Implementing web analytics successfully throughout an organisation requires more than just a “fire-and-forget” approach to the platform.  There are many elements that go into making it worthwhile for your business, including:

• a measurement strategy
• resources
• domain expertise
• data integration
• data visualisation
• site performance analysis
• online marketing analysis
• social media and competitive analysis
• measurement adoption throughout the organisation
• measurement governance
• and ongoing optimisation

Last year I posted some thoughts around “how to create a good measurement strategy” and we’ve now taken it one step further by having a questionnaire on Digital Balance to help you visualise your measurement footprint in relation to what we think is achievable for most organisations, and in relation to other respondents.

See how you shape up against everyone else.

I’ve come across a few clients now that either aren’t using SAINT, are using it in a limited way, or are using it for campaigns only.  Maybe people are confused by what it does, or daunted by it, or just don’t know what it can be used it for.  It’s got uses that extend way beyond campaigns.

So, in this post, I’ll re-cap a bit about what SAINT actually is, and how it can be used, across a whole multitude of things.

And classifications can be used for millions of records.  We recently uploaded a very large list of customer ID’s and segments per customer, which enables some fascinating insight into customer behaviour.

SAINT – the acronym

To get this out the way, SAINT stands for SiteCatalyst Attribute Importing and Naming Tool.  It’s a way to classify a SiteCatalyst variable into more meaningful terms, and enabling you to group them together in certain ways.

What’s a Classification?

Basically, when you “classify” a SiteCatalyst variable, you are extending the information available on that variable through additional meta-data. 

Classifications are most frequently used on campaigns.  When you run a campaign you track it through a campaign code – a unique code that you set to identify that specific campaign element, such as “eml123”.  You add the tracking code (typically in the format www.youdomain.com/page.html?cid=eml123) to a link that’s driving traffic to your site.

Your s_code is most likely looking for any page query string to contain the parameter “cid”, and once it sees it, it’ll put the value “eml123” into the s.campaign variable.

It only needs to see it once…typically on the landing page.  As long as it saw it and recorded it then you can see success events further down track, tied back to the campaign code.

Looking at your campaign reports, you’ll see one called “Tracking Code”, and in there, you’ll see all of the unique values that have been passed through the s.campaign variable.

But by themselves, they’re pretty difficult to read.  “eml123” doesn’t mean much to anyone.

So what if you want to view them by type of campaign, or source of clickthrough, or media type etc.  Do you need to create a new conversion variable for each one?  No. 

This is where classifications come into play.

You can simply tell SiteCatalyst, through SAINT, that there is additional information that represents the unique campaign code, and using that information, you can view reports and conversions by the extended data, slicing and dicing to your hearts content.  Obviously you need to upload that data using the SAINT template, but that’s all pretty straightforward.

So, what else can it do?

Well there’s plenty of things that can be classified. 

We’ve used classifications across a broad spectrum of values, including:

• Products – the obvious one, classified into category, sub category, manufacturer, supplier, etc
• Internal promotions – the next most commonly used one, classified in the same way (generally) as external campaigns
• External Search Terms – classified against branded or non-branded terms
• Internal Search Terms – classified against type of term, such as product, information, support, sales etc
• Customers – classified against customer demographics, business segments, locations, products owned, mosaic segment etc.
• Behavioural Segments – classified against profile characteristics (such as described in Moving Beyond Business-Based Segmentation)
• Videos – classified against genre, length, player etc.
• and the list goes on…

If you’re using multiple eVars to capture similar information, or information that is essentially meta-data to do with another eVar, then you should be using SAINT to classify from a single eVar.

And it’s not just eVars that can be classified.  Traffic props can be classified too. 

Use Hierarchies

I’ve also come across plenty of clients that don’t have the hierarchies configured.  To configure hierarchies is very simple using the admin.

The benefit to hierarchies is that they allow you to view rolled-up metrics, and then allow you to drill-down into your chosen hierarchy.

Once you apply a hierarchy to your classifications, your menu structures change to support that hierarchy.

The most common use of hierarchies is within campaign structures, but they apply to all classifications.  Below I’ve shown the resulting menu structure for Murdoch’s equivalent of products – courses:

Once you open a report, for instance, Course Area (shown below), you initially see the rolled-up metrics.  Once you click on the + sign, you drill into that classification to report on the next level.

So, if you don’t see the classification drilldown in your menu’s…

…ask your admin to classify as it will surely help in your day to day reporting capability.

While Jerome is busy posting about the in’s and out’s of implementing Search&Promote, I thought I’d wade in with a post on why businesses should consider their search as a missed opportunity.

I’ve previously posted on what I think is a hidden gold mine of information called internal search.  It’s an area of the site that many companies, quite frankly, ignore.

Not too sure how to do anything with it, we assume it’s working just fine serving up results to random queries, so we’ll leave it alone and focus on our core purpose, driving people into our conversion funnel.

Or something along those lines.

If that’s you, go stand in front of a mirror and slap yourself a few times!  Wake up and smell the coffee…there’s much more to search than that!  And while you’re busy trying to optimise other areas of your site, you’re also blindly missing a massive opportunity for conversion optimisation.

The usual culprits

Almost all internal search engines (those used to search your own content) rely heavily on the traditional methods used for SEO – namely optimised pages of content.  They will dutifully rummage around your content on a predetermined frequency, building indexes that are searchable by the masses.

But there’s a whole land of missed opportunity if you rely on just organic searching.

Some of the more advanced search engine appliances will be able to up weight & down weight those results.  Some of them include facets (those subcategory links on the left hand side that are quite popular these days, especially amongst retail sites).  Most of them include some form of miss-spelt word or Did You Mean… capability.

Your opportunity to Search&Promote

You’re presented with a golden opportunity here.

Search&Promote can make your existing search engine look like it’s a digital yellow pages.  And how many people really want to use Yellow Pages nowadays?

What if you want to group certain types of results, such as content or products, and display them first.  What if you want to rank results, or in fact pre-filter results based on what the user has searched for, or interacted with, previously?

What if you wanted to display a different set of results for customers versus non-customers?

What if, by doing the above, you could marginally lift conversion rates?  Would that make a difference?

This opens up a whole new level for internal search.  You begin to have some control over the content that is actually displayed, rather that letting the search engine determine it.  And you can then begin to have your search contribute more to your conversions.

Make search work for you

If you’re already running SiteCatalyst and Test&Target, then adding Search&Promote really seems to be a no-brainer.

How much traffic do you get across your search pages?  Go and have a look.  How much of that traffic ultimately converts?  Take a look (you can use participation metrics to check that one out).

Now compare that to traffic that didn’t search internally.  How do they compare?

Given the volume of traffic across your search page, are there opportunities to engage them further?  If you could optimise your search page and influence conversions, what would be needed before you can show a return on investment.  I’ll bet it’s not much.

Optimisation Calculator

I’ve included as part of this post an Optimisation Calculator (excel spreadsheet) that can help you determine annual incremental revenue from optimisation efforts.

To use it, just put in your traffic, conversion and revenue amounts in the coloured cells, as well as a “what if we could it increase it by…” percentage rate.

In the example I’ve used, suppose you have 40,000 unique visitors to your internal search page.  Suppose they contribute to only 77 purchases, with $36,500 revenue generated from them.  That’s a search conversion rate of about 0.19%.  Not too much.  Some companies would think it’s not worth it.  They’re not there for that reason.

Think again.

If you could lift search conversions by an incrementally small amount, say 17% overall (taking the conversion rate from 0.19% to 0.23%, then you incrementally add nearly $100,000 to your annual revenue, given the example above.

If you can achieve the same conversion rate that your site gets overall (in the example, I’ve used 2.78%) you’d incrementally add a whopping $5.8million.

Did that make you sit up and look closer?

It’s a “suite” integration

If you have SiteCatalyst and Test&Target then you’re definitely one step ahead of your competition.  If you add in Search&Promote and spend the time to integrate all three products, so they leverage each other, you can, without a doubt influence internal search conversions.

With Search&Promote, you can do all of this and more – up weight/down weight results based on SiteCatalyst data such as top content; integrate external datasources such as product databases into the search results and have a different look and feel for those results, placing them at specific locations on the page.  You can target offers or promotions to users based on their search terms or previous browsing history by adding mboxes to the results page.  You can even change the entire search filter based on things like the last product type they viewed – why show them mens pants when they previously viewed female pants, and came back to do a search.

We must open the doors of opportunity.
But we must also equip our people to walk through those doors.
Lyndon B. Johnson

Well, the doors are wide open.  You’re suddenly in the land of opportunity.  Are you going to step through?

Remember, content relevance is just as, if not more, important on the search results page as it is across your other pages.  But many companies just forget about it assuming their search engine is doing a reasonable job.

Take a look at exit rates from search.

The other very much overlooked area for internal search is staff-based applications.  How many companies run intranets?  How many of you have multiple search boxes, searching different things across your company?  I’ve seen companies with between 3-10 different search types available to them, from internal product database, customer databases, content, FAQs, manual lists of links, and so on.  Search&Promote can integrate all of those into one easy to use search tool – saving hours of frustration for staff who can’t find the thing they wanted.

A small percentage increase in conversions, in a segment of traffic that virtually everybody forgets about (or discounts as not worth it) can make a whole heap of difference to your business.

Internal search…it’s an internal gold-mine waiting for you to excavate.  And the excavator is Search&Promote.

I challenge you to go take a look – spend an hour analysing your internal search traffic and play with a few “what if’s”.  Then decide if you can afford to ignore your internal search.