December 2006

Stone Temple Consulting and Alchemist Media are seeking additional participants for their upcoming Comparative Analytics Study. They are going to be running six leading analytics platforms side-by-side so they can compare results.

• Omniture
• WebSideStory
• Indextools
• ClickTracks
• Webtrends
• Google Analytics

They are seeking B2B and B2C ecommerce sites that spend at least $10,000/month on PPC advertising. In order to put these systems to the test, they prefer companies with a sales cycle that frequently takes more than 1 visit, a range of latency and some repeat customers.

Participants in the Analytics project will receive the following benefits:

1. Data on how the various analytics packages performed on their site. This may help the participant better understand the best analytics vendor(s) for their needs.

2. Detailed analysis of your site metrics by veteran SEM consultants using a variety of analytic tools. Their efforts to normalize data across these tools may also help you better quantify your ROI and understand current analytic issues.

3. Credit and acknowledgment for participation in the project. While they cannot quantify the word of mouth benefits or guarantee a number of backlinks, they anticipate that this study will be widely discussed in the press, in the blogosphere and at conferences.

In order to conduct this study, they will need to analyze performance data outlined below. They recognize that this is sensitive and confidential information. The confidential specifics of your campaign are not pertinent to the study, and will not be published. What is important to study is the relative data, information such as the differences in conversion data between analytics vendors, for purposes of evaluating the performance of the vendors.

They will mask all specifics, such as keywords, products, campaigns, the categories that the campaigns relate to, etc. In order to guarantee participants that they do not reveal sensitive information, they will allow each the opportunity to review information prior to releasing results.

Here are the specific items they will attempt to compare:

1. Clicks by source, campaign (e.g. Google AdWords Ad Groups, Overture categories, and logical groupings of web pages for organic campaigns) and term (first touch)
2. All conversions captured during the study, regardless of source (including transaction ID, customer ID and amount for ecommerce site)
3. Conversion by source, campaign and term of first touch. Including transaction ID (and amount for ecommerce sites)
4. Latency for each transaction where latency is the time from first touch to conversion
5. Number of touch points prior to conversion
6. Last touch source (when the number of is touch points greater than 1)
7. Pre-conversion events (downloads, signups, etc., depending on the site)
8. Repeat sales by source, campaign, term and customer ID
9. A/B Testing scenarios where appropriate
10. Various other tests that will be designed to expose the strengths and weaknesses of the Analytics Vendors products.

Please contact Eric Enge of Stone Temple Consulting at eenge@stonetemple.com and Jonah Stein of Alchemist Media at jstein@alchemistmedia.com if you are interested in participating.

Consumer privacy and behavioral targeting by marketers appear to be diametrically opposing forces.  These forces are headed for a showdown, observed Gord Hotchkiss in a recent Online Spin article entitled, The Coming Storm:  Search and Consumer Privacy.

The early signs of things to come appeared in a complaint filed by The Center for Digital Democracy and the U.S. Public Interest Research Group with the Federal Trade Commission.  They cite user tracking, web analytics and behavioral targeting as  “invasive and deceptive” online advertising practices.

Performance Metrics are addictive for Search Marketers. Companies use cookie and login based systems designed to track user behavior and provide analytic capabilities.  ROI metrics justify decisions and provide a rational basis for advertising spend. Executives armed with defensible marketing metrics have nothing to fear from scrutiny; every campaign can directly assert revenue.  The more the advertiser understands click through, conversion, latency and customer value for each key phrase in each campaign and channel, the more efficiently they can target spending. 

Consumer have long stated a tremendous concern from privacy coupled with a inexplicable willingness to give up personal information for an unlikely chance of winning prizes or obtaining a discount on products and services.  These concerns pale in comparison to the double whammy of Big Brother and Big Corporations abusing our privacy. The DOJ subpoena of search records in January and the release of search logs by AOL in August drove home the fact that using a search engine reveals information that is far more personal than your name or your social security number.

Some pundits have suggested that the market might solve the problem, that an engine like Ask.com or MSN could offer strong privacy guarantees such as not logging queries with any other information as a competitive angle to try dethroning Google.  While that would be a step in a positive direction, the problem goes beyond search; it is built into the information age and the solution must be technology driven.

Consumer demands for privacy will become fertile grounds for demogogery unless we proactively address the problem.  Few observant users should believe that the government is the answer. What we need to develop is a technology solution that splits the horns of the dilemma and aligns the forces for privacy with those of behavior targeting.  What is needed is a seamless avatar system that allows marketers to track clicks and conversions, allows search engines target behavior and allows users to enjoy the internet, including search and ecommerce, WITHOUT sacrificing anonymity.   

What we need is web browsing with a plain brown wrapper.