The team of @MailerMailer has released their tenth email marketing metrics report, providing a variety of industry benchmarks, both in aggregate and specific to several different sectors and three different list sizes. The sample size for the data used to create this report is over 900 million email messages. This is a subset of the messages sent through MailerMailer between January 1 and December 31, 2009.
MailerMailer ” The benchmarks provided here are not intended as a measure of success or failure. The ultimate metrics are those that speak to the bottom line – primarily return on investment.” A campaign that generates revenue in excess of its cost is successful, no matter what the open and click rates are. And a campaign that exceeds industry benchmark open and click rates but doesn’t cover its own costs is not successful.
It’s common knowledge for some time now that online analytics can be a valuable asset for a company. However, it’s value frequently diminishes amidst the web of tools and optimization strategies available. And that’s exactly why These Days will be hosting a workshop the 23rd of March in Antwerp and the 25th of March in Amsterdam , focusing on online analytics from a managerial perspective.
International speaker Stéphane Hamel will be leading the workshop. As a board member of the Web Analytics Association and developer of the widely-respected WASP analytics tool, he’s the perfect person to give you an insightful overview of the different online analytics goals as seen from a business, marketing or web manager’s perspective.
This workshop will go through an assessment of your online analytics goals and objectives from a business, marketing and web executive’s point of view. You will learn about the critical success factors and the process that will enable you to plan for future advancement.
Specifically:
A method to do a strategic evaluation of your current and desired situation
How to leverage the six critical process areas of a successful data driven organization
Tips & tricks to define realistic objectives aligned with your business… how to measure & achieve them!
How to determine the resources and investment required to advance to the next level
How to communicate effectively, be a change agent and overcome internal political storms
Several real-life examples, failures & successes.
Knowledge on web analytics or available solutions is not required; the programme is first and foremost aimed at directors, marketing managers, E-commerce managers… in fact, anyone who has an interest in online strategies and ROI.
All further details on the program, entry fee and online registration can be found on http://wamm.thesedays.com
This article gives a short introduction to a very important element of today’s online production rules: renderability.
Renderability is the keyword to all adaptations to optimize how your message is displayed on a device connected to the web. The way your messages arrive at your target group is essential in customer conversion. Call to actions in your emails should be clear in five seconds, landing pages should guide you through the sales funnel and even mobile readers should be able to scan your message immediately.
All this depends on copy, design, personalization and usability, which are the bricks of renderability.
Are your emails optimized to your target group?
The email client market is split up in web-based solutions (Hotmail, Gmail, Yahoo, …) and desktop-based solutions (MS Outlook, Lotus Notes, Entourage, …). All solutions have their own specific rules, and functionalities, challenging content designers to optimize for each one of them. Even different software versions make a huge difference on production rules, e.g. MS Outlook 2003 and 2007.
Marketers complain on how they should test and optimize for these +20 available email clients, taking an awful lot of time. One free tip: check your target group! Track your target group settings and user insights, to define which clients are commonly used, and optimize your message to that software. Luckily many tools are available on the web to test to the email client you want to focus on.
Web browsers fight each other
The browser market is splitting too, as Microsoft’s Internet Explorer keeps on losing market shares, taken over by Firefox adepts and the upcoming high speed and secured Google’s browser Chrome. Again browser testing remains essential in today’s website development process.
Watch out: mobile devices coming up!
A third party in this story is an interesting one. Try to find one trend report that does not contain a mobile-topic, you will not find any. Mobile is hot, but brings in a completely different website and email experience. All sites and emails should be optimized to all, of course many different, operating systems, screen sizes and interfaces.
Is the content of this article valuable for you? Our next post will be all about tips and tricks on how to optimize your message for mobile email, so stay tuned!
As technology advances, mobile devices are playing a bigger role in our lives. Thousands of you are already using iPhone, Blackberry or Nokia Smartphones to browse the web, track email or use mobile App’s.
As of today, ActiveMetrics.be will be automatically displayed when accessed with a compatible mobile phone.
Phones with a modern web browser like those on the iPhone and Android will get easy access to posts, pages, archives and experience fancy AJAX commenting and post loading. All other mobile devices will get a stripped down version, but still with a great reading experience.
We hope that this will even more increase your engagement, so please check it out and enjoy!
As an authorized Google Analytics Consultant (GAAC) we were invited at the GooglePlex in Mountain View (CA) to preview the brand new features, but we had to keep our lips sealed under NDA.
By all means it was worth it and today Avinash Kaushik presented them at eMetrics Washington DC. Below are some of my favorite features:
Analytics Intelligence and Custom Alerts
The most exciting of these new features is a set of reports called “Analytics Intelligence”.
The “intelligence” provides automatic alerts of significant changes in the data patterns of your site metrics and dimensions over daily, weekly and monthly periods. Resulting in less time spend monitoring manually and more time to do things useful things.
However, don’t expect the tool to do your analysis! The tool doesn’t know your business as you, or your consultants, do. There is still much need for ‘human’ intelligence and analytical skilss.
Expanded Mobile Reporting
You can now track mobile websites and mobile apps to better measure your mobile marketing efforts. If you’re optimizing content for mobile users and have created a mobile website, Google Analytics can track traffic to your mobile website from all web-enabled devices, whether or not the device runs JavaScript.
And coming soon, you’ll be able to see breakout data on mobile devices and carriers in the new Mobile reports in the Visitors section!
Expanded Goals & Site Engagement Goals
Google Analytics offers two new goal types – time on site and pages per visit – to enhance functionality. Additionally, you can now have up to 20 goals in each profile. Yes!
BUT! The danger here is that you will lose your focus, and start defining goals for ‘less useful’ events. We always advice our clients to focus on 3 KPIs, and optimize and analyze the conversion paths (on site and other channels) based on these figures. Trust us, you need to focus!
Multiple Custom Variables
You can now segment different variables at the page, session, and visitor-level. Previously, you were limited to one custom variable/segment. With this feature, users can classify any number of interactions on the site into trackable segments. For example you can now define and track visitors according to visitor attributes (e.g. member vs. non-member), session attributes (e.g. logged-in or not), and by page-level attributes (e.g. viewed Sports section).
We especially celebrate this enhancement! We really had a clear need for extra parameters especially to create new visitor segments. This will also allow you to create drill-down reports based on this extra parameters. We’ll publish some fine examples on this blog later on.
Website Optimizer – Over time charts
With over time charts you can see the cumulative conversion rate of each combination over the life of an experiment. This can give you a better understanding of how your site is performing. The new charts are available for all Website Optimizer experiments, and you’ll find them on the reports page.
In addition, Google will also luanch an API for the Google Website Optimizer, which will allow you to integrate the tagging (without touching your website code) and the data into your CMS in order to create a ‘more or less’ automated platform.
More features also means more data to investigate, more questions and more reporting capabilities. As an authorized Google Partner, These Days offers Google consulting services to help you properly configure, analyze and optimize your visitors online measurement to deliver insights that help you to increase conversions, page views, and revenue.
And to finish a small quote by Avinash ”HITS: How Idiots Track Success”.
Interesting read by Nick Moore who’s our Chief creative officer at Wunderman, and I quote:
“Remind me,” said the surgeon as the patient slipped under the anesthetic. “Which hand are we operating on today?”
“Hand?” replied the patient, fading fast. “It’s not my hand. It’s my…” That’s not much of a joke. We want surgeons to know how to conduct an operation, just as we want airline pilots to know their routes and lawyers to be on top of the facts of their cases.
And advertising people? Is it different for us? Shouldn’t we be basing our creativity on the facts, or data? You know, the customer purchasing patterns sitting in our clients’ databases, the lists of search questions pouring out of Google and Bing and the real-time insights uncovered by online listening platforms.
Apparently we do think it’s different for us. Too often, we continue to base our creative decisions on the flimsiest of focus group data. And we seem to take a perverse delight in the separation of data and creativity in both client and agency organizations.
“I find this bizarre”, says Nick.
Do you think this is bizarre too? How do you balance between data insights and creativity? Feel free to share comments below.
The network includes 48 partners across the globe, each independent web analytics specialists who have proven their expertise in online conversion through actionable analysis, and the deployment of Yahoo! Web Analytics in particular.
On Sept. 15, 2009, Adobe Systems Incorporated (Nasdaq: ADBE) and Omniture, Inc. (Nasdaq: OMTR) announced the two companies have entered into a definitive agreement for Adobe to acquire Omniture in a transaction valued at approximately $1.8 billion on a fully diluted equity-value basis. Under the terms of the agreement, Adobe will commence a tender offer to acquire all of the outstanding common stock of Omniture for $21.50 per share in cash.
Hardly anyone in the analytics world saw this one coming! Although the speculations about about major online and database players such as Microsoft, IBM, Oracle (who acquired MoniForce in the mean time), … entering the web analytics market via an acquisition of a current vendor have been around for a few months now, I didn’t think it was going to be Omniture that would be acquired, and definitely nobody thought about Adobe as a possible player.
Omniture has been acquiring heavily the last few years (Instadia, WebsideStory, Mercado, Offermatica, …) and seemed really to be moving towards 1 ‘full-service’ integrated marketing platform. That was their goal, and promise towards clients and partners, but when Adobe puts $1.8bn (= 1.23bn €) on the table, I guess Josh James, founder and CEO, forgot quite quickly about that objective. But ok, this acquisition doesn’t necessarily mean that they can’t and won’t still move towards 1 enterprise platform.
Web Analytics is gaining importance and ROI is probably the most used word during the current recession. So if you really think about it, Adobe‘s move is not that strange. The time for ‘creativity only’ is behind us, it’s about efficiency and conversion nowadays. With the current merge the developers and creative content builders will now have the opportunity to measure and optimize their creations, or at least they won’t have an excuse anymore to neglect measurement and optimization. This is more or less what we could conclude from the graph below:
In addition, there is a major increase of flash/flex/air desktop and web applications. Some people think that these applications will push pure html out of the picture within 5 years , so based on that assumption I understand Adobe‘s interest in measurement and web analytics. (by the way, our Production Director completely dis-agrees with the html-disappearance thesis, and probably he is right if you take a look at the recent HTML5 development)
So what does this mean for the web analytics market? What can we expect, feature-wise, from this merge ?
Less and less independant web analytics vendors, but I guess the Omniture solutions will still be positioned and sold as stand-alone tools or integrated optimization platform.
Web analytics is still a marketing tool so the website production team will need some education
Easier measurement implementation for rich internet application and flex/flash, but hopefully this will also mean an easier implementation process for non-RIA
Omniture can further develop its video and streaming measurement
Not much at this stage. It’s clear that the interest in and the importance of web analytics keeps on growing. For the real impact of this acquisition for Omniture, Adobe and the whole web analytics industry , we’ll need to wait a bit longer. But it’s clear that this industry keeps on moving, and is more fascinating than ever before. I’m curious what’ll be next…
Useful readings
Definitely read following reactions on the acquisition:
We’re looking for an experienced ninja to strenghten our analytics & optimization team at These Days!
If you’re interested in a new challenge, want to work from our Antwerp or Amsterdam office in an inspiring environment, want to serve clients such as Telenet, Pioneer Europe, Microsoft, Citibank, Nokia, and many more major brands, … and have at least 2 year experience with the Omniture platform and especially with SiteCatalyst, you are the man or woman we might be looking for!
On August 4th 2009, Webtrends Analytics 9 was released. No major historical news, but I thought it was a good reason to write down my personal thoughts about one of the leading web analytics vendor in the market.
My first experiences with Webtrends already go back about 6 years. I’ve always been on the consultancy side in web analytics, having done and still doing business development, implementation, analysis and optimization, and trainings. I am a Webtrends Certified Consultant and Authorized Trainer since 5 years, so I think I know Webtrends and its solutions pretty well. But my relationship with Webtrends has been one with ups and downs from the start. Nevertheless I must admit that I am totally loving the new spirit that seems to live within the company since Alex Yoder and Jascha Kaykas-Wolff have taken over the ship.
A small recap of the last 6 years, from version 6 up until 9:
The network includes 48 partners across the globe, each independent web analytics specialists who have proven their expertise in online conversion through actionable analysis, and the deployment of 
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