Web Analytics in China

Social Media Analytics - IWOM Analytics or a lunch with Sam

As a nice follow up to my post on online metrics in the world of user generate content, I had the chance to have lunch with Sam Flemming of CIC / IWOM fame. While I have been somewhat critical of CIC's reports, I do admire Sam as a visionary and Chinese internet pioneer. CIC almost single handedly popularized Social Media marketing and measurement (they call it Internet Word of Mouth or IWOM) in China, a market that has not even started to measure online activity on company websites effectively.
Most of our discussion focussed on how to integrate social media measurement, an area where CIC has patent pending technology, with web analytics data, CIC's positioning towards agencies, using social media effectively and the Chinese Social Media environment in general. But one thing after the other (or Step by Step, as NKOTB said, yes I still can sing that song)

Chinese Social Media environment

• China has a very vibrant social media scene that is driven by BBS culture
• Social networks are growing out of successful BBS' and this history makes them      unique and uniquely different form popular western networks
• These networks are populated mainly by young netizens, highschool and university      students
• The discussions hosted on these networks cover a wide range of topics, many of      them relevant to major consumer brands
• Currently there is no equivalent content rich network for business users (while      there are LinkedIn clones they do not feature discussions), although companies like Alibaba and Xing are moving into this space

CIC's positioning towards agencies

• Sam sees online agencies as partners for CIC and has positioned the company as a compliment. They will measure social media conversation and consult clients on a IWOM strategy, but it will not execute or manage IWOM campaigns or seed posts.
• In reality both agencies and clients don't see this distinction as clearly and advertisers do position CIC and agencies as competitors. More communication is needed to create a win-win situation. Our discussion was good step into this direction.

Effective usage of social media

• Once marketers understand that their brand is talked about online and how this      influences their brand equity, their natural response is asking "how can I influence the ongoing discussion". While this is a valid question, the easy answer (seed your own posts or hire a 3rd party vendor to control the debate) raises serious ethical issues and will, in the long run, destroy the trust and effectiveness of internet word of mouth. Especially multinationals should be aware of the risk to their reputation that comes along with faking posts.
• Sam believes that this traditional media approach (just shout larger than everyone else to make your message heard) is too simplistic and recommends advertisers to listen first then be understood. (Wise words if you ask me) Understanding the      discussion going on online can inform advertising campaigns, since it works like a giant focus groups (free of charge). In a next step advertisers are also able to get almost real time feedback about users take aways from ongoing marketing efforts, and can adjust their campaigns to better resonate with their audience.
• IWOM tracking can also be an early warning system. Brands can learn about      problems with their products, communication or distribution by listening to the unfiltered voice of the customer
• For brands to participate in the discussion (note the difference to 'control the discussion') Sam recommends a more sincere approach that centers around 'real people' sharing their personal opinion in a casual language. He notes the example of Dell, a company that effectively used the 'personal' blog of senior managers to enter into an open discussion with users that previously voiced their frustration on sites like Dell Hell. An interesting question will be how to translate such blog based effort      into the BBS culture in China (Any ideas? Let me know in the comment section). I do strongly agree with Sam that in the long run only sincere and real participation will be rewarded. But China being China, many a company will look for quick fixes that will in the end harm their brand.

Integration of social media measurement & web analytics data

• To enable a better integration of IWOM data into regular web analytics  reports, along the lines of Dennis Mortensen's Online Business Media Quadrant Model, I highlighted some challenges of CIC's current offering to Sam

1. Timeline: My main gripe with CIC's "CIC data" report is timing. It usually covers a 1 month time frame, while ad campaigns usually start sometime in the middle of the month and end 4,6,8 or 12 weeks later. Aligning these timelines is almost impossible. In addition CIC's reports arrive with 2 weeks+ time delay after the month is over (most of this, I am sure, due to the insight mining that takes place), that is too long for      kind of near time reporting I am looking for. Sam assured me that their "CIC Alert" product provides more flexibility in terms of timing (daily, weekly or monthly) and can be adjusted to follow the campaign duration. This type of reporting would integrate with Web Analytics efforts more effectively. To take that one step further we talked about access. 
2. Access: Currently CIC delivers its reports in PDF formats by email. I would love      to have a web interface, much like my web analytics tools, or IResearch's IUserTracker (link in Chinese). That way I could download the quantitative info (number of posts, share of positive, negative, neutral) whenever I need it (I can wait for the qualitative insights by PDF), manage the keywords I would like to have tracked (product names, campaign names, competitors etc.), organize them into campaigns, specify the      timeline I want to analyze and then export all this data to an Excel spreadsheet and compare and correlate to my other online data. Doesn't that sounds like a nice little IWOM vision

While I am not at liberty to share more details, I can say that Sam was certainly listening intently and I am curious what they have in the works. Stay tuned. I certainly will.

Online Metrics in the world of User Generated Content

Catching up with my analytics reading, I saw this interesting post from Dennis Mortensen explaining his Online Business Media Quadrant Model. His basic assumption is that in a world where user generated content becomes more important, measuring only what happens in the controlled environment of your site (with tools like Google Analytics and Omniture) gives us only half the picture (or one quarter, if you don't measure UGC on your site). He recommends a more holistic approach by looking at

• Controlled On site Content
• Controlled Off site Content (User Generated)
  
• Uncontrolled On site Content (Syndicated content - PR)
  
• Uncontrolled Off site Content (User Generated)

What a nice summary of some of the work we have been doing recently ;) A couple of thoughts on this (not yet well structured)

1. In China, but I assume in other countries as well, marketers still have a strong urge to control as much of the conversation as possible. This old reflex limits the reach of their message. Web 2.0 is a reality in China and marketers need to move away from a shouting mentality towards communication mentality, that emphases listening to the "voice of the customer".
2. Separating online marketing and PR becomes increasingly difficult, especially when looking at user generated content (or IWOM to use another term). Marketers need to find ways to tear down the organizational barriers that prevent better integration especially on the analytics side. Otherwise their understanding will be limited to one or two quarters of Dennis' quadrant.
3. Measuring user generated content (quantity, quality, key messages) is a new challenge for most advertisers in China. With the amount of conversation going on in the millions of blogs & BBS's in China, manual tracking and counting is not scalable. While Sam Flemming's CIC owns the conversation an IWOM tracking in China, looking at other alternatives might pay off, especially regarding integration with current analytics efforts.
    
4. Measuring off-site content provides a new challenge to advertisers as well. While some of the large advertisers in China just get comfortable with Web Analytics on their own site, some of our client already move away from viewing their site and their banner campaigns as the main medium for communication. They increasingly communicate with 3rd party vendors (e.g. video, sharing sites, business communities) to engage their audiences more effectively. While that makes a lot of sense from a marketing perspective, analytics team need to find solution for tracking the effectiveness of these cooperation. A low trust environment like China adds its own challenges (tip: never trust your vendors numbers). The best solution we have found thus far is forcing vendors to integrate our tracking codes on the pages / experiences they create for our clients. While this opens a whole different can of worms (explaining the differences between "our" numbers and "their" numbers anyone?) it seems like the best available solution.
5. Making your own content "mobile" will significantly increase your reach. Many brands in China have experimented with viral videos, hosted both on their mini-sites and video sharing sites and our numbers show a huge boost reach. Who says video's are the only "mobile" / "viral" content brands can create? Think about making your downloads available on third party sites, your mini-games and your widgets and you will be rewarded with an explosion in reach. At least as long as you can measure it. Users seem to be more willing to engage in advertisers content when they are in the "mood" to watch, play or download.

P.S.: You can find a version of this post on longmarch.chinalytics.com. Please leave your comments there since I plan to move this blog over there.

How Web 2.0 and IWOM will change online marketing

While everybody and their grandmother is talking about "New Marketing" or "4E's", our own work with on viral marketing and "engaging online experiences" has triggered me to think about the impact these concepts will have on online media spending.
When brands focus their marketing efforts on "joining the conversation" with users, and "first understand, then be understood" (which certainly makes sense in China, too). Who will pay the bills of the loudspeakers (read portals) of todays online ecosystem?
While I do not believe that this business will go away any time soon, I do see a significant reallocation of online marketing budget in 2008 and beyond, from banner advertising to more integrated long term efforts that include syndicated content, in depth media cooperation and interactivity (e.g. blog, bbs, chat, votes, competitions etc). With the rising tide of online ad spending in China,  many a Kuai will flow down this Sina/Sohu river. But in two or three years what looks like a rainbow with a pot of gold at the end, will look more like the bridge over the aptly named river.
Now if you have enough of my poorly written allegories you can check what Jeff Davis over at the Guardian has to say on the topic. I will toil on to find more effective ways to analyze and optimize the online effort of our clients in this brave new world. A short hint: It really helps if you can add your own tracking codes on your media partners site (at least the part they customize for you).
And will I do this, can anyone explain to me how advertising will be different from PR when all we do is build a conversation? Anyone? Kaiser?

Engagement & Strategic Web Analytics

Due to the Chinese National Day holiday I am little late on this one, but Avinash Kaushik just earned another feather in his guru cap with his post on engagement as a web analytics metric. His main points are:

1. Engagement is not a metric that anyone understands and even when used it rarely drives the action / improvement on the website.

2. Because it is not really a metric, it is an excuse. An excuse for an unwillingness to sit down and identify why a site exists. An excuse for a unwillingness to identify real metrics that measure if your web presence is productive.

3. It is nearly impossible to define engagement in a standard way that can be applied across the board. Definitions that exist are either too broad (to cover every nuance) or too narrow (hence very unique)

4. At the heart of it engagement tries to measure something deeply qualitative.
   Yet most efforts to measure it in our world tend to be hard core quantitative

Its great to see someone spelling it out so clearly, so please go ahead and read the whole post.

My own experience trying to implement Avinash suggestions for our own clients suggests a deeper meaning between the lines of this post. An answer to the question "Why do Web Analytics practitioners still use Engagement as a metric, when most of us should share Avinash's skepticism?"
Its because in most companies Web Analytics is in a silo, where it is not involved in strategic planning and decision making. Following Avinash's methodology we end up asking strategic questions over an over again, but in many companies web analysts are not expected and / or not allowed to ask questions like:

• What is the objective of your site?
• What is the objective of this campaign?
• Can that objective be measured by analyzing clickstream data?
• What action do you want the user to take on the landing page?

These questions are owned by other silos, so we end up defining metrics that are under our control. We look at the data from our web analytics tools and hope to gain additional insights from "Engagement" however we define it. This may not solve the problem, but it is within our circle of influence.

So Avinash, what I hear your really saying is this: "Web Analysts of the world unite, and increase your circle of influence. Make Web Analytics a strategic function". Oh, and one more thing: Don’t call your approach Web Analytics 2.0. Call it by its real name. Don’t hide behind a pretty moniker. Call it Strategic Web Analytics ;)

If a man does not know to what port he is sailing, no wind is favourable (Seneaca)

In a previous post I expanded on my methodology to reach actionable insights through web analytics by answering the 4 questions:

1. What is the current performance?
2. Is it good or bad?
3. What are the root cause and key drivers that lead to the current performance?
4. Which steps can be taken to improve the current performance?

While discussing the importance of context to answer question 2, I did not touch one key point:

• Did we reach our target?

Setting and measuring on targets is critical to all analytics efforts since, as Seneca said in my post title, "If a man does not know to what port he is sailing, no wind is favorable". Yet often targets for web analytics remain elusive.

Online marketing and campaign objectives are often vague and unspecific. Take the objective of this blog for example: "Provide relevant web analytics insights and best practices to local practitioners and drive the adoption of an analytic mindset for online marketing in China". All the detailed numbers Google Analytics and Feedburner can provide cannot tell me if I reached this objective.

To make the objective measurable, we need to break it down into measurable Key performance indicators (KPI) and to measure success we need to set target values for these KPI's. If that sounds more like business school gibberish than down to earth web analytics (?) remember the old adage "You get what you measure". So lets break the objective down into pieces to see which KPI's we can identify.

relevant content:Relevance is always in the eye of the beholder, but I can track the number visitors who identify this blog as relevant by tracking their loyalty e.g. repeat visits and subscription to the RSS feeds.
local practitioners: Since this blog is targeted at Chinese (what a shame I can't write Chinese), the KPI should be Visits from China / Visits.
Adoption of analytic mindset: While I can't measure what is on peoples mind (though not for the lack of trying), I can measure actions. In order to have an impact on the ecosystem, I need to reach a large number of people and engage them in a discussion about analytics. Both are measurable. For reach I will track Unique visitors. And for engagement tracking comments, trackbacks & emails received is relevant.

Now that we have a spanking new set of KPI's, we need to take the next step and set targets for each KPI.  Many web campaign and website owners do have a set of KPI's (not necessarily the right one), but don't have a target. The analytics team then end up in a desperate search for context and comparables to tell them is they are doing well. There is no context like a wisely set target, since the target setting process should take all available context into account.

For my little red blog I set the targets for October like this

Reach: Unique Visitors: 200
Loyalty:  Repeat Visits + Feed subscriptions: 100
Engagement: Comments + Trackbacks + emails received: 15
Visits from China: 70%

Since I am new at blogging, I am not sure how realistic these goals are. But I will certainly report my progress. If you have any thought, comments or recommendations. Please share them with me and my readers in the comments.

Analytics and the future of online marketing

Microsoft aQuantive acquisition and Google's recent move to hire Madison Avenue talent has created a lot of controversy about their future plans and how traditional agencies should respond. Some argue this heralds the end of the agencies and all of us need to pack their bags.  While I don't agree with this doomsday (at for agency people like myself) scenario, it is certainly interesting to hear what Google and Microsoft have to say about the future of online marketing.
Rebecca Lieb of ClickZ, one of my regular reads (see blogroll), shared some very insightful thoughts on this topic today. The two key points that make me think are:

1. "You don't need to go into a fixed budgetary cycle," Armstrong argues. Instead, advertisers must learn how their budgets fluctuate with consumer-interest cycles.
2. Utten may have put it best when he explained insofar as E-Trade's constellation of traditional, interactive, and media agencies are concerned, the company remains idea agnostic. Instead, what he's buying is the "best optimization."

While idea 2 is not really new, and everyone in web analytics space should live and breath it already, the first idea takes online advertising and web analytics to an new level. It really is the next big step away from the broadcasting marketing model of old to a targeted, focussed and optimized advertising model. It recommends moving away from spending money communicating to your customers when you want to say something, to spending money communicating to your customers when they want to hear from you. That for once sounds like an idea that moves the needle on marketing effectiveness. While I continue to wrap my head around this, I hope to hear your thoughts in the comments section.

Unique Visitors & the importance of context

One of the key metrics in every analytics report is "Unique (weekly, monthly, etc) Visitors". In its easiest form, it will tell you how many people visited your page or site in a given period. Even given the problems of accurately measuring the advertised number (done with persistent cookies), unique visitors is the best headline number to evaluate the success of a campaign and add significant value compared to looking at page views or visits. The key reason is that it can answer the key marketing question: "How many people (prospective clients) have seen my message (e.g. website).
But just looking at the plain visitor number does not allow us provide actionable suggestions. And this is what web analytics is all about. Even adding general ratio like Visits / Unique Vistor or Page Views / Unique Visitor do not provide much additional room for analysis.
There are three simple questions that help us on our path to actionable insights.

1. Is this number good or bad?
2. Why is the numbers good or bad?
3. What can we do to improve this metric and is it worth the effort?

Today I will focus on point one.

"Is this number good or bad?".

The answer this question, we need a little help from a friend. This friend is context. In order to understand if we are doing well or not, we need to compare our number to other numbers. Let me use the example of school boy that comes home from school with a "B" in Chinese. (Luckily he is preparing from the future) His parents will naturally look at the context to interpret his performance. They would ask themselves question like:

• What were his previous grades? (A "B" is great if he got all "C's" before, but a little disappointing when we was all "A's"
• How well were his classmates doing? (If it was a difficult test, and all other classmates got "C's", this B is great!)

We need to do same in Web analytics, when looking at numbers like "Unique visitors".

1. How did the number of unique visitors develop over the last month? Is it growing or declining? How fast?
2. How are your competitors doing in terms of Unique Visitors? Who is getting more visitors, who less?
3. What is your share of the overall internet population? (Here I need to leave my school boy behind) Is  Is it growing or declining?

Most practitioner of web analytics will easily do point 1. Heck, most analytics tools will do it for us. Point 2 and 3 are more problematic, especially in China.

Competitive information
... is hard to come by. In the US and Europe Comscore and Hitwise will provide such competitive intelligence. In China we are less blessed. Startup companies still rely on their Alexa ranking (if favorable), but Alexa numbers have been discredited for some time. The only other provider I am aware of that can provide competitive web information is IResearch. The company started to run a panel of about 50K internet users, and provides its client access to their surfing behavior (adjusted to represent the Chinese Internet audience). Due to my past occupation, I am not a big fan of IResearch, but after initial tests their numbers seem fairly reliable.
Based in this competitive information your are now able to tell you client (internal or external). "We have 1000 unique visitors this month. This makes us number 3 in the industry. The best competitor is X." for more details on competitive analysis, that a look at Avinash's post here.

Share of internet population (Reach)
Another way of providing context to your Unique Visitor number is comparing it to the overall internet population. This is especially critical in a market developing as quickly as China. CNNIC provides a semi-annual report on the size of the Chinese Internet population. If your number of unique visitors is growing by 10% annually, while the internet population grows by 30%, you certainly have a trigger for a more in depth analysis of the cause (Why in my previous list). If you need reach data for your site on a monthly basis, you can refer to IResearch as well, which will have a monthly reach for your site.

The importance of context is true for any web metric, and I will continue to highlight it future post. If you have any thoughts or comments, as well as any recommendation for better competitive information in China. Please share with us in the comments section.

Why Google (and Baidu) need a Web Analytics Evangelist in China

In my last post I mentioned that we are currently using GA Analytics for one of our projects. So far I have to say, it is one sweet tool. It is easy to implement, has a very intuitive, easy to use interface and all the key metrics are there.

Some of my fellow analytics bloggers seems to believe that making such a great tool available free of charge is Google's bid to monopolize the Web Analytics Tool market place (ala Microsoft and Internet Explorer). I believe nothing could be farther from the truth. In fact, I am sure Google loves any kind of Web Analytics Tool, from Omniture to Webtrends, from Clicktracks even to Microsoft's Gatineau. That is because any Web Analytics tool, used well, will tell you that Search is the most effective driver of high quality traffic. And search, after all, is where Google is raking in the money.

Now, how to let EVERYBODY know that? You can tell them, again and again (and again). Some may believe you, other will think it's just a sales pitch. So how about giving them the tools, to find out themselves and improve their whole online marketing process along the way? And giving them these tools for FREE?? This is what Google Analytics is all about.

But here is the problem: Now everyone has a great free tool on their hands. But do marketers in China don't know how to use it effectively? The answer is in China is certainly no! And there is noone around in China to tell them! (especially in Chinese) You will find a couple of Chinese Blog telling you how to use Google Analytics. But there is noone telling you how to do comprehensive web analytics. The kind that gives you actionable business insights. That is what Google (Baidu) need an Analytics Evangelist for. Any takers for the job?