Digital's Blogstag:www.digitalstrategyconsulting.com,2009:/blogs//532007-10-09T12:06:45ZMovable Type 3.35Writing about the digital networked society for more than a decadetag:www.digitalstrategyconsulting.com,2007:/blog//53.14552010-10-08T16:03:28Z2007-10-09T12:06:45ZThanks for dropping by my personal blog. This is a scrapbook of stuff about the digital networked society that caught my eye. Many of the last two years' posts are now open, but the content properly got going back in...Digital's website editorhttp://www.digitalstrategyconsulting.com/Thanks for dropping by my personal blog. This is a scrapbook of stuff about the digital networked society that caught my eye. Many of the last two years' posts are now open, but the content properly got going back in 1999 when I first started lecturing about how the digital networked economy would impact social behaviour. Some posts go way back to diaries and travel journals from the early nineties, just as the first ripples of networked life started to be felt. It's only a scrapbook that I sometimes use in my teaching, but if you want, then you can find out more about this blog, or skip to some of the more popular posts, including how US presidential challenges made it online in 98, projects I helped out with in Ethiopia in 2000, what it was like to discover wireless hotspots in 2001, or challenges with internet access in Italy in '05. Remember it's only a private little space for random jottings; you're welcome to comment, but be polite to others and keep on topic. I hope you find it useful or interesting, and feel free to let me know. Home is where you hang your @, and you'll find mine around Danny@DigitalStrategyConsulting.com]]>
Meadows-Klue on Mediatag:www.digitalstrategyconsulting.com,2007:/blog//53.14562008-04-14T11:00:00Z2008-04-14T10:36:48ZClick to read the most recent posts on Meadows-Klue on Media Note that as this is a private blogging space it doesn’t necessarily reflect the views of Digital’s companies, its clients or partners....Digital's website editorhttp://www.digitalstrategyconsulting.com/
Click to read the most recent posts on Meadows-Klue on Media
Note that as this is a private blogging space it doesn’t necessarily reflect the views of Digital’s companies, its clients or partners.
]]>
Guest blogger: Alex Burmaster | European Internet Analyst | Nielsen Onlinetag:www.digitalstrategyconsulting.com,2008:/blogs//53.17922008-04-14T10:36:53Z2009-04-29T10:55:31ZAs a regular guest blogger, Alex shares some of his insights from the Nielsen Online research tools to help unpack the behaviour of online audiences. Nielsen has been tracking online audiences since the mid nineties and their data helps unpack...Digital's website editorhttp://www.digitalstrategyconsulting.com/As a regular guest blogger, Alex shares some of his insights from the Nielsen Online research tools to help unpack the behaviour of online audiences. Nielsen has been tracking online audiences since the mid nineties and their data helps unpack where people go on the web, how they interact with sites, and how firms convert that energy into commercial returns.
]]>
Guest blogger: Jim Sterne | CEO | Target Marketingtag:www.digitalstrategyconsulting.com,2008:/blogs//53.24612008-04-13T10:36:53Z2009-04-29T10:58:16ZJim Sterne is an international consultant who focuses on measuring the value of the Web as a medium for creating and strengthening customer relationships. Sterne has written eight books on using the Internet for marketing, is the Founding President and...Digital's website editorhttp://www.digitalstrategyconsulting.com/Jim Sterne is an international consultant who focuses on measuring the value of the Web as a medium for creating and strengthening customer relationships. Sterne has written eight books on using the Internet for marketing, is the Founding President and current Chairman of the Web Analytics Association www.WebAnalyticsAssociation.org and produces the eMetrics Marketing Optimization Summit www.emetrics.org
]]>
Guest blogger: Brewster Barclay | Managing Director, Business Development | Clickstreamtag:www.digitalstrategyconsulting.com,2008:/blogs//53.27382008-01-14T11:36:54Z2009-07-08T10:34:37ZBrewster Barclay has over 25 years of experience in the technology industries and for the last 6 years has been the Managing Director of Clickstream Technologies. Brewster is passionate about improving and simplifying data tracking for websites and taking it...Digital's website editorhttp://www.digitalstrategyconsulting.com/Brewster Barclay has over 25 years of experience in the technology industries and for the last 6 years has been the Managing Director of Clickstream Technologies. Brewster is passionate about improving and simplifying data tracking for websites and taking it from the dark ages to a fully automated future.
Why is website optimization still so important and how to do it easily
Website optimisation is the art and science of improving the outcomes for the traffic that your marketing department has spent your precious pounds, dollars or euros on. Once your visitors land on your website, you are trying to encourage, cajole, direct them to take the next appropriate steps on each page that will, you hope, lead them down the path to conversion. Not quite a Damascene moment, you will never convert everyone, but there are techniques and methodologies which will increase your probability of conversion.
]]>
You could ask, why spend time and money on improving conversion? Why not just spend more money driving traffic to your site? Isn’t that more cost effective? The real answer is almost certainly not. Conversion optimisation exercises will often lead initially to improvements in conversion of 20% or more. So, if you are already selling £10,000 a month from your site, you will now sell another £2,000 a month and this will be every month and not just a one off uplift from buying more traffic. On a one year time horizon, this would be £24,000 more sales from one experiment. It would take a lot of increased marketing spend to ever achieve the same result.
What is stopping website optimisation?
If the numbers in favour of doing optimisation are so clear why don’t more people do website optimisation? Why has every year for the last 4 years been the year for optimisation? I think there are two main reasons. First, marketing, page design and usability have always been “soft” skills in the pre-digital world. It is the great marketing campaigns with wonderful images and tag lines that we all remember. This idea that the marketing will surely come up with the best web pages based on their “experience” inhabits the digital world as well, rather then using rigorous measured testing. The choice is still often made based on the HiPPO (Highest Paid Person’s Opinion) and I have suffered from this myself. But does the HiPPO, or anyone else, really know the right colour, right picture and right font?
The second reason preventing more people doing website optimisation is implementation cost and hassle. There are many excellent multivariate and A/B testing tools on the market which will help website owners optimise website pages. However, to implement them requires the website owner to add code to specific pages of their website that they want to test. Also, all except Google Website Optimizer (GWO) have a cost associated with them.
Causes of marketing optimisation paralysis
Clickstream Technologies is finding that the implementation constraints on the deployment of GWO, or other testing tools, is the key factoring limiting the ability of companies, particularly large enterprises, to benefit from website optimisation for the following reasons:
The code window to put in the code for even one experiment may be 3 to 6 months but…
The web marketing team do not know in advance which pages or page sections they want to experiment
The IT director does not want to put active tags into any of the web pages in case it causes the site to crash.
Tags can frequently be inserted at the wrong place on the page and there is no window to go back and change the tags.
The result of this is can be almost complete marketing paralysis. Few experiments are done, there is no continuous optimisation and multivariate testing is thrown out as not being useful. Back to HiPPO.
Clickstream Technologies’ Answer for Google Website Optimizer
Our answer at Clickstream Technologies is the Datasherpa Platform that squarely addresses the problems of time to implementation, control and simplicity when it comes to deploying GWO or any other tagging based application, including other multivariate testing tools or indeed Google Analytics. This is done by abstracting the tagging problem from being an IT implementation problem to being a simple matter of configuring the Datasherpa Platform that will do all the tagging dynamically.
The Datasherpa Software is generally installed on a proxy server in the same datacenter as the web servers of the company wishing to implement the GWO test (or in the cloud as a Clickstream managed service) and all traffic for the website is routed through the proxy server. See graphic below. This means that the web page is served from the web server to the Datasherpa Proxy server.
This is when the Datasherpa Server goes into action. A simple configuration interface allows the GWO user to define all their requirements for a GWO experiment.
Test page
Tracking and control tags
Page sections to be tested and their experiment names
Conversion page
Conversion tag
Then, as the page passes through the Datasherpa Proxy server, all these tags are inserted on the correct pages, in the correct spot and associated with the correct page sections. The client then only has to go to their GWO interface to set up or turn on their experiment and all the tagging happens automatically.
Advantages of the Datasherpa Platform’s Solution
What are the advantages of the Datasherpa Platform for the website owner and for any agency helping them to implement GWO?
Experiments can be implemented in minutes with no need to wait for a code window and no matter how the web pages were created.
Clients can run multiple experiments in parallel or sequentially to continually optimize their websites.
The tags are always in the right places
The IT director is happy as a major headache has been taken away
Conclusion: Simplify and automate your Google Website Optimizer Implementations
Overall, there should be a much happier website owner. Not only can they get the initial boost from optimizing a few key pages but also they will be able to continuously optimize any page on their site to keep increasing conversions. For, in the long run, optimization is not a one step event but an on-going improvement process that all websites should engage in.
If you would like to see a short video demo which shows exactly what has been described above, click this link: http://www.clickstream.com/demos/gwodemo.
By Brewster Barclay | Managing Director, Business Development | Clickstream
]]>
Digital Intelligencetag:www.digitalstrategyconsulting.com,2008:/blogs//53.21872006-04-01T09:00:00Z2009-07-07T16:08:19ZYour monthly summary of the best in research and statistics – tracking the growth of the digital industries since 2000. Digital Intelligence...Digital's website editorhttp://www.digitalstrategyconsulting.com/Your monthly summary of the best in research and statistics – tracking the growth of the digital industries since 2000.
Thanks for dropping by my personal blog. This is a scrapbook of stuff about the digital networked society that caught my eye. Many of the last two years' posts are now open, but the content properly got going back in 1999 when I first started lecturing about how the digital networked economy would impact social behaviour. Some posts go way back to diaries and travel journals from the early nineties, just as the first ripples of networked life started to be felt. It's only a scrapbook that I sometimes use in my teaching, but if you want, then you can find out more about this blog, or skip to some of the more popular posts, including how US presidential challenges made it online in 98, projects I helped out with in Ethiopia in 2000, what it was like to discover wireless hotspots in 2001, or challenges with internet access in Italy in '05. Remember it's only a private little space for random jottings; you're welcome to comment, but be polite to others and keep on topic. I hope you find it useful or interesting, and feel free to let me know. Home is where you hang your @, and you'll find mine around Danny@DigitalStrategyConsulting.com]]>
As a regular guest blogger, Alex shares some of his insights from the Nielsen Online research tools to help unpack the behaviour of online audiences. Nielsen has been tracking online audiences since the mid nineties and their data helps unpack where people go on the web, how they interact with sites, and how firms convert that energy into commercial returns.
Jim Sterne is an international consultant who focuses on measuring the value of the Web as a medium for creating and strengthening customer relationships. Sterne has written eight books on using the Internet for marketing, is the Founding President and current Chairman of the Web Analytics Association www.WebAnalyticsAssociation.org and produces the eMetrics Marketing Optimization Summit www.emetrics.org
Brewster Barclay has over 25 years of experience in the technology industries and for the last 6 years has been the Managing Director of Clickstream Technologies. Brewster is passionate about improving and simplifying data tracking for websites and taking it from the dark ages to a fully automated future.
