Author Archive

Why do I need MAXAMINE?

January 29, 2008

OX2 provides, among other things, web site auditing services for our clients. We try to help them figure out what they really want to get out of their web site, especially when the answer isn’t quite so obvious as “increased online sales.” Sometimes it’s providing product information to prospective customers, then referring them to retail sales partners. Other times, it’s helping provide product support, such as downloads of product manuals or tutorial videos. And sometimes, it’s engaging readers by providing content, as on a site for a magazine or newspaper publisher.

One of the steps of our audit is to help make sure that their analytics tools are capturing everything they are expected to. But no matter how well-written the javascript code is, and how well the Rich Internet Applications are designed (RIA such as Flash, Flex, AIR, Ajax, and others), if you have a partner such as an advertising agency who is helping with the design and implementation of your site, then you have to have a good process in place to make sure that your analytics tagging is consistent and complete.

For many of our clients, great care is taken to ensure their primary site is well-maintained, but the process sometimes fails when multiple agencies help create sites for individual countries, or business units or divisions of the company, individual product lines, or even one-off campaigns, such as launching a new product and coordinating it with television, print, and other media vehicles.

When we explain why consistency and completeness are important to gathering metrics, so that business decisions can be made with the benefit of insight and interpretation from robust data, our clients are often ask us if we can help validate their data capture efforts.

This is when we are pleased that we have partnered with MAXAMINE to offer their tactical-level auditing solutions to complement our strategic-level process and design work.
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Accenture acquires Memetrics and MAXAMINE

January 29, 2008

Yesterday, we were pleased to see a couple emails from our friends over at MAXAMINE announcing their acquisition by consulting giant Accenture.

Debbie Pascoe, VP of Client Services for MAXAMINE, shared with me their formal statement, “We are excited about this tremendous opportunity, and believe it will ultimately expand our capacity to deliver compelling value to our customers and partners. Accenture Marketing Sciences shares our unwavering commitment to maximizing the value of digital investments and online operations, and can help us deliver on that promise within the broader context of overall marketing excellence.”
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Rubix from IndexTools

January 24, 2008

IndexTools LogoRecently, Dennis R. Mortensen, COO of IndexTools, shared with OX2 a sneak preview of Rubix 1, which is part of their new marketing optimization framework, and we were so impressed that we wanted to share with you (with Dennis’s permission) a little bit of what we learned.

Aurelie Pols, Julien Coquet, and I (“Wandering” Dave Rhee) all agree that one of IndexTools strong points is that, unlike the American market leaders, they do not feel compelled to re-invent everything with new terminology, and pretend that it is new. Instead, they quite happily take the best of every tool already available, listen closely to their customers about what their most important features are, and then focus on developing only the most valuable items to the business user.

For example, Jim Sterne and the eMetrics Marketing Optimization Summits have influenced everyone to think about web analytics as one part of a larger marketing optimization program. Our friends at Omniture have made clear their partnerships with other firms, and acquired many other players to be able to offer a wide spectrum of complementary products and services.

IndexTools (IT) continues this trend by branching out from their basic web analytics offering, comparable to Omniture’s SiteCatalyst. (The primary difference is that IT includes their data warehousing functionality for free, while Omniture offers their data warehouse as a separately-priced product.) IndexTools also includes their integration platform (which without any fuzz is called “External Data Sources”) in the base costs, while using Omniture’s Genesis platform typically incurs additional integration charges.
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Tracking web lift in retail cross-sales

October 29, 2007

I (“Wandering” Dave) moderate the Web Analytics Forum, and a few days ago, Tim M posted a question about cross-sell activities, and determining the effectiveness of some changes they recently made. In particular, he notes that, “The difficulty I’m finding is in determining the attributable growth in store sales overall to cross-sell.”

This is indeed a difficult problem that I seldom see addressed, so I wanted to note that there are a couple of ways to “buy” some measurements in situations like these. Of course, they are dependent on a few attributes of the product or service you’re selling, such as the average unit price. If you’re selling $1000 items, then you can probably afford a short 3-day coupon promotion where a web-printed coupon is brought into the store for a $25 discount. That will cost you $25 per response, but if you’re already doing something like a $20 discount promo, then it’s only an incremental $5 to collect some cross-sell data. Of course, if your average unit price is a $2.49 bottle of aspirin, you’ll need some other kind of incentive, like, “Print this coupon out and bring it in for a free buyer’s guide.”

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OMD Düsseldorf 2007

October 1, 2007

This year, attendance at OMD, the Online Marketing conference held in Düsseldorf, was expected to top last year’s 6000 attendees — but I think everyone was surprised by the 11.000 who registered!

And for much of Tuesday, it seemed as though they were all blocking the aisles between me at the next seminar I wanted to attend or booth I wanted to visit.

Naturally, the web analytics vendors were represented — Omniture, WebTrends, Nedstat, Visual Sciences — though they all had smaller booths since for them, it’s a “must be there to show your face” kind of event, not one where prospects really coming looking for you. Google had a huge presence, and at least one or two of the GA folks where at their booth, but you couldn’t find them among the 50(!) other Googlers who were wearing brightly-colored T-shirts and chatting with everyone who came by. (more…)

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Social Networks and Influence Analytics at the Web Analytics Day

September 16, 2007

Dave Rhee’s Influence Analytics for Social Networks presentation

“Wandering” Dave Rhee here – reporting on last Friday’s second Web Analytics Day organized in Brussels by OX2, for which I had the honor of delivering a presentation about one of my favorite subjects, Social Networks, and more specifically, analytics which can help determine the influence of individuals within those networks.

Overall, the day went really well, and not just because the venue was well-chosen and food and cocktails were great, but because we had a very large proportion of actual web analytics practitioners present, and just enough of a vendor presence to help answer the questions which inevitably arose. Although a few people had to leave in the afternoon, the vast majority chose to stay until the very end (a good success metric!), and even though the day was full of information, the attendees were so engaged that we usually ran out of time before running out of questions.

Microsoft’s worldwide first look at Gatineau was certainly a surprise highlight for most attendees, and emphasized how much Microsoft values its European audience for Web Analytics tools, as well as how highly regarded OX2 is in the global web analytics community.

Watch this space for video highlights of all the presentations, including Stephan Loerke’s opening keynote from the World Federation of Advertisers, and Eric T. Peterson’s usual brilliance in summarizing difficult concepts in a way that makes perfect sense to the rest of us. And of course, our own Aurélie Pols, whom you know from this blog, provided an overview of running a web analytics implementation project smoothly, given her extensive experience in helping OX2 Clients avoid common problems with their own sites.

I led off my own presentation in the afternoon with the worst slide of the day: a very dense table comparing several media, including press releases, surveys, blogs, audio and video podcasts, discussion message boards, social networks like Facebook or Myspace, and immersive environments like Second Life. The comparison attributes included style, “coolness factor,” ability to control your message, the value of feedback you can collect, the level of intimacy and trust possible, what resources are required to commit to creation and maintenance, the primary risk factors, and finally, the best use for that type of medium. (more…)

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