Hello Melbourne!

It was great to come down south and meet you all on my brief whirlwind tour.

I thought I’d take a little time to add some depth to some of the information that I mentioned when I was there.

First - RSS (Really Simple Syndication) it is a great way to stay abreast of changes in the rapidly evolving world of the Internet - you can subscribe to mine by clicking here. There are many different RSS readers, however, I don’t think any are as feature rich as Google Reader.

Second - Doing online competitive analysis is just as important as looking at your own data. Google recently released Google Trends for websites. It isn’t quite Hitwise, but it is a fantastic free alternative with exeptionally robust data. I’ll be comparing the different competitve analysis tools in the near future, so stay tuned. The normal Google trends for search terms is also very good for understaning how your offline campaigns are impacting your brand.

Finally, to back up my mantra on usability and interaction - this video is a great presentation on why the KISS principle (Keep It Simple Stupid) is still a winning formula for usability in the Wide World of the Web.

Posted: June 26th, 2008 under Retail, General, Data analysis.
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The Page view is all but dead as a metric for measuring the success of a website. Despite many companies pushing to get them higher and higher to satisfy the demands of advertising agencies - as explained in this article from RRW , it seems that even engagement as a metric has it’s short comings . Even Microsoft have weighed in with “engagement mapping” .

What is clear here is that Page Views are almost meaningless except as an indicator for server loads, and engagement is a fluffy term that lacks a clear relation to a company’s goals. It would seem that the one metric to rule them all approach might be a pipe dream for people that would love to be able to apply apples to apples comparisons of things that are clearly apples and oranges. True, the core metric to measure those by should be nutritional value, but well all know that colour, weight, smell and taste contribute to our apples and oranges decisions.

Is there a nutritional value of a website to the users that rely on it?

Ultimately, it may lie purely in the ROI, the return on investment. For Google, there are two major stake holders - the searchers and the marketers. For searchers, they invest their time (very little) and are returned very well targeted information. Here you need a metric for the information quality (like a quality score) and possibly a monetary valuation of time (as we all know T=$).

For the marketer, they invest Time and Money, and they are returned Impressions and Clicks. The market then tries to map these to visits, and then this to conversions, then to a ROI (actually ignoring the time component).

For each website, the way the stakeholders map their ROI will always be different, and measurements of Page Views, Time Spent on site etc have always been proxies for determining what this one core metric for capitalist nutritional value is. Time spent per visit is great for Facebook, less so for Google. Number of visits is great for Google, less so for YouTube (see Why visitors is a misleading metric).

ROI comes with conversion, finding the correct proxies for this are going to be different in different media. Things like user reviews and ratings will be helpful indicators as we close in on the ultimate conversion goal. For now we must find the metrics that are the best proxies for narrowing in on this goal, and this is going to have to vary - but the bottom line of this IS the bottom line.

Posted: February 29th, 2008 under Marketing, Data analysis.
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When using a medium for advertising that can’t track down to conversions (which is ultimately the right success metrics for a business) it is important to find the right metric to measure ROI. It should be simple to understand, and accurately contain a measurement of the goal you are looking for.

Traditionally, newspapers have used “Readership” and “Circulation” as a proxy for measuring advertising effectiveness - however, this is merely a measure of reach - not of advertising effectiveness. Similarly, TV has be measured by similar metrics that were calculated in an even more dubious manner - without any kind of third party auditing. The has always been allegations of “dumping” to inflate figures.

So when is advertising effective? It is most effective when it converts, next would be when it elicits a reaction from a reader/ viewer, and still further from the goal would be when it reaches a reader/ viewers eye balls and communicates a message.

So with traditional media - none of these three are measured, all that is measured is how much air time, how many newspapers your ad was in, and you are charged by that amount as a factor of the publication reach.

With digital media, if the digital chain isn’t broken, you get all three. Cost Per Acquisition (CPA), Cost Per Click (CPC) and Cost Per Impression (CPM) respectively.

Offer Impressions and Offer Interactions are essentially a measure of Impressions and Clicks respectively.

Offer Interactions – Every time a user interacts (or clicks) with an offer

Offer Impression – Every time an offer is loaded onto a users screen and it isn’t interacted with.

It is important to use the right metrics for the job because as the Web changes, things like “Time Spent on site” and “Page Views” may become irrelevant as information delivery and Web page design becomes more efficient. However, the Offer Impressions and Interactions should always go higher if a communication advertising platform is to be effective.

Posted: January 24th, 2008 under Marketing, News, Retail, Data analysis.
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Google has proved itself time and time again when it comes to delivering accurate search results. Most of the time, their accuracy is being improved by how they innovate in restructuring the web to make it easier for their crawler to understand. Often, they leverage the symbiotic nature of users of the web and the web itself.

By being the providers of valuable tools, Google can then better understand the information that relies on the standardised structure of the information using those tools.

Examples of this can be seen with Google Analytics, Sitemaps and to a somewhat lesser extent, Google Webmaster Tools. Page rank was used in a similar way to manipulate SEO methods to the advantage of Google.

Their latest innovation in this area is the Google Chart API.

This allows people to code charts with just a URL, and from the structure of that URL, Google can understand all of the data contained within it. All of a sudden, the information that once sat within the images of this blog, can now be unlocked through Google’s search engine.

So, to demonstrate, here is a quick graph of Lasoo’s first month of growth.

http://chart.apis.google.com/chart?
chs=300x200
&chd=t:0.0,12.0,72.0,72.0,100.0
&cht=lc
&chxt=x,y
&chxl=0:|03Nov|10Nov|17Nov|24Nov|1Dec|1:||Market%20Share(.25%)

Posted: December 11th, 2007 under Data analysis.
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A story about Lasoo recently ran on “A Current Affair” and resulted in a massive amount of interest in Lasoo.com.au. You can view the video under “Shopping revolution” at the ACA home page. Traffic to the site increased by a factor of 4 and hasn’t shown much sign of decreasing outside of standard weekly trends.

I believe this is indicative of “one shot marketing”. You get one shot to show your value proposition, and usually, from a usability stand point, about 10 seconds in that one shot. So, you must be compelling to maintain a stickiness with users. Following this, WOM marketing kicks in. This is what allows large web companies to grow organically purely through WOMM.

When considering the chicken and the egg principles of web marketing, consider letting the product market for you primarily, and then making lots of noise as a secondary tactic. This is incredibly important on the web, but probably just as applicable to products in the real world - except maybe commercial music (but is that the real world?)

Posted: November 29th, 2007 under Marketing, News, Data analysis.
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The first rule of Facebook, is don’t talk about the Facebook (negatively at least).

Facebook recently launched their new advertising platform and have raised a lot of privacy concerns. This is compounded with other Facebook woes, as they have also been accused of censorship around the issue, and are fighting a constant battle convincing marketers of good returns on Click Through Rates, which have been estimated as low as 0.04%. This post from Carnegie4Life points out some of the creepiness of their new features, and the paradigm shift in how privacy is managed on the Internet. Your anonymity on the Internet when surfing corporate websites that opt in to Facebook Beacon (particularly those you purchase from) is taking a bit of a back seat compared to how things were prior to the release of Beacon.

It is legitimate for users to be concerned about this, mostly because it has totally avoided any sort of permission marketing principles, and because it is co-opting users as affiliate marketers without their consent, and without reward. Similarly, marketers should be aware of their brand reputation in this light.

This disregard for user rights seems to be the most astounding trend with Facebook, and posits a dramatic difference in cultural identity to that of Google. Now, Google isn’t infallible, but their actions seem to point to some sort of economic justice in sharing the wealth (AdSense for example).

At the end of the day, a Facebook profile is content driving traffic, a recommendation is affiliate marketing, and none of this revenue generated flows to the end user. This seems to be greedy from Facebook, and presents an opportunity for competitors to give users a better value proposition. Not that these value propositions always take off - eg Metacafe pays for views of videos, yet YouTube doesn’t, but it is still the market leader. Similarly, advertising in the newsfeed doesn’t seem too far removed for from soliciting exception in an email spam filter.

It seems open platforms, transparency, respect for users and shared spoils seem to be indicative of a company’s longevity in the new Web.

Posted: November 28th, 2007 under Social Networks.
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“According to Hitwise data, Lasoo.com.au in its short existence has managed to capture 5.34% of the Shopping & Classifieds – Department stores classification and is ranked as the 7^th Australian website (today) in this classification.”

It has been a busy couple of weeks, but the trends and feedback have been overwhelmingly positive. Growth continues to steam ahead towards a much more efficient market benefiting retailers and consumers. Christmas spirit seems to be in full swing with the top search terms being; camera, ipod, wii, dvd, television and Christmas

One can only imagine the impact this will have when people begin to browse Lasoo on their phones - quite possibly with the release of Opera Mini 4 Beta.

It seems, when market information is unlocked it enables a far more efficient market by providing information without the cost of transport and time, and by providing real-time feedback for supply and demand management. A fantastic case study of this is outlined in this economist article on how mobile information effected a fishing market.

Posted: November 18th, 2007 under News, Data analysis.
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When we build a website, it seems quite obvious that there is one thing that you want in order to be able to monetize, it is traffic. More visitors means more opportunity to monetize. So then, it should stand to reason that if you are measuring rapidly growing visitors then you are winning the war…right?

Well, not entirely. The real objective of most websites (if not all websites) is to deliver information. Granted, for some, the payload is in the ad information, some is in the information that will lead to a transaction - but at the core, that is all a website wants to do, and really all a website can do.

So, if delivering information efficiently is the absolute goal, why are we so focused on visitors? Isn’t this just a proxy measurement?

It is because, for many companies it is the most relevant metric for their web strategy, since their “web-footprint” is small, or limited to just their email and website. It is also because to those who don’t quite understand the game, a high monthly UV means a popular site, which equates to a high value.

That thinking isn’t flawed, however, in a perfect world YouTube’s content could reach me at exactly the moment I wanted it, in whatever virtual location I was in. So long as they could deliver their advertising payload with it, this becomes the most efficient form of information delivery, and I would never visit their site. So, in a perfect world their visitors would be zero, yet they would be able to reach an audience far larger than before (and track the server calls).

This is why widgets have the buzz that they do, it is the thinking paradigm shift that information wants to be free and is virtual, so shouldn’t be chained to a domain (albeit in a virtual environment) .

This change in thinking, is taken to a radical nth degree in this discussion on “information centric network architecture”. It sounds like a much more efficient way of organising the web.

Posted: November 12th, 2007 under Data analysis.
Comments: 2

Blinging it online is an overview of the direction of the jewellery industry online.

Blinging it online - Jewellery industry analysis

Posted: November 6th, 2007 under Whitepaper.
Comments: none

These white papers provide insights into current online trends with a focus on how consumer behaviours are rapidly changing in the midst of the information revolution.

Clicks to Bricks - Online information effects on offline purchases

Posted: November 6th, 2007 under Whitepaper.
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