One the 2nd day of xmas my true love said to me we set up our metrics and defined what we wanted to see.

On the 3rd day of xmas my true love said to me it starts with a prospect, we set up our metrics and defined what we wanted to see.

On the 4th day of xmas my true love said to me, what is the value? it starts with a prospect, we set up our metrics and defined what we wanted to see.

On the 5th day of xmas my true love said to me, Benchmarking!!!!! what’s the value, of a prospect, we set up our metrics and defined what we wanted to see.

On the 6th day of xmas my true love said to me, when do they churn? Benchmarking!!!!! what’s the value, of a prospect, we set up our metrics and defined what we wanted to see.

On the 7^th day of xmas my true love said to me how do you measure it? when do they churn? Benchmarking!!!!! what’s the value, of a prospect, we set up our metrics and defined what we wanted to see.

On the 8^th day of xmas my true love said to me testing multivariates, how do you measure it? when do they churn? Benchmarking!!!!! what’s the value, of a prospect, we set up our metrics and defined what we wanted to see.

On the 9^th day of xmas my true love said to me standard deviations, testing multivariates, how do you measure? when do they churn? Benchmarking!!!!! what’s the value, of a prospect, we set up our metrics and defined what we wanted to see.

On the 10^th day of xmas my true love said to me top and bottom limits, standard deviations, testing multivariates, how do you measure, when they churn? Benchmarking!!!!! what’s the value, of a prospect, we set up our metrics and defined what we wanted to see.

On the 11^th day of xmas my true love said to me look for the trends, top and bottom limits, standard deviations, testing multivariates, how do you measure, when they churn? Benchmarking!!!!! what’s the value, of a prospect, we set up our metrics and defined what we wanted to see.

On the 12^th day of xmas my true love said to me build in the science, look for the trends, top and bottom limits, standard deviations, testing multivariates, how do you measure, when they churn? Benchmarking!!!!! what’s the value, of a prospect, we set up our metrics and defined what we wanted to see.

This is an excerpt from our upcoming book “The Sucking Manifesto” which will be out early 2012. If you “like” our facebook page we’ll let you know when and where you can buy it from. It will cost less than a beer and you’ll be able to read it in an evening.

That said this is me saying Merry Christmas and a Happy New year to everyone a little early – at least it’s December!

If online advertising is forced out of business the only way for content providers and media site owners to stay in business is to charge for content. Maybe the journalists that are jumping on the “cookies are evil” bandwagon should ask people if they would prefer to pay for content than have cookies in their browsers.

Like I said, just a thought.

Basically we all suck at marketing.

The Sucking Manifesto is an upcoming book that explains why we suck, how to prove we suck, how to learn from your own suckiness and then how to not suck again.

It’ll be funny. There’ll be drama, tragedy and joy. You’ll be able to read it in a night and it will cost less than a beer.

If you like us on the Facebook page we’ve set-up we will inform you all when the book is ready for public consumption!

If their own website traffic since this time is anything to go by online marketing in the UK is in trouble. (Picture supplied by Vicky Brock)

Approximately 90% of the visitors did not opt-in. And why should anyone opt-in? There is no downside of not opting in on the site so it makes perfect sense that most people wouldn’t.

Now before all the privacy folks have a go at me I am not suggesting for a moment that privacy isn’t important. Far from it. I have argued the case before for peoples right to anonymity particularly when Phorm and BT broke the law back in 2008. As I said in that post privacy should be the Holy grail as far as online marketing is concerned but when people ask you to opt in to receive an identifier that looks like this;

ZLhHHTiegr9Ny%2FdlviNhjUoXSrVDRIOE7v61hsd%2F8NY%3D

I think this is when it gets a bit silly. The above is a cookie. Scary stuff isn’t it?

That’s what Twitter uses to identify me as a repeat visitor to their website. And in the analytics tools I use of have used in the past (approximately 20 or so) I have never even seen an individuals cookie. You know why? Cos it would be a pointless way to demonstrate what a visitor was.

Let’s imagine for instance that Analytics tools did show individual cookies in their reports. What could you do with it? Does ZLhHHTiegr9Ny%2FdlviNhjUoXSrVDRIOE7v61hsd%2F8NY%3D say Steve Jackson visited? No. Does it identify me personally? No. Does this simple string of characters launch dangerous software on my computer allowing hackers to get my credit card information? No.

Basically it’s a string of text that is recognized by Twitter.com with one purpose, to tailor preferences to me because I’ve been there before. That’s it.

Here is another scary cookie;

162046575.1061623444.1310637483.1310637483.1310637483.1

Yes you got it, that’s Steve Jackson visiting his own blog and that it obviously a Google Analytics tracking cookie of the UTMA variety. I bet you guessed that immediately. Not! But that’s not even the farcical thing.

The farcical thing is that when I look at Google Analytics I don’t even see this cookie, I am just logged as a repeat visitor (a totally anonymous number). So if there were 10,000 repeat visits to my website and then I visited, that cookie would be recognized and I would be reported as the 10001st repeat visit. There isn’t even a place in the tool that  says this is what 162046575.1061623444.1310637483.1310637483.1310637483.1 did today when they visited. The cookie is just aggregated along with the rest of the visitors so that I can see trends about what the 10001 people did. If you don’t believe me set up a Google Analytics account and look for yourself. At the time of writing it’s free.

This is the same of the vast majority of web analytics tools available today. The ones that do report single visitors (Yahoo! Analytics for instance) only report at the IP address level so you get something like 188.117.0.34 as an identifier for the visitor. Even if you go and identify the IP address which you can do in a number of freely available tools you would still only get a company name and the companies location not an individual person. Try it with mine if you like.

The final farce is this.

Look in your wallet. Got a credit card? A loyalty card? I would bet my house that 99% of the people reading this have some form of bank, credit, debit or loyalty card in their wallet. Has it got your name on it? Every time you use one of those they log what you do and this is personally identifiable information. They know your name, where you live, what car you drive, where you shop, what mobile phone you have, your phone number, whether you have kids, a dog, a rabbit, a budgie in fact all your purchase history since you started using your card. Don’t believe me? look at your credit card bill.

Businesses have been profiling you since the day  you were born in order to sell you stuff. They can easily find out everything about you by bringing up your name in a computer. It’s why you get 10% off your purchases when you use your loyalty card. You might argue that the point is you gave the company permission to have your data and it would be true. But I would counter that by saying they have already got a good idea of what to sell you based on your demographics. This is the informed guess they make when you’re anonymous in order to sell stuff to you. That in my opinion is all that a cookie does, allow businesses to make informed decisions based on your anonymous data.

So in summary the ICO have set the UK up to be less competitive than other countries in the world. If companies in the UK start making online marketing decisions without knowing what 90% of their traffic does there will be a lot of money lost and a lot of pissed off customers.

The data sources are varied.

1. You have sensory data. What you personally can see, hear, smell, touch and taste form probably your biggest internal database to draw information from. This data is stored in your memory. You know what Chocolate tastes like right? So you can make a choice based on this data whether you like it enough to buy it or not. You know the atmosphere at a football game right? the sight and sound of 50,000 people singing for the glory of your team? Then you know whether or not to go to a game or not.
2. You have friends and colleagues that tell you stuff, usually the local things like the great new bar you should try or the inside scoop about the great band coming to your city.
3. You also have a lot of like minded individuals that you’ll never meet that freely disperse information about all sorts of things. When was the last time you read a review about a restaurant? or visited tripadvisor before booking a holiday?
4. Then you have the informed opinion. The news, trade views, government and authoritative voice that are sometimes fact based that everyone is conditioned to believe because the “authority” says so.
5. Then you have numbers and stats that effect your choices in a number of ways. If 50,000 people go to the football game then there must be something good about going right?

I believe that I can predict the right answers more often than I get them wrong by combining all the data I have, putting into context and coming up with information. This allows me to make informed choices.

It’s the same in business. When you want to make more money you need to have as many informed choices which combines all the different data points you have.

Just like in life it doesn’t always work. But we’re living in the age of information and there has been no better time to learn how to make informed choices. Food for thought.

2) If you intend to simply use tools to report without taking action. (All analytics should result in doing something because of something).

3) If you’re using numbers as an emotional crutch (We’re doing really well, look we got 10 million page views yesterday).

4) If you intend to communicate like a drip! (Our bounce rate was down 10% resulting in more page views per visit and therefore an increase in overall engagement).

5) If you haven’t got a hope of putting your findings in front of someone who cares about the business (eventually you have to have management buy in cos it gets expensive in terms of resources).

6) If you’re trying to use competitive intelligence to figure out how much your competitor sells (if they get 10000 visits and have an average conversion rate they must be making X… complete bollocks!)

7) If you only intend to measure unique visitors (everything needs to be in a business context and Uniques alone simply isn’t in a business context).

If you’re obsessed with tools and how to implement them (get a life! I mean data integrity is important, sure but don’t obsess over getting perfect numbers, it’s never gonna happen!)

9) If you’re not prepared to work at it (I’ve being doing business optimization with analytics in one form or another since 1996 and I’m still learning every day)

10) If you expect analytics to solve all your problems (Having data can help in so many different contexts but it isn’t a magic bullet).

11) If you’re not prepared to work with other people in your ecosystem (Doing analytics in a goldfish bowl is a waste of time).

12) If you’re doing analytics because everyone else is (there is nothing worse than copying without a reason to copy).

So there you have the 12 worst reasons I can think of to start doing analytics. Anyone else got a worse reason?

My reply was just do it.

Of course it didn’t end there.

The next question was “but where do you start?”

The answer… “Google Analytics and your own website.”

The next question, “yes but how do you know what to look for?” to which I replied “why do you want to learn about analytics before knowing why you need to understand it?”

That’s a question people don’t ask themselves but they should.

A lot of students have read my book and I get asked questions about various things in it from time to time. That’s cool by the way. I like helping people in my own small way.

But you won’t learn analytics by reading a book, it’s by doing what you need to learn for a reason. Don’t get me wrong the books are treasure troves of information, there are dozens of things you can use in Eric’s books, Avinash’s books, my book (shameless self promotion.. I know!), or many of the others on the market. My point is that you really should apply what you’re learning in those books to your own specific situations or you’ll forget most of what’s in them.

Learning by doing

When you actually do analytics in order to optimize your business somehow then you’re learning, whether you succeed or fail, you’re learning. Your business could be to save money, to earn more money, to get leads, to support your customers better, to understand your market better or simply find out where you stand in comparison to your competition. It doesn’t really matter.

In the early days of my career in this industry I didn’t have a clue what I was doing with the tools or what they could show me but I knew what I wanted to find out. In most cases I only got part of the answer but it led me onto different questions which in turn taught me things like how to use benchmarking, segmentation and KPIs to test out theories and ideas. Then I realized I could apply something else I’d learned earlier, direct marketing and statistical thinking to what I was doing. In the end analytics became a good tool for me to apply to a number of different business questions.

So the discussion ended with “take the business problem and start from there. Then ask why.”

Not enough sales? Why not? Not enough leads? why not? Not, how do I do analytics?

So as they say at Nike. Just do it.

There are 3 main instigators behind the majority of these articles. Fear, Doubt & Uncertainty.

Fear

“Technology has rendered the conventional definition of personally identifiable information obsolete,” said Maneesha Mithal, associate director of the Federal Trade Commission’s privacy division. “You can find out who an individual is without it.” (NYT – How privacy vanishes online; March – 2010)

This is a guy from the FTC making a statement about how we can track all your personal movements online and more importantly tie them back to you. Its true. It’s possible. And it’s completely wrong in my opinion to do it but not illegal.

The problem here is bad journalism. This guy from the FTC could be talking about anything from using tracking logs (which is harmless) to deep packet inspection of mirrored consumer journey content (which isn’t). The first and most important question I’d ask of this article is “What technology are we talking about?” I know the bad technology from the good but Joe Public doesn’t.

The journalist has conjured up an article which takes a very one sided view, the view he wants to sensationalize in order to get readers interested instead of doing a good job giving a balanced account of what to look out for.

This is breeding fear. Fear makes you want to know how to fight or when to flee. Fighting in this case is getting informed (therefore reading the NYT and becoming all outraged…. Damn those advertisers! They shall know the porn sites I frequent! They must be stopped!). Fleeing is simply pulling the plug and sitting in the dark with a magazine and a pocket torch.

The problem is the NYT has taken the sensational view, an unbalanced one.

While you or I might ask “what technology” Joe who reads the times wouldn’t know to ask that and so the propaganda starts winning the education battle.

Doubt

Let’s face it, the public have a right to doubt what corporations, consultants, industry bodies and advertising agencies are telling them simply because of the amount of times they have been robbed blind by the very same individuals. Don’t even get me started on the state of the search marketing industry. Bunch of bloody cowboys half of them! I know, I’ve seen the analytics!

Politicians can’t help us because they go where the votes are and are therefore dishonest by default, so who do we turn to to get unbiased opinions out there?

Uncertainty

All of the above fear and doubt leaves Joe Public wondering what to do and relying on people that he trusts. He doesn’t trust anyone and uncertain about what to do (or not) Joe freezes and does nothing. Like a rabbit in the headlights.

But there is someone he trusts. The opinions of his Mom, his family, his friends, his friends’ friends. Should I use FaceBook? Well 500 million people can’t be wrong can they? And Bob uses it every day, they never know what porn Bob looks at…. well, Ok, I’ll use it too.

So is Social Media Actually our industries Savior?

Should I pick up the phone to Zuckerberg? Well, no, people don’t trust him either (and he probably wouldn’t answer! . But there may be something to say for public acceptance, good PII laws and corporate responsibility.

This is where we as an industry need to begin

Isn’t it better to embrace the potential publicity as an opportunity to educate and enlighten rather than stick your head in the sand and hope the privacy issue goes away? If we can address the fear, doubt and uncertainty that exists around online tracking and analytics we’d not only become the good guys (in 99% of cases) but we’d also expand as an industry. I liken this opportunity to the day Google gave away Google Analytics for free. We may even break out of the nerd corner into the mainstream business world!

It’s started already, Eric came out with a code of Ethics and the WAA are building on it, a great start, but it’s still a bit toothless. It’s nice to say you follow a code but it isn’t worth the paper it’s written on really. Certainly it would be laughed out of court. However could more be done? Could we build on the great initiative shown by Eric, John and the WAA?

Is the WAA the right organization to stand up here? Could they give the FTC their own draft of a law (not Ethics but a legal white paper based on those Ethics). One that is fair for the consumer and protects his or her rights while being sensible where behavioral targeting is concerned.

A law that can be examined and iterated by the FTC and the EU. (SECRET: They don’t know what they’re doing, so help them!)

If not them who? I feel it is the WAA that should take that forward, get some press and get some people on our side. I can’t write it for them (I’m not a lawyer) but I can help. I can tell them what’s Ok and what isn’t. So can some privacy guys I know that have fought their cases and won in Europe. So can some readers of this post. Over to anyone listening.

Many in the web analytics and business optimization space will tell you to measure everything, never guess or rely on intuition. In some cases it’s like religion, “Though Shalt Not Guess!”, however I don’t think there is anything wrong with using your intuition, your experience and yes dare I say it take a chance on something working that you have no idea will work.

It’s like life. You have to take risks in order to get anywhere.

Next year I turn 40.

One of the things I learned when I was 30 is that grown ups guess all the time. No-one has a clue what they’re doing really. Parents for instance (the new ones) have told me the feeling of complete panic when they have no idea why Junior is crying. After a few experiences however they learn to deal with it and figure out it’s usually one of a few things that pisses the little one off. It’s usually one of a few tactics that will stop said little one wailing.

Managing directors and CEOs usually have a plan that relies on them making very good decisions but they are in the position they’re in because the majority of those decisions are based on their experience and their ability to weigh up the risk/reward equation. However they are essentially playing it by ear as well and learning as they go.

Personally I follow my gut all the time. When I left a relatively high paying job to become an entrepreneur again 18 months ago, I didn’t have much in the way of solid facts and figures to rely on. I had a good idea of the market size and was betting that I could assemble a good team to tap into that market but I was taking a calculated risk (again!).

So I don’t believe it’s wrong to follow your gut. I do however believe we should use analytics to improve our understanding and make better guesses in the future. I do believe that data is an important part of understanding what the big picture is. What I find myself doing is trying to prove whether my gut feeling was right or wrong. If I’m right – hunky dory! If I’m wrong, learn, adjust, re-evaluate, move on.

However Lars and Emer got me thinking (always dangerous I know), about the HiPPOs and what the people actually say. I have to say that in the majority of cases the HiPPOs opinion has been reasonable given the information that they have had at their disposal at the time.

I would have to say that 99% of the executives I’ve met and discussed with have been pretty open. In fact the reason most of them are paid as well as they are is that they have a responsibility to make decisions based on the information presented to them.

I can remember 1 occasion where a HiPPO forced through a bad decision, but I could understand why that decision was made even then.

My point is I guess that HiPPOs are people too!

Our job, your job I’d argue is to make the HiPPO understand what your point is. You need to make the HiPPO your friend, because someone with influence is going to have to have your back when you tell the higher ups how much time, process, tools, people, training and culture is needed to become slick at business optimization.

That HiPPO could just make or break your career.