Chinalytics Longmarch Blog

Using Omniture in a more remote market (China, 210 million Internet users), I used to complain about the quality of the service we could get. Things took a remarkable turn for the better when Omniture opened an office in China.
Starting to dig into a WebTrends project for another client, I am facing the same problem. If anyone at WebTrends is read this, please let my know if you have a team on the ground. I would love to be in touch.
A Google search for “WebTrends China” turned up this article from 2000, stating

“WebTrends Corporation (Nasdaq:WEBT), the leading provider of
Enterprise Solutions for Visitor Relationship Management(TM), and
eBusiness Intelligence, announced today
that it has entered into a master distribution agreement with Ronghai Consulting, a leading IT systems consultant in the Peoples Republic of China.”

If anyone has heard of Ronghai Consulting or the people behind it, I would appreciate a shout as well.

Landing pages / experiences in China suck. Its official. I challenge everyone who claims otherwise to a duel to the death. While I have seen one or two exceptions, a short visit to the Sina, China’s largest portal. Will prove the point. Click on any of the ads and tell me what you think. In general I see a couple of common mistakes

1. The link goes to general page (mostly the homepage) that only loosely connect with the banner message.
2. The landing page is too long and too confusing. Its is not clear what the advertiser wants the visitor to do.
3. The landing page is executed in heavy Flash file that take forever to load and is all fluff but no content
4. The key message / action is hidden somewhere is a complicated navigation structure and not clearly visible on the homepage.

These mistakes are not unique to China, nor are the solutions. (See the “Post Click Manifesto” from the folks at Ion Interactive for an American perspective). The most effective way to an optimized landing page is testing, but testing itself comes as one part of part of an effective optimization process.

1. Identify the optimization target. This answer should come from the owner of the campaign. The person that pays the bill, the person that grew up with newspapers and TV (some education might be necessary). You would be surprised by the number of advertiser that cannot answer the questions. “What do you want the visitor to do, after he / she clicked the banner?” Often the answer is “Read the content on my website.” That is not enough. In best case you can drill down to specific actions (download whitepaper, fill in form, play video, sign up for newsletter, click on store locator). In the worst case you need to settle for metrics like bounce rate or pages / visit.
2. Measure the performance of the current landing page based on the target.
3. Develop a hypothesis, why you conversion rate is bad. Trust me it is worse than it could be. If you start with your optimization, any of the common mistakes above will serve well as a starting point. For more details about a good hypothesis take a look at “Website Optimization Starts With a Hypothesis” over at Grokdotcom
4. Develop an alternative landing page that fixes the problem and run an A/B test. Google provides as free and easy to use tool, Google Website Optimizer, that lets you run these tests without any changes to your banners. The test will tell you which alternative page performed better.
5. Then choose the better alternative and start the process form the beginning.

Going through this process, I found Semphoric’s Web Analytics Functionalism idea thought provoking. Borrowing from the modernist design credo “form follows function”, Semphoric theorized that each page has a role (function) and the most effective design will always be the one whose design (form) allows it to fulfill the function most effectively. Read their whitepaper to get a better idea and some great idea for hypthesis why our page does not work as well as it could.

Dear friends of the dark arts of web analytics,

As I mentioned during the last Web Analytics Wednesday and on my blog, the high priests of corporate web analytics (Omniture) are coming to town. They would like to hear from us locals, what we would like them to do for middle kingdom.
Lets celebrate their arrival together with Darryl Su from the Omniture China office as well as couple suits from Utah (no they won’t knock on your door) with a nice dinner at LAN club. I am planning to show off Beijing as modern international metropolis, so please come over and show some Olympic spirit (Beijing Huan Ying Ni ?????) (no Olympic rings or Fuwa’s required)

Best,
Florian

P.S.: Please do RSVP by sending me an email (florian-dot-pihs-at-ap-dot-mccann-dot-com) as I would like to reserve a room to ensure our uninterrupted enjoyment.

In a recent presentation to a group of University of San Francisco MBA’s I showed the slide below to explain the web analytics process.

Now it strikes me that the key point I made (see the center of the graph) misses the mark somewhat, since it does not describe the methodology we use to optimize for ROI. Thus the title title of this post. Whatever we do in Web Analytics it comes down to testing, testing, testing. We try out multiple creative ideas, formats, channels, media, landing pages & offers, then keep what works and kill the rest.
In the early days of this blog I theorized about the scientific method in web analytics,  and “experiments” in the scientific method can be equated with “testing”. Now however it strikes me, that the “survival of the fittest” of Darwinian evolution is a method that is more efficient, if not more effective. Advanced ad servers, web analytics tools and multivariate testing environments, large amount of online interactions + raw computational power today provide tools, which enable us to quickly experiment with a large number of variables and choose the variations that drive visitors to take action most effectively
Regrettably this brave new world of online marketing has not fully arrived in China yet (although I hear is going to arrive before the Olympics ). The main challenges I see are:

• Unless the client is an e-commerce client (which is very rare in China) or a cost per lead client (less rare but still not mainstream), it is often difficult to define and agree on a success event (action). But as long as you don’t have a target to optimize for, it is impossible to effectively test campaigns. Often the first step of an effective web analytics effort will focus on, is working with the client to identify how they define success for an online marketing campaign
• Clients are averse to testing, since
• they trust their judgment (or their creative / media agencies judgment) to tell them what will work and what won’t, more efficiently than their target audience will through testing. The truth is, all their research, focus groups and (more often) gut feeling is not as accurate as a well planned and executed test (actually their are often quite far off). Experience has shown that the most educated approach is following Einstein: “The more I learn, the more I realize I don’t know”. Therefore I need to test to be sure.
• they believe testing wastes money, since creative / web development effort and media money is spent on media, creative and landing pages that will not work as well. This is based partly on the first point, since you have to be comfortable with the current plan to believe that testing wastes money. Experience in the US has shown, and SEM practice globally and in China has proven that well executed test (e.g. following an 80/20 rule, spending 20% of the budget on testing and 80% on running the optimized campaign) will outperform untested campaigns every time by a significant margin.
• The media serving infrastructure and media buying practice does not allow for rapid testing or changes in budget allocation (by media, by position, by creative). What can be tested more or less effectively right now is creative execution, landing page design and call to action. While the media buying process adjusts to the international standard this is a good place to start. Often times landing page testing & optimization alone yield a performance boost of several 100% (if some of the alternatives follow best practices, as most current landing pages in China do not).
• Timelines are often not planned to allow for testing, including creating multiple creatives, calls to action or landing pages

If you have experiences about testing, especially if you are in China, please let me know, ideally through a comment on this blog or by email to florian-dot-pihs-at-ap-dot-mccann-dot-com.

And happy Chinese New Year
????

Can’t get enough of Web Analytics goodies? Take a look at my Google Reader Share items feed. There you will find all the items I found thought provoking, interesting or helpful, out of the 50 to 100 post or articles I read on a daily basis. Consume them on your own time with a convenient RSS feed.
Some of you who use Google Reader as an RSS reader might have noticed the Shared Items feature. It allows me to select items I want to recommend to others and combines them to a feed for easy sharing. Its are great social feature and I hope you find these shared items as valuable as I do.
Please also do me a favor and share links to your shared item in the comments sections, or by email (after you have evaluated the privacy implications). I very interested in what you are reading, and am thinking about aggregating the Shared Items feeds of other web analytics addicts into a ranked feed using Yahoo Pipes!. I guess that will start to be useful when I have collected about 10 feeds. So get the sharing started.