Coffee, Sun & Technology

I’ve sat through another of these meetings with talented analysts reviewing reports and sharing their findings with the rest of the online team. It was brilliant. Then the discussion turned to development schedules, which are (almost) always packed with projects and have (almost) no room for implementing any of these recommendations.

We’ve all heard this story a billion times. Analysts cannot succeed if they do not have the power to drive change. Give them the power to act on their recommendations to work and they’ll do wonders. So, repeat after me:

Old Economy Analyst = the reports guy.
New Economy Analyst = the action guy.

(Meanwhile your conversion rate already jumped 10%!)

A heads-up for marketing managers with plans to customize price based on user behavior on site - see this article on the Seattle Times.

[…] It said 87 percent of people strongly objected to online stores charging people different prices for the same products based on information collected about their shopping habits.[…]

What people don’t know is that pricing customization almost always plays in their favor. But I guess no one can go against public perception.

Short story on InternetRetailer.com about how Bass Pro Shops combines email and analytics to target users who did not complete a purchase. The good: rather than sending their customers a discount for an abandoned product, they’re sending a list of related items in the same price range. Consistently sending coupons X days after a product was abandoned is a bad idea. The bad: going public with this story. Every time you expose your marketing tactics, some will try to take advantage of them, one way or another.

In one of his useit.com newsletters, Jakob Nielsen talks about how users now have a mental model for what site Search should do. I can’t really argue about what users expect from site search or whatever mental model they’ve built over the years. But clearly someone searching on Expedia is expecting a different experience from searching on Google. There is no real reason why search results page on Expedia should have the Google look and feel.

And that’s kind of Nielsen’s point - most commerce sites don’t really have a “search” function, they have a “find” function. Subtle difference. My favorite hotel reservation site Hotels.com elegantly circumvents this issue by labeling the button “Go!”, not “Search”. Like Nielsen says:

Given how ingrained it is, it’s crucial that you avoid invoking a user’s mental model of search for other interactions. Don’t use a “Search” button for parametric search. Although often useful, such searches don’t fit the design pattern for search. You should thus call them something else to avoid confusing users.

Nice post with a zest of humour from BJ Cook on corporate blogging, with a few references worth checking out. (”As Blogging Goes Corporate, So Does Your College Roommate“). BJ even gives a link to a PEW study with some cool stats.

My 2 cents: it’s too late to get into the blogsphere for corporate purposes. I can’t see any positive ROI at this point.

In the offline world, segmentation consists of dividing the market into groups based on variables such as age, gender, income, product preferences, etc. Such groups, or segments, are then analyzed separately using analytical tools.

In some ways, online segmentation is radically different. Online, there is a lot more information can be used to define segments: marketing campaign, landing page, path taken on the site, Repeat vs Return visitor, etc. This isn’t possible offline (in general) because most segmentation models are based on transactional data only. Some Web analytics professionals call this kind of segmentation “behavioral”. I’d rather call it online segmentation because it goes beyond behavior.

If you formalize online segmentation a little, you may arrive to a model that roughly divides your segmentation variables in 4 or 5 large buckets, for example:

- Site events: pages visited, entry/exit page, number of pages viewed, etc.
- User actions: add to cart, remove from cart, buy, etc.
- Marketing: Original campaign, landing page, etc.
- User attributes: age, gender, income, location, lifecycle stage (hot!), etc.
- Custom events: personalized onsite promotion, etc.

Over time you will realize one other large difference with offline segmentation. Lots of the segments you will analyze will be temporary segments you may never re-query, ever. “First time users from New York who access the site via the “Yankee Special” campaign and place a baseball bat into their cart” for example.

Some argue segmentation is only valuable on pre-defined segments and for a limited set of metrics. Non-sense! Sites, visitors, campaigns, business priorities are changing way too fast for pre-defined segments to be of any help.