The Commerce360 Blog

OK, it’s been a while. My original idea of reviewing a chapter-a-day from Waiting For Your Cat to Bark didn’t go so well in terms of timing, but the ideas in these chapters are still worth further consideration, so let’s get back to it.

Chapter 16 is a quick introduction to the Persuasion Architecture process known as “uncovery”. Uncovery is the R&D phase, where the “goal is to examine the topology, psychographics, and demographics as they pertain to the business in question. We’re also looking to understand the culture of the organization itself.”

In our own Persuasion Architecture practice, Uncovery is a one or two day exercise which seems designed to educate the Persuasion Architect and get them up-to-speed on the business - and it does do that – but it also allows management and other stakeholders to gain fresh and alternate perspectives on their business. And this turns out to be extremely valuable.

Management teams can easily slip ‘inside the bottle’ as discussed in Chapter 4, and taking a fresh look at the goals and issues and customers you serve can be a surprisingly enlightening effort. Uncovery forces questions to be answered, priorities to be set, and even agreement to be reached among team members. And most importantly the process and discussion puts the current selling process, online and sometimes offline, into a new and very unflattering light – leaving everyone eager to get into and through the process which will result in such dramatic improvements.

Tomorrow (really) I’ll get into Chapter 17 and the first steps of Uncovery.

:: This is part of a chapter-by-chapter review and commentary on Waiting for Your Cat to Bark, by Bryan and Jeffrey Eisenberg with Lisa Davis. Read the original review here.

Posted by Craig Danuloff at 7:01 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Weds evening Omniture hosted quite a swanky 'user group' meeting at the Forbes Gallery in NYC. There was great attendance with about 100 existing Omniture users representing many large and well known companies. (Check out dates for Omniture Cafe meetings in other cities.)

It was clear the Omniture users have quite a pent-up demand for information and a community. It didn't take 2 minutes into the first presentation for the audience to begin asking questions and sharing work-arounds and requesting features. That could have gone on for hours - and been very useful and informative.

But the agenda called for a series of presentation from both Omniture users and Omniture staff, and so we learned a little about how the product is used in the real world and some 'inside' information on current and future happenings at Omniture (it was an NDA event so I can't share too many details.)

I was pleased to have been invited to share some of our experiences, and pulled together what would have been a solid 45 minute presentation - but the agenda allowed only about 15 minutes (which I knew in advance, so the over-stuffing was totally my fault). Still I was able to share a bit about how we approach both implementation and ongoing analysis, and discuss some of the tough spots we got into and how we managed to wiggle out of them.

The most interesting part of preparing the presentation was stopping to think about our 'Analytics Philosophy'. It don't think I was able to fully or accurately define it, but here's what I came up with:

1. Analytics is required. We don't take clients or work on any online marketing activities without 'appropriate' analytics software installed. Usually this means SiteCatalyst, although we do have some smaller clients on Google Analytics or IndexTools, and one major account still on HBX.
2. We need analytics in order to understand marketing programs, user behaviour, and website content and architecture. These are three of the most important attributes of an online marketing program and it is just impossible to make very many intelligent decisions about any of them without solid analytics.
3. Interesting isn't enough, it has to be actionable. After operating a website without any analytics, just getting the basic reports seems like a miracle. But the thrill of that wears off quickly, and it ultimately becomes clear that the data only looks backwards but the business needs to move forward. This means relating the data to goals, options, theories, and external information.
4. Analytics software is a tool not a solution. Gathering and presenting the data is a big hard job, but even a full implementation and lots of customized reports won't let anyone maximize business results. Analysis takes time and skill - which both mean resources and money. Avinash started the conversation with his 90/10 Rule but there is a lot more conversation to be had. And some of it should start with the vendors who need to set realistic expectation when marketing and selling even the high end tools. We prefer Omniture because of it's complexity and ability to be customized - attributes which add to the ongoing cost (and value) rather than reducing them.

Thanks to Omniture for hosting a great evening, and inviting us to participate. My primary suggestion to them: users need more. This is a mission-critical function for nearly everyone I met that evening, which means it doesn't have to run after-hours. Start the event at 1pm, schedule 3 1-hour sessions with general topics but setup to allow the room to talk (think un-conference) and some breaks. You can still buy us great hors dourves and cocktails at the end of the day. :-)

I'm looking forward to the next event, whatever form it takes.

Posted by Craig Danuloff at 3:39 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

A few days ago I documented some problems I had making reservations using the Sheraton website. Yesterday I got a call from someone at Sheraton, who let me know that my 'post had come to the attention' of somone and she was calling to help.

What she did, in fact, was adjust my room rate down to the sold-out group rate, and apologize for the issues on the site and the fact that the telephone team had no information or power to resolve problems which began on the website. I'm pleased about the resolution, and glad to see they're monitoring the blogosphere so closely. Just another example of how powerful this tool is.

While ultimately it shouldn't take a public (and potentially embarrasing) stand to get personal problems resolved, assuming they take internal action beyond just molifying me (and the other online whiners) then everyone benefits. I got the sense on the call that having this type of 'ammo' even helps the insiders who want to get the call center folks better attuned to life in a web-based world.

Thanks Sheraton.

Posted by Craig Danuloff at 3:18 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Most click fraud articles thus far have involved PPC customers who swear there is click fraud arguing with search engines who claim clickfraud isn't much of a problem. BusinessWeek decided to investigate and talks with a whole bunch of people who actually make money click fraud'ing. They talk to individuals, networks, and technology developers.

Makes it a lot harder to believe the engines when they tell us how well they have things under control. Here's the key paragraph:

A BusinessWeek investigation has revealed a thriving click-fraud underground populated by swarms of small-time players, making detection difficult. "Paid to read" rings with hundreds or thousands of members each, all of them pressing PC mice over and over in living rooms and dens around the world. In some cases, "clickbot" software generates page hits automatically and anonymously. Participants from Kentucky to China speak of making from $25 to several thousand dollars a month apiece, cash they wouldn't receive if Google and Yahoo were as successful at blocking fraud as they claim.

Posted by Craig Danuloff at 10:45 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Commerce360 continues to grow, with both exciting new clients and service expansions to existing clients. We're hiring in a number of areas, and will post a series of position openings here in the coming days. Today we'll start with openings for SEO and SEM talent, here's a snipped of the job posting on CareerBuilder:

We're a rapidly growing online marketing agency seeking search marketing experts with top skills obtaining organic ranking and/or managing paid search campaigns. We’re looking for skillful and passionate SEOs and SEMs who know how to win on Google, Yahoo, and MSN.

We manage large-scale and long-term efforts to get the best rankings and run the most efficient campaigns. We need search marketers who have proven track records with agency or in-house experience, and want to work on serious projects with access to the resources necessary to win. You'll be an important part of a full marketing team that includes experts in search, affiliate marketing, email, conversion, and analytics.

Commerce360 is a profitable company with clients throughout the US. This is a full-time position in our Plymouth Meeting office. Please
to arrange a confidential conversation.

Posted by Craig Danuloff at 12:10 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Making a reservation for the upcoming Emetrics Summit should be a simple process. Sheraton managed to make it a nightmare. The mess began on the Starwood Website where entering all the required info including the Promotion Code returns the following hard to read message:

Thinking that perhaps the Starwood site didn't have the promo-code rate but the Sheraton.com site would (that's the one the brochure suggested), I went there to give it another try. It quickly became obvious that I wound up on the same page and the deal was not going to be had online. Another available rate, with the friendly terms of pre-pay and no-refunds, was only $20 higher so I opted for that.

After finishing the complete reservation, reviewing the terms and details, and submitting my reservation, I was given this notice that I'd just wasted my time (click to enlarge)

OK, to the phones. There I am told that the promo rate is unavailable for 2 of the 3 nights of the conference, and the internet rate I was trying to book cannot be provided. Requesting a supervisor results in a few minutes of hold music and then a dead line. Calling back I got hung up on 2 more times, but this the simple result of a rep who admitted she didn't know how to use the phone system.

On the last attempt I made it to a 'reservations supervisor' who was equally incapable, unempowered, and/or not well-trained enough to simply take my reservation and provide the internet rate. Instead I was advised to book at a nearly 50% higher rate and then wait to talk to the hotel itself the next day. I declined this 'offer'.

I'm a Starwood Preferred Guest program member, but really haven't stayed there much in recent years. I'll probably wind up at the hotel where the event is, for simple convenience, but will go elsewhere in the future when I have the choice. Hopefully this little story helps to erode their image and appeal to many others, and prompt someone at Starwood to a) reprogram the website to tell you it's not accepting reservations before allowing people to spend time making reservations, and b) train and empower the telephone reps to properly pick up the slack when the site does go down.

Interestingly, I just heard today that there is another Word-of-Mouth conference coming up. I hope I have better luck getting reservations for that one...

Update: Sheraton Responds

Posted by Craig Danuloff at 1:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Visitors arrive at your website with a lot of baggage. They bring with them not only a mind focused on the very specific problem or goal that drove them to you in the first place, but also a whole lifetime of experiences, beliefs, communication styles and behavioral patterns.

How realistic is it to expect them to abandon all of that and instantly start doing things your way?

I say 'your way' because most web sites present information and options based on one view (the marketers') of what's important, how it should be expressed. And everything from bounce rates (the number of people who leave after looking at only one page) to conversion rates (the number of people who buy or achieve the primary goal) is screaming that 'your way' is not the right way.

I spent most of this past week with the minds behind Persuasion Architecture, including Bryan and Jeffrey Eisenberg as well as John Quarto-vonTividar and Holly Buchanan. The essence of Persuasion Architecture is the idea that your communications have to anticipate and then meet the needs (and personalities and communication preferences and even belief systems) of those you want to take specific actions (including purchasing something) on your website.

This isn't easy. In fact, it is quite difficult. It requires a tremendous amount of effort (and training and experience before the effort even begins) because it forces you to:

1. Determine and then understand the typical customers that you need to address
2. Anticipate the situation they may be in when they approach your business
3. Restructure the marketing materials that drive people to your site and just about the entirety of the website and its content in order to meet and satisfy these very individual needs.

But is there really any alternative? About 2% of our visitors seem willing to perservere through processes not customized for them, but what about everyone else? Is there something we can do to get them to put their personalities and needs aside for just long enough to order or sign up or download (or whatever it is we're trying to get them to do?)

An interesting new Forbes article by Jack Trout suggests not. The article talks about the efforts of MTV, Dell, Xerox, and others to change market perceptions and then ends by saying:

So my advice to you marketing experts out there? If your assignment is to change people's minds, don't accept the assignment.

So it's time to embrace the baggage. Pretending it's not there isn't working, and it's never going to.

Posted by Craig Danuloff at 12:49 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Omniture SearchCenter version 2.2 ostensibly offers support for MSN AdCenter, but when you try to enable your AdCenter account you're asked for an API-Token which it turns out is only available by request from MSN (you won't find word of it in the AdCenter interface or even on Google).

I don't know yet how easy or hard it is to get one - the word is you have to have a sufficient monthly spend on MSN. BTW: This fact doesn't appear in the SearchCenter User Guide (v2) or the KnowledgeBase.

Posted by Craig Danuloff at 10:23 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

In this release, we are providing new tools designed to increase your productivity and effectiveness. New features and functionality include;

The industry’s first portfolio of Business Optimizations: Business Optimizations package best practice expertise and technology into discrete offerings that help you achieve faster time-to-value from Web 2.0 technologies including:

• Social Networking
• Blog Value
• Rich Internet Applications (RIA)
• Dynamic Search
• Visitor Interaction Profiling

The industry’s first self-service administration console. The Online Business Administration Console helps you increase productivity and respond to business change more quickly through a graphical, self-service configuration tool.

Key features of the console include:

• Management of user access and permissions for individuals, groups and functions by roles and entitlements
• Fast and accurate creation, configuration and management of thousands of report suites which includes pre-configured suite templates tailored for specific industries and site types
• Support for the deployment and management of multiple currencies and languages
• Automatic generation of collection code by application type, including Web pages, wireless devices and rich Internet applications
• Open access to external systems through a Web Services API and software developer kit to automate all administrative functionality

That first item sounds great - looks like they're starting to address the 'death of the page' and the way in which blogs and web2.0 will/may replace it. The new Admin console looks great too (They've posted a training video on that one so I was able to take a look) and will save those who admin SiteCatalyst implementations a lot of time.

I hope we're safe in assuming that blog support and new admin tools do not a full digit upgrade make, so that leaves a lot more surprises for tomorrow. Here are a few random items from my personal wish-list:

• Completely revitalized charting. We currently have the charting equivalent of MacPaint - I want Photoshop.
• The ability to override date ranges stored in dashboards. Those dang things take way to long to create for every date range I want covered.
• Automatic treatment of Natural Search as a campaign via Paid Search Detection. If you tag all your other traffic sources, why leave organic search out of the reports.
• A toggle switch to turn 'None' off. Why do I want the data not included in what I'm looking at overwhelming my charts?
• An easy way to add a group of pages in a single slot in Fallout Reports. It would make landing page testing (and lots of other occurances) way easier to deal with.

These and a few dozen more important needs were discussed at the Omniture Summit in March, and I can't wait to see what the "New Features Fairy" actually has in store for us. I'll post some reports and thoughts as soon as we get a look.

Update: 12:35am EST, and Version 13 now appears in the log-on pull down menu, but when attempting to log in, 'access to that version' is not yet enabled.

Update: After using Version 13 for a day, it looks like the Admin features and web2.0 support ARE just about all that is there. I've added the 'Release Notes' after the jump. I hope to speak with someone at Omniture on Monday and better understand this release, and post more thoughts.

OMNITURE SiteCatalyst 13 Release Notes
===========================

SiteCatalyst 13 delivers a new Omniture Administration Console designed to reduce the complexity and increase the speed of managing online business.

It improves time to market by decreasing report suite setup and configuration time while improving report suite setup accuracy. It also allows for integration with external systems to optimize administration through automated processes. The Administration Console provides a single place for managing all Omniture products -- empowering users to more easily manage their online business and deploy new strategies with fewer IT resources.

New features of SiteCatalyst 13 include:

• Omniture Administration Console:

Through a powerful user interface, or using the web services API, you can now create new report suites, manage configurations, view and manage billing services, generate and archive code, adjust international privacy settings, administer user permissions and much more.

• Web Services API, or Web Interface Access
  1. API
  o Programmatically synchronize Omniture platform settings with external systems through a robust Web Services API. Using the systems your IT teams are designed around, connect directly to the Omniture platform and manage users, report suites, privacy, billing information, and more.
  2. Web Interface
  o Leverage the full capabilities of the Omniture Administration Console through a powerful and intuitive interface, with drag and drop configurations and task oriented navigation, directly within SiteCatalyst.

Using either the API or the Web Interface, you can...
o Configure Reporting:
+ Easily control the business rules for populating reports and update the names of those reports.
o Configure User Groups and Permissions:
+ Add or delete users with appropriate levels of permissioning and monitor and audit system usage.
o Manage Information Security:
+ Privacy policy manager and IP address eliminator.
o Manage Billing and Transactions:
+ View billing and manage traffic level notifications.
o Create New Report Suites Based on Pre-configured Best Practice Templates:
+ Out-of-the-box, for specific industries and site types that leverage the best practices across thousands of customer business models.
o Manage and Archive Code Versions:
+ Code generation, versioning and archiving to simplify the measurement across all channels of customer interaction including web pages and Rich Internet Applications (RIA) such as Flex/Flash, and AJAX.

• Mac Support:
  o SiteCatalyst 13 increases native support for Apple systems. Apple users can now leverage the SiteCatalyst Dashboard player from the Mac desktop, and DirectAccess, built on the native Mac widget technology.
  + Dashboard Player:
  # View dashboards on your Mac through a screensaver, dedicated display, or a separate screen for continuous updates on key SiteCatalyst reports.
  + DirectAccess
  # Link directly to dashboards from your Mac desktop for quick access to SiteCatalyst reporting.
  + Browser & Operation System Recognition:
  # Improved recognition of Safari browser and Mac OS versions for reporting.
  * Processing Rules Improvements:
  o SiteCatalyst 13 improves data processing for more advanced search engine detection and increased browser and operating system recognition.

• Lost Password Recovery:
  o Lost passwords can now be reset through an automated process instead of requiring administrator contact.

Posted by Craig Danuloff at 10:47 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)