Chinalytics Longmarch Blog

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As a web analysts, we try to understand and optimize the performance of our or our clients’ websites and digital campaigns. For the most part that has included media optimization, creative opmtimization and site optimization. In a Web 2.0 world that is not enough anymore. As brands realize that they share the ownership of their brand image with their customers, prospects  and other interested parties online, (who influence each other by sharing their impressions, opinions and feedback trough ever increasing social media channels), brands are asking us to help them make sense of the discussion happening about their brand online a s well.

Zhou Lei will introduce Daqi’s tools and services that enable brands and agencies to keep track of the  ever proliferating online discussion. She will share some examples from auto/IT/FMCG case studies and describe  Daqi’s methodology. A quick intro to their service:

Daqi’s Buzz Radar system monitors 700,000+ BBS and 10 blog service providers in China. We capture av. 500,000+ data points from social media sites every day. From 2004 to now, our database has 8000+ million data entries. Based on the primary data from social media, we provide market intelligence, ads/campaign tracking, industry analysis, online behavior analysis, social media analysis,  IWOM analysis reports for our clients.

Please join Zhou Lei, me and more than 30 other web analytics enthusiasts to learn about web analytics, meet other web enthusiasts and have an all around great time. Bring any friends who might be interested to join our community along as well to:

Location: Luga’s Villa (right behind 3.3 in Sanlitun)

Time and date: Wednesday April 1st , 8PM

We will have a buffet dinner and soft drinks available for our guests. Be prepared to spend RMB 50 for the evening. As usual the knowledge you get in exchange is invaluable

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• March Web Analytics Wednesday Beijing with Google’s Stephanie Hsu (longmarch.chinalytics.com)
• Using Web Analytics to Meet Your Business Objectives (edocr.com)

I am just returning from today’s AdWorld 2009 event in Beijing and am happy to report that all three keynotes (Jeremy Fain of IAB US, David Ketchum of ADMA and Will Hodgman of Comscore) were focussing on data & standards or had some interesting related comments.

Jeremy gave and introduction on “The Importance of Standards in Growing the  Interactive Advertising Market”, and Will repeated a disappointing standard Comscore deck without any China data (that takes guts in the market with the largest online population)

The “on the money” comment came from David Ketchum. “2009 is not going to be the year of data and standards”. David’s conversations with the largest publishers align closely with my observations, that big publishers in China are still very comfortable making money from a lack of transparency. They are very interested in talking to the ADMA or IAB, but still feel like they have something to loose in a more standardized and transparent ad-world. The key drivers for change towards more transparency have to be advertisers and smaller publishers who do business by proving their performance through independently verified superior performance.

I see this already happening, but it takes time to build momentum. 2009 will be a good start but it will take time until well into the new decade until we can say goodbye to cost per day media buys, ad serving by publishers and hundreds of different banner sizes.

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• Event on 11/5/08: About IAB In China (Beijing)
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For everyone who can’t get enough of interesting events after yesterdays WAW, there is something happening tonight. The folks over at WanMo are throwing a “First Thursday’s” party at Drei Kronen 1308, a swank new German restaurant close to Gongti. Their panel will include:

Generously sponsored by Web Analytics Demystified, we hosted our August Web Analytics Wednesday event yesterday
at Club Camp. In the spirit of continuous improvements we changed from
a normal dinner set up to a buffet style arrangement, and I won’t look
back. I was happy to observe and join the many small group discussions,
that would have been impossible before. Plus we could easily host all 18 – 20 participants and have room for more.

Attentive Listeners

The main attraction of the day was the presentation of Feedsky CEO
Lv Xin Xin. The most interesting point for me was actually the audience
reaction after the presentation had started. More that 50% of our
audience were not familiar with the concepts of feeds in general and
RSS in particular. While there are 50 – 60 million blogs in China, the
way to follow them is still very different to the US and Europe. While western users often use their browsers and RSS readers to subscribe to
RSS feeds to feed their news habit, Chinese blogs are mainly personal journals set up on
platforms run by IM companies (Q-Zone by QQ, LiveSpace by MSN) and
portals. In order to keep updated users just check their corresponding
IM client to see if their friends have updated their blogs. The “old
way” of bookmarking blogs and checking them directly remains popular
too. Google reader or other RSS readers are still only used my a
minority of users. Lv Xin Xin mentioned that only 2 million users subscribe to
Feedsky feeds, while the online population is estimated at 253 million users.

LV Xin Xin in from of his slides

Other point from his presentation:

What is Feedsky?

• A Feedburner clone in China (Feedburner is blocked in China by the GFW)
• It provides are platform for publishers, mainly bloggers, to publish and track their RSS feeds easily
• Publishers can also merge multiple feeds, change the layout of the feed, add advertising and online bookmarking links

What data is Feedsky tracking?

• Number of subscription
• Tools use to subscribers
• Number of clicks
• can enable / disable
• most popular articles (Just the top 5, and no exact clicks
• real time subscription data (Geo, tools, time of last 20 – 30 subscribers

In his a recent post
Stephane Hamel linked to an interesting Gartner slide about their “Web
Analytics Maturity Model”. It seems a I am a bit late to the party,
since the slide was presented at eMetrics 2007 in San Francisco.

Regardless, its an interesting view of the evolution of web analytics.
Where do your efforts fall? Most of what I see in China is squarely in
level 1. Some leaders are implementing level 2 or 3 activities,
but I have not seen any web analytics implementations here that would
fall into Gartner’s “CRM” or “Corporate Performance Measurement” level.
While we could ague about which activity should go into which level (I
would argue well defined personas should go into level 4), I see the
main value of this graph in showing us what else can be done outside
our current scope of work. Thought provoking stuff.

Reader Tai Te, posted an interesting comment on the “The third party online metrics controversy” post, that I used to argue that 3rd party metrics are unnecessary to plan online marketing campaigns and and to evaluate campaigns success. This post generated a lot of interest due to Kaiser Kuo’s mention his the Digitalwatch blog.

Tai Te writes:

I highlight this comment because it echos common concerns about using web analytics metrics for campaigns planning and evaluation.
I can agree with this criticism for “one off” campaigns. It becomes mute though when you regularly or
continuously run campaigns (which is the case for most online advertisers) since you can build on experience. It also leads to best practices that accommodate media testing and continuous media optimization.
Testing and ongoing optimizations are critical for other reasons too. While reliable 3rd party
metrics will be able to tell you the number of impressions and clicks
you can expect for your campaign given a dollar number and media, these metrics will not allow you to predict the results of
the campaign.
Real campaign results (outcomes) depend on actions users
take on your landing page (e.g. buy, register, play video, learn more
etc.) I would argue that its these outcomes you should optimize your
media buying for.

Kaiser Kuo at Digitalwatch has an interesting write up of the Metrics and Measurement Panel at Verge. While there focus is all of Asia, there is certainly a lot of meat there about China (did someone say red meat?) Take a look at check it out.

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.

Coming through Jeremiah Owyang’s Web Strategy blog, I found this little gem of a video from MRM Worldwide’s own Alastair Duncan. Alastair is MRM’s digital strategist in the UK and covers companies like Intel, Microsoft, Unilever etc. But better listen to his own words.
Alastair, glad to learn you are blogging
Thanks Jeremiah! Hope you get the company name right next time Its MRM Worldwide, not MRM Global.

While everybody and their grandmother is talking about "New Marketing" or "4E’s", our own work with on viral marketing and "engaging online experiences" has triggered me to think about the impact these concepts will have on online media spending.
When brands focus their marketing efforts on "joining the conversation" with users, and "first understand, then be understood" (which certainly makes sense in China, too). Who will pay the bills of the loudspeakers (read portals) of todays online ecosystem?
While I do not believe that this business will go away any time soon, I do see a significant reallocation of online marketing budget in 2008 and beyond, from banner advertising to more integrated long term efforts that include syndicated content, in depth media cooperation and interactivity (e.g. blog, bbs, chat, votes, competitions etc). With the rising tide of online ad spending in China,  many a Kuai will flow down this Sina/Sohu river. But in two or three years what looks like a rainbow with a pot of gold at the end, will look more like the bridge over the aptly named river.
Now if you have enough of my poorly written allegories you can check what Jeff Davis over at the Guardian has to say on the topic. I will toil on to find more effective ways to analyze and optimize the online effort of our clients in this brave new world. A short hint: It really helps if you can add your own tracking codes on your media partners site (at least the part they customize for you).
And will I do this, can anyone explain to me how advertising will be different from PR when all we do is build a conversation? Anyone? Kaiser?