I will be joined by two very intelligent and highly respected personalities in web analytics and interactive marketing space, Gary Angel of Sephonic and Akin Arikan of Unica.
Gary Angles co-founded Semphonic and is president and chief technology officer. He’s responsible for leading Semphonic’s development of Web analytics and SEM decision making tools for web marketing professionals. Read Gary’s blog at http://semphonic.blogs.com.
” 5 Do’s and Don’ts for Behavioral Segmentation, Targeting, & Interactive Marketing” The saw to a carpenter is as vital as segmentation is to a web analyst. Without segmentation, reporting can hardly be called analytics. Behavioral segmentation lays the groundwork for behavioral targeting which automates the process of turning insights into action. Using both behavioral segmentation and automated targeting, the online marketer can truly begin to be interactive – driving a timely dialog between the customer and company which build on the individuals past and current online behaviors. Please join me, Gary and Akin on December 4th at 12:00 Noon EST.
I am heading off to D.C. tomorrow morning to attend eMetrics. eMetrics Marketing Optimization Summit is the a premier conference for Online Marketers and Web Analysts. It is a great place to learn from and network with online professionals from around the world.
Behavioral Targeting is a topic that I cover extensively on this blog and have spoken on at past eMetrics. In this session I will talk about the benefits of BT to consumers, publishers (site owners) and advertisers. I will show what vendors are available to help with different types of BT and review various aspects of BT, from the available technologies to the tried and true techniques to the preponderance of privacy pains. I will also present 5 step process to successful Behavioral Targeting and is not just limited to online advertising but also how these techniques can be used for onsite advertising and content and product targeting as a part of onsite campaign and email marketing.
If you are going to attending eMetrics, I would love to meet with you. Look for me there or drop me an email (batraonline at gmail.com) with your phone number.
Here is a partial list of other presenters at this conference (I took it straight from Jim Sterne’s email) Gray Angel, Tim Ash, Douglas Brooks, Jason Burby, Joseph Carrabis, Terry Cohen, Matt Cutler, Justin Cutroni, Bryan Eisenberg, Vanessa Fox, Bill Gassman, Andrew Goodman, Rob Graham, Ann Green, Mike Grehan, Stephane Hamel, Alex Langshur, Pat LaPointe, John Lovett, Neil Mason, Jodi McDermott, Liz Miller, David Millrod, Angel Morales, Jim Novo, Bob Page, Katie Delahaye Paine, Todd Parsons, Laura Patterson, Eric Peterson, Michael Stebbins, Robbin Steif, Pat Stroh, Jennifer Veesenmeyer.
In early days of ZeroDash1, I started a tradition of sending out an email titled “Whereabouts” to let everybody else in the company know where we are going to be. With small size and flexibility to work from home, client site etc. made it difficult for people to know where others were and this email was a way for us to notify other team member about their whereabouts (it was our version of Twitter).
Well anyway, I have not written a blog post in pat 2 weeks so I think I owe you all an explanation of what happened and my whereabouts.
New addition to the family
We had a baby boy on September 3rd, his name is Neel. We were mostly busy with shopping for him before birth and then getting used his eating, sleeping and pooping patterns. Life has been hectic. At times it feel painful to get up in 2-4 times in the night when he starts crying, but as soon as we look at his innocent face all the pain goes away and he becomes our top priority. Finally I think (and people warn me that I am wrong) we have figured out his pattern and I will be back to my normal working schedule.
Internet Marketing Conference
Yesterday I made a day trip to Vancouver, Canada to speak at Internet Marketing Conference. The topic of my session was “Monitoring Website Performance”. In this session, I discussed what Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) are, how they’re defined, what the difference between a KPI and a metric is (web analytics tool provide you lot of metrics, not all of them are KPIs), and how to effectively present KPIs.
I attended eMetrics on May 4th and 5th. On May 4th, I taught a full day class on Web Analytics for Site Optimization. This class was a part of the WAA base camp series. This class showed the tricks, tools and techniques needed to improve the websites, increase engagement and improve conversion rates. Some of the topics that were discussed in this class were
Building a measurable site
Designing for navigation vs. conversions
Improving online persuasion
KPIs for ecommerce, content sites, and intranets
Understanding visitor behavior
A/B & multivariate testing
Using advanced metrics such as frequency, recency and latency to increase customer engagement and conversions.
Next day I took the topic of optimization to next step and talked about Behavioral Targeting and how you can use it to increase your online marketing ROI. The topics I covered in my presentations
What is Behavioral Targeting?
How does it work?
What Determines Behavior?
What can you target?
Why should we use it?
Description and examples of Network and Site-Side Targeting
5 Step Process for you to successful Behavioral Targeting
ROI Model – Is BT for you?
Privacy Issue surrounding BT, results from a survey on privacy and a 5 step process to ensure you don’t run into privacy issues
It is clear that the interest in this topic is increasing. It was evident by the use of this term in several other presentations at the conference and the attendance in my session.
If you missed this presentation and are interested in learning about Behavioral Targeting email me. If you attended the session, I would love to hear your comments and questions.
I wish I could have stayed for the all 4 days of the conference but I had to come back to Seattle to take my US citizenship exam. I am happy to announce that I have I successfully completed the citizenship exam.
This workshop will give you the tricks, tools and techniques needed to improve navigation, increase engagement and improve conversion rates.
Building a measurable site
Designing for navigation vs. conversion
Improving online persuasion
KPIs for ecommerce, content sites, and intranets
Understanding visitor behavior
A/B & multivariate testing
On May 5th I will be speaking at emetrics. My topic is “Behavioral Targeting Across Ad Networks and on Your Site“. My session will cover the benefits of BT to consumers, publishers (site owners) and advertisers. I will show what vendors are available to help with different types of BT and review various aspects of BT, from the available technologies to the tried and true techniques to the preponderance of privacy pains. Finally I will walk you through a 5 step process to successful Behavioral Targeting and it is not just limited to online advertising but also how these techniques can be used for onsite advertising and content and product targeting as a part of onsite campaign.
If you are going to be at eMetric, email me so that we can get together. I will arrive on Saturday evening. See you in San Francisco.
Behavioral Targeting (BT), as I predicted earlier this year, has become very common term among marketers. Look at any online marketing events and you will see more than one session on Behavioral Targeting. This was also evident at eMetrics in Washington DC, where a full track was devoted to Optimization and Behavioral Targeting and several other speakers, not in this track, also talked included Behavioral Targeting in their presentations.
In my presentation, I gave an overview of behavioral targeting, what it is, why should marketers get involved with it, the difference between On-Site and Network targeting, who the players are in the market for each type of targeting and also talked about the privacy issues surrounding Behavioral Targeting. I gave several examples showing how business can benefit from Behavioral Targeting. I also outlined a process that you need to follow if you decide to engage in Behavioral Targeting. This is one of the main things that I wanted my audience to take away from this presentation. This process is an outcome of conversations with several customers who have engaged in Behavioral Targeting. To make my point, I cited an example of customer who engaged in Behavioral Targeting network. After running BT ads on one of the leading BT networks, they called me complaining that they were not seeing the value in Behavioral Targeting. After few minutes of conversation it became clear to me that they did not have a proper process in place, they did not fully understand how BT worked and what to expect (one of the reasons of why BT did not work is cited in my previous post titled Size of Your Segment and Network Reach Matters in Behavioral Ad Targeting). Result? A lot of effort, time and money was wasted. So, if you are planning on getting involved with Behavioral Targeting make sure you have a proper process in place (I will outline our process in a future post). (Note: If you were, are or planning to use Behavioral Targeting I would like to talk to you, please contact me at batraonline at gmail.com)
At the end, I showed how on-site Behavioral Targeting can be accomplished without using any third party Behavioral Targeting tools. You can use any Web Analytics tool including Google Analytics, persistent cookies and some coding to get Behavioral Targeting going on your site. This is a great way to try on-site Behavioral Targeting before spending money on third party tools.
If you missed the presentation, don’t worry you will have more chances to hear it in near future. In November I will be doing a free Behavioral Targeting seminar in Seattle so if you are in Seattle area I would love to meet with you there. The final date of the seminar will be posted on this blog and also at ZeroDash1 events page. If you would like to schedule one in your city, email me at batraonline at gmail.com
As the name suggest the theme of the conference was visitor engagement. I had a privilege to be on a panel with Gary Angel, Andy Beal, Manoj Jasra, Jim Novo and Jim Sterne. All of us, except Andy Beal, came from Web Analytics background and were in agreement that Engagement was not an excuse, it is a metrics. Andy Beal brought some interesting points about how we should look at engagement not from just web point of view (which was mostly the focus of this conference) but should take other channel e.g. offline into consideration when measuring customer engagement.
360 degree view of the customers
Remember the Predictions I made in January of this year? (Yes they have all come true, 100% on the mark; I just have to do a follow-up post). I wrote “Web Analytics won’t be standing alone – Marketers will want 360 view of the customers.”. Guess what? 360 view of customer was another of the subject that was discussed in this conference. Another validation of my predictions.
WebTrends Gone Wild!!!
On Tuesday evening, WebTrends threw a great party at the Palms hotel. The view of Vegas strip from the club was excellent, great choice of venue. It was interesting to see these web analytics folks “engaged” in dancing, free drinks and with each other.
New Products from WebTrends
I was very impressed with Visitor Intelligence and WebTrends Score. I have to say Visitor Intelligence is a great tools for doing advanced segmentation. A very easy to use interface, just drag and drop dimensions and measures and build your segments. It also has the ability to exports the cookie ids so you can take action on your segments, yes I am talking about targeting (behavioral targeting in particular). Visitor Score allows you to score visitors engagement with the sites, product, attribute scores to various actions that a visitors takes on the site. Visitors Scores will allow you to measure visitor/customer engagement with a very simple interface. However the challenge most of the business will face it to determine what score to assign to which activities (and this is where I can help you). As I wrote last week, If defined properly (that’s the key) engagement metrics can be good measure of past and predictor of future. Here is tool which can help you in defining engagement. Also, score provides a way to segment your users and then do on-site Behavioral Targeting. According to my friend Jacques Warren “Score will need to run on Visitor Intelligence, which will in turn need to run on Marketing Warehouse. This means that you will need to get new money to pay for them, whatever you have spent on the regular product.”
My New Prediction WebTrends is on the right track with their new products and you will see them giving Omniture run for their money. Omniture get ready for some stiff competition. The more I think the more convinced I get that Webtrends is making the right moves. Howvere WebTrends has to make some more moves to get these products adopted by the market. I have my opinions on how Webtrends can make these products a success, and I already talked to them about it. Thank you for listening, I hope you will also act on what I said. If you are from Webtrends and want to listen to those again I would love to talk with you(Note: I will be at eMetrics next week). I have talked to several people about my concerns and they all agreed, so this is not just me.
What’s Next for me I have a lot to write, two main ones are
A follow-up post on my Predictions
My view of the future and how cookie deletion won’t matter, yes, you will have to wait for it. I have discussed my views with two fellow bloggers and they have promised not to reveal it.
Next week, I am going to eMetrics, where I will be speaking about Behavioral Targeting Then I am off to India for a week.
Next week I will be in Las Vegas on 8, 9 and 10. No, I am not going to gamble (well maybe a little) but I will be there to attend WebTrends Engage 2007 conference. This is another great web analytics conference. I highly recommend this conference even if you are not a WebTrends customer, as it will allow you to see what WebTrends can do for your business. This conference will provide you an opportunity to learn from current WebTrends customers and other experts in the field.
I was a speaker at the last conference in Orlando. This year I will be on a customer engagement panel with elite group of web analytics and online marketing gurus. The panel on consumer engagement will include the following • Gary Angel, SEMphonic • Anil Batra, ZeroDash1 (Me) • Andy Beal, Marketing Pilgrim • Manoj Jasra, Enquiro Search Solutions • Jim Novo, The Drilling Down Project • Jim Sterne, Web Analytics Association and Emetrics
Some of the speakers at the conference are
Paul Wilmington, Naked Communications Julian Brewer, Barclays Bank Kevin Doohan, ConAgra Loran Gutt, ShopNBC
I will arrive there on 8th evening; I would love to meet with readers of this blog, so if you are going to be there email me at batraonline at gmail.com.
I am back from from XChange, a conference organized by Semphoic in Napa last Thursday and Friday. The Conference consisted of many small discussion groups (“Huddles”) hosted by facilitator experts in specific topic areas. I felt that this was a great way to have all the attendees participate in the conversation. In most of the conferences it is usually one way communication (speaker to audience), even though there is an opportunity to ask questions still only few participants are involved, but these types of huddles provided a way for every participant to talk about their experiences and voice their opinions.
I lead the huddles on Behavioral Targeting and Practical Approach to Online Campaign Measurement. Eric Peterson of Web Analytics Demystified was the keynote speaker. As always Eric is fun and informative to listen to. In his keynote he talked about how we are fast moving (already are) in Web Analytics 2.0 era and introduced the concept of Web Analytics 3.0, mobile analytics (see side note). Attached is the pdf of his Keynote presentation.
It was a great event and I congratulate Gary, Grace and other members of Semphonic team for arranging such a great event. I look forward to the next year’s event.
In case you could not make it to XChange and missed my great huddle on “Behavioral Targeting”, you have another opportunity to listen my views on Behavioral Targeting at eMetrics in Washinton D.C. eMetrics is another great conference that brings the participants from all around the world. Last eMetrics in San Francisco was the largest to date, the one is D.C. is expected to bring even more attendees.
Side Note: Eric and I later discussed how I did some early mobile analytics work for one of my clients, a leading mobile services provider, while I was a digiMine (now Revenue Science). At that time we were still trying to figure out the whole mobile analysis. Our solution was a hack; we used wap gateway logs and converted them into web logs format. Phone number was used in place of a cookie. It was not the best solution but given what we had it was great and helped us analyze and meet our business goals. Now the technology is changing and I am sure web analytics tools will become sophisticated enough to cater to the measurement, analysis and optimization needs. I even put together a presentation on how Behavioral Targeting can be deployed combining the web and mobile data; however, this never reached anywhere (long story) but I know it was coming. Revenue Science just announced Mobile BT, more on this later (Disclaimer: The presentation I put together has nothing to do with Revenue Sciences new Mobile BT offering, like I said my presentation never reached anywhere except one person).
I am excited to be a part of the X Change conference organized by Semphonic. X Change is a highly focused web analytics conference for and by real-world practitioners and web analytics managers, today announced that it has attracted another group of top industry experts.
The Conference consists of many small discussion groups (“Huddles”) hosted by facilitator experts in specific topic areas. During the intimate setting, conference participants will be able to share experiences, exchange ideas and brainstorm new approaches with experts, as well as with each other in a structured environment. Eric T. Peterson of Web Analytics Demystified will be the Keynote Speaker, and also serve as one of the expert facilitators.
I will be one of the expert facilitators joining Eric Peterson of WebAnalyticsDemystified, Duff Anderson of iPerceptions, Gary Angel, June Dershewitz and Paul Legutko of Semphonic, Matt Belkin of Omniture, Paul Bruemmer of RedDoor Interactive, Joseph Carrabis of NextStage Evolution, Terry Cohen and Matt Jacobs of Digitas, Aaron Gray of WebTrends, Manoj Jasra of Enquiro, Phil Kemelor of CMS Watch and Semphonic, John Quarto-vonTivadar of FutureNow, Marshall Sponder of IBM and Webmetricsguru, Jaques Warren of WAO Marketing, Client Ivy of Visual Science and Judah Philips of Reed Business Information (Reed).
I will be leading the huddles on Behavioral Targeting and Online Campaign Measurement.
Note: If you are in Seattle area on 30th Aug, I would like to invite you to the launch party of ZeroDash1, a new web analytics consulting firm in Seattle area.
