Detailed Notes

Digital Marketing and E Commerce (KMBN207)

Unit 4

Using Marketing Strategies & Analytics Tools: Understanding Digital marketing Strategies, Using Marketing
analytics tools to segment, target, position; Online PR and reputation management, Digital Marketing
Strategies and its ROI. Using Google Analytics and other social media analytics tools. Using Apps and
Gamification.

Using Marketing Analytic Tools to Segment, Target and Position

 Segmentation – Segmentation is the process of classifying customers into groups which share same
characteristics
 Targeting – Targeting involves the process of evaluating each segment attractiveness and selecting one or
more segment to enter
 Positioning is arranging for a product to occupy a clear, distinctive and desirable place relative to competing
products in the mind of consumer

Particulars Segmentation Targeting Positioning

Search What/ How people Search Search Relevance Relevant Info

Social Media Taste, Preference, Interest, Existing Customer, Brand, Support,

Domain Taste, Interest Info / News

Mailer Email Database Taste, Needs & Informative / Solution

Requirement

Segmentation, Targeting and Positioning apply to digital marketing strategy:

Digital channels offer new options for targeting audiences that weren't available previously, but we need to
reserve sufficient budget for. For example:

 Search intent as searchers type keywords when comparing products, they are interested in buying
 Interest-based targeting in Facebook, e.g. Prospecting for those interested in Gardening, Gym membership
or Golf

 Targeting through email personalization and on-site personalization based on profile, behaviour (e.g. content
consumed)

How to use STP?

Through segmentation, you can identify niches with specific needs, mature markets to find new customers,
deliver more focused and effective marketing messages.

The needs of each segment are the same, so marketing messages should be designed for each segment to
emphasise relevant benefits and features required rather than one size fits all for all customer types. This
approach is more efficient, delivering the right mix to the same group of people, rather than a scattergun
approach.

Basis for Segmentation:

 1. Demographics

Breakdown by any combination: age, gender, income, education, ethnicity, marital status, education, household
(or business), size, length of residence, type of residence or even profession/Occupation.

An example is Firefox who sell 'coolest things', aimed at younger male audience. Though, Moshi Monsters,
however, is targeted to parents with fun, safe and educational space for younger audience.

 2. Psychographics

This refers to 'personality and emotions' based on behaviour, linked to purchase choices, including attitudes,
lifestyle, hobbies, risk aversion, personality and leadership traits. magazines read and TV. While demographics
explain 'who' your buyer is, psychographics inform you 'why' your customer buys.

There are a few different ways you can gather data to help form psychographic profiles for your typical
customers.

1. Interviews: Talk to a few people that are broadly representative of your target audience. In-depth interviews
let you gather useful qualitative data to really understand what makes your customers tick. The problem is
they can be expensive and difficult to conduct, and the small sample size means they may not always be
representative of the people you are trying to target.

2. Surveys: Surveys let you reach more people than interviews, but it can be harder to get as insightful
answers.

3. Customer data: You may have data on what your customers tend to purchase from you, such as data
coming from loyalty cards if an FMCG brand or from online purchase history if you are an ecommerce
business. You can use this data to generate insights into what kind of products your customers are interested
in and what is likely to make them purchase. For example, does discounting vastly increase their propensity
to purchase? In which case they might be quite spontaneous.

An example is Virgin Holidays who segment holidays into 6 groups.

 3. Lifestyle

This refers to Hobbies, recreational pursuits, entertainment, vacations, and other non-work time pursuits.

 4. Belief and Values

Refers to Religious, political, nationalistic and cultural beliefs and values.

 5. Life Stages

Life Stages is the Chronological benchmarking of people‘s lives at different stages.

An example is Saga holidays which are only available for people aged 50+. They claim a large enough segment
to focus on this life stage.

 6. Geography

Drill down by Country, region, area, metropolitan or rural location, population density or even climate.

 7. Behaviour

Refers to the nature of the purchase, brand loyalty, usage level, benefits sought, distribution channels used,
reaction to marketing factors.

In a B2B environment, the benefits sought are often about ‗how soon can it be delivered?‘ which includes the
‗last minute‘ segment - the planning in advance segment.

 8. Benefit

Benefit is the use and satisfaction gained by the consumer.

Smythson Stationary offer similar products to other stationery companies, but their clients want the benefit of
their signature packaging: tissue-lined Nile Blue boxes and tied with navy ribbon!

Market targeting

 Criteria Size: The market must be large enough to justify segmenting. If the market is small, it may make it
smaller.

 Difference: Measurable differences must exist between segments.

 Money: Anticipated profits must exceed the costs of additional marketing plans and other changes.
 Accessible: Each segment must be accessible to your team and the segment must be able to receive your
marketing messages

 Focus on different benefits: Different segments must need different benefits.

Product positioning

Positioning concerns how well a company differentiates itself from its competitors and where it sits in the
particular market. When referring this to being digital, this is all about how it uses its online presence, targets its
audience and becomes noticeable.

Example of STP: Amazon Model

Online Public Relations

Online PR is very similar to traditional PR in the sense that it‘s about influencing people rather than buying
placement for brand content.
Online PR activity is closely associated with improving results from many of the other digital marketing
communications techniques in particular content marketing, social media, SEO (link-building), partnership
marketing and viral marketing / word-of-mouth marketing.

Benefits of public relations

The advantages of PR include:

 Influence – audiences are more likely to trust messages coming from an objective source rather than paid-
for advertising messages. It is one of the most credible forms of promotion and can be persuasive.
 Reach – a good story can be picked up by several news outlets, exposing your message to a large
audience.
 Cost-effectiveness – PR can be an economical way to reach a large audience in comparison to paid for
advertising media placement, particularly if it is done in-house.

 No direct control – unlike advertising, you can‘t exactly control how your business is portrayed by the
media, when your message will appear, and where it will be placed.
  No guaranteed results – you may spend time and money on writing a press release, getting suitable
photography and speaking with journalists, but you can never guarantee your story will be published. This can
result in a poor return-on-investment.
 Evaluation – it can be difficult to measure the effectiveness of PR activities. You can count media
mentions and published stories, but it‘s harder to determine the impact this has on your audience.

Traditional Public Relations Vs Online Public Relations

Online PR Tools

Websites – A good Website is the heart of any small business marketing and online public relations effort. All
other online public relations and marketing activity is tied to Website.

Key points:

 Keyword research and search engine optimized writing are essential.

 Search engine algorithms keep getting more sophisticated – they now are starting to recognize and reward
good, informative content (even if a keyword or two is out of place).
 Good sites require thoughtful planning to develop a hierarchical structure that is easy to navigate.
 Search engines reward a steady flow of new content, including specific topic pages, press releases, blog
posts, newsletters, podcasts, video and updates from social media sites.
 Writing for two audiences of equal importance – humans and search engines – requires solid writing skills.

Online press releases – The building blocks of online public relations, are nearly identical to traditional press
releases, with a few significant differences.

Key points:

 Content is based on keywords derived from keyword research.

 Where the words go in the release and how often they are used is important.
 Typical length is 400 – 600 words.
 Well crafted online press releases contain links back to your Website or your client‘s.
 Online releases may incorporate logos, photos and video. A number of formats are in use, which we will
cover in more detail elsewhere.
 Article marketing – It is similar to issuing online press releases. The main difference is that it delivers a
finished product directed at non-journalist audiences.

Key points:

 Articles provide a quick and inexpensive way for small businesses to build a strong online reputation and
generate Website traffic.
 Based on keyword research, placement and density.
 Distribution, usually free, is made through article publishing sites, not newswires.
 Links are not permitted in the body copy.
 Articles can be somewhat longer, preferably 500 – 800 words.
 An ―author block‖ provides a brief description of the author‘s credentials. This is the place to provide one or
two links, no more.

Online newsletters – It is a great tool for any small business, yours included. This one is a no-brainer for online
public relations work and PR pros – it‘s story telling.

Key points:

 3-5 short articles of 100 – 300 words.

 Use photos, charts, graphs to illustrate stories.
 Short, punchy headlines and email subject lines.
 E-Newsletter software is part of many Website content management systems, but several good stand-alone
alternatives are available.
 Most newsletter software as a service is priced by number of addresses on your list, not the number of
newsletters you send each month.
 Costs as little as $15 per month for up to 500 addresses.
 Can be posted to Website to add more good content, build site visibility.

Blogs - By all laws of nature and online taxonomy, blogs define social media, but because of their importance,
we will consider them separately here.

Key points:

 Blogging is universally popular, and now is taking a bigger role in small business.
 Top bloggers consistently provide great content that answers questions and helps people solve problems.
 Blog posts enjoy favoured status with search engines.
 Blogs are incredibly easy to start and maintain with services such as [Link] – but if you plan to do
much with it, get your own domain name so you build content for yourself.
 Wordpress is perhaps the most popular software for creating stand-alone blogs. It‘s free, and a huge
developer community keeps delivering plug ins that make it a good choice for building small business sites, if
you have some programming knowledge.

Other Social Media – The key to social media success is to join a conversation, not try to dominate it. Social
media sites are a perfect fit for online public relations because they play to the strengths of PR professionals to
build relationships.

Key points:

 Social media sites work well across all traditional PR functional areas – media, internal and community
relations.
 Social sites provide instant feedback about products, consumer complaints and preferences.
 Popular social media sites, such as Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube and Flickr make excellent
platforms for small business marketing.
 You must have a strategy and key messages to get the most from social media sites.
 Many companies now use social media sites for primary customer relationship management.
 The list of sites keeps growing: no one can use them all, and there is no need to.

Online Reputation Management

Online Reputation Management (ORM) deals with everything about your company‘s brand in the online
community. This community includes the entire web – search engines, forums, blogs, news sites, social
networking sites, etc. Online Reputation Management is first being mindful of your company‘s online brand
then building on that brand in the search engines (chances are this is where you are sought for the most)
through social media and other websites that produce and disseminate content.

Online Reputation Management is a process of managing the brand value of a business for the targeted
audience, website, on social networking sites, social media and search engine. It works with only one
determination i.e to promote positive content about your business and suppress the negative content written
about your company on online platforms. A professional reputation specialist plays an eminent role in
building your customer relationship and managing the reputation of your website. A reputation
management specialist monitors the existing content about your website and brand online. They use
advanced reputation software to keep a track of what is being written online for your business.

Definition

Online reputation management (ORM) is the practice of crafting strategies that shape or influence the public
perception of an organization, individual or other entity on the Internet. It helps drive public opinion about a
business and its products and services.

By- Techopedia

ORM Process

Step 1: Tracking and monitoring. To get started with ORM process, identify keywords that represent you,

your brand, your company, or anything you want to track. There are several tools that allow you to type in a

keyword and then have a report sent to you via email or other means that provides blog posts or tweets that

include those keywords. You then need to read through and pick out the ones that are relevant to you.
 Some good tools to help you with this are:

 Social Mention – [Link]

 Google Alerts – [Link]/alerts

 TweetBeep – [Link]

 Technorati – [Link]

 BlogPulse – [Link]

 TagBulb – [Link]

Step 2: Evaluate and interpret. Since there are many tools that help to automate the process of finding

conversations online and measuring sentiment, you can easily miss this important step if you are not careful. It

is important to read through the results and try to interpret the true meaning.

Set up a process where you identify key statements from step one that you feel are impactful regardless of the

sentiment. Then read those aloud to your team and try and interpret what is really being said. The information

that comes out of a team discussion during this interpretation session can make a big difference in your entire

online reputation management strategy. It will provide you with the right basis as you decide how you are going

to act on what you have learned.

Once you have interpreted the various messages and conversations you have mined, you should place these into

several categories that you will address in the next step. Some of these categories could be broken down into:

 Positive

 Negative

 Branding

 Personnel

 Regional

 Industry related

Step 3: Engage and act. Now that you have a list of categories you wish to address and you have the basis for

what the issues are you want to focus on, you need a plan of action. I suggest that you put together a type of

editorial calendar that allows you to plan how and when you will act. This will help you pace yourself and act

when the timing is best.

For each of your categories you made in step two, you should plan a specific action you will take to address

them. For instance, you may want to directly comment on a blog post or you may wish to write an article or
white paper that addresses a specific concern or perception. Once you have your editorial plan in place, assign

you or your team members to execute the plan.

There are two strategies to consider, reactive and proactive.

Reactive is to have accounts set up and people in place to quickly respond to conversations (positive or

negative) that come up. In this case, a policy should be put in place on what should and should not be said as

team members respond to comments and feedback. Additionally, you should identify at what point is an issue

serious enough that it should be escalated to a higher level for the correct response. Issues can happen overnight

and you need to have a plan in place and be ready to act at a moment‘s notice.

Effective Online Reputation Management Best Practices

1. Research
Find the cause of the negative online discussions about your brand or company? What can be done to bring the
conversation to an end? The repairing process of your online profile can only start once the controversy ends.

2. Keywords
Compile a list of keywords related to the negative comments and focus on to one or two phrases keywords at the
most. These keywords can include your company name, brand, your own name, event, etc. This keyword list
will be used in your marketing efforts to push down the negative comments from the search engine result pages
(SERPs).

3. Identify
Identify key websites, social media channels and blogs and that you can use with your keyword list that will be
used to displace the damaging stories, comments and articles.

4. Website
Add new content and fully optimize your primary website for your company' brand or products and services.
This is the one website that you control and have a say over the content on it.

5. Link building
Create and launch a link building campaign on the niche websites, blogs and social media channels you have
selected in the identifying step. Now, use the keywords which have been chosen listed earlier and insert them in
the anchor text for the best results.

6. Blogging
Create a blog where you have control of the content and publish a couple of blog posts with the keywords you
have selected in the content. Use blogging networks to promote your content and your own social media profiles
such as Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. You can also release a couple of press releases through normal media
channels.

7. Ongoing content marketing

Google is always looking for new and interesting content. Create a dedicated content marketing campaign that
focuses on your company's brand products and services. The content that you use shouldn‘t just be any plain old
text book content. The content generated should be magnetic where it draws people in and encourage them to
share it with their own social circles. This can in-turn boost your online reputation significantly.

8. Videos
Publish and promote videos on popular video sharing channels such as YouTube and Vimeo. You can optimize
the videos by adding your keywords in the title of the video and tag them with targeted keyword phrases.

9. Damage control and monitoring

Setup a couple of listening processes so that you can be notified of any future negative or disparaging remarks.
If this happens, try to address these immediately and appropriately. To get started with this, create alerts on
Google Alerts for your brand name so that you are notified every time Google picks up content with your brand
name.

10. Measurement
Constantly monitor the first few pages of Google with the keywords you have selected. Take note of the article
positions you want to purge.

Online Reputation Management Tools

Claim Your Brand Name

To do this, use one of the following web services to lock up every instance of your brand name online:

 [Link]
 [Link]
 [Link]

Manage Your Brand Name

Once you have locked up the 100+ username accounts found through the resources above, the next thing to do is
to manage them.

Top Online Reputation Management Accounts

 Facebook
 Twitter
 Google+
 LinkedIn
 Pinterest
 Quora
 Tumblr
 YouTube
 Foursquare
 Yelp

Monitor Your Brand Name

Claiming and managing your brand name are only 2 parts of the equation when it comes to establishing and
improving your online reputation. One of the most important pieces of reputation management is actually
monitoring your brand online.

Top Brand Monitoring Tools & Track Online Reviews

 Google Alerts
 Twitter Search
 Google Search
 Bing Search
 Trackur
 Social Media Monitoring Tools and Sentiment Analysis Software.
  Trackur monitors mainstream media and social media such as blogs, social networks, Twitter,
Facebook, forums, images and video.

 TruReview
 TruReview's business review and appointment scheduling software makes it easy to get reviews
from your real customers to show on your website and social media.
 MonitorThis
 With MonitorThis you can subscribe to 20 different search engine feeds at the same time. Enter a
search term and click the 'make [Link]' button to get a list of rss feeds in OPML format.
 Naymz
 Naymz was established to help you create, define, and manage who you are on the Web.
 Brandseye
 BrandsEye is an online monitoring and insights tool used by brands and individuals globally to
track all their online conversations.
 [Link]
 [Link] helps businesses and individuals improve their search results, protect their privacy,
and get more positive customer reviews.
 Rankur
 Rankur monitors social networks like Facebook, Twitter, Google+, LinkedIn and more. It offers
identification of opinion leaders and facilitates the analysis of your customers‘ behavior and
engagement.
 Integrated solution for social media monitoring, social media management, and team workflow.
For brands, businesses and agencies.
 SocialMention
 Social Mention has a number of real-time search tools and a useful statistics sidebar. The statistics
include sentiment, top keywords, top users, top hashtags, last mention and more.
 To set up Social Mention monitoring, type your search term(s) in the text box and choose a channel
(e.g., blogs, microblogs, bookmarks, images, videos or questions). You can sort results by date,
source and time.
 IFTTT
 If This Then That (IFTTT) automates simple online tasks by using one of the most basic principles:
If this happens, then do that.
 To monitor what people are saying about your company, set up a recipe that scans RSS feeds of
important industry websites, then sends you a daily email alert with the results—IF [website]
mentions your company, THEN receive an email alert.
 IceRocket
 If you want to instantly search blogs, Twitter and Facebook for specific terms, IceRocket is the tool
you need.
 IceRocket doesn‘t require an account and is easy to use. Just type your term(s) in the search box
and choose the channel you want to search: blogs, Twitter, Facebook or search all.
 Topsy
 Topsy is a powerful Twitter search tool (more powerful than Twitter‘s native search). Use Topsy to
find key influencers related to your industry and company, as well as sentiment scores over a
period of time.
 Use all of Topsy‘s options (i.e., social search, social analytics and social trends) to keep up with
what‘s being said about you, your competitors and any general discussion around your industry.
 Yext
 Yext offers a free scan to find out how your business appears across the web.
 Monitor reviews, track results and mentions and more, or get comprehensive review analytics and
other features with Yext‘s small business or enterprise packages.
 Klout
 Klout is probably one of the most well-known free apps for gauging your online influence.
 Connect your various social networks to Klout and it will offer you a score to indicate how
influential you are online—based on the number of connections you have, how engaged your
connections are with you and other metrics. Don‘t forget to brag about your Klout score on Twitter
and Facebook.
 [Link]
 Review Monitoring for Business | Online Business Review Monitoring | Business Reputation
 ReviewPush
 Online Review Monitoring Tool - Online Review Management Tool.
 ReviewTrackers
 ReviewTrackers is the premier online review management software. Receive review alerts.
Request New Reviews. Improve your reviews.

ROI of Digital Strategies

What is Digital Marketing ROI?

Digital marketing ROI is the measure of the profit or loss that we generate on our digital marketing campaigns,
based on the amount of money we have invested. In other words, this measurement tells we whether we are
getting our money‘s worth from our marketing campaigns. If we have a positive return on investment, it means
that our campaigns are bringing in more money than we are spending on them.

Knowing the ROI of different aspects of your campaigns helps you better understand where you should be
allocating your marketing budget for best results.

What Are The Benefits of Measuring ROI?

1. Justifying your expenses. Small or big, if you‘re putting dollars into a marketing campaign you want data
that proves the money is well spent. Example, a restaurant spends money on a Facebook ad campaign. Their
marketers want to know if the people who see that ad are actually coming into their establishment.

2. Determining the most effective efforts. Measuring ROI is typically done on a case by case basis. That way
you can decide how to properly allocate your budget into the different marketing channels. Example: Data
shows that your video ads seem to be translating into more customer conversions than photograph ads. In the
future, you decide to invest more into video marketing productions.

3. Ensures your marketers have the company interests at heart. If you‘ve ever seen the TV show Mad Men,
you might have noticed that the marketers talk exclusively about the creative aspect of their campaigns, and
almost nothing about whether or not the client is going to make more money. That‘s because back in the 60‘s
marketing wasn‘t as heavily data-driven as it is now. The wittiest slogan was considered the most successful.
Nowadays marketers have to place the company‘s bottom line as priority number one, and personal creative
goals number two. By frequently measuring MROI you keep your marketers accountable for every dollar.

4. Learn from your competition. Many companies have public financials. This allows other businesses in the
same industry to learn about how they can better manage their marketing expenses and margins. For example, if
you notice that a competitor is spending less than you on marketing, but seeing twice the returns, you can easily
deduce that there‘s a ton of room for improvement.

Challenges of Measuring ROI

Multiple touches – Touches refers to all of the company to consumer interactions it requires to turn a lead into
a customer. For example, a customer journey through touches may look like this:
Initial brand awareness established > subscribes to email > receives marketing email > viewing of product
tutorial > sees targeted ad > makes a purchase.

As you can see, there are so many points of marketing contact that it‘s hard to measure exactly which touch
created the most motivation to buy.

Measuring at the right time – Sometimes a marketing effort doesn‘t pay dividends for a long time. A customer
may love your ad and product, but have no need for it today. A year from now when they‘re ready to buy, your
ad pops into their head and they make a purchase. By then, chances are that campaign is long over, and you
wouldn‘t be able to classify the return on investment correctly. For this reason, marketers are challenged by
choosing the optimal time to attribute a return to a specific campaign.

Uncontrolled variables – Circumstances outside of the companies control may be the reason for a change in
sales. Maybe the economy is suffering as a whole or maybe it‘s summer time and short shorts are making a
come back. Lucky for you, your company specializes in short shorts. When extraneous circumstances are at
play, it‘s hard to know whether or not your marketing efforts are having an impact.

Variations in influence – Not everyone is affected the same by a marketing campaign. Example: The majority
of people may see an advertisement and feel nothing. But perhaps that ad really resonates with one person, and
they happen to make a huge purchase. This type of scenario makes it challenging to measure the efficacy of a
campaign, and may skew the data.

What is considered a good ROI ratio?

Financially speaking, ROI is the ratio of net revenue versus cost. An easy way to simplify your ROI is by
calculating the ratio. This is done by subtracting the cost of a campaign from its net profit, then dividing that
number by the original campaign cost. In a formula that would be:

ROI = (Incremental Profit – Campaign Cost) / Campaign Cost

So with that said, what is a good ratio? 5:1 at the very least. If it helps you can look at this in dollars. For every
$1 spent on marketing, you earn $5 in sales. In other words, most successful businesses spend no more than
20% of their revenue on marketing. 10:1 is the benchmark for an extraordinary company.

How Digital Marketing is Adding Value to Business

Technology is now an essential component of our social and business worlds. Everything appears to be growing
at a digital speed. The competition in each domain has come to be quite fierce, and the sole means for those
businesses to live would be to stay informed about the digital trends and ever-changing marketing
approaches. Digital Marketing is your most excellent tool to maintain your own business growth chart higher.

The adoption of digital technology in modern marketing strategies is increasingly gaining popularity in
businesses. Digital marketing is being embraced through the use of social media, SEO services, responsive
websites, and email marketing. However, the major concern is how your business can benefit from the
integration of digital technology in marketing. Listed below are the five benefits of digital marketing to your
business.

Improved Customer Service

Digital marketing avenues like social media are heightening clients‘ expectations and experiences. Enterprises
that embrace these avenues in their marketing activities are more focused on their clients‘ happiness. In
business, an enterprise should deal in products or services that have an intimate connection to the consumers.
Furthermore, it should use platforms such as social media to enhance customer service.

Get Valuable Data and Analytics

Digital marketing business tools like search engine analytical tools help you in determining page views of your
brand‘s website. These analytical tools also give you information and stats regarding your marketing website
and its effectiveness. You need this information in prioritizing your brand‘s marketing channels. You can use
this information to budget for more effective ad campaigns.

Higher Conversion Rates and Increased Revenue

Through digital marketing, your brand will achieve over 24 percent conversion rates, generate leads, and reach
out to your targeted customers. You will also save over 40 percent of the money used for traditional marketing.
As a businessperson, using the Internet to reach your clients helps you to generate more revenue. This is because
more consumers are turning to the Internet in search of products and services that match their preferences.

Being on Par with Competitors

Despite having competitors in your field of business, your goal as a business owner is to use your products or
services to create unique customer experiences. Digital marketing business helps you to not only achieve this
goal but to also stay abreast with your competitors. It also helps you to compete healthily with them and emerge
as the leader. This type of competition is key in building trusted brands.

Preparedness for the Internet of Things

The Internet of Things is an ideology about interconnected devices like smartphones, tablets, and PCs on a
global scale. According to a study done by Gartner, over 26 billion devices will be interconnected to form a
global online ecosystem by 2020. As a company owner, digital marketing enables you to be part of this exciting
opportunity. It gives you information on consumer‘s preferences and habits that you will use whenever you want
to market more products and services online.

The Internet of Things gives marketers a chance to discover more exciting analytical tools they can use to map
consumer behaviour. In the near future, marketers will have the right tools for predicting the exact time a
consumer will be in need of a particular service or product. In this case, marketing data will be personalized for
sales timing, ad campaigns, and targeted market.

In reference to the points above, digital marketing adds value to businesses in several exciting ways. Business
owners get more clients and revenue due to their online presence and reputation. They also get to understand
their target audience and how they can become part of the Internet of Things.

Evaluating Cost Effectiveness of Digital Strategies

The cost benefit evaluation method and the cost effectiveness evaluation method are two different tools that
businesses may choose to use to help make business decisions. Both methods involve comparing the future or
impending purchase of new equipment or programs based on their cost and their expected benefits to the
company, but one may be more suitable for certain circumstances than the other. For instance, a company may
find it best to use a cost effectiveness evaluation to narrow down a list of new equipment choices or programs,
and a cost benefit method to analyse whether to adopt the final choice or choices.

About the Cost Benefit Method

Companies use the cost benefit method to help make financial decisions, particularly those that involve the
purchase of new equipment. The cost benefit method involves placing factors in two columns on paper. In the
first column, the company lists all of the financial benefits the new equipment or software will provide. Such
benefits might include improved productivity, lower supply costs and increased business. In the second column,
the company lists the concrete and peripheral costs of the new equipment or software. This includes the basic
cost of the equipment, any business lost during the transition to the new equipment, training costs, the cost of
changing suppliers, and the like. Administrators, managers or executives look for options whereby the financial
benefits outweigh the costs.

Cons of the Cost Benefit Method

The cost benefit method uses hard numbers to inform decisions, and some of these numbers can be misleading
at first glance. When using the cost benefit method, you must be aware of all of the intangible benefits that may
come from the business decision. For example, a switch to new software may allow the company to attract a
larger pool of qualified employees, or a particular advertising strategy may weigh better with customers and
improve customer loyalty. The large cost of a decision may quickly overshadow many of the intangible benefits
if they are not accurately calculated.

About Cost Effectiveness Evaluation

A cost effectiveness evaluation is more complex than the cost benefit method because it involves more
components. This method may be favoured before the cost benefit method to narrow down a list of potential
programs or new equipment to purchase. Rather than looking solely at the monetary value of the change, this
method looks at the broader effects of the program. For example, a company may evaluate which employees
will receive the greatest benefits from a specific training program and whether the costs of that training program
will still be beneficial if certain employees leave the company.
Cons of Cost Effectiveness Evaluation

Because the cost effectiveness evaluation method does not always take into account all of the costs of a new
program or equipment, it may fail to consider items such as the cost of training new employees or other
additional costs that will accompany the program and equipment. Often this method takes into account only
individuals currently involved in the business or program and does not account for newcomers who will need to
be trained or what will happen if key individuals leave the business, taking specific skills sets with them.

What is Web Analytics?

Web Analytics is the methodological study of online/offline patterns and trends. It is a technique that you can
employ to collect, measure, report, and analyze your website data. It is normally carried out to analyze the
performance of a website and optimize its web usage.
We use web analytics to track key metrics and analyze visitors‘ activity and traffic flow. It is a tactical
approach to collect data and generate reports.

Importance of Web Analytics

We need Web Analytics to assess the success rate of a website and its associated business. Using Web
Analytics, we can −

 Assess web content problems so that they can be rectified

 Have a clear perspective of website trends
 Monitor web traffic and user flow
 Demonstrate goals acquisition
 Figure out potential keywords
 Identify segments for improvement
 Find out referring sources

Web Analytics Process

The primary objective of carrying out Web Analytics is to optimize the website in order to provide better user
experience. It provides a data-driven report to measure visitors‘ flow throughout the website.
Take a look at the following illustration. It depicts the process of web analytics.
 Set the business goals.
 To track the goal achievement, set the Key Performance Indicators (KPI).
 Collect correct and suitable data.
 To extract insights, Analyze data.
 Based on assumptions learned from the data analysis, Test alternatives.
 Based on either data analysis or website testing, Implement insights.
Web Analytics is an ongoing process that helps in attracting more traffic to a site and thereby, increasing the
Return on Investment.

Web Analytics - Google Analytics

Analytics Tools offer an insight into the performance of your website, visitors‘ behavior, and data flow. These
tools are inexpensive and easy to use. Sometimes, they are even free.

Google Analytics

Google Analytics is a freemium analytic tool that provides a detailed statistics of the web traffic. It is used by
more than 60% of website owners.

Google analytics helps you to track and measure visitors, traffic sources, goals, conversion, and other metrics
(as shown in the above image). It basically generates reports on −

 Audience Analysis
 Acquisition Analysis
 Behavior Analysis
 Conversion Analysis

Audience Analysis

As the name suggests, audience analysis gives you an overview of the audience who visit your site along with
their session history, page-views, bounce rate, etc. You can trace the new as well as the returning users along
with their geographical locations. You can track −
 The age and gender of your audience under Demographics.
  The affinity reach and market segmentation under Interests.
 Language and location under Geo.
 New and returning visitors, their frequency, and engagement under Behavior.
 Browsers, Operating systems, and network of your audience in Technology.
 Mobile device info under Mobile.
 Custom variable report under Custom. This report shows the activity by custom modules that you
created to capture the selections.
 Benchmarking channels, locations, and devices under Benchmarking. Benchmarking allows you to
compare your metrics with other related industries. So, you can plot what you need to incur in order to
overtake the market.
 Flow of user activity under Users flow to see the path they took on your website.

Acquisition Analysis

Acquisition means ‗to acquire.‘ Acquisition analysis is carried out to find out the sources from where your web
traffic originates. Using acquisition analysis, you can −
 Capture traffic from all channels, particular source/medium, and from referrals.
 Trace traffic from AdWords (paid search).
 See traffic from search engines. Here, you can see Queries, triggered landing pages, and geographical
summary.
 Track social media traffic. It helps you to identify networks where your users are engaged. You can
see referrals from where your traffic originates. You can also have a view of your hub activity,
bookmarking sites follow-up, etc. In the same tab, you can have a look at your endorsements in
details. It helps you measure the impact of social media on your website.
 See which plug-ins gave you traffic.
 Have a look at all the campaigns you built throughout your website with detailed statistics of
paid/organic keywords and the cost incurred on it.

Behaviour Analysis

Behaviour analysis monitors users‘ activities on a website. You can find behavioural data under the following
four segments −
 Site Content − It shows how many pages were viewed. You can see the detailed interaction of data
across all pages or in segments like content drill-down, landing pages, and exit pages. Content drill-
down is breaking up of data into sub-folders. Landing page is the page where the user lands, and exit
page is where the user exits your site. You can measure the behavioral flow in terms of content.
 Site Speed − Here, you can capture page load time, execution speed, and performance data. You can
see how quickly the browser can parse through the page. Further, you can measure page timings, user
timings, and get speed suggestion. It helps you to know where you are lagging.
 Site Search − It gives you a full picture of how the users search across your site, what they normally
look for, and how they arrive at a particular landing page. You can analyze what they search for
before landing on your website.
 Events − Events are visitors‘ actions with content, which can be traced independently. Example −
downloads, sign up, log-in, etc.

Conversion Analysis

Conversion is a goal completion or a transaction by a user on your website. For example, download, checkout,
buy, etc. To track conversions in analytics, you need to define a goal and set a URL that is traceable.
 Goals − Metrics that measure a profitable activity that you want the user to complete. You can set
them to track the actions. Each time a goal is achieved, a conversion is added to your data. You can
observe goal completion, value, reverse path, and goal flow.
 Ecommerce − You can set ecommerce tracking to know what the users buy from your website. It
helps you to find product performance, sale performance, transactions, and purchase time. Based on
these data, you can analyze what can be beneficial and what can incur you loss.
  Multi-channel funnels − Multi-channel funnels or MCF reports the source of conversion; what roles
the website plays, referrals‘ role in that conversion; and what all slabs did when users pass through
landing page to conversion. For example, a user searched for a query on Google search page, he
visited the website, but did not convert. Later on, he directly typed your website name and made a
purchase. All these activities can be traced on MCF.
 Attribution − Attribution modeling credits sales and conversions to touch points in conversion
tracking. It lets you decide what platforms or strategy or module is the best for your business. Suppose
a person visited your website through AdWords ad and made no purchase. A month later, he visits via
a social platform and again does not buy. Third time, he visited directly and converted. Here, the last
interaction model will credit direct for the conversion, whereas first interaction model will assign
credit to paid medium. This way, you can analyze what module should be credited for a conversion.

Web Analytics - Optimizely

Optimizely is an optimization platform to test and validate changes and the present look of your webpage. It
also determines which layout to finally go with. It uses A/B Testing, Multipage, and Multivariate Testing to
improve and analyze your website.
A wonderful feature of Optimizely is that you do not need to be a technical expert. You just need to insert a
deployed code provided by Optimizely in your HTML. After putting it, you can trace anything, take any
action, and make any changes in your website.

Optimizely provides you administrative and management functionality to let you create account, organize
projects, and experiment. This facility helps you in tracking clicks, conversions, sign-ups, etc.
You are allowed to run tests and use custom integrations with Optimizely interface. All you need is −
 Set up an account on Optimizely and add a generated script.
 Once you are done with it, select your test pages. It implies the factors you want to run test on.
 Set Goals. To set goals, click on the flag icon at the top right of the page and follow up the
instructions. Check metrics you are looking for. Click Save.
 You can create variations with the usual editor like changing text and images.
 Next step is monitoring your tests. You need to test which landing pages are performing well. What is
attracting the visitors? What is the bounce rate? Understand the statistics, filter the non-performing
areas, and conclude the test.
 You can run multipage tests using javascript editors.
Optimizely gives you a better understanding of conversion rate optimization and running tests.

Web Analytics - KISSmetrics

KISSmetrics is a powerful web analytics tool that delivers key insights and user interaction on your website. It
defines a clear picture of users‘ activities on your website and collects acquisition data of every visitor.
You can use this service free for a month. After that, you can switch on to a paid plan that suits you.
KISSmetrics helps in improving sales by knowing cart-abandoned products. It helps you to know exactly when
to follow up your customers by tracking the repeat buyers activity slot.
KISSmetrics helps you identify the following −
  Cart size
 Landing page conversion rate
 Customer activity on your portal
 Customer bounce points
 Cart abandoned products
 Customer occurrence before making a purchase
 Customer lifetime value, etc.

Summarizing KISSmetrics

 It gets you more customers by not letting you lose potential customers and maintaining brand loyalty.
 It lets you to judge your decisions where you are playing right.
 It helps you identify data and trends, which contribute in customer acquisition.

Best Features of KISSmetrics

 Ability to track effective marketing channels.

 Figure out how much time a user takes to convert.
 Determine a degree of which user was engaged with your site.
 A convenient dashboard. You do not need to run around searching for figures.

Installation

Just sign-up for an account and customize accordingly.

Tracking

Add a java snippet under <head> tag of the source code of your website.

Event Setting

By default, KISSmetrics sets two events for you − visited site and search engine hit. To add more events,
click on new event, add an attribute and record an event name.

Setting up Metrics

Click on create a new metric. Select your metric type from the list. Give metric name, description, and event.
Save metric.

Define Conversions
Define your conversion and track them. Select number of times event happened. Give metric name and
description and select event. Save metric again.
KISSmetrics can track web pages, mobile apps, mobile web, facebook apps, and can blend all data into one.
You don‘t need the multiple analytics platforms.

Web Analytics - Crazy Egg

Crazy Egg is an online analytics application that provides you eye-tracking tools. It generates heatmaps based
on where people clicked on your website. Thus, it gives you an idea on where to focus. It lets you filter data on
top 15 referrers, search terms, operating systems, etc.

To use Crazy Egg, a small piece of JavaScript code needs to be placed on your site pages.
Once the code is on your site, Crazy Egg will track user behavior. Your servers will create a report that shows
you the clicks on the pages you are tracking. You can review the reports in the dashboard within the member‘s
area of the Crazy Egg site. Setting up Crazy Egg is a quick and easy task.
It offers you insights in four different ways −
 Heatmaps − It gives you a defined picture of where visitors who clicked on your page. Where you
need to make changes so as to improve conversions.
 Scrollmaps − It gives you insights of to what length people scroll down on your page. With Crazy
Egg, you can ensure where people leave your page and where to hold them exactly and where to add
more to hold them for longer.
 Overlay Tool − It gives you overlay report of the number of clicks occurring on your website. You
may be able to get more on it.
 Confetti − Confetti distinguishes clicks for you segmented by referral sources, search terms, etc. Now,
you know the origin of your clicks, so you uncover the traffic sources. Put extra efforts there and you
will earn more traffic and revenue.

Installation

Insert JavaScript code on source code of your website. Crazy Egg will by default track the user behavior. The
servers generate reports providing you the view. Set dashboard to review the reports.

Web Analytics - Key Metrics

You need to find a few key metrics for your business. You have a website and it has a tracking code in it. Now,
you need to make sure what are you going to measure. Analyzing may help you retain your customer and hold
them.

What to Measure

Audience
 Pageviews − Pageviews is the number of views of a page. Multiple pageviews are possible in a single
session. If pageviews is improved, it will directly influence AdSense revenue and average time on
website.
  Bounce rate − Bounce rate reflects the percentage of visitors returning back only after visiting one
page of your website. It helps you to know how many visitors do so. If the bounce rate of a website
increases, its webmaster should be worried.
 Pages per session − Pages/session is the number of pages surfed in a single session. For example, a
user landed on your website and surfed 3 pages, then the website pages/session is 3.
 Demographic info − Demographic data shows Age and Gender. With the help of Demographic Info,
you can find the percentage of Male/Female visitors coming to your website. Analyzing the ratio of
this data, you can make a strategy according to genders. Age group data help you find what
percentage of age group visiting your website. So, you can make a strategy for highest percentage of
age group visitors.
 Devices − This data shows the devices info. In devices info, you can easily find how many percentage
of visitors come from mobile, how many come from desktop, how many come from tablets, etc. If
mobile traffic is high, then you need to make your website responsive.
Acquisition
Traffic sources − In the acquisition, you have to check all your sources of the traffic. Major sources of the
traffic are −
 Organic traffic is the traffic coming through all search engines (Google, Yahoo, Bing....)
 Social traffic is the traffic coming through all social media platforms (like − Facebook, Twitter,
Google+, ...)
 Referral traffic is the traffic coming through where your website is linked.
 Direct traffic is the traffic coming directly to your website. For example, typing the url of your
website, clicking on the link of your website given in emails, etc.

 Source/Medium − This metrics gives you an idea of the sources from where you are getting traffic
(Google, Yahoo, Bing, Direct, Facebook...).
Site Content
 Landing pages − Landing pages are the pages where the visitors land first (normally, home pages of
the websites are the landing pages). With the help of this metrics, you can find the top pages of the
website. Using this metrics, you can analyze how many pages are getting 50% or more traffic of the
website. So, you can easily find which type of content is working for you. Further, based on this
analysis, you can plan the next content strategy.
 Site speed − Site speed is the metrics used for checking page timing (average page load time). Using
this metrics, you can find which page is taking more time to load, how many pages have high load
time, etc.

End of Unit 4