The Clickthinking Blog | Scent Optimisation

International Customer Experience Analytics service ClickTale has appointed Clickthinking as one of their five global recommended consultants. We were thrilled when ClickTale approached us to join their list of associates, which also includes Semphonic, i.a. consultants, Summit Media and Webalytics – all four big industry names.

ClickTale is a well-established business which boasts a solid and extensive international customer base of brands such as Hallmark, Mint.com, and European telecommunications company O2. As one of five recommeneded consultants we will work with ClickTale, specifically in the regions of Africa and Australasia.

Web analytics are a vital component of what we do here at Clickthinking. In order to design and build websites that facilitate perfect online customer journeys we need  to observe and measure user behaviour, and web analytics enables us to do this.

ClickTale’s cut-above-the-rest analytics

ClickTale’s advanced in-page analytics service is more specialised and insightful than any of its predecessors, offering exclusive features such as heatmaps and video recordings of invidual user journeys, and combining these with formal analytics.

The videos which document each user’s time on a site are a particularly handy feature. They allow us to watch how individuals navigate and engage with each page on a website so that we can identify weak points in the customer journey.  enabling us to optimise the usability of our clients’ websites like never before.

Riana Meyer, Clickthinking’s Head of Conversion, will be integrating ClickTale’s solutions with our conversion-focussed strategies.

“ClickTale’s in-page analytics provide the critical information missing from regular analytics tools, namely what happens between one page view and the next. The real-time videos are the perfect complement to regular quantitative analytics data, delivering insight into the ‘why’ of online user behaviour.”

We anticipate a long and successful relationship with this renowned leader in the analytics field!

Read the full press release on BizCommunity, or visit ClickTale’s website to find out more about them.

A few weeks ago we featured exclusive insights from the eMetrics Optimization Summit in San Jose California, courtesy of our COO Niel Bornman who attended the event.

What we didn’t mention was that Niel was flown to the conference to accept a prestigious award from the Web Analytics Association.

As chairman of the WAA’s Examination Committee, Clickthinking’s COO was instrumental in the development of the Web Analyst Certification Program, the first official global certification for web analysts.

He was presented with a Presidential Award in recognition of his significant contribution to the WAA and the global web analytics field. Needless to say we are very proud to have Niel on our team!

Read the full story on BizCommunity.

This is the second installment in Niel’s two-part account of his experience at the eMetrics Optmization Summit in San Jose, California. If you haven’t read the first part see previous post or click here.

Take action, even in the face of data discrepancies!

It is clear to me that there are two distinct tracks in web analytics.

Technology – this track is concerned with instrumentation, data integrity, data integration, BI warehouses, cubes, data model development, etc. The web analytics space is filled with technologists, people who migrated out of the back office into the limelight when their data warehouses seemed to contain valuable information. Read the rest of this entry »

Our COO Niel Bornman attended the international eMetrics Marketing Optimization Summit last week in San Jose, California. This is the first of two posts in which Niel shares his experience of the conference, as well as insight into the web analytics industry.

Are we still behind the rock?

“How far behind are South African web analysts?” is a question I pondered the entire week at eMetric

I spent the most part of the last 9 days travelling to and from the eMetrics Summit in San Jose, in the heart of Silicon Valley, and the rest of it interacting with the best and brightest minds in the world of web analytics…as well as some of the not so bright.

The eMetrics Summit is aimed at the web analytics industry comprehensively and attracted people from all three walks of web analytics life – vendors, clients and consultants. Speakers included Avinash Kaushik, Jim Sterne, Jim Novo, Eric Petersen and Bryan Eisenberg.

I walked away with a couple of key insights:

1. Technology vendors don’t understand the world of web analytics, they understand databases.
2. Web analysts at large organisations have very tough jobs.
3. If data discrepancies are stopping you from gaining actionable insight, you probably don’t know how.
4. Web analytics is a third world economy with too many of us thinking we are ninjas. Read the rest of this entry »

For the second installment of the Improving conversion series we use analytics data for phinda.com, another lodge from andBeyond that we launched on the same day as Kwandwe.  All the lodge sites have the same content structure and page layout, only the content differs.

FIVE SECOND TEST

Following on from our first conversion post we review the relevance of the fivesecondtest.

The top clicks from the home page for 1 Jan 2010 to 5 Feb 2010 were:

FINDING: As suspected there weren’t any relationship between the fivesecondtest results and the actual behaviour of visitors. Although the Africa and India links were immediately noticed very few people clicked on it.

PATH ANALYSIS

Most analytics tools offer numerous reports to evaluate typical visitor paths. These types of reports are problematic to interpret.  A common mistake is to look for an ideal path to conversion. There is no such thing!  Individuals with a variety of needs, personalities and levels of knowledge are visiting your site.

A better approach is to evaluate bounces and exits for each step to identify conversion opportunties. We start with our Top landing page:

1. Landing page:
•    68% of traffic enters via the home page
•    We are happy with the 33% bounce rate. It is well above category average.

2. Second page:
We selected the Path Finder report from to evaluate the performance of the second page.

Please note: we couldn’t simply pull the exit rate report for these pages it would not have given us the performance of the page as STEP 2 in a journey.

Entrance -> Landing page -> SECOND PAGE -> Exit

We found that the Safari-lodges page performs the best as a second page from the home page. Only 10% left.  Although the exit rate of the other pages is also within acceptable margins we will focus on the Map page to identify conversion improvement opportunities for the next post in the series.

A final test for the second page performance is to see which page is most often the second step in a path that led to a conversion:

The winner is Safari-lodges with 30% and then Specials with 25%. Again it looks like the Map page is best reviewed for conversion opportunity.

Yesterday we launched the new kwandwereserve.com website. It features the Kwandwe safari lodges owned and operated by our client &Beyond. The purpose of the site is to generate qualified leads for the business.

As a result converting visits to enquiries is of critical importance to them.

Priority placement and prominence of the various elements on a landing page plays an important role in the conversion success of a website. A good landing page helps visitors differentiate quickly what the next step to their goal is. It should guide them effectively to the required information.

We came across a free tool recently that helps you evaluate what the most prominent items on your landing page are. It is called the fivesecondtest.

The free version of the tool lets you run two types of tests on 15 people each:

1. Memory test – what are the five things people remember when they see your page for 5 seconds?

2. Click test – what do they click on if they have only 5 seconds?

Finding:

In our opinion the memory test provides a good indication of what catches the eye when a page is scanned. The results from the Kwandwereserve.com test highlighted that the top utility links to the greater &Beyond sites (Africa and India) are potentially too prominent compared to the main navigation. We also noted that the word LODGE wasn’t mentioned which is the primary focus of the site.

However for the click test we would hesitate to respond to the results in isolation. Five seconds isn’t enough time to read the navigational options and therefore the majority of clicks would be on images. Also the clicks for this test aren’t carried out with a particular task in mind which actually renders the results meaningless. The memory test provides qualitative information which works better with the small sample size.

The next step in our conversion optimisation process is to monitor the analytics for real user behaviour from the landing page. We’ll cover our findings in the next post: Improving conversion #2

Omniture announced this week that it is being acquired by Adobe. My first reaction was surprise, not because Omniture was being purchased but that Adobe is the purchasing party.

At face value this appears to be a very strange match indeed.

Adobe
Adobe sells real world software to creators of real world and digital media. Their software predominantly sells under licensing as once-off costs while upgrades require further payment. They have a very big continuous development requirement and very little data warehousing needs (in comparison to Omniture). Adobe also has a vast network of resellers, training institutes and support mechanisms in place where clients can find after sales service and help without relying on Adobe.

If it wasn’t for their acquisition of Macromedia in 2005 I wonder if they would ever have looked at Omniture as a potential acquisition?

Omniture
Omniture on the other hand sells Software as a Service, meaning you don’t get a CD! Upgrades on many of their products come “free”, but you have monthly costs and mostly yearly renewable contracts.

They continuously develop their products but no where close to the extend that Adobe does. They have massive data warehousing and processing requirements for processing all the data made available via their analytics platforms.

Omniture’s made their fair share of acquisitions since their IPO in June 2006, acquiring many of their competitors as well as growing their product offering with related products.

Omniture has a good partner network, but have tried to keep sales, training and support close their chest with very few partners truly set up to deliver these after sales services. Potentially one of their key faults at the moment.

Will the match start a fire?
Adobe definitely believes that this acquisition will spark something – they are paying $1.8 billion for Omniture, 45% above their average stock value for the last 30 days. This is Adobe’s biggest acquisition since they acquired Macromedia for $3.4 billion in 2005.

The true value in Omniture’s products lay in their ability to provide marketers with insight into their marketing activities, enabling them to make better decisions about their marketing Dollars.

Adobe’s products allow designers and developers to create visually appealing and engaging platforms – not all in the digital space.

Adobe cites the following as a key factor for acquiring Omniture:
“The combination of the two companies will increase the value Adobe delivers to customers. For designers, developers and online marketers, an integrated workflow—with optimization capabilities embedded in the creation tools—will streamline the creation and delivery of relevant content and applications.”

http://www.adobe.com/aboutadobe/invrelations/adobeandomniture.html

Having worked in the online space for the last 12 years, there is one thing I know intimately – marketers and developers don’t sit around the same fire at the best of times.

Perhaps the integration, or at least the gap between these two product sets closing, will help?

However, there is much that Adobe will have to pull out of their hats to get the opposing sides to the fire:

1. Seamless integration – Their development products will have to become very smart in the addition of Omniture’s products
2. Education – Designers/Developers will have to be educated about the benefits of the Omniture suite of products.
3. Product cost/licensing – They will have to solve the sales and licensing complexities and differences that come with Omniture. Adobe’s sales are easy, you buy a product at a set fee and can upgrade for a certain time frame. Omniture on the other hand has extremely complex pricing models.

At worst, this acquisition won’t go up in flames! Adobe’s acquiring a business with an extensive partner network, continuous stream of contracted income, more than 5000 clients with a large number in the top 500 companies in the US and some correlation to their digital products.

Wildfire or slow burning coles?
I suspect the immediate impact will be minimal. In the medium term we may find it easier to integrate analytics with websites and other digital content using Adobe’s suite of products and in no way will Omniture’s products become exclusive to Adobe’s.

In the long run we may see the need for a developer to think and for a marketer to give a clear instruction replaced by intelligent software that knows what you want to accomplish and then does it for you. Wait a minute, this sounds too good to be true…

I don’t foresee this acquisition revolutionising our lives any time soon!