Emetrics London round up

I have just finished attending the Emetrics Optimisation Summit in London. It has been a busy two days with a variety of presentations on different subjects from a variety of different organisations. I kicked off the conference by taking a look at the journey the organisations are on from web reporting to marketing optimisation and I took the opportunity to describe some of the necessary requirements along the way.

First of all there is the need to get the basics right. This means getting the right numbers right and having Key Performance Indicators that are aligned the business goals and that are strategic, action able, easy to understand and based on valid data. Once this has been done businesses can start to optimise their digital marketing processes but must ensure that they are organisationally ready to do this. I’ve talked before in this column about the need for organisations to have “the ability to execute”. There is no point generating all the insight required for optimisation if you can’t do anything about it. Finally there is the need for “customer centricity”, which means getting beyond the “one size fits all” approach to digital marketing and developing an understanding of your customer segments and the role that digital channels play within the relationship between them and your brand.

The comforting thing for me was to see some of the themes reinforced by other speakers from big brands in the UK and Europe. Julian Brewer from Barclays Bank talked about the journey they had been on from “Activity Counting” through to “Customer Intimacy” and how now they wanted to deploy their web analytics fare more operationally to move towards the concept of Customer Tailoring.

Dell talked about their Voice of Customer programme which not only included the organisational-wide deployment of a customer satisfaction tool but also the work that they are now beginning to do in monitoring and understanding the impact of social media and “Web 2.0″ activity on their brand. Angus Crombie from Dell explained why Dell felt they needed “better listening skills” and that comment reminded me that it’s not just about having the “Voice of the Customer” but actually listening to it. Another interesting aspect of the talk from Dell was the work that they had done to try and measure the impact that their Voice of the Customer programme had had on the business in terms of Return on Investment. Understanding and quantifying the ROI on the investment in measurement systems and analytics is a notoriously difficult thing to do. However Dell estimated that there had been a very short payback on the investments that they had made.

As at in San Francisco a couple of weeks ago, I took the opportunity to catch up on the latest thinking and discussions around the social media space. Listening to the various contributors in a panel session on the subject made me think that the discussions around social media analytics is sort of where the debate around web analytics was five years ago. There is a lot of discussion around the technology of data capture and reporting and the accuracy of measurement. There is also the obvious need to start to develop some standards in this particular part of the industry so that people know what these measurements are and how they are defined. I know this is something that the Web Analytics Association is beginning to address and it is definitely needed.

We also got an insight into how media companies are using analytics these days from Channel 4 on this side of the Atlantic and from the New York Times on the other. Channel 4 talked about some of the challenges involved in terms of tying up web metrics with business metrics. New York Times showed us some of the work that they have been doing in cross-channel analytics, tying up web data with circulation data and understanding the impact of online activity on circulations sales and vice-versa.

Perhaps one of the more interesting presentations was in the work that Econsultancy (www.econsultancy.com) had been doing to understand how to measure the effects of online PR. Having been saying that companies should be looking to measure the effects of their online PR activities, they decided to put their money where their mouth was and carry out their own study. They set up an online PR campaign and measured to the best of their ability the impact of that campaign in monetary terms. What was interesting was whilst they saw a positive ROI from the online PR campaign itself, there was also an additional benefit from improved search engine optimisation performance.

All in all, having been to two Emetrics conferences in the past few weeks (San Francisco and London), I can’t say that there was a massive difference between the two in terms of the issues being talked about and discussed. Core themes revolve around the need to move to a more analytical framework, to develop the tight kind of analytics “eco-system”, the fact thata we need to listen more and the challenges of social media measurement. The scale and the emphasis may be different but the main issues were the same.

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