painting by numbers

Paint a Total Customer Experience in Your Web Analytics

Some say they see Poetry in my paintings ; I see only science.

-Georges S eur at
Trying to analyze your customers in different systemsweb analytics, CRMS, loyalty platformis like trying to look at a George Seurat painting one dot at a time. Dots exist in three different systems, but only when those dots are layered over one another and in aggregate can you start to see the full picture. All you really want is to see all the data together. With a few tweaks to your web analytics code, you can start to layer those data dots and paint a larger picture of your overall customer engagement and experience.

2013 500FRIENDS, INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

painting by numbers

Canvas
Lets start preparing the canvas by exploring the state of the union facing analytics today.
Einstein said it best, If I had an hour to solve a problem, Id spend 55 minutes thinking about the problem and 5 minutes thinking about solutions.

Part 1 | Canvas

Start by identifying the problems that youre facing. But if youre like the majority of the marketers out there, here are a few common problems:
Connecting the Dots
problem

The Cookie Eraser

problem

Many of your customers use a work computer, home computer, mobile device, and possibly a tablet on a near daily basis. Chances are theyre also using your website from multiple devices. Traditional analytics would treat every single one of those touch points as a different customer. With some of our clients experiencing 50% penetration of mobile-based visits and over 20% in sales coming from mobile channels, it is crucial to start capturing and analyzing your customer experience across multiple touch points.
Solution

The majority of your data today is probably based on cookies, which means that its subject to the cookie eraser (e.g. user clearing their cookie data or using incognito windows). When someone deletes their cookies, its like shaking the etch-asketch. With the cookie dumped, your web analytic software treats the customer as brand new and your trusted metrics become not-so-trusted.
Solution

Luckily there are quite a few people that have already started tackling this issue. However, check out some inventive storage solutions such as ever cookie that try and evade the cookie eraser.

Make sure your tracking is consistent across touchpoints: website, mobile site, and in-store. The simplest solution is to make sure you have a mobile optimized website that includes the same level and detail in tracking that you have on your desktop sitethat way you have a true apples-to-apples comparison.

2013 500FRIENDS, INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

painting by numbers

Part 1 | Canvas

Know Your Brushes

problem

Blurred Lines
problem

Remember the first point on mobility? Well, to further complicate things, cookies are generally turned off on some devices (iPod, iPhone, etc), leaving traditional web analytics blind.
Solution

No personally identifiable information (PII). Most, if not all, web analytic platforms state in their terms & conditions that youre not to send over personally identifiable data. So how are you to tell whos who?
Solution

To get around this obscurity, we have login! Start by encouraging members and non-members to login on various devices. For members, think about rewarding them with as little as 5 points per login (which is equivalent to a mere fraction of a penny).

Devise a universal unique identifier that doesnt disclose PII. Most reward programs have a loyalty ID or number that isnt their email address. Make sure this identifier is present across all systems.

2013 500FRIENDS, INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

painting by numbers

sketch
Start by thinking about your customers, current business needs, and what dimensions you want to track.
Its one thing to say that you want data, and a completely separate thing to identify what data you want and what youre going to DO with the data. Start by asking yourself: What do you hope to learn about your customers?

Part 2 | Sketch

Here are two key aspects to keep in mind:

Aspect #1 Aspect #2

Identify the dimensions you want to track

Look at your customers and identify what current analytics that you are interested in, e.g. How many gold members are returning to my site on a weekly, monthly, daily basis? How many members are purchasing a particular product versus non-members? How does attribution differ across my customers? Even if you initially track a single aspect of your customers or action on your website, having an overall sense what dimensions you want to track and questions youd like to answer will help you establish a report structure that scales well with an increase in the number and types of reporting.

Visualize the end report and work backwards

Knowing in advance how youd like the reports to look will direct the structure of your tagging and tracking implementation. For example, if the reports only need to show member versus nonmember, your tracking structure will be quite different than if the reports need to show other details like tier status, decile, conversions and AOV. If possible, mock up an example report with all the data that youd like to see and provide that to your implementation specialist. Theyll be much better equipped to meet or even exceed your expectations when they know exactly what you want and how you want it.

2013 500FRIENDS, INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

painting by numbers

paint
With the canvas set, now its time to get out the paint, brushes, and tools youll need to start your work of art.
Lets first start by defining what exactly is a variable versus an event. Youve probably heard the terms before but may not be aware or are even confused about the differences (s.prop versus eVar anyone?). Events are typically milestones that your customers do (add to shopping cart, make a purchase, enroll, login, etc). Variables are dimensions or aspects of your customers or their actions that are associated with those events (city, state, zip, products purchased, time on site).

Part 3 | Paint

Step 1

STEP 2

Track Login
The first part in connecting the dots in your customer experience is tracking login (an event). After all, login takes the guess who work out of the equation. Remember that pesky little problem about mobility of your customers? Well, with tracking login and setting certain variables at login, you can start to see the customer across channels and devices.

Track Member Dimensions

At the time of login, deciding what to track depends very much on your business needs, the type of program you have, current data tracking practices, and your analytics platform. From a very high level, there are a couple of key dimensions that you should track.
Variable 1: Unique identifier Variable 3: Tiers/subscriptions

Whats the unique identifier that you use to track your customer today? Remember, that means no personally identifiable data (no email, address, name, etc.).
Variable 2: Member/non-member

If your loyalty program incorporates tiers, be sure to set the tier value in a variable so that you can track the performance of the tier with and against other variables.
variable 4: Decile/Quartile

If using an ex-commerce platform, capture at the time of login if the user is a Member/Non-Member of the loyalty program. Otherwise, set Member when the user logs into the loyalty program.

Fancy yourself a Rembrandt? If you currently divide your customers into deciles or even quartiles, devise a naming convention for your customer splits and at login place that customers decile into a variable. If youre short on variables, you can look at appending your decile or quartile ID to any of the previous variables.

2013 500FRIENDS, INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

painting by numbers

Part 3 | Paint

STEP 3

Track Additional Member Events

Once you have logins and dimensions defined and being tracked, move on to tracking some other key customer events and milestones.
Event 1: Reward Redemptions & Point Purchases Event 2: Point Searches

A Word To the Wise

1. Adopt a consistent and clear naming convention
Anyone who has pulled reports should know that data is quick to get messy and extremely hard to get clean. When implementing your web and customer analytics, its important to have a clear and consistent naming convention across your data and analytics platforms. Gold in your CRMS cannot be gold in your Google Analytics, or youll waste precious Gold (i.e. your time) trying to standardize it later on.

If your program doesnt allow for points at the time of purchase but has other reward-based redemptions (e.g. free bronzer or free shipping), capture those redemptions in a variable so that you can report on them later. If your program allows for points at the time of purchase, track the overall amount of points being redeemed within the transactions.

Similarly, while point purchases will tell you the rewards that are getting redeemed, point searches will give you the demand side of the funnel.
Event 3: Unsubscribe

In the case they do unsubscribe, hopefully theyre doing so through your site so that you can analyze campaign unsubscribes within certain segments.

2. Make sure you capture your marketing channel

As a point of any web analytic tracking strategy, please be sure that youre setting channel variables accordingly (in-store, website, mobile site).

2013 500FRIENDS, INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

painting by numbers

10

step back, admire, & refine

A true artists work is never done... neither is a marketers or an analysts.
Like an artist, you need to step back and evaluate the metrics and the stories being told of your customers experience and journey with your brand.

Part 4 | step back, admire, & refine

Your customers story is hidden in the data its your job to nd it. Wait for the data to pile up to get a cleaner picture (about 2-3 months depending upon your sales cycles and your customer loyalty). Once you have a better understanding of your customers stories, you can start to take action.

Start by analyzing members versus non-member conversion

funnels and click-through streams.

Look at referral reports and keywords to see which keywords

are associated with your most valuable customers (e.g. Gold members, #1 decile), in order to decrease your CPA and ad spend.

Build segments based off the information and see how those
segments differ from one another in conversion and behavior.

Define and create goals around conversion, email sign up,

and other events your tracking on your site.

Devise and run A/B tests around your new dimensions and
segments. Armed with the Swiss Army knife of the analytic features in your various platformssegmentation, A/B/multivariate testing, personalization, attribution modelingyou can start to better tailor your customers experiences to meet your business needs.

2013 500FRIENDS, INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

painting by numbers

12

key takeaways

Start with your canvas

Always start by analyzing the problem and identifying the opportunities.

Sketch it out
With the problem defined, identify what it is that you hope to do with your analytics and how the data might be visualized prior to writing one line of code.

Paint
Start with tracking key variables at login and then, quickly expand to tracking additional variables with other events (enrollment, purchase, etc).

Reflect & refine

With the data in hand, start the analysis and try to sift out the gold nuggets from the sand. Make full use of your platform features, like segmentation, a/b testing framework, and personalization, to paint a new quick tip customer experienceone thats more desirable for both your customer and your brand.

Be consistent - its best to have a standard naming convention across all of your analytics platforms so that you can easily aggregate data.

2013 500FRIENDS, INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

painting by numbers

13

about us
500friends is a team of eCommerce experts committed to maximizing the protability of customer relationships for the worlds retailers.
phone (800) 818-8356 address 444 spear street SUITE 213 SAN FRANCISCO, CA 94105 email [email protected] Visit our website 500friends.com visit our blog 500friends.com/blog