Aaron Gray // Greater Returns

Icon

Musings on Web Analytics, product strategy + other stuff.

October 16, 2009 • 1:45 pm 0

Maybe You Need a Web Analytics Turnaround, Not a New Vendor

The Problem

Many companies have invested hundreds of thousands of dollars in web analytics tools and talent, and still find themselves frustrated by a lack of demonstrable value — a lack of real, calculable return on that investment.

It’s not a good situation to be in.  It’s bad personally for the managers and executives who have overseen the investment.  It’s bad for the vendors who take the blame for providing no value.  And it’s bad for the business which, unless corrective action is taken, will continue to throw good money after bad.

What to Do?

Typically, the response to this situation is to blame the vendor and put out an RFP.  It’s a natural response.  But is it the right response?  Most of the time, it isn’t.  Read the rest of this entry »

Filed under: People, Process, Tools, Web Analytics

October 12, 2009 • 4:50 pm 1

5 Things You Can Do to Reduce eCommerce Friction

Friction is the enemy of conversion and, ultimately, the enemy of your success online.  Friction is cognitive dissonance.  Friction is interactions that produce results that are counter-intuitive or, worse yet, useless.  Friction is site features that stumble to keep up with the pace at which people want to interact — whose responsiveness doesn’t allow the speed of interaction necessary to match the expectation set by the very presence of the feature.  Friction is anything that gets in the way of an effortless and enjoyable shopping experience.

In my experience, friction is often introduced by the very features that were intended to reduce friction and drive conversion and revenue performance improvements.  The result?  As friction goes up, return on investment tanks, and so, too, does revenue.  That’s why, to maximize success, it’s critical to isolate and understand the bottom-line impact of any new site feature and to eliminate (or modify and retest) any features that drag down performance of the site.

Here are 5 things you can do to reduce friction on your site. Read the rest of this entry »

Filed under: eCommerce, Process, Web Analytics

July 25, 2006 • 1:00 pm 0

Six Sigma Applied to Marketing

Decker Marketing: Marketing Bullseye 2: Think Six Sigma

Sam Decker, VP and marketing guru at Bazaarvoice writes in his blog on the application of Six Sigma to marketing, specifically online marketing. This should be especially interesting to banks and financial services companies, where Six Sigma reigns supreme.

Read carefully. It’s actually a nice blueprint for successful adoption of a web analytics within the organization. The core principal of Six Sigma (Define, Measure, Analyze, Improve, Control) is also the core principle behind successful use of Web Analytics to drive increasing ROI from your marketing dollars, although we usually shorten it to some variant of ‘Measure, Analyze, Improve’ for simplicity’s sake — Define and Control are implied.

If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it. And if you can’t define it, you can’t measure it. ‘Nuff said.

Filed under: Process, Web Analytics,

Twitter

Follow

Get every new post delivered to your Inbox.