Where Marketers (Used to) Fear to Tread
During the height of the recent recession, marketing industry publications were lamenting the diminishing average tenure of the CMO. 22 months was about the time when someone in the hierarchy got tired of waiting for results. The lamentation was well-meaning: Marketing is under a great deal of pressure to create ROI immediately and this pressure results in hasty decisions, usually spurred by cost-cutting CFOs and CEOs. While 22 months might seem unfairly short, some marketers likely think of short stints as a blessing.
Why? Because they are scared to get the results of their marketing campaigns, some of which inevitably will be a failure.read more…
Event Tracking vs. Virtual Pageviews
Straightforward page-tracking can be easily performed using Google Analytics, but what happens when we want to track more complex activities, such as watching a video, clicking on an external link, or switching between tabs on a single-page application?
Such activity tracking can be performed using one of the following two methods:- Event Tracking: By treating activities as events you can call _trackEvent every time your visitors perform something on your site that you want to track. Each event holds three basic attributes: category, action and label, which help you organize and manipulate the data collected by Google Analytics.
- Virtual Pageviews: Using _trackPageview, you can send Google Analytics a pageview for each of the activities you want to capture. For example, if you want to track how many times your visitors watch a movie, you can capture the “Play” click and call _trackPageview every time a visitor clicks on it.
Until a while ago, it was inadvisable to choose event tracking, as goals could not be defined based on events. GA, luckily, amended this problem in one of its recent versions, so both methods can now be used to track activity, and can be compared.
In this post I will summarize the pros and cons of each method, as I see it.read more…
Intlock Hackathon
Last week we had our first hackathon. We took the entire company – Product and Development Teams – to the desert for a two-and-a-half day coding session. Except for a few team members who couldn’t join us (mainly from our Boston office), almost all the Intlock technology guys were in one place – for the first time in a very long time. And without phones, emails, business sessions, conferences or any other distraction. It was just us for 50 hours straight – talking, designing, debugging and coding our marketing suite (with some breaks now and again to recharge our batteries).
Let me begin by telling you about where we stayed. The good news is local residents don’t pay taxes (our accountant is already working on relocation packages…). The bad news is there is absolutely nothing to do there. Especially for city people like myself. For those who like hiking and don’t mind the cold, we offered early-morning meditation sessions and sunrise trips between 5 and 6 am, to see nature at its best. It was, however, so cold (desert cold) that most people just stayed put the entire time. (I have a hunch our CEO “fixed” the heating in our rooms so that the only warm place would be the hackathon hall.)
So with about 35 hours of coding, plus 20 espresso shots per person, we really accomplished some amazing achievements.
Right from the start we knew exactly what we wanted to achieve. From what I had read on the Internet prior to the hackathon, it seemed that most other companies don’t actually have a clear agenda or specific goals for their hackathons. But we did:
- Close as many bugs and tasks as possible – preferably those that require more than one person.
- Bring new employees up to speed and introduce them to other employees and their line of work.
- Initiate new projects and ideas that have been waiting for a long, long time.
We had spent hours preparing the technical agenda in such a way that people will not have to wait for others to finish their present task. Not an easy task when you have 100 tasks, 2-3 people on each task, etc. We were sure we had everything carefully planned, but reality has a way of intruding on even the best laid plans: On the morning of the hackathon one of our key people woke up with a fever and was unable to join us.
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Cooperation will soon trump any other concept in the world of business. An evolutionary step beyond collaboration, cooperation will be the pivotal concept in how sustainable societies, corporations, and organizations are structured. Whereas collaboration connotes people working with each other, cooperation connotes people working with and for each other.
While some market theorists believe in the value of competition over cooperation, an increasing number of scholars (Kohn, Sennett, Axelrod, Benkler) argue that there is nothing “natural” about the competitive state, that, in fact, a cooperative state can benefit both the individual and the collective.
In order to reach a state of cooperation, there are 3 things that have to be done:
- A framework of commonality has to be articulated.
- A philosophical agreement has to be created.
- Tools for cooperation have to be built.
Point three draws me to Intlock. Formerly antagonistic departments (Marketing and IT, Sales and Marketing, Sales and IT) are brought together in common cause, connected by the threads of shared goals and a common technology framework. Intlock’s solutions drive clear cooperation and therefore can confer comparative advantage to customers who buy, deploy, and use them.
Cooperation is the paradigm for the future. Enable yourself now by shifting your mindset. Use tools like those that Intlock provides to find your way to cooperation.
Some years ago, I wrote a piece arguing that IT Professionals and marketers have much more in common than is typically thought. In the popular conception, IT and marketing are cordoned off from each other, each group having a different lexicon and a different culture. This conception holds also that marketing and IT are in conflict with each other, marketing being a risk-taking organization and IT being the voice of constraint.
I continue to reject this notion. As marketing “digitizes” it is powered increasingly through IT. As IT gets a seat at the table, it utilizes the discipline of marketing to “sell itself” into higher levels of decision-making. Both are bound by a cost-cutting corporate philosophy and both innovate constantly to do more with less.read more…
Summary: Unbounce and Visual Website Optimizer are both good candidates for a Testing platform. Each covers different aspects and has its pros and cons. In this post I will compare the two and explain why in my opinion, using both of them together is probably the best solution available out there at the moment.
Theoretically, I would have liked this post to be solely about the differences between Unbounce and Visual Website Optimizer (VWO) as testing platforms. However, they really are too different to be compared, as each tool addresses different aspects. That is why this post actually describes the synergy of using the two tools together. Let me explain. I have been using AB and MVT tools for a long time. I first began with Google Website Optimizer, and managed to work with it for quite some time – providing I had a technical person to help me at all times. The fact that my technical person had to add a code to each and every page that I wanted to test was a pretty big downer, but I managed to live with it for few years. Few months ago I was asked to implement a testing platform for a client, who wanted me to come up with both the tool and the methodology. This client had only one requirement – to be able to define and deploy tests without the involvement of a technical team. As this automatically disqualified Google Website Optimizer, I had to look for a different solution. I had previously tried using both Visual Website Optimizer and Unbounce, but was not thrilled with either of them, due to the concept of a WYSIWYG editor, where the marketer could edit the page. At that time, I was concerned that the editor would not work properly with complex pages that had a JavaScript manipulation. In addition, the editor at that time was a bit shaky, and in many cases we could not achieve what we wanted without first having a JavaScript/HTML guru change the page layout and logic. Following my client’s request, though, I decided to re-examine these tools. It turned out that over the past two years both tools had progressed immensely – so much so that today, these are the only two tools I would consider using for my testing platform – together. In order to be able to use them together successfully, let me explain about each of the tools. First things first. When using Unbounce, you have to first create the page that you want to test, whereas with Visual Website Optimizer you create a test for the existing page that you wish to test. This difference between the two tools has a huge impact on creating and managing tests, including who is involved and what kind of traffic can be included.Types of Experiments – AB and MVT
Secondly, while VWO supports AB, MVT and split tests, Unbounce only supports AB tests. If you want to run a multi-variant experiment, Unbounce’s recommendation is to use the Visual Website Optimizer. This is rather odd, as Unbounce is supposed to be a holistic solution for landing pages – if I understand things correctly. Maybe they’re still trying to decide whether or not to add MVT to their solution, so in the meantime they have created an alliance with VWO, in order to provide this.
Unbounce has other partners and integrations, including KISSinsights, Wufoo, and MailChimp, which does make sense, as I don’t expect Unbounce to provide a survey tool. What I don’t understand is why Unbounce does not support MVT itself. MVT is, after all, a core aspect of the optimization phase – which is part of the Unbounce slogan: “Create, Publish and Optimize Landing Pages”, which appears on their homepage. The problem is that it is really an option to use Unbounce’s AB and VWO’s MVT – as Unbounce suggests. It’s much too complicated – especially when you can just use VWO for both.read more…
In the past, choosing a web analytic tool or service was simple as there were very few vendors. Today, however, there are literally hundreds of services and tools available, costing the customer anywhere between zero and tens of thousands of dollars each year. After focusing on vendors in my two previous posts, I would now like to focus on the customers, and the decisions they have to face when choosing a Web Analytic Suite.
From the customer’s perspective – Web Analyst or Marketer – having such a huge variety of tools and services to choose from makes their mission almost impossible. Let’s say, for example, that we want to test and optimize Landing Pages. We can choose between Optimizly, Unbounce, Visual Website Optimizer, Monetate, LiveBall, Reedge, or any number of other tools. If that’s not enough, we can choose a free solution, such as Google Website Optimizer, or download an open-source project such as Genetify. We even have the option of choosing an all-in-one package such as Unica or Omniture. Each tool has its own architecture and advantages, and of course, its own limitations. Some are on-premise solutions while others are cloud based. Some require technical involvement for the set up period and then for each and every test we wish to run. Others require the mapping of a dedicated subdomain and then host the landing pages externally – or on-site, depending on the tool. Confusing? I agree. And that’s just for testing and optimizing Landing Pages. Imagine what happens when we have to choose a complete web analytic package. There are two ways of choosing a complete web analytic package. One approach is to choose the best tools available (AKA Best of Breed), while the other approach is to purchase an all-in-one suite (AKA an All-in-One Solution), which contains all or most of the tools needed. If you choose to create a Best of Breed package, there are numerous issues that need to be addressed. The first thing is the importance of having a JavaScript Guru. I addressed this matter in an earlier post, in which I talked about my personal selection of tools – which includes Visual Website Optimizer, KISSinsight, Google Analytics and others. However, although having a JavaScript guru who can implement and integrate the chosen tools is a necessary condition, it is insufficient, as unfortunately there are many additional obstacles along the way:Discrepancies
The most common question asked by my clients relates to discrepancies between different tools. Although there are many reasons for discrepancies, one thing I can say with great certainty is that in most cases, the problem is not a technical one (although that is the first thing we tend to check).
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In my previous post I described the changes that the Web Analytics Industry has seen over the past 6 years (more or less). From there being very few vendors, we have now reached a point where for each segment there are literally dozens of companies offering their services. In addition, huge changes have occurred in the way software and service providers – as well as the authorities – treat User Privacy, which is drastically affecting our market landscape, and will continue to do so over the next few months and years.
Google Analytics has been undergoing massive developments over the past few years. They have been launching new features on a monthly basis (such as Cross Channels, Real Time, Visualization Flows, Advanced Segmentation, Customized Reports, and many more). At the same time, companies such as IBM, WebTrends and Hubspot have expanded their offered services by acquiring companies such as Performable and Reinvigorate. So on the one hand, the “rich get richer” (feature-wise), while on the other hand there are more and more one-feature companies. There are now dozens of web analytic reporting tools, at least ten different visitor recording tools, Real Time analytic tools and more than 20 different testing platforms. I have a list of around 200 different companies that provide at least one web analytic service, and I am sure the complete list is actually longer. I’m not saying that niche companies don’t have real value. Quite the opposite, in fact. Most of them have an advantage, especially over the monsters’ tools. For example, I don’t think Google Analytics’ Real Time feature is even close in what it offers to what you can get from GoSquared of ChartBeat, but once GA released its Real Time analytics, the chances of a customer looking for a different Real Time analytic solution is extremely low. That is why, as time goes by, and as Google Analytics expands its arsenal, niche companies are becoming more and more redundant – at least for most potential customers.read more…
The real evolution of the Web Analytics Industry, in my opinion, began when Urchin was acquired by Google back in 2005. In reality, web analytic tools already existed prior to this event, and Urchin was not the first company to use a JavaScript agent. However, what made their solution unique was that (a) they were acquired by Google and soon became a standard solution for most sites, and (b) their JavaScript agent was more than just a pixel request sent to the server.
Over the past few years, we have literally seen hundreds of companies that provide all kinds of segmented web analytic capabilities. From a small industry with very few solutions and with almost no successful M&A or investments, this industry suddenly became fertile ground for hundreds of solutions and services. All the industry’s “monsters” (i.e., Unica, CoreMetrics, Omniture, etc.) have since been acquired, and dozens of start-up investments and acquisitions are performed each year. To date, 99% of the services use the same “old” technique that Urchin used in 2005. Thanks to JavaScript, and mainly due to the privacy ignorance of the users, the software providers and the authorities, it is possible to obtain services that can tell you almost everything there is to know about your users. This includes anything from something as trivial as pages that the user visited on your site, to invasive things such as other sites the visitor visited earlier, sentences the visitor copied to his/her clipboard, and every key stroke and mouse movement that the visitor performed on your site. However, it seems that we are now looking at the beginning of a strange phase in the Web Analytics Industry: From almost zero privacy we are moving towards almost zero transparency. From being able to track almost everything about the user, you will soon have to once again rely on the IP and other server-side techniques, in order to identify the user. And you will have to ask your visitors to opt-in, in order to be able to track their activity.read more…
The meteoric rise of Microsoft’s SharePoint platform is the stuff of software history. From its foundation about a decade ago to a multi-billion dollar business with a vast and growing ecosystem, SharePoint is a powerful platform for collaboration, content management, and Digital Marketing, both inside and outside the firewall.
As with all Microsoft products, SharePoint is a generalized platform that offers tremendous opportunities for partners to add value upon. Whether they bring specific industry knowledge, deep domain expertise, or appreciation of a specific audience-based application, Microsoft partners take the product the ‘last mile’, into the customer and the specific scenario that solves the customer’s business pain. Intlock, a strong ISV for Microsoft, is a great example of this phenomenon at work. In a nutshell, Intlock’s Marketing Suite is an easy-to-use, scalable solution that extends into the realm of today’s Digital Marketing Executive, making SharePoint relevant and efficacious for folks in an entirely new realm of endeavor. In one fell swoop, Intlock’s solution has liberated SharePoint from the exclusive realm of IT and has helped spawn a dynamic and growing business for Microsoft as it looks to play an active role in the world of Digital Marketing. I encourage everyone to take Intlock’s solution for a test-run. As a Marketer, I got a “Hallelujah” moment when I saw it in action. I’m a betting man and I’m willing to put money on the fact that you will too!