Adotas » Tim Kopp

Grappling With Engagment: It’s About Time…& More

Tim Kopp — Tue, 07 Aug 2007 17:52:00 +0000

Recently, the industry has debated the most effective ways to measure online consumer engagement, with some vendors moving from pages viewed to time spent. Unfortunately, engagement is not something you can measure using a stopwatch alone. If you could, we’d be back in 1999 talking about site stickiness and hits.

It’s no wonder that the concept of engagement has become such a lightning rod for publishers, marketers and agencies. At the end of the day, marketing is really just a conversation. The best marketers know that it’s a two-way conversation—a dialogue that builds relationships with target consumers.

When we have a “live” conversation with a friend, co-worker or spouse, it is easy to see how engaged the other person is. There are many indicators; are they making direct eye contact, leaning forward or sitting with their arms crossed, nodding in agreement, or, most importantly, are they responding to you?

In the online space, marketers obviously lack the ability to perceive some of these nuances, however, they have a tremendous advantage over those purely using traditional mediums like Television, Print, Out of Home and even offline Direct Marketing. Online marketers have the unique ability to see every customer action, from the initial response, to the depth, frequency and focus of their interactions over time.

This is why, as an industry, we are so excited about online engagement–especially now that marketers have the ability to measure an weigh each activity as offered through WebTrends Score, a patented solution that reveals the true value, interests and engagement of visitors. There’s no better source of information, from what assets a customer already owns to their demographic profile that a marketer can use to deduce what a customer is most likely to do next. This real-time insight into prospect and customer intent is plentiful on the Web. Yet much of the interactive advertising industry is focused on general yardsticks of “page views” or “time spent”, both of which do not do justice to the opportunity marketers have to leverage the engagement of visitors to truly understand, interact and respond to them in unique ways. I think a better definition of engagement might be time spent+interaction+emotional response. However the industry today is only measuring one of these three attributes instead of all 3 at once.

For every business, and even every campaign, engagement means different things that must be interpreted by marketers within the context of their business objectives. However, the goal remains the same: to create messages and offers so powerful and relevant that customers deepen their relationship with you because they want to, not because they have to. This need for relevancy in marketing is only accelerating as it is being driven by consumer choices and control, as well as the rise of social media.

Measuring marketing and web site ROI is more than just tallying page views or even revenue earned; it’s about understanding whether consumers are becoming more or less engaged with your business over time in ways that matter given your objectives and having the insight to do something about it. The future of web measurement is about understanding and fostering engagement in the context of your business and marketing objectives.

If you want to continue the conversation, I’m listening; drop me a line at: tim.kopp@webtrends.com

Building A 360 View Of The Customer

Tim Kopp — Mon, 09 Jul 2007 16:08:54 +0000

Today, most adept online marketers utilize performance measurement to compare campaign response rates, evaluate web site conversion processes, and ultimately determine where their marketing dollars produce the greatest returns. Yet all too often, the analysis of “what happened” gets priority over “what happens next.”

From hectic schedules to boardroom justification, many marketers are at risk of using metrics primarily as a report card rather than realizing the tremendous optimization opportunities that can be achieved. As 19th century poet Andrew Lang put it, “He uses statistics as a drunken man uses lamp posts — for support rather than illumination.”

True, many web analytic solutions on the market are just reporting tools. Marketers know which campaigns produced the highest clickthroughs, sales and profit, but aside from running the same top-performing campaigns through the same top-performing demand channels, the high-leverage steps that should be taken next are not always clear.

A new generation of analytics solutions focused on customer-centric insight is shifting the metrics paradigm, enabling marketers to leverage past performance and current customer activity across channels to drive future actions.

Take for example, a situation where marketers see a significant percentage of web site visitors dropping out of a conversion process at step four. In the old metrics world, marketers would move beyond reporting by running tests to reduce abandonment. Perhaps they’d find that a “satisfaction guaranteed” offer on this step most positively affects overall conversion rates. In the new world of customer-centric insight, marketers have much more information to holistically diagnose issues and prescribe remedies at a more personally relevant level. For example, marketers may track what visitors viewed after abandoning the process and on subsequent visits, combined with their past campaign responses and offline purchases, to reach highly defined audience segments with targeted offers and messages that incite the desired action.

At the end of the day, web analytics will continue to provide the numbers by which online marketing ROI is gauged and the prowess of digital marketers is assessed, but the new world of customer-centric analysis is not about numbers, nor is it channel specific. It’s about people. By understanding the behavior and actions prospects take across all channels, marketers can tune-in to the affinities and motivations of different audiences and have the insight necessary to overcome conversion obstacles and grow customer value.

A consumer-centric approach to analytics provides exponentially more opportunities to influence marketing results, where even negative visitor actions such as abandonment can be turned into positives by leveraging a greater understanding to drive customer conversations and build stronger relationships.

Post-Consumerist America Experiences Growing Pains In Push To Pull Market

Tim Kopp — Fri, 08 Jun 2007 14:20:00 +0000

Thefuture of marketing is here. The shift from push to pull marketing is creating both challenges and opportunities to engage consumers in new ways—and to develop profitable relationships with them.

Consumers are in control. And this trend is only going to continue as they spend more time online. They’re getting hands-on with brands: creating videos , watching what others have made, sharing photo sets, joining social networks, subscribing to (and delivering) RSS feeds, and taking their media with them in their mobile players. They’re also personalizing the way they shop, interact, watch, listen, communicate and buy.

The bottom-line is that organizations no longer have the tight control over their message as they once did, but they have new opportunities to build long-term customer engagement. In my previous role at Coca-Cola Company, where I led the Worldwide Interactive Marketing Organization, I was a part of this shift every day. When we launched the new Coca-Cola brand site in July 2006, it differentiated Coca-Cola from traditional company sites because it consisted primarily of user-generated content. And we used marketing analytics to make sure we were hitting our business objectives.

Advertising in Web 2.0 technologies and user-generated content can be an effective way to make lasting consumer connections. What do we mean by Web 2.0? Streaming media, mobile media, podcasts, Rich Internet Applications (RIA), and syndication technologies like Really Simple Syndication (RSS). And consumer-generated content can take a variety of forms: video, photos, comment boards, product reviews, and more.

All of these have the potential to hook your audience—and to keep them coming back. But in order to make sure your marketing strategies are really turning occasional visitors into long-time customers—and hopefully, brand evangelists—you need to move beyond a tactical view of campaign performance and attain true customer-centric insight.

Companies like Microsoft, Kimberly-Clark, Orbitz, Kettle Foods, and many others are using marketing analytics to understand the effectiveness of Web 2.0 campaigns and to better connect with their consumers. And there’s never been a better opportunity to form lasting connections with consumers, breaking through the clutter, reaching them when and where they want to be reached, on their terms, and in relevant, targeted ways.