In today’s complex digital world, marketers rely heavily on analytics to measure the effectiveness of their online marketing strategies. Survey results and the insights gleaned from carefully crafted analytics can be invaluable tools for driving online marketing optimization and ROI.

Recently, Adobe’s 2010 Analytics Survey questioned over 1,000 marketers to gain insight into the current online analytics landscape. This guide reviews the lessons and best practices learned from the survey. It also describes how Zeo, an emerging company in an entirely new field, is using the Adobe Online Marketing Suite, powered by Omniture®, to create a holistic view of customers and campaigns to increase return on its marketing investment.

The 2010 Online Analytics Benchmark Survey addressed analytics, attribution, and emerging technologies such as social media and video. The objective was to discover opportunities for companies to increase their online marketing effectiveness and build current best practices into their programs.

Common challenges

The survey found that marketers faced a number of challenges when it comes to web analytics:

• Marketing data doesn’t easily integrate with marketing channels and technologies.
• Current solutions don’t go deep enough into the data.
• Many tools lack robust two-way APIs, so marketers have trouble importing and exporting marketing data.
• There is still a disconnect between data and marketing. Marketers are often unable to fully integrate data from social media, display, video, and other channels.
• Marketers spend too much time analyzing the data and not enough time optimizing their efforts based on insights from that data.
• Marketers are unable to develop a 360-degree view of customers that makes it easier to reach out to them.

Best practice 1: Data should integrate for a holistic view of customers and campaigns

The survey found that 44% of respondents have trouble properly relating sales revenue and costs to marketing campaigns. This makes it extremely difficult to calculate an accurate ROI. When asked if they could measure full marketing ROI, 76% of survey respondents said no. Based on survey demographics, this problem seems to be especially true for companies with relatively immature analytics processes, so technology could be especially useful for them.

Best practice 2: Data should be integrated seamlessly and automatically

According to the survey, companies most often set up automated integration of data from paid search, search engine optimization (SEO), and email. These are also seen as the most important channels to integrate, along with social media and ad networks. Other channels are integrated manually, and some channels, including retail and call centers, can’t be integrated at all

Best practice 3: Your data should enable advanced ad hoc segmentation

After you’ve collected the data, you need to be able to learn from it. Advanced ad hoc segmentation is one of the best ways to do this. However, many marketers have trouble with segmentation. Survey respondents said that they’re especially vexed by their inability to glean useful insights from their data and identify visitor profiles. This makes it harder to create and optimize targeted marketing campaigns, in particular.

Best practice 4: Analytics need to be the foundation of optimization

Without strong analytics, you’re going to have a hard time developing effective marketing campaigns. Respondents talked about not being able to act on the data they collected. As a result, their customers and prospects weren’t getting the most relevant or targeted content. Respondents also said that they weren’t able to optimize across channels and marketing support systems. Companies lacking a strong analytics program felt that they weren’t able to provide personalized, relevant, and ultimately profitable user experiences.

Multivariate testing platforms help companies meet some of these challenges. For example, solutions like Adobe Test&Target™, powered by Omniture, allow you to offer several user experiences, experimenting with different messages so that you can determine which ones resonate best with your target audience.

Best practice 5: Align measurements with marketing and business objectives

Here’s another very interesting survey finding: A surprising number of marketers had not correlated the data they were capturing with the business and marketing goals that they were trying to reach.

• Almost 40% said that they can’t measure sales conversions.
• Nearly 60% said that they can’t measure the lifetime value of their customers.
• More than 50% can’t measure ROI.
• Over 40% can’t measure revenue per visit.

While respondents said that they could measure things like visits and page use, these top-funnel metrics are only important as they relate to revenue-based metrics. It’s great to attract a lot of visitors, but until you know how to turn those visits into sales, your site is not as optimized as it could be.

Marketers need to delve deeper into revenue-based metrics, but these need to be the right kinds of metrics. Not all companies have the same business goals, so not all of them should be using the same benchmarks. When developing an analytics program, make sure that the numbers you’re calculating give you a clear picture of how well your site is performing against your overall goals.

Here is how companies rate the analytics solutions that they are currently using:

• Four percent said that they were somewhat dissatisfied with their solutions.
• Twenty-six percent said they were very satisfied.
• About half said that they were somewhat satisfied.

About Zeo

Analytics are important for any company, and even more so for companies working in new business models.

Zeo’s business model is built around this simple premise: Your quality of sleep is central to your quality of life. Zeo’s products are designed to improve sleep patterns with web-based tools that show customers personalized sleep graphs and offer sleep-related guidance. Zeo’s revolutionary sleep device is composed of a lightweight wireless headband, a bedside display, a set of online analytics tools, and an email-based personalized coaching program. These not only enable customers to track their sleep patterns at home, but also let them upload their data into Zeo’s website for further analysis and tips on getting a better night’s rest.

Zeo is a new company launching a new product in a new category, which means that there is no historical set of expectations for sales and revenue to rely on. Moreover, because Zeo’s products do different things, the company is sending different messages to different market segments, and it needs to know how each one is tracking with specific groups of users.

Business goals for Zeo’s analytics

As Zeo thought about which marketing analytics would be the most useful, it set the following goals:

• Determine core markets – Identify the most-relevant target customers based on data, not assumptions – Refine marketing and advertising tactics to deliver more-qualified site traffic
• Tie offline marketing to on-site experiences – Must have real-time, actionable marketing performance data of offline public relations (PR), event, and short form or infomercial advertising to choose best channels and time slots
• Understand on-site experience – Require strong, tailored messaging to improve the website experience and the existing sales funnel Zeo has dealt with all these common marketing challenges, and in building its analytics program, it has learned a few valuable lessons.

Lessons learned

First, let technology like Adobe SiteCatalyst®, powered by Omniture, do most of the work. A company that relies heavily on data analysis must leverage its technology to zero in on the most important metrics and streamline those processes to reduce analysis time—whether that means setting up automated report generation or performing certain tasks during off hours.

Integrate data to create a holistic view of customers and campaigns

Zeo has also learned that you need to limit the type of data you acquire and apply. While data is available from a number of sources, it must be relevant to the specifics of a company’s business model, products, target markets, and customer base. By using solutions like those offered in the Adobe Online Marketing Suite to measure specific results, Zeo can get a core set of data that integrates to create a more holistic picture, as well as makes external data easier to manage and better aligned with marketing and business objectives. This in turn provides the most actionable insights into Zeo’s online marketing campaigns.

Measure the effectiveness of PR efforts

A company or product that no one has ever heard of clearly benefits from mentions in newspapers, magazines, blogs, and social media. Therefore, one of Zeo’s “go to market” strategies involves heavily leveraging PR. The problem is that it’s often hard to determine the amount of benefit or whether PR efforts are generating incremental sales.

Use segmentation to hone in on the most successful marketing strategies

Zeo is using targeted marketing campaigns to let potential customers know who Zeo is and what it offers. Currently, the company is running three different ad campaigns touting three different benefits. It’s using Adobe Discover™, powered by Omniture, to learn which of these is most successful. Adobe Discover matches inbound data against each campaign and measures the response rates among each segment. Segmentation is proving invaluable because it helps Zeo pinpoint which campaigns are most effective within which segments.

Take full advantage of the best technology

Zeo used Adobe Test&Target to great advantage during a recent campaign. The company wondered whether offering a free premium with its products would lead to more conversions, as conventional wisdom would indicate. It set up a campaign where some prospects got no free gift, while others got things like blankets, pillows, relaxation CDs, or books.

What did the results show? As it turned out, the free gift actually hurt sales rather than helping them. The free pillow, as an example, cut sales by 50%. Zeo concluded that because very few people know about Zeo and its products, a free gift wasn’t going to change anybody’s mind. Because Zeo was able to use Test&Target analytics quickly and properly, it could quickly turn its focus away from unsuccessful campaigns, saving time and marketing dollars in the process.

Zeo centers its metrics on marketing cost, orders, and sales conversions. It’s a small start-up with very little cash, so it must account for every dollar spent. Its success is measured by cost per order. Because that’s the number that the board is reviewing when looking at company performance, it’s imperative that Zeo be able to accurately calculate how much revenue comes from each marketing dollar.

 To achieve these goals,Zeo leverages the best tools in the marketplace—the Adobe Online Marketing Suite. And because it has reliable numbers at hand, it can take advantage of the opportunities generated through offline activities.

Zeo’s top results with Adobe Using the Adobe Online Marketing Suite, Zeo has optimized marketing efforts significantly with the following results:

• Increased revenues by 1500%
• Return on advertising spend (ROAS) of more than 4000% Gained efficiencies in data collection and reporting
• Significant revenue increases based on multivariate testing
• Scaled solutions as the business grows

Adobe SearchCenter

Adobe SearchCenter, powered by Omniture, has helped Zeo realize that pure search engine marketing (SEM) is not the most effective marketing channel as previously thought. As a result, SEM efforts have been scaled back, and resources have been shifted to more effective marketing channels. Ad and marketing spend have been optimized for greater ROAS.

Adobe SiteCatalyst

Adobe SiteCatalyst has helped Zeo tie offline media to online performance, isolating data spikes related to PR events, measuring PR impacts, and tying ad spend to online behavior.It has helped Zeo quantify a baseline traffic pattern for its site and then show how much traffic comes in after a PR event (TV appearance, infomercial). Zeo is now able to show the degree to which certain PR activities drive traffic and revenue. This influences media buy options and helps Zeo optimize ad investments using SiteCatalyst daily data exports. Zeo marketers can also decide which media channels are most appropriate by turning costly guesswork into targeted insights and informed media buys.

Adobe Test&Target

Zeo uses Test&Target to run home and landing page tests on its main website and microsites. Metrics are used to produce statistically significant conversion, response, and customer behavior metrics. With strong targeted messaging, Zeo is better positioned to further optimize its sales funnel and engage in the most profitable marketing projects.

Putting it all together

Zeo is an excellent example of a small start-up using technology to make analytics easier, more integrated, and more aligned with the business. In fact, Zeo is the kind of company that needs to be using analyticsto the fullest extent because it has very little else to draw on. It’s a new company, offering a new product in a new category with no history against which to measure results. By using Adobe solutions, Zeo can make intelligent decisions more quickly, creating its own model for success.

Of course, this also means knowing which campaigns don’t work. A company like Zeo doesn’t know which cross-sell and upsell opportunities are available, so it needed to test a few. It tried to tie into searches for Ambien and other sleep-related products, but the analytics showed that those searches didn’t do anything to boost sales, so the effort was dropped. By collecting and using this kind of data, Zeo was able to move away from the things that didn’t work and identify the things that would. In short, Adobe analytics have allowed Zeo to “fail faster and thus succeed faster.”

Key takeaways

• Leverage the best technology solutions to make analytics easier, more integrated, and more insightful.
• Make analytics the foundation of your optimization.
• Use data to create a holistic view of customers and campaigns.
• Enable advanced ad hoc segmentation through the data acquired.
• Fail faster so that you can succeed faster.
• Align your metrics with your marketing and business objectives