Employing Data for Insights…in Three Steps
Being a contrarian, I opted to attend the “Know Thy Customer: Hard Data + Fresh Insights” while next door, the “UGC + Social Media” session with CNN and Facebook had a standing-room only crowd. This decision was based on how the session intended to address challenges facing a modern agency of continual optimization: 1) how to derive insights from data analysis; and 2) how to connect insights to decision making.
The panelists included the following:
- Cindy Roche, VP, Site Experience, TripAdvisor
- Janet Eden-Harris, VP of Web Intelligence, J.D. Power and Associates
- Emily Sawtell, Founder and Managing Director, GradeGuru.com
The main topics of panel was centered around three main ideas: how to understand the customer, always tests, and use analytics for more than measuring ROI. Indeed, taken together, they can be taken together as three steps involved in optimization.
Understanding the Customer
Janet-Eden Harris of J.D. Power discus focusing sed how the use of customer data allowed them to measure the amount of consumer discussions around the environment and sustainability, beginning in the summer of 2008, and adjust their content to those needs.
Emily Sawtell of GradeGuru.com took the discussion further by discussing the integration of ethnographic research and customer segmentation to help communicate with their customer at an emotive level.
I think something to explore further is how to link hard analytics data (numbers) with ethnographic/segmentation data. Ethnographic research and segmentation research is old-hat for major consumer-packaged goods (CPG) companies, but there is a question is how to correlate and match that with analytics data.
Always Be Testing
A common topic throughout the panel was not so much illuminating, but effective in hammering the point home: “Always Be Testing.” While this a known fact among creative-types and search engine marketers doing landing page testing, the reminder here is that this needs to be applied to everything.
Sawtell of GradeGuru.com and Cindy Roche of TripAdvisor discussed the use of testing for non-traditional media, like Facebook updates A noted metric was that there was a 50 different subject lines for Facebook message, which saw conversion rate difference of 21x from the worse to best creative.
Roche added that it took three different videos by different groups to develop a viral video that worked. They began with a video from the CEO which failed, and on the third try had Rosario Dawson and got over 1.5 million views.
Diversifying the Term “ROI”
Cindy Roche of TripAdvisor measured the need to move away from ROI defined as being “finance.” This was also shared by the Modern Agency panelists earlier during the day, who felt the need for “Return on Objectives” rather than just ROI. Roche felt that analytics needed to provide trending analysis, not just financial data, to feed back to strategy and optimization.
Closing Thoughts
The session’s topic was very ambitious but in the end the ideas were simple: continually test and optimize campaigns, use all tools (social media to ethnographic research) to better listen to your many different types of customers, and analytics is not just for ROI.
