Analysis: The Top 10 Most Underappreciated Metrics To Track in 2008

Authored by Rohit Bhargava on December 18, 2007 - 9:05am.

This post is the continuation of a topic I started yesterday all about the right metrics to focus on and how many marketing teams may be using the wrong ones without realizing it. In Part I, I shared 10 meaningless metrics that brands should consider moving away from. Most of those metrics are either based on precedent (what brands have always measured) or ignorance (a lack of knowledge about other metrics to track). As a whole, the single word that defines the old view of metrics is to focus on impressions. A more sophisticated model measures engagement or interaction (ie - a more active consumption of content). Eyeballs are not enough. So, to help you start thinking outside your typical metrics, here are some of the underappreciated metrics that I believe more brands should focus on in 2008:

1. Inbound Links (from influential sources) - Most marketers right now are already paying attention to inbound links, but the problem with most is that there is no qualitative assessment. What this means, for example, is that getting included on the blogroll of a spam blog is the equivalent of getting mentioned in a post on a high influence blog. They are not equal, which is why the Technorati Authority rating made it onto my list of most meaningless metrics yesterday. Getting smarter about measuring inbound links, however, will be crucial - and this means paying more attention to where that link comes from.
2. Direct URL Access - Do you record how many people get to your site by directly typing in the URL? This may be the most important ignored metric of all. The reason is that it tells you volumes about your brand and your marketing if you can find a way to get better at measuring it. When someone directly types your URL into their browser, it indicates familiarity with your brand, recall of a particular message that made your URL stick in their heads, qualified traffic and a likeliness that they are seeking some piece of information specifically.
3. RSS Subscribers - Most bloggers have already started to pay more attention to how many RSS subscribers they have and even use it as a badge of honor when describing the traffic to their blog. Aside from being more accurate than inbound links as a measure of influence simply because it is much tougher to accidentally count spam as traffic, this allows you to measure a level of engagement as well. If someone has chosen to subscribe to your content, that indicates a depth of engagement that a simple page view does not.
4. Email Link Referrals - We all know that people cut and paste links and forward content to one another, but few marketers pay enough attention to tracking this. The reason is fairly obvious ... when you get a link coming through from a forwarded email, it is typically impossible to follow. As a result, it is rarely counted in referring links and ignored as a source of traffic. Yet, once again, if someone sends a link to your content to someone else, it is likely to indicate a level of engagement that is far higher.
5. Time Spent (engagement) - In my post yesterday, I noted that time spent can be a misleading metric because it can also unintentionally give you credit for having a confusing user interface that takes a long time for a user to navigate (thus inflating your time spent). This doesn't, however, mean that I think you should ignore the time spent metric altogether. It still provides a valuable data point, assuming you are confident that you are measuring actual engagement rather than time wasted.
6. Organic Keyword Referrals - Most large brands are getting far more sophisticated with search terms, targeting the popular ones and measuring their response. Alongside all this paid search marketing, however, users are typing in their own search queries, and arriving at your site organically. What many brands surprisingly forget to do is fully track and index all the keywords that people are using through organic search to reach their site. This gives you clues not only to help you focus a search campaign, but also to improve your content.
7. Email Longevity and Multiple Opens - As I shared yesterday, email opens are a useless metric because many emails are opened by accident. An interesting measure that is underappreciated by many email marketers is how long people keep an email in their inbox and how many times they open it. If you think about it, the most useful emails that you have gotten are ones that you are likely to keep on file and open at least a few times. Aside from forwarding an email, which pretty much everyone already measures, keeping track of multiple opens (and particularly the time between opens) can lend interesting insight into how evergreen your emails are.
8. Abandonment - One of the most useful areas to focus on gathering as many metrics as you can is around the idea of abandonment, or the moment when a user leaves your site for any reason. The types of metrics that could be useful here are time spent before leaving (which may indicate that they arrived at your site by accident if it is only a few seconds), last page viewed (which tells you whether there is a "dead spot" that tends to lose users), or shopping cart behaviour (obviously key to know why people don't complete purchases).
9. Clickstream - The clickstream can mean many things to people depending on how they term their metrics. what I mean by it are the sites visited directly before and after someone visits your site. This can tell you volumes if you learn how to read between the lines to what the data is actually telling you. For example, if people go straight to Google after your site, chances are they are still seeking something they didn't find on your site. Visiting a competitor site also gives you clues of what other products or services your customers consider. Finally, when someone is visiting an unrelated site, this may give you a clue about what they thought they might find on your site and perhaps why they left.
10. Microsharing - Of course, regular readers of this blog probably know that I couldn't get through a post like this without making up a new term ... so let's talk about "microsharing." This is the idea that people are sharing bits of knowledge in lots of ways that don't show up on traditional marketing metrics. They post a link on Twitter, they bookmark something on del.icio.us, or they add something to Digg. Each is a social method of sharing information, but brands typically don't track any of these effectively because few feel they have the means to do it. Unfortunately, there is no magic solution to help brands measure this today. There are conversation tracking tools, and manual analysis is always an option ... but in 2008, this will be something that most smart marketers will be paying a lot more attention to - and more vendors will likely be coming up with easier solutions to help track.

Any other favourite metrics that you would add to this list that you feel marketers have been ignoring and need to focus on in the new year?

How 2007's Key Search Trend Will Impact 2008

The search world is ever-changing. Although the changes may not be large, even small upsets to the system can throw an SEO (define) program into a tailspin. And no matter how small an update Google makes to its algorithm, what happened yesterday certainly impacts tomorrow.

In honor of the New Year, let's examine key changes in search from 2007 and project how they might impact 2008.

It's not just the individual events that really make a dent; it's the incremental impact of everything that's happened over time that really affects the way we execute SEO. The better term to use, therefore, is the "evolution" of search. The most significant trend that contributed to its recent evolution is social media's role in search.

Social Media for Dummies

Everybody's doing social media now. They're on MySpace, Facebook, Digg, Del.icio.us, Twitter, Flickr, and the like. And not only are they doing it, they're leveraging it for their search programs.

It started with corporate blogs. These were launched on the theory that if you're creating fresh, good content, people will link to it, and search engines will think it's important stuff. Most also throw an RSS feed in there to up inbound link potential.

But there are other ways social media has been leveraged for search. Savvy organizations have realized the benefit on search rankings for an article that's dugg by others on Digg. Other organizations have started viral campaigns to get their site bookmarked in del.icio.us.

Although many search marketers have dabbled in social media marketing (SMM), campaigns don't seem to be very strategic and fully coordinated campaigns. Not yet, anyway.

Aligning SMM and Search Marketing

If 2007 was the year of testing these social media vehicles on an ad hoc basic, 2008 could be the year search marketers start to formulate full SMM plans as part of their off-site SEO efforts.

In the current SEO landscape, on-site factors are playing a diminishing role in determining search rankings. The emphasis continues to shift to off-site factors -- most importantly, getting more inbound links pointing to your site. The search marketer's role is expanding to include such things as online PR, reputation management, and, yes, social media campaign management.

If your 2008 search plan doesn't include social media, you may want to reconsider.

Further Exploiting Social Media for Search

Businesses are already making use of the social media trend. But what will they do in 2008?

Likely much of the same, but more of it, and they'll likely do it better. But some new trends will also play a role.

Now that Facebook has opened up profiles to be indexed by the search engines and businesses can have their own profile pages, we can only imagine how much clamoring there'll be to have a presence there.

Because video content is now being indexed along with regular content in search engines, YouTube is sure to become more of a focus for search marketers in 2008.

But it's not just video -- audio files, images, news stories, and blog posts can all be indexed. Creating and optimizing multiple types of content will be the next challenge for search marketers.

These are just a few ways search marketers might leverage social media in the coming year. As new social media sites emerge, so too will new ways to exploit them for search.

Social Media and Search: Together Forever

Social media isn't poised to end anytime soon. In fact, the usage of social networking media and user-generated content on the Web continues to rise. Social media is now so ingrained in our Internet psyche that it's an institution. Marketers who are either unwilling or unable to leverage this space may find their search presence dwindling in the face of savvier competitors.

By Julie Batten, The ClickZ Network, Jan 7, 2008

Use this 9-step checklist to ensure your email sign-up process not only lures in users, but also keeps them subscribed -- and happy.

My biggest beef with email marketers is that they design and manage their programs based on marketing goals and internal objectives rather than their end users. Since my company keeps the lights on by working with marketers to create, optimize and manage their email campaigns, I need to be careful where I tread, but let's face it: Email programs that come across as created and delivered specifically for the email subscriber's benefit are few and far between.

Therefore, as we head into 2008 shining from the glow of the latest report telling us that email budgets are surging, let's use this as a chance to rethink our overall email program's value to our subscribers.

Your email program's (and often your brand's) first impression starts with offering up a value proposition to your website visitor (or maybe a catalog or in-store browser if you are a lucky retailer that collects email addresses via call center or in-store). Be relevant, and deliver real valuable and unique information, offers or something that is compelling enough to give your users a reason to read and respond -- and subscribe.

It all starts with the sign-up process, which is the permission email agreement you make with your opt-in database subscribers. This is a contract and, like with any contract, if you violate it any time during the email marketing process, there can be a penalty. In this case, it can be disengagement (or as some call it being unemotionally subscribed), actually unsubscribing or the dreaded THIS IS SPAM label, whether you received their permission or not.

Here are some questions to ask yourself to ensure you treat your email sign-up form/preference center like a binding contract:

What did you say you do?
Make it clear what the email will consist of. Don't just offer up "Sign up for our newsletter." That doesn't tell your potential subscribers anything. Offer up the benefits and a general overview of what they would be receiving.

Can you show me what you are talking about?
Samples, much like the snacks at gourmet retailers, can lead to a bigger purchase and convert browsers into buyers. In email, it can help seal the subscription deal or alleviate any fears of potential subscribers that they may just be receiving "a bunch of emails" with little value.

The Email Experience Council's RetailEmail.Blogspot, in its "2007 Retail Email Subscription Benchmark Study" found that only 12 percent of major online retailers offer a sample of their newsletter(s) during the email subscription process.

How often will we be talking?
Spell out how often a subscriber will receive your emails. Daily or monthly can make a big impact on whether a user signs up or not. Don't mislead users. Signing up for a quarterly newsletter and receiving it three times a week constitutes a violation of trust and, in this case, the subscription agreement.

Most companies do a poor job in this area. Notably, retailers are missing the mark. RetailEmail.Blogspot's findings revealed that not even 7 percent of retailers give subscribers any kind of idea how many emails to expect.

What's in it for me?
An enticing reward can often help create the email relationship and convert many would-be email subscribers. It also provides an early indicator that there is real value in being an email subscriber. Remember, anyone can go to your website if all you are doing is cutting and pasting your home page and putting in an email template.

May I make a suggestion?
Let your new email subscribers choose some content and have some control over their subscription, whether it is HTML vs. text, the frequency, the language or just a nice menu of newsletter and email offerings.

How well do you want to get to know me?
The amount of information collected can often be the reason why (or why not) people sign up for your email program. KnowledgeStorm in a 2007 study found that 72 percent of buyers felt the "amount of detail in the overview" was a major factor in deciding to register for emails. Remember the general rule is that with more than four to five fields of information you may start to lose potential subscribers. If you are not using the information for segmenting, than just ask for a first name and email address.

Why should I trust you?
Every company should have a privacy policy. Make sure you make it accessible for your future subscribers with just a simple link as it can do the trick in confirming you are a legitimate company with respectable privacy practices. RetailEmail.Blogspot's study found that almost 50 percent of major online retailers address privacy concerns during the email subscription process.

How easy is it for me?
Finding your email sign up and ensuring the process isn't a laborious one is key to your strong first impression and foreshadows what kind of experience you should expect. Ensure your sign up form can be found (and completed for most) on the home page. Silverpop's 2007 study found that 80 percent of companies offered email sign-ups on their home pages.

Can you please confirm that with me?
A frustrating experience off the bat can be signing up for an email and not receiving a web-based or email confirmation -- or worse, not receiving an email for a lengthy period. Tying in with the incentive aspect, your confirmation email/page is a great spot to receive the actual coupon/white paper and engage the new subscriber right away. Twenty-seven percent of companies in Silverpop's survey failed to send emails to new subscribers confirming their registrations.

Use this guide to kick start your email sign-up process and list-building efforts for 2008 and ensure the value is going to be delivered in your future email campaigns.

G. Simms Jenkins is founder and CEO of BrightWave Marketing, an Atlanta-based email marketing and customer relationship services firm.

Organic and paid search are often better together; read on for tips to maximize your search campaign's performance.

About a year ago I came up with this clever (at least in my mind) catchphrase "Search is Search." It was my mantra to marketers who treated paid and organic separately.

As the year went on, marketers seemed to agree. As the search world evolved, the paid and organic synergies have evolved. You can't say that you want to manage search as one tactic and have it magically happen. However, that's what many marketers want. The feeling is this: "You're my agency. You do paid and organic. You make it happen."

I understand this feeling, but it's not that simple. What both clients and agencies need to understand is that there are criteria that need to be in place in order to reap the benefits of an integrated search plan. And I hate turning conversations like this back on clients; it seems like I'm passing the buck.

I'm only trying to be fair and actually do what clients pay their agencies to do: help them reach their goals and tell them when we're wrong. So let's share the responsibility of solving this issue and addressing those pesky qualifications.

Did you fix the analytics like I said?
I said it in the last article, but apparently, like my kids, nobody listened. Of the numerous clients I have worked with, only a small fraction have had their analytics configured properly. While this is a topic for another article, at a bare minimum one should filter paid and organic down to a keyword level. Remember that the goal here is synergy of paid and organic. Here is an all too typical conversation:

Client: "Can I stop buying certain terms?"
Me: "How well do you convert for those terms organically?"
Client: "I don't know."
Me: "Then keep buying them."

It's a mistake to assume that just because you rank well organically the organic traffic will convert the same as paid. The message and landing pages may be different, and users may have different intentions.

If you're too paralyzed with fear to tackle your analytics, work with your agency to implement Google Analytics or create a custom report in your current package to get the data. Even if you do it just for a month you will learn a great deal.

Where are you with your SEO project?
Just because you signed an SOW to do SEO it doesn't mean that paid and organic synergy will magically happen. If your SEO is focused on a site redesign, synergy can't be recognized until the new site launches. For clients that have their big book of SEO recommendations, the question becomes, where are you with implementation? If you haven't completed at least the most important recommendations then it is a little unfair to expect your agency to be able to help you with search synergy.

It's kind of like when a mechanic tells you that you need to fix several things on your car. You know it has to get done, but with limited time and money you're not sure where to start� so you don't. When your car dies on the highway, you really can't get mad at the mechanic.

Ask your agency to help prioritize the recommendations, and just get them done. If search is important to your brand then there are no excuses.

Brother, can you spare a dime?
Going back to the example of how to lower your paid search spending, how well funded is your current plan? The principle of saving money is basically this:

• I spend money on words that I rank for organically (usually brand or tail terms).
• There are words that convert well, but are more expensive (usually head or torso terms) so I cannot afford a high SOV.
• If I stop buying some words, can I divert the savings into those bigger words?

The challenge for many marketers is that their category is either too big or they are not funding search well enough to use the savings. I have a client working in the healthcare space. Its words are expensive, and the company maintains about a 30 percent SOV on "bigger" words. When I examined how much money the company would save if it pulled back words with good organic conversions, I found it would only have raised the SOV 2 percent. Since it has good analytics, we were able to test and discovered that the traffic and conversions lost when they did not have two listings were not worth it. That's why proper analytics are important.

It's great to see clients recognizing that paid and organic should be one tactic, and yes there are lots of ROI-based synergies that exist. However, there is also a lot of account management; we just can't expect these synergies to magically appear without being upfront and working through the qualifications that need to be in place.

Joshua Palau is group director of SEM at Avenue A | Razorfish.

Asia-Pacific B2C E-Commerce Awakens

Japan and South Korea rule, but not for much longer.

In 2006, B2C e-commerce sales for the five major markets in the Asia-Pacific region totaled only $59.1 billion, and Japan accounted for a tiger’s share of the sales.

But things are changing.

eMarketer forecasts that B2C e-commerce sales in the region will grow at a 23.3% annual rate, reaching $168.7 billion in 2011.

"Japan was the largest market in the region, by far, with a 62.3% share of online sales in 2006," says Jeffrey Grau, eMarketer Senior Analyst and author of the new report, Asia-Pacific B2C E-Commerce: Focus on China and India. "But by 2011, Japan and South Korea, the region’s other mature market, will both lose share to two up-and-coming online markets—China and India."

Both China and India are growing rapidly, but they are far from reaching their vast potential.

"A number of hurdles, common to both countries, must be cleared to ensure sustainable long-term growth," says Grau. “Immature online payment systems, poor delivery networks and distrust between buyers and sellers, to name just a few.”

According to a China Internet Network Information Center survey, the top reason that Internet users in China do not buy online is uncertainty about the security of the online shopping process.

Smaller developing countries in the region, such as Thailand, the Philippines and Malaysia, are also on track to become viable e-commerce economies.

"For Western e-commerce firms with global aspirations, the challenge is to decide what to do in this region and how to do it," says Grau. "These markets are very different, so prospective entrants must seek local solutions."

Before jumping in, however, companies should be warned that it will take longer for e-commerce to advance from its formative stage in India and China and other developing countries in the region than it did in advanced industrialized countries like the US, Japan and Western Europe.

"Most countries in the region, particularly China and India, lack a nationwide credit card system or an efficient delivery network," says Grau, "essential infrastructures that have greatly facilitated e-commerce growth in more advanced countries."

In addition, in developing countries, the online shopping process is often at odds with traditional business practices. B2C transactions in China and India are conducted on a cash-basis, requiring e-commerce companies to provide alternative-payment methods, such as cash on delivery and wire transfers.

"Still, no matter what the obstacles, the markets of the region are simply too big to be ignored," says Grau.

Proceed, but do so with caution. Download the new

AdAge video on ATL video outdoor and ESPN mobile

http://link.brightcove.com/services/link/bcpid1185071587/bctid1368776601

Three in Ten US Mobile Users Recall Seeing Mobile Ads

More than three in ten mobile users - some 78 million US consumers - saw or heard advertising on their mobile phones in the fourth quarter of 2007, according to a study by Gfk/NOP Research conducted for mobile entertainment community Limbo.