Our jobs, as web analysts, are to be complete marketers. To enable and shine a spotlight on the listening. When we know what “marketing” means, we can call ourselves marketers. We are here to unite the clans. Bring the separate (and often competing) disciplines together. We are there to weave the tactics into a tapestry, to create a better product, to find opportunities, to add value, and to boost awareness so that we can protect price.

If your customers aren’t willing to pay full price, it’s because you’re not delivering full value. We have the power to close that value gap and make real, economic changes in our companies. It’s in your hands to figure out what instigates those changes for your particular company. I have no doubt you will.

But we’re not here to talk about that. We’re here to talk about how that number comes into being.

Despite our own analyst-y opinions of marketers and their effectiveness or connectedness to reality (we do tend to be hard on these folks), the truth is that a marketing budget is designed to provide a return. That budget breaks down into slices that will individually provide some sort of a return, and the size of those slices is ideally decided by some sort of an investment order, making sure that companies invest in one channel to the point that investing in another channel provides a greater marginal return.

Stop laughing. I know this isn’t how it ever really happens, but just go with it.

I like this metaphor of cups. If I gave you a pitcher of budget, how would you fill the cups?

Chances are, your company is pouring a little budget in each cup. But what if I changed the cups to say the ROI on the side?

Now how would you distribute your budget? Yeah. A little differently, right?

The truth is that you would pour so much water into the 5:1 cup that you’d form a reverse-meniscus on the top as you added incremental molecules of water to get as much in that cup as you possibly could. You would then go on to the 3:1 cup, and on down the line until you ran out of budget.

But we know that ROI isn’t as simple as that. For one thing, PPC doesn’t have a fixed ROI across all keywords. Same for display across your placements, networks, or creatives. It’s more like a diminishing return model. PPC might look like this:

So, your really have cups within cups, to keep the metaphor rolling. Brand keywords will provide high return, then some other keywords, then others, and on. And it’s truly analog: no group of keywords has a real “ROI,” instead it’s cups within cups within cups…

Forecasting Budget and ROI

So, if we know approximately how much demand there is in each cup, and we know approximately what the cost of filling each cup is, then we can forecast out to a blended ROI we’d like to hit and know how much we can spend to maximize our reach, right?

NO.

Because you’re forgetting something really big here: none of your keywords, campaigns, creatives, placements, email lists, social media followers or fans, or anything you do has a set intrinsic value. The outcome of every single thing you do to bring people to the web site depends completely on the web site itself.

Don’t believe me? Turn your site off.

Just because one keyword (apples) performs better than another (oranges) doesn’t mean that “apples” people are any more conversion prone or valuable as human beings. What it most likely means is your business is better set up to help the apples folks today. The oranges crowd could very well be your bread and butter tomorrow, if you make changes to your site (or other things) to improve that experience.

So, what does that mean for the cups?

It means that each cup actually has a much higher intrinsic value (if there is a limit), and that intrinsic value is held back by what you offer (also, the cups are resized to reflect available demand). Have a bad user interface in your product details and cart pages? Subtract ROI. Have unclear navigation? Dollars out of your pocket. Do you suck? Cut that ROI into a fraction.

So if we remove these obstacles, we can improve return immediately across all cups. In terms of our paid search, this is an amplitude shift. Every time we improve the site, we improve the ROI of every single keyword (or any other marketing channel) we have. Every one.

So, the blind spot in our budget forecasts is we are ignoring the potential for this amplitude shift. Instead, marketers spend their time looking for the next magic bullet. The next pool of audience that’s untapped. The next $500,000 of budget that can be spent at their target ROI, assuming everything else stays the same.

But everything else doesn’t have to stay the same. Spend that $500k on your site, and you can stand to improve the value of every single dollar you’re already spending on traffic and audience generation.

If your agency or marketing department gives you a target budget, ask them where it came from. What assumptions were made about conversion rates, average cart size, ROI, etc.? What could the budget (and revenue / cash flow) be if you could improve your conversion rate by 20 basis points (0.2%)?

I’m betting the answer will wow you. And that $500k will go to a better home.

I’ve gotten some great feedback via twitter/facebook/conversations that got me thinking about this some more. What’s the purpose of web analytics? Now keep in mind, this is just how I have come to see the world, and you may see it differently. But this works for me (so far) and I’d love to hear your thoughts on why your way works for you. So, please leave comments.

Analytics world view:

We talk about being data-driven businesses. But these aren’t businesses built around a culture of measurement. They’re built around a culture of accountability.

That sounds a little scary, but bear with me here for a second.

It’s my opinion that measurement alone is not a compelling source of value to a business. We know that the absence of measurement is very horrible, and it’s still a problem. There is value to measurement, but it just isn’t compelling, which is why I think there are still sites out there with zero visibility into what’s happening on their sites.

The effective use of that measurement (a separate trade, called analysis) is highly compelling, though.

For example, people get as excited about accounting as they get about watching paint drying on growing grass. Accountants measure. Yes, they occasionally help companies defraud millions of Americans out of their retirement, but most days are just measuring. Analysts, on the other hand, use that measurement to make a company accountable to goals, outcomes, advancement, achievement. I think we need to be building cultures around those things.

But I also know that measurement is seen as a stepping stone on the way to these things. If we can build a culture of measurement first, we will be closer to a culture of achievement.

Now I can’t tell the future, but my gut tells me that this stepping-stone approach will end up biting us in the medium and long term. If we set precedence around our role and a purpose of measuring, we will likely face a difficult battle when we strive for the next stepping stone. Businesses like to define roles. If we’re looking for ours to be fluid or evolutionary, that’s tough for them to handle. I fear that our steps are momentum-less, in other words. So we’d better take big ones.

True, you can’t do analysis without measurement. But this is sort of like saying you can’t build houses without wood; you just don’t see people going nuts about lumber.

Let’s make it a [vitally important] afterthought, and count on the fact that good analysts will make 100% certain that the measurement is handled because it’ll cripple them otherwise.

So, the world view part:

In my mind, the purpose of web analytics, or any analytics, is to give your organization the confidence needed to accelerate the pace of decisions.

I don’t think that the purpose of analytics is limited to helping the company make better decisions: great, slow decisions are a hallmark of companies who stink. Plus, better, more economically-valuable decisions are a completely unavoidable outcome of good analytics, so I’m going to just recommend that we start taking that for granted. Yes, use it as a selling point: it will be the thing that gives your organization greater confidence. But to me, success will be based on pace, not just rightness. Being able to make good decisions faster compounds their effectiveness.

I think it’s an unsafe assumption that once decisions are made better, they’ll magically get made faster. Most big decisions are made slowly because people are afraid of being judged; they’re nearly paralyzed. When you research a decision for a quarter and make the best, most economically-rewarding decision possible, you suck if you could have made the same decision in 5% of the time, and made 50 more decisions over the year that all compounded the value of the first one.

And a culture of accountability sounds scary, like a place where everyone is constantly told about everything they didn’t do right. But think about such a place: the only way for it to sustain itself is for people to establish a comfort level with failure: failure is a part of the process. And the only way the company can survive is if the system is built to react to failure, not built on the assumptions that decisions are right. Think about it today: why is testing so hard? Why are changes to your web site difficult? Because your site is built around decisions made in ink, not in pencil.

Also, we’re talking about being accountable to outcomes, not to some Tyrannosaurus on a power trip. That’s a big deal.

Again, like the last post, this isn’t about making big decisions quickly, it’s about making big decisions often. A usability person or designer who makes one big decision about a product details page will be much less effective than a similarly-skilled person making frequent decisions about that interface based on a constant stream of information that keeps him accountable to the success of that page.

Give it a try. You wouldn’t be the first organization to embrace failure and show employees it’s not the end of the world to be wrong. In fact, being wrong is the only thing that allows us to be more right.

Let’s build that kind of a culture. One that forgets about the measurement, because that has to happen to get to the good stuff. We need to take measurement completely for granted.

Whether we get there stone-by-stone or in one big leap is up to us.

Some very hungry and impatient patrons may just think, “Get on with it, I just want a steak and an 8,000 calorie onion. Take my order, give me what I want, and I’ll be on my way.”

Sound familiar?

We analytics people have been fighting hard to get our seat at the table. We want to burst into the executive suite with all of our knowledge, insight, and provable or defendable ideas, join the decision makers, and show them how valuable we can be in helping set the direction of the……wait for it…..web site (hint: we should be talking about the business, not the web site — the web site is a tool for the business).

But a lot of the time, we don’t even get to do this. The executives scooch over in their booth, let us sit down and take their order, we bring back some steaming hot reports, sizzling like fajitas, and we disappear as they digest the data meal we just served and decide what they want to do next. We bring them the bill for our services, and they don’t ask for us to participate until they are again hungry for the specific type of meal we serve at Analytics Steakhouse.

Think about this in your own work: are you sitting down at the executive table as a waiter, or are you a diner? And also remember that it’s hard to become a diner if you start out as a waiter. You earn a reputation for the types of things you do in your work; you set a precedent. If you want to be a diner, you need to start acting like one from the beginning. Don’t serve data or insight or even recommendations. Serve action. Be the one who is conducting the orchestra, not just another player in a chair. You have the data and the know how to pick up your little stick and start getting the various specialist roles to play in symphony. Do that and then tell the execs how it works and how it can work better.

And don’t eat those onions, they’re terrible for you.

In the stock market, these emotions influence buying behavior. Everyone knows that to be successful, you have to buy low and sell high, but when you do the forensics on actual market purchase behavior, you’ll actually find that the opposite is true: people buy high and sell low. Why? Because when stocks are on the rise, people think they will go to infinity, and when they’re on their descent, people think they are going to zero. In a rising market, greed takes hold. People who have stock hold on to it as it rises, even above logical levels (pets.com, anyone?), waiting for their ultimate payday. People who don’t have the stock buy it when it’s at its peak, jealous that other people are making money while they sit on the sidelines. Greed fuels this ride to the top of the roller coaster.

Then, the stock starts to falter. It has a few days of downward movement, but nobody sells because they want it to get back to where it was. They’ll sell when it gets back to the previous week’s high, they say. Well, that turns out to be a long wait, it continues to plummet, and people sell all the way down to the bottom. When did everyone get out of our lovely, depressed market in the last few years? You guessed it. At the bottom. And they’re going to wait to get back in.

Then, you can look at when a stock is practically worthless compared to where it was. Fear sets in. Nobody wants to buy this stock. So when it’s cheapest, people aren’t buying it because it’s going to zero. And I’m not talking about day trading or penny stocks here. I’m talking about stocks like Merck; people avoided this one like the plague when Vioxx went south on them. At its cheapest, nobody wanted it, even when just one successful drug would bring it back to life.

In our day to day, greed and fear fuel a lot of decisions, too. Fear is what causes people to stick with the old page design after a multivariate test, even though there was a clear, new winner. Greed causes stakeholders with a smaller share of the company’s revenue to get their offers plastered all over the home page, harming other, more important revenue channels.

So how do we, as analysts, handle these two emotions?

Primarily, I’d accuse us of living in fear, right now. We have been crying out for years that we want our seat at the table, but when we get it, we clam up. We don’t barge in there with our mountains of data and convince the CMO or CEO that the whole company needs to be turned on its head, even though that’s what we’ve been saying around the water cooler or over lunch for years.

We call ourselves “digital measurers” out of fear. We know that we really are valuable business assets, but when the rubber meets the road, we are comfortable in our ability to measure. There’s no risk in measurement. But we are pushed out of this comfort zone when we aim to turn that measurement into provable business results. That’s less of a guarantee, so when we’re asked to take the risk of advising shifts in strategy and tactics, we clam up again, often choosing instead to give the data to other stakeholders and let them make the tough decisions. Ridiculously, we sacrifice the potential reward to avoid the potential blame. Because for someone who’s data driven, there is nothing worse than being wrong.

Well, I have news for you. You’re going to be wrong. But there’s more news: the business is used to people being wrong.

This is in no way a criticism. If there were three or four emotions for us to choose from, maybe letting “happiness” rule our decision-making, it would make our lives easier. But unfortunately, there are only two emotions that run decision making, and that makes it hard for us because greed sounds so bad. We don’t want to be lumped in with people that caused rolling blackouts in California or who started the mortgage crisis.

But I want to go out on a limb here and suggest this to web analysts: be greedy, but still be you.

Greed, in fact, can be a good thing. Greed builds risk tolerance. Greed is what gets you your seat at the table. Greed is what compels you to challenge the status quo and make bold recommendations about how to change the web site, or better yet, your process or even the whole business. Greed is what will get you promotion after promotion, and turn you into the person everyone leans on to make hard decisions when they are paralyzed by their own fear.

But the house of cards will all come crashing down if you don’t keep being you. What I mean is that if you are greedy, you must stay analytical. Your greed will put you into a mindset where you are solely focused on finding opportunities, but your analysis will vet those opportunities. You’ll buy opportunities low and sell them high, because you know what constitutes low and high: you have the data. On the other side, your fear causes you to focus on small things fixing what’s broken on the web site. Yes, these fixes have upside, but that is a mindset that takes your performance from negative back to zero. Not from zero to positive.

• Fear has you measuring. Greed has you creating.
• Fear has other people talking to the CEO. Greed has you talking to the CEO.
• Fear has you changing bids. Greed has you building new pages and sections to satisfy an unmet need.
• Fear has you focusing on the “visit quality” side of conversion rate. Greed has you focusing on the sales.

Give this some thought; leave some comments. How will a greedy outlook today change what you do in your analysis? If, instead of fixing what’s broken, you create something completely new, what new and different information would you be diving into to prove your hunch?

Try greed on for size, but never forget that you have the information to back yourself up. Gain some confidence and swagger. Make bold claims and back them up. Leave fear behind.

Update: It was pointed out to me that these questions are uncannily similar to one of Avinash’s most recent posts. Not sure how I didn’t remember the questions/answers (I blame sleep depravation), but I’m sure some of our answers will be very similar, since as you all know, I want to be like Mike.

Q: If you were to put together an effective web analytics plan to measure my client’s website, what tools would you use and why?

Google Analytics, 4Q survey, maybe crazyegg to appease some people. If we were going to be making some changes, feedback army and usertesting.com can often be great. It goes without saying this is without knowing the types of decisions people will be making, but this is a good standard suite of tools I could live pretty happily with.

Q: If you had one wish that would force all analysts to do one thing perfectly all the time when analyzing, what would it be and why?

Stop thinking about the web site and start thinking about the business. We tend to just keep our heads down and tie what we are seeing to the web site, rather than realizing that the implications are probably much, much bigger. When we think about the business in our daily/weekly/monthly/etc. analysis, we can be a lot more creative with our solutions and not treat things like the product, branding, offline efforts, etc. as “fixed.”

At their core, most companies are configured for failure online. The typical compensation plan where product development is compensated on upside and IT/development is compensated for cost-reduction reveals a planned point of failure. As web analytics people, not only can we find ways to improve outcomes, but we can also find ways to remove key roadblocks in the business, from an unbiased, external perspective. When we start doing this, we will own much more expensive shoes and cars.

Q: How do you sell the value of web analytics to a skeptical client in 30 seconds or less?

If I were trapped in an elevator and had to have a conversation with a person this insane, I would probably just tell them that I’m not going to waste 30 seconds of my life explaining why driving down the interstate with a blindfold on doesn’t make sense. There are too many smart businesses out there for me to spend my time convincing someone that the earth isn’t flat and that analytics matters. And believe me, if they are skeptical about web analytics, just wait until you find out how this type of person will get in the way of actually doing anything with that information once you have it. Hmm…guess I just spent 30 seconds explaining what I said I wouldn’t…

I believe, in the big picture, that we’re going to be a lot more successful in the future if we sideline people with brain-lock, rather than trying to convince them of something they subconsciously aren’t on board with. It’ll take years, but it’s time to dump some chlorine into the corporate pool.

Q: What is the best way to attribute an offline sale to an online assist? This is very important, as our business provides its services both online and offline.

There really is no best method. You have a number of ways to do this, and each one has huge holes somewhere in it. But I would use a mix of coupons, vouchers, bar or QR codes (something that people can bring with them physically), maybe with email registrations or some other type of pre-sale PII that you could use to link the activity. Ultimately, you’ll have to look at how offline sales happen in your organization and find a method that won’t be disruptive to the natural flow of those sales, but will help you get this data.

Also, don’t fall into the trap that so many businesses fall into: this data is like a drug. Know when to stop chasing rabbit holes and get back to work. You’ll just frustrate yourself and you’ll be no closer to discovering a colony of jackalopes, which is what you’re doing when you’re trying to make this data perfect. 80/20 rule all the way.

Q: What is the best way to measure and communicate “available demand” from available channels (social, search, display) for forecast modeling?

For search, you can use Google’s set of tools to get volume data fairly easily. For display, there are similar tools that will talk about reach that are a part of your ad network and delivery service. Social, it depends on the medium, but I would say that social is a marketing arena, not an advertising arena. The difference being that marketing is about learning, not just about sales. You have to know your market, whether there is cash or no cash in the interaction. What’s the ROI of your business plan, for example? Probably the whole future value of the company, arguably. So ongoing marketing has a similar value proposition. If you don’t do true marketing instead of just broadcasting your message in social, I’d be so bold as to call that downright idiotic, given how incredible what you can learn about your business through social media is.

Ultimately, regardless of the channel you’ll have to take the plunge with some level of budget to see if you can generate a true business ROI. Not a media ROI (revenue/cost), but true cash flow. The good news about the web is that you can learn quickly and adjust. So if you’re building a business plan or working with people who will be providing capital to the business, make sure that they understand it is impossible (and unintelligent) to go into launch with too rigid a plan and/or forecast of channel performance and budget allocation within the media mix. Also remember that if you are ROI positive, you should be able to reinvest those funds in your marketing, rather than having to continue exhausting capital or pay back investors or debt early in the game.

Q: How to gain insights to improve competitive keywords rankings of websites? And to how to visualize it in a report?

I’m assuming this is about search engine optimization. Step 1: hire a tenacious and reputable SEO. Step 2: see step 1.

The first thing you need to realize is you don’t care about rankings. You care about customer creation. Again, keep it about the business, not the web site. Now that you have your business hat on, figure out where you need to focus to gain customers via organic search. It’s probably going to take content development, particularly around the types of things that help people make decisions and learn, not just about some landing page that says “buy today.”

This is where businesses fail online where they often succeed in-person. I don’t walk into a Home Depot and see a bunch of people who just keep running on listing features with a button on their forehead that says “buy now!” I instead find people who are genuinely helpful in helping me pick a color to paint the room, talk to me about how that will make the room feel, and make me feel informed about what I can expect with the project, especially where to start painting because the first wall I do will definitely be done wrong, before I learn how to paint better than a 5 year old. Or I might talk to someone who walks me through their own experience with the Weber grill I’m considering buying.

When we bring it back to the web site, though, most sites in the commerce vertical have so little genuinely helpful content, or content that isn’t purely bottom-of-the-funnel focused. Inject some humanity into your web site and not only will it help your customers, but it’ll show Google that you really know a lot about a topic, which leads to rankings.

The key to these rankings is in how comprehensively you cover topics, not little tricks that fool Google. Just like how the experts you know personally understand their topics deeply, Google wants the same from the sites they promote to the top of rankings for certain keywords. You’ll also notice that competitive, high-volume keywords are mid to high-funnel, more information-driven keywords, not imminent conversion keywords. Winning there requires real content.

Your SEO partner will handle the report. This will be the easy part, and it’ll need to be somewhat tailored to your business, so that’s a little hard to answer, generally. But if they focus on your business, they can tailor reports to what you can act on.

Q: What is the most superficially tempting metric that is almost never worth worrying about?

I would say it’s not a metric; it’s pathing reports. Pathing is a consequence of your design, and doesn’t even remotely reflect consumers’ true intent, because your web site is designed in a way that influences behavior. While a web site is much more fluid than a real world store, for example, obsessing about pathing is still a little like asking people what the first thing they see when they come into Best Buy is: duh, it’s the stuff in the front of the store. Customers’ paths in the store reflect the layout of the store. On the web site, it is definitely more fluid and you have more options, but the layout of your interfaces still influences behavior in a major way. Plus, the paths get so fragmented so quickly (in both cases) that they’re barely usable under any circumstances.

We have to ask ourselves: What are we trying to learn with pathing? Is it what our customers want? We know now we can’t do that. Are we trying to learn if our design actually works? Well, testing is a heck of a lot better way to gain insight into what works, which is a lot more valuable than knowing whether something works. It’s a lot easier to react to analog data like, “What types of things work better?” than binary data like, “Does it work?”

On the metric end, though, exit rate gets a bad rap. I do think this is a ridiculous metric if your aim is to keep people on your site for the rest of their lives, but if you look at your top exit pages, this is a good way to see if there’s the possibility of better serving that audience. Hopefully, one of the top exit pages is your order confirmation page, for example. If this is the case, do you think there’s anything of value you could put on this page? Tell them about your social media presence, your weekly specials email list, or just give them a link to something you think is cool about your company or some other wondrous thing on the Internet. Don’t just wave goodbye after you get their money. Genuinely thank them in some constructive way; humanize the site. Don’t mistake me as saying you should try to contort them to do something they don’t want. If your social media campaign is just a broadcast, do you think they want that noise? No. But if it benefits them, tell them.

Q: How can competitive intelligence be used to estimate competitors’ conversions?

Some tools like comscore will let you purchase this type of data for a fee. It’s fairly straightforward. But keep your eye on the ball because I’ve seen this type of data derail conversations and whole businesses for months on end. Every sliver of data your company gets, particularly when they pay for it, should be about one thing and one thing, only: action. If it doesn’t cause you to act quickly and frequently, drop it like a bad habit. If this type of data paralyzes your company in a whirlwind of meetings and everyone’s opinions, you need to seriously evaluate whether this data is actually value-positive.

Q: What’s the most accurate way to discern a competitor’s web traffic (at least visits)?

Hire one of their analysts!

Corporate espionage aside, go to a competitive intelligence tool, preferably a free one like compete (for this type of data), get a comparison of your site vs. theirs, see how wrong the data is about your site, realizing that at best, this is a scalar comparison, and get on with your day.

You already know how to earn or buy more traffic. You already know how to generate sales on your web site. Focus on those two things and growing your business. Even for a media company, focus on how engaged your visitors are, rather than basic traffic volume. While the display market today values uniques, visits, and pageviews, this really is old thinking and doesn’t really have any bearing on how successful their display campaign would be. I’d rather have 100 impressions on a small-circulation article about Oprah’s endorsement of my product than 10,000 impressions on CNN’s home page, if I’m smart.

Q: Since our company is new, how would I optimize with sparse data?

Starting a new company is like launching the space shuttle. The tiny changes in direction that happen just after lift-off will mean a difference of thousands of miles later in flight or can even throw you completely off balance. Later in flight, it’s easier to keep moving forward while you try new things.

If it were my business, I would say this, “I only know the slightest shred of what my business will look like a year from now.” I want to be highly reactive and a true marketer, not highly active and a loud advertiser. It can be hard to walk the line between being reactive and being fickle, but it’s something good businesspeople manage, and if you’re not a good businessperson, I can’t help you in a 10 question interview But it’s important to use everything you have data-wise to make those early decisions count, because early decisions matter so much.

To make this more concrete, start out by looking at your visitors data, your traffic source data, and your content consumption data. Where are people coming from, what kinds of people are they, and what are they looking at? What attributes within these sets make those visits more or less valuable? Why might that be? Do some user testing or set up A/B and multivariate tests to confirm your thoughts on how people interact with your brand by testing the response of each of the “value drivers” you found. And for search traffic, use their keywords to help you understand what they were looking for in the first place. How well are you satisfying those array of needs? Are you the Home Depot store, helping people out with their broad base of questions and needs, or are you just a robot repeating, “buy now, buy now?”

I think what separates great business from regular ones online is that the great ones realize that they create the data they need to make decisions, and I don’t mean they do it in the same way as Enron. Everything you do creates information. You used a lot of information or research to figure out what to create in the first place, but the greatest value is in watching the data that flows in once your creation exists and using the information you actually give life to. For example, when Boeing makes a new model of aircraft, an outrageous amount of research goes into its design. But ultimately, the design will be tweaked thousands of times based on human feedback when pilots and passengers use it in the real world.

So I would say that the focus shouldn’t be on just reacting to sparse data but aggressively figuring out what data you need to create through your own actions and testing to learn more about your audience. Your sparse data is a lot more valuable when you create it with a purpose, like testing an offering, than when you call your site a finished product and just take what the world gives you.

Did you know that if you bought Apple today at full price ($311 billion), you wouldn’t make your first penny of return for 14 years* (see below if you’re a super finance nerd)? Future value is a big deal, and we have the type of information that can generate tremendous future value for our companies. Are we using it? Not really.

Lastly, we talk about how to make your marketing and its reporting and insight more closely reflect your business, rather than just spitting out data, based on the core ideas around information architecture (see this post for more on that).

Try to ignore the first little bit on social, that’s not what this is about at all.

Evan LaPointe – the true value of your marketing from Evan LaPointe on Vimeo.

Leave some comments! What sticks out to you? How do you put this idea to use in your business?

* This is a way overly simplified model of valuation, not counting discounted cash flow or time value, which would actually extend the return horizon significantly. For the purpose of the presentation, the example is simplified, so don’t tell me how it’s not proper valuation That’s not the point!

The first thing that needs to be said is that people of all flavors are completely needed and incredibly valuable to the practice of web analytics. From the person putting events in onclicks to the person pleading with the CMO, everyone is critical. But this is where my beef with the #measure hashtag comes from: this job is NEVER about measurement. It’s about a company, a business, a value proposition, and we all work together to make a business grow and thrive.

From a big picture perspective, here’s how I would answer the question of how the 180 applies to different career paths (with answers to the more specific points below):

There is not a single person practicing web analytics in any corner, role, niche, area of responsibility or slant of the practice who wouldn’t immensely benefit from knowing why they are doing what they are doing.

When I was discussing this with someone, we were standing on a tile floor. Looking down, you have to realize there is someone out there who is a super grout badass. He is the Michelangelo of grout. But he understands that grout is what sits between tile. His work has to complement the tile. He also understands that this grout and tile combination will make a floor. Floors are something people walk on. With tennis shoes, heels, maybe even golf spikes. And the entrance to this room will be walked on by thousands of people a day, some dragging boxes or rolling luggage. He knows that this building is a hotel, and a high-end one. And that the reputation of this hotel rides on the little things: the flowers they set out, the subtle music. The sharp suits they wear at reception. And he realizes that all of these heels, golf shoes, boxes, intense heat and light coming in from the nearby windows have to be something that can be withstood by this grout. Cracks ruin the perfect patina of this lobby. Chips and loose grout may cause someone to slip and fall.

He needs to lay the grout of his life. And he will, because he appreciates why he is laying that grout and what doing anything but the best job will mean.

So that’s my high-level sell. Now for the nitty gritty.

I’ll build the specifics off of Avinash’s post about the four career paths or roles that will be filled in this practice. They sit in four quadrants defined by these two decisions:

1. Do you want to be on the business or technical side?
2. Do you want to be an individual contributor, or a team leader?

So, let’s talk about the 180 in terms of these roles.

The Technical Individual Contributor (or the Tagging God / Developer Extraordinaire)

For this person, who may live in the IT group, the story is all about the grout example above. I hate that the example may feel as if it reflects poorly on this group, because it really does the opposite, when you think about it. It illustrates someone who is thorough, thoughtful, full of pride, and secure in their work; not seeking or in need of outside approval to be content with their trade. In fact, some may even get a kick out of the fact they know nobody will ever understand how good their work really is.

For 99% of the audience of the average web site, the work and expertise that goes into this role will never be appreciated or even noticed. Yes, visitors may notice a slicker calendar or cool drag & drop functionality, but they will probably never, ever go to the point of understanding how badass these things really are on a technical level.

For this person, the 180 may cause two changes in their daily activity:

1. They will take pride in invisibility. Calm waters above while a submarine battle of epic proportions is unfolding below the surface. When you fully appreciate that the outcome of your best work may be absolutely no reaction (when your choice in reaction is either negative or nothing), you can seek no reaction. You’ll have to trust that the team leader does a good job of demonstrating that no news is good news, but hopefully the 180 will give you room to explore and experiment, which is what really makes you feel rewarded. A raise and recognition is a great thing, and you deserve it, but what really makes you tick is what you’re able to create.
2. Specific to tagging, it may develop and deepen curiosity about how your creations and addition of measurement impact the business, which may enable you and your team lead to better explain how that calendar or drag and drop (and investments in more innovation) made a huge difference or had an unforeseen ripple effect. The idea here is that the organization may feel like it needs to tell IT the solutions to problems they’ve discovered. Hopefully, they’ll begin describing the problems and the solutions will be more elegant than the business side of the house could have ever dreamed of. From the inside, you can work with other developers or teams to help them feel that the true value of their work is seen and appreciated on a level they may have little exposure to otherwise.

In general, I think that these individuals will feel tremendously invested in their work. I know a few people like this, and any company in the world would be lucky to have them (I’m looking at you, Keystone) and should treat them like angels.

The Business Individual Contributor

With great power comes great responsibility. I think this is a particularly exciting role for the 180, because your job should get a lot bigger and more interesting, but at the same time, you need to do a very good job of highlighting where you were helped. The business individual contributor runs the risk of becoming a jackass who thinks of himself as an oracle. Fight this. Remember how important other roles, the technical team in particular, are, because they will be the ones that turn your business into greased lightning once things come into alignment. Ideas and drawings have to turn into reality, and this team will make it a cooler reality (and do so much more quickly) than the business first pictured if they’re given the creative space.

The hopeful change in your day-to-day is going to be cross-team and business-level assessments, in addition to tactical analysis. What this means is you’re not going to be focused 99% on the web site, but probably 60% on the web site and then 40% focused on how the business executes, how decisions are made, when compromises are/aren’t made, who wins, who loses, and why. This analysis will help your executives understand why bad decisions are made (which are inevitable), and whether they were made for good reasons or bad ones. This should make your life a lot cooler and your day a lot more well-rounded feeling, which you probably will enjoy a lot if this role feels like a good fit for you.

There are some sub-divisons of this role where statistics people and things like that fit in. These roles may need a little more consideration, but they probably aren’t liable to change much, because they are based on more specific education and a specialization. While the output of their analyses may be more broadly-applicable, their day-to-day work may look somewhat similar to beforehand, especially compared with everyone else we’re talking about here.

Technical Team Leader

After you’ve followed Avinash’s advice, I’d just say this about this role and the 180. Buy your team time and space. Show the organization the art of development. Some companies feel like IT is a giant, real-life dot matrix printer, turning the business’s eloquent words and thoughts into a material product. Rid the business of that mentality and begin contests, pet projects, 20% time, and things like that where technical projects can blow people’s minds in terms of time savings, ease of process, feature development, etc. Development is inherently (but not obviously, to some) creative, and it’s on you to set the stage for this to happen. Otherwise, you’re just going to have a cynical, miserable group of people on your hands, all waiting for their job applications to Google to come through.

Business Team Leader

If I have to explain the 180 to you, you need to find one of the previous 3 categories and get a new job. Make it happen or make room for someone else. Tough love.