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Creating effective web presence

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Strategic Premise

Building a Web Site for an Enterprise or

Non-Profit is Not an Exercise

in Either

Technology Or Aesthetics.

It is an Exercise in Creating Satisfying

Customer Experience in a Way that Leads to

Cost-Effective Execution of Marketing Strategy.

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Effective Execution of Marketing Strategy

Building Web sites that deliver satisfying customer experience and do so in a way that fits both strategy and budget.

Visual attractiveness is a plus, but not a necessity.

If technology gets in trouble, it is a negative, not a plus, e.g., flash intros/demos.

Web sites is an important marketing strategy but not the only one - that must be cost-effective.

Most Web sites should eventually be expected to produce a reasonable return on investment.

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Web Site Development Process

Not too different from marketing / communications planning

Planning a Web site should be first Foremost a business/marketing planning process Good business sense should take precedence

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Establishing Site Objectives

Enterprise/Unit Marketing Objectives cascade with levels

The Interactive Nature of the Internet Communications/Branding Objectives Behavioral Objectives

Role of Web Site on Overall Marketing/ Marketing Communications Strategy integration of online and offline strategy for

multi-channel marketers

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Identify / Describe Target Market

Demographics, Life Styles

Motives for using the site

Tasks they wish to perform

Consider utility and customization

Stepwise scenario development / use

case analysis

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Site Content / Navigation Structure

What content do visitors need/expect?

How do they access content?

More than just a straightforward replication of offline

content

Interactions

Marketing research

What role should visuals/graphics play?

Simple and Usable

Content and structure more important

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Typical Site Hierarchy

Enough second-level pages to clearly categorize content but not create confusion

Visitor should never be more than 2-3 intuitive mouse clicks away Avoid dead ends

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Site Design Issues

Content Navigation Color (especially background) Font Minimize Scrolling Artwork Animation/Graphics/Rich MediaDemo Case: http://www.cnet.com/

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Deployment and Tuning

Uploading site server / hosting service raises many technical issues

Calibrating and fine tuning for best site performance is highly technical

Reliability and scalability issues Test at your target customers’ regions

and environment!

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Measure / Evaluate / Improve Performance & Effectiveness

Measuring and Improving site performance is a technical task

Measuring and improving the business effectiveness of site is a marketing task

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Measurement Techniques Concept Tests - basic marketing research techniques

Prototype Tests - tests of sites with limited functionality, usually

done in a laboratory setting.

Beta (Functional) Tests – testing a fully-functioning Web site.

can be done in a laboratory setting or by giving trusted users/customers

access to a site on a server, before the site has been deployed to the Web.

Customer Usability/Satisfaction Feedback - uses conventional

marketing research techniques to measure satisfaction with the

Web site experience.

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Measuring Web Customer Satisfaction

Employs research methods developed offline

Adapted for the online environment Single measures vs multiple measures

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Satisfaction with Content

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Satisfaction with Transactional Experiences

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E-Commerce Satisfaction Drivers

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What Should The Marketer

Do

To Create Good

Customer Experience

On The Web Site?

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Stages/Elements of Customer Experience

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Continuous Improvement Essential

Figure 9.12TOP Image Only

Goes Here

Figure 9.13TOP Image Only

Goes There

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Elements WSJOnline Offers

Usable Site Navigation Made Easier By Familiarity

With Print Version Personalization Options A Trusted Brand Name E-Mail Notices—Features, Breaking News Community Through

Feedback/Discussions

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Web Site Costs

2 to 3 times as much to maintain a site as it costs to develop it initially!

More on website evaluation

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The Power of Clickstream to Produce Internet Metrics

Tremendous amount of data produced on the Internet.

One of the main challenges for the Internet marketer is to control this data to improve existing marketing programs and to gain insights into additional marketing efforts that have a high probability of being productive

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Purpose of Usability Testing

Visitors expect smooth navigation suiting their need

To be pleased and not frustrated The fundamental basis of Web site usability

is user task performance. • Visitors come to the Web site motivated to

accomplish some goal, to perform some task.

• Usability testing is designed to ensure that task performance is not only possible, but hopefully efficient and entirely satisfactory.

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Types/Stages of Usability Testing

Concept Testing - testing site design concepts to see if they make sense. This is primarily site structure, not design approaches.

Prototype Testing - testing prototypes to see if they fit the manner in which users expect the site to be organized and laid out in order for them to complete tasks in an orderly fashion.

Full Usability Testing - Testing the full usability of the site when it is functionally complete and most if not all of the content is there.

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Pareto Curve for Usability Testing

Over 75% of the problems can be identified with 5 user tests; only 15 are need to find 100%

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No Website can Ignore the Need for Usability Testing

Usability testing is critically important.

A careful marketer can learn to do it, especially one who has had focus group training or experience.

It can be outsourced to interactive marketing agency or a specialized marketing services firm.

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Site Performance Metrics

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Traffics & Audience Metrics

Site Administered Hit Counters

Purchased Services Server Request Log Data Coded Web Pages Customer Panel Data

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Hit Counters are Often Free

They Provide Simple But Useful Reports

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What is a Server Log?

Server logs record every hit (every file requested) and most pages have many files.

This is a necessary lead-in to understanding that the IT people use server log data to run the site and marketers use it (after much processing) to understand the performance of their marketing programs.

Includes, e.g. IP address, date and time of request

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Basic Metrics – Site Traffic

Hits recorded each time a file is requested little value in measuring site effectiveness.

Impressions. Typical advertising usage applies here. Each time a visitor has an opportunity to

view an item, an impression is recorded. Page views (page impressions).

recorded each time a page is requested.

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Basic Metrics – Site Audience

Visitors - simple count of the number of people who visit a site

Unique visitors - the number of different people Identified visitors - the next step up; now we know

who they are Unduplicated audience - the number of unique

visits/exposures in a specified time frame.

Traffic and audience measures are obviously related.

Traffic simply measures the activity on the site. Audience measures are of more interest to marketers who

need information about the composition of that traffic.

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Need for Ratings

Management to assess performance Investors to assess potential & returns Advertisers for traffic numbers Must be accurate & verifiable External audit is the preferred option

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Television Ratings

Create-once-sell-many medium Production costs don’t change with number of

audience Producers cannot directly count their audience Independent panel-based measurement

companies are preferred, e.g. ACNielsen Survey a representative sample of viewers and

the TV channels to which they tuned Set-top box is used to record the viewing

behavior

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Magazine Ratings

Create-many-sell-many medium They can count how many copies printed &

sold No way to count magazines actually opened

and read Independent companies verify circulation

numbers based on audits of financial documents, mailing lists, postal receipts, and printing bills

Survey is much harder than TV as the number of magazines is much higher than TV channels

No mechanism similar to set-top box

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Web Ratings

Create-once-sell-many medium Supply side resembles magazines but demand side

resembles TV Can count using server logs how many pages were

“printed” Can install set-top box like software to record viewing

behavior Millions of web sites with billions of web pages require

prohibitively large samples Representative samples are impractical to put together in

addition to difficulty of installing measurement software Don’t guess but count!

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Something You Can Know

The referral links let you know how much traffic is coming from where?

Also captured are the search terms visitors typed into portals like Yahoo!

Can discover the most-used entry and exit pages

How long did they stay on each page?

IAB Online Measurement Study

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Background & Objectives

Online Advertising Measurement Study Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) Media Rating Council (MRC) Advertising Research Foundation (ARF) Conducted by PricewaterhouseCoppers (PwC)

Review measurement criteria & practices for online advertising and audience measurement reporting

Document and report the comparability of existing metrics used by the industry

Propose a common set of industry definitions and guidelines for data analysis and reporting

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Scope 11 participating companies selected by IAB

portals (e.g., AOL, MSN, Yahoo!) destination sites (e.g., CNET, Forbes.com) third party ad networks / servers (e.g., Avenue A,

DoubleClick) Participating companies represented 2/3 of total

industry revenue Interviews

what types of audience and advertising data are measured how the data is measured and how it is reported

Verified collection methods & definitions using scripted testing

Identified discrepancies between definitions, editing procedures, and reporting

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The Top Five Metrics Ad Impressions Clicks Unique Visitors Total Visits Page Impressions Time Spent on

Page Number of

Completed User Registrations

Conversions

0

2

4

6

8

10

12

AdImpressions

Clicks UniqueVisitors

TotalVisitors

PageImpressions

# Participants

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Ad Impression

A measurement of responses from an ad delivery system to an ad request from the user browser

filtered from robotic activity recorded at a point as close as possible

to the actual viewing of the creative material by the user browser.

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Server Initiated Measurement prior to serving a web page to a user

agent request the page is built with links to an ad

resource ad impression transaction is recorded

in a log Client Initiated Measurement

direct connection between a user agent and the ad server via advanced HTML tags

recorded via an independent request to a special ad transaction logging server

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1

2

3

4

5

6

7

Server Client

# Participants

Ad Impression Measurement

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Page Impressions

A measurement of responses from a web server to a page request from the user browser, which is filtered from robotic activity and error codes, and is recorded at a point as close as possible to the actual viewing of the page by the user browser.

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Clicks

A measurement of the user-initiated action of clicking on an ad element, causing a re-direct to another web location.

Tracked and reported as a 302 redirect at the ad server.

This measurement is filtered for robotic activity and is recorded at a point as close as possible to the actual viewing of the destination web location by the user browser.

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All 11 participants track clicks & share a common definition

A click is a user-initiated action of clicking on an ad element causing a redirect to another web location

A click does not include information on whether or not the user completed the redirect transaction

All base click metric on 302 redirects (or transfers) successfully processed by the ad server

Uniform Use of 302 Redirects

0

2

4

6

8

10

12

Tracking via 302redirects

No Tracking via302 redirects

# Participant

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Unique Visitors

10 out of 11 participants track unique visitors

Cookie Based 8 use cookies with 2

using also IP address recurring vs new

cookies Registration Based

2 use registered users or user login counts

0

1

2

3

4

5

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8

Cookie Registration None

# Participants

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Cookie Based Unique Visitors Should new cookie be

counted? Count all new cookies Exclude all new cookies

a unique cookie must visit the site at least twice to be considered a new visitor

Exclude some new cookies based on historical data

using known user data estimate of new cookies

representing repeat visitors that do not accept cookie

0

0.5

1

1.5

2

2.5

3

3.5

4

Count AllNew

Cookies

Count NoNew

Cookies

CountSome NewCookies

# Participants

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Total Visitors

10 participants calculate total visitors

Definitions vary among participants

Actual Sampling

sample user activity (e.g. several days over a period)

Statistical Analysis to perform statistical

analysis to estimate total visitors

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1

2

3

4

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6

Actual Sampling Statistical

# Participants

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Web vs Ad Server Tracking 8 participants track page

impressions 6 use standard web server

logs with successful HTML status

codes filter from robotic activity

2 use web beacon technology (see Yahoo)

A Web beacon is an object that is embedded and invisible but allows checking that a user has viewed the page or e-mail.

no third party entity does the tracking

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1

2

3

4

5

6

Web Server Ad Server

# Participants

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Robotic Activity Filtering

All participants perform some such filtering

Basic prevent robots from

scanning the ad server exclude transactions from

empty agents or “bot” agents

List of Known Robots based on User Agent

Strings or IP address varied from 10 to 700

Behavioral Filtering define business rules to

identify robotic behaviors

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2

4

6

8

10

12

BasicFiltering

ListFiltering

BehavioralFiltering

# Participants

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Internal IP Address Filtering

Eliminate any activity generated by internal monitoring tools

Demographic of company users may not be representative

Eliminate any activity generated by internal testing 0

1

2

3

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5

6

7

Remove InternalIP Addresses

Include InternalIP Addresses

# Participants

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Independent Verification

01234567

ProcessAudit

ActivityAudit

Process &ActivityAudit

No Audit

# Participants

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Resources

Web Metrics: Proven Methods for Measuring Web Site Success, Jim SterneJohn Wiley & Sons, Inc., 2002

IAB Online Ad Measurement StudyPricewaterhouseCoppers, 2001