How to measure the performance of a newsletter or e-blast ?

There are several ways to measure the success of a mass mailing, but the 3 most important performance indicators are:

- the delivery rate is the proportion of emails sent that have reached the recipents’ inboxes. This rate provides information regarding the quality of an email database.

- the open rate is the proportion of delivered emails that have been opened by users. This rate provides information regarding the visibility of an e-blast and is mostly influenced by the sender ID, the email title and the moment when it is sent.

- the click rate is the proportion of opened emails in which at least one link was clicked by the user. This rate provides information regarding the email’s content relevance and quality.

How to improve the performance of a newsletter or e-blast?

These 3 elements can have a great impact on the performance of your campaign and are easy to control:

The email title: the key factor which determines your open rate.

- The email title should be a maximum 50 characters long (including spaces) in order to make sure it is not truncated in the recipient’s inbox.

- Titles should be as precise as possible. One would think that a mysterious or vague title can lead curious users to open an email but the truth is users want to know what they are clicking on and are likely to disregard your message if it’s not appealing enough.

The email content: has to be relevant while encouraging users to click on the various links provided.

- There is no ideal lenght but the email should be relatively short and long paragraphs should be avoided at all costs. It is ideal to repeat the email title and to have an introductory paragraph which sums up the email’s content.

- You should have at least one explicit call to action which invites users to click and reach a landing page with more relevant content. Make sure to avoid the words “click here”. For example, say “discover this product” instead of “click here to discover this product”

The delivery time: An often-overlooked factor, this can have a huge impact on open and click rates.

- In the case of B to B campaigns, the best day to send your newsletter or e-blast is on tuesday, wednesday or thursday. since employees have to deal with a great number of emails on monday (included those received during the week-end) and they often disregard commercial emails on fridays in an effort to clear their inbox before the weekend.

- The ideal time to send a newsletter or e-blast is during the late morning to early afternoon period (between 11 am and 2 pm) since the morning’s email rush has been dealt with and there is still enough time left in the afternoon for an employee to take the time and read your email.

Many of the tips included in this article are a summary of the many great articles which can be found on the Mailchimp articles section, which I strongly encourage you to read to get more information.

But then a story like this happens, and I realize that the power of social media is a big deal after all.

A couple of weeks ago, someone close to me who grew up with a severe heart condition saw his health deteriorate fast. His doctors all agreed: only a heart transplant can save him. The only things is, Philippe El-Hage lives in a Lebanon (where there isn’t enough equipment to perform a heart transplant) and he does not have medical insurance. It order to live, he has to go to Paris to have his operation, which is to be paid in full by his family. Needless to say, they don’t have the required 220 000 euros (minimum) to pay for the surgery.

This is where Facebook comes in. The groupe Un coeur pour Philippe was created in the morning of wednesday May 19th. Two and a half days later, there are over 3,600 members (by the time you read this, the figure will probably be  much higher) many of whom have made donations through paypal. We don’t have exact figures yet, but we know the donations are in the tens of thousands, if not more than a hundred thousand dollars. Events are being organized throughout Lebanon, in Paris, Montreal etc…

Can Facebook help save a life? If yes then all I can say is that in the end, social media does deserve all the hype. The REAL power of social media is not just in allowing people to connect or allowing businesses to create awareness their brand or product. It is still about gathering people from around the world to support a just cause.

If you want to help, join the group and donate through this paypal page. Thanks!

In the meantime, many people have told me that they would like to read my Master’s thesis (technically, it’s a Research Paper though), and I have always thought that I’d rather publish it on the Web in the hope that one day it might be useful to someone. If you’re a historian and you read this, feel free to contact me. I love to talk about history and I’d love the share my limited research with you.

My paper was written in the spring of 2007 under the supervision of Professors Nicholas Dew and Daviken Studnicki-Gizbert and was entitled Intercolonial Trade within the French Atlantic World, 1708 – 1763. Frankly, it was a fascinating and under-studied topic that allowed me to combine my interests for Economic History and the History of the Atlantic World during the era of European Colonialism.

Here’s a pdf version of my paper: Intercolonial Trade within the French Atlantic World, 1708 – 1763

And a summary for those too lazy to read it (it’s OK, you don’t have to pretend to want to read a 50-page paper just to be my friend):

Between 1708 and 1763, metropolitan officials tried to promote a system of intercolonial commerce between French possessions in the Americas because of France’s inability to provide sufficient supplies to its colonies. The goal of this policy was to create a self-sufficient economic sphere within the French Atlantic World. While legal intercolonial trade rose to significant levels during the eighteenth century, it was overshadowed by the great quantitative superiority of illegal contraband commerce between British and French colonies. Because of a variety of structural factors, as well as a series of inefficient policies, illegal commerce was more profitable for French colonies than legitimate intercolonial trade, and this eventually led to failure of the ‘Colbertist’ economic system that had prevailed in the colonies since the 1670s.

Cet article a donc 3 objectifs principaux (oui, j’adore les listes chiffrées…):

1. Démontrer au comité de sélection de Radio-Canada que je mérite le rôle de blogueur représentant les Pays-Bas pour la Coupe du Monde 2010.
2. Prouver à ces mêmes personnes – et à ma blonde – que je suis tout à fait capable de bloguer en français (je n’ai pas passé dix-huit ans de ma vie au Collège Marie-de-France pour rien!)
3. Expliquer (enfin!) à mes amis et connaissances mon obsession pour l’équipe nationale des Pays-Bas.

Voici donc les 5 TRÈS BONNES raisons de me choisir comme blogueur officiel des Pays-Bas pour le mondial 2010:

1. Bien que ma famille ne soit pas d’origine néerlandaise (mais alors là pas du tout) ma soeur s’est mariée à Rotterdam. J’ai donc passé deux mois aux Pays-Bas au courant de l’été 2001 et ceci n’a fait qu’amplifier mon amour pour ce pays.
2. Je suis probablement la seule personne au Québec qui possède l’immonde maillot orange fluo de l’équipe nationale néerlandaise qui ne s’est pas qualifiée pour le mondial 2002. La preuve:
3. J’ai failli me faire casser la gueule à cause de ce fameux maillot le 9 juin 2008 alors que je courrais au milieu de la Petite Italie après la victoire des Pays-Bas 3-0 face à l’Italie. N’ayant pas appris de mon erreur, j’ai répété la manœuvre en face du Massilia sur Parc quatre jours plus tard alors que les Pays-Bas ridiculisaient la séléction française 4-1.
4. J’ai passé près de deux ans de ma vie à prendre Feyenoord à Football Manager 2005 pour essayer d’en faire une équipe championne d’Europe. Je pense que le jeux est truqué, car malgré tous mes efforts, je n’ai jamais pu passer les quarts…
5. Mon DJ préféré est hollandais (Tiësto), ma bière préférée est hollandaise (Grolsch) et mon joueur préféré est holandais (Van Persie). Si ça existait, mon joueur de hockey préféré serait hollandais!

Si vous n’êtes toujours pas convaincu que je suis le candidat idéal, pensez à ceci: quel autre non-hollandais serait capable d’adorer cette équipe avec autant de passion alors qu’elle nous a si souvent déçue, notamment au Mondial 2006 avec une défaite en huitièmes face au Portugal, et à l’Euro 2008 avec une défaite en quarts face à la Russie… ?

Sur ce je vous laisse avec les moments forts de cette fameuse leçon de soccer que nous avons donné au Français, ce 13 juin 2008:

Held along with the Search Marketing Expo from April 6th to 9th, eMetrics is the Canadian rendez-vous for all things web analytics.The Summit is organized by Andrea Hadley of eMetrics Canada in partnership with Rising Media and it is the official conference of the Web Analytics Association (WAA). I was participating in the event as a volunteer and it was a chance for me to meet incredibly interesting people and attend numerous insightful presentations. If you’ve been there, you probably remember me as “That French Guy”, as my business card was saying

Wow that’s a long scrollbar you have here. Why should I read all of that?

Well, here is what to expect in this post:

• An introduction on Web Analytics and the purpose of eMetrics
• An illustrated review of the best presentations I attended
• My thoughts about the WAA Certification Test
• A discussion on the past and future of Web Analytics
• Tons of links to speakers, resources, other reviews and my twitter account of course.

There’s more than fried nom nom, here is a quick wordle representing what’s in that post:

Wait, what is that Web Analytics thing?

If you attended the event or are a WAA member, skip this part. If you think Web Analytics = Google Analytics, please read it. Twice.

For those of you wondering what is Web Analytics, well first of all, it’s not simply “Google Analytics”. Not at all. Here is some neat official definition, courtesy of Wikipedia:

Web analytics is the measurement, collection, analysis and reporting of internet data for purposes of understanding and optimizing web usage

Hence yes, that’s what Google Analytics does. But the vendors of analytics solution are many out there (Omniture, Clicktale, Coremetrics…), it’s a whole ecosystem, and it’s important to go beyond the tool. It’s like saying, design is photoshop. As you may understand, Web Analytics could be understood as a broader term, ranging from Business Intelligence, Marketing Research… and I can throw more fancy consultish words in here: Customer Intelligence, Conversion Optimization, Online Accountability… Funniest thing is, the more it evolves, the less “Web” it is, increasingly focusing on a holistic approach of optimal decision-making support for businesses. Eat that pie chart!

So to understand that this is a field, an industry, with professional practitioners and a continuous concern of defining what data means online is crucial for perceiving the value of a summit like eMetrics.

Should you have any interest in this topic, the ultimate reference is Avinash Kaushik’s bible of Web Analytics

Duh! Now, What it’s in it for me?

Avinash Kaushik – Social and Search: Rock Both Worlds With Data!

Let’s start by the opening presentation on Thursday by Avinash himself, a brilliant piece of public speaking. Really entertaining and insightful, here is an good post about it. Few take-away:

• Funny definition of bounce rate: “I came, I puke, I left”
• Social analytics: sentiment rating stinks (positive/negative), instead, use attitudinal frameworks and analyse words
  • I have to add that on that point, there is an exciting new world to build. Being a marketing student, I learned some of the construction of the concepts behind “consumer behaviour”, and let me tell you that it’s a huge discipline by itself. Attitudes, behaviour, mental models, ethnographics… There are many way to quantify and qualify the conversation happening on Social Media and I agree with Avinash, starring at graphs that shows “positive sentiment toward a brand” is just plain bullshit. Get your psychology 101 book, go beyond the traditional Maslow’s pyramid and start working on your own decision matrix. Be smarter than tools. Or wait a few month, it’s coming…
• Consider “aggregate marginal gains” of long tail search and microconversions. Yes the internet is full of weird people messing with your website, and no that’s not a bummer. It’s a world of opportunities!

Theresa Locklear - How NHL.com Measures Fan Equity Online

On Wednesday, we had the chance to have the full Web Analytics team from NHL.com presenting their work. A complete team of analysts! Seems NHL.com is a serious playground… One of the best presentation of the event, and mostly because they were amongst the few to actually share numbers. Sharing is really important for this practice to progress, but as you guess it’s sensible since we deal with competitive intelligence here.

Main Dashboard. I told you, Web Analytics is more than Google Analytics. I don't know about you, but that thing arouses me.

Mobile Dashboard. More location-based arousing.

Interesting fact, most of the dashboards built by the team were done with Excel. Data was extracted from different tools (i.e social media analytics tool, mobile analytics tool, log analysis etc.) and compiled in good old worksheets. It seems that automating reports and setting up custom dashboard is not an easy task yet for our Web Analyst friends…

Matrix Framework for Voice of Customer (survey) report, progress tracking and decision-making

The other point that got my attention was how NHL.com used survey report and Voice of Customer Analysis (a frequent term used by Web Analysts). Online customers opinions are regularly investigated with the help of survey tools (from the main vendors Foresee and iPerception), and the NHL team use 4 way matrix to decide on what action to take and track progress of the part of the website they change and improve. The survey results are often showing a significant impact when doing design change, and this information is crucial for completing the data given by clickstream analysis (which is obviously not self-sufficient).

Social Media Dashboard. Yes there are a lot of metrics, so stop counting Retweets!

John Lovett – Organizing for Analytics

John is an eminent member of the WAA and an old-timer of web analytics. His management-oriented presentation aimed at explaining how to structure an organization around web analytics, who are the analysts and how should they interact within the business. It all started with one statement which everyone agrees on:

“Businesses can create sustainable and strategic competitive advantages by investing in analytics.”

After explaining why Analytics shouldn’t be a siloed function in the business, but be global and managed amongst all areas, why it’s about people and processes, not just technology, and the importance of reporting and informing, not just collecting data, we understood that the game-changing attitude lies in one thing:

“Businesses can create sustainable and strategic competitive advantages by investing in organizing for analytics.”

The Real Problem: Web Analytics is Hard

Web Analytics is Hard, but it’s ok, because John has the solution:

1. Architect Your Web Analytics Technology
2. Manage Your Web Analytics Talent
3. Focus Your Analytical Efforts

A little more on Manage Your Web Analytics Talent:
Lovett explains how Analytics is a team effort, and describes the 3 profiles required:

• Analytics Executive: the senior and business oriented analyst, team manager
• Analytics Professionals: the trained analyst
• Analytics Amateurs: one foot in analytics, he knows the tools and the practices, he his the marketer, the developer who will interact with the Analytics team.

What is a profile of an Analytics pro:

• Business-minded, strong interest in marketing
• Tech-savvy, knowledge of code, bridging the gap between business and IT
• History of working with cross-functional teams, able to message the value of the data
• Senior enough to be heard, report to VP
• Expect to pay about $100K or more (rare profile + highly skilled)

Now, what the presentation doesn’t say, it’s how much of a technical background in data analysis this professional should have. So I went to talk to John at the end of the presentation, and he confirmed: ideally, this individual has a background in statistical analysis, not necessarily a PhD, but a sufficient training in making sense of the data. While other individual like Patrick Glinski (I talk more about him later in the text) may argue that this is not enough, that ideally you’re a UX practitionner, an information vizualization enthusiast and what not, I think John has a decent and realistic framework for defining the Analytics pro.

Talking about paying for your analytics crew, here is an extract from the 2010 Ad Agency Salary Guide done by the IAB Canada:

So, despite what John annouced, we can see that one can still afford the “reporting bitch” for cheap, now moving on to higher positions, and specific to web analysis, we’re moving toward serious salaries.

One slide got my attention on the topic of profile, the Analytics output. Above the red line, you can see what is ideal but not there yet. And that include Predictive Analytics, Forecasting and Statistical models. So it would make sense that your analytics pro is a statistician, not just a tech-savvy marketer.

Web Analytics Output

Last take-away:

• Managers want Recommendations!
• Analytics is equally technology, people and process.

Brian Flanagan – How Expedia Listens to Millions of Customers as Individuals

Big business, big insights. See for yourself:

And they have tools!

• Web Analytics
• SEM tools
• Feedback and survey tools
• Email tools
• Customer Experience Management tools
• System Monitoring tools
• Data Warehousing and BI tools

But the tools give little insight on customer experience, while listening to customer only gives a part of the picture, so how do Expedia manage to be an excellent business?

First, don’t rely on the IT + Financial report, your customer might encounter problem for month without seeing those indicators fail. The secret is combining Voice of Customer and Web Analytics. It gives context for feedback and lead you to identify the source of experience problems.

The right tool combination:

Notable point, Expedia is well organized for Analytics, the reports are shared and send across different line of business and everyone is accountable for great customer experience.

After numerous example given by Brian, we could feel how Customer Experience is improved by successfully tracking and monitoring intent and action, not just planning or looking at simple metrics. The fallacy is, you may want to rely on a sole indicator, a judgmental one, such as usability testing or UX design for example, with a given set of scenario to validate. In the end, you can’t predict all intent and attempt on a huge website like expedia (or should I say, the many expedia points of access, and that also include Call Centers). You need to listen to all kind of feedback, and then investigate to understand what has happened, whether technical issue, information architecture issue, pricing issue and what not.

Eric Pierni – Built to Click

Eric Pierni, a former BComm graduate from the John Molson School of Business (\o/ yeah the school that trains champions), is the of Head of Advertising at Kijiji, the Canadian branch of Ebay classified.

As you may guess, Kijiji is a huge, traffic driven, content rich, multi-niche website. Its revenues are generated from on-site advertising, and the competition is tough. Eric explained how he manages more than a forever-going PPC campaign of 2 millions keywords for maximizing the acquisition of traffic. Kijiji is an aggregation of niche, and it’s a universe of perpetual microconversions. It was captivating to hear him explain how he optimized conversions and minimize acquistion cost, and how he is always listening to customers for forever improving the efficiency of Kijiji.ca. On the keyword acquisition thing, Eric was explaining that at the time of Kijiji’s launch, they had no idea how much to spend on a keyword. All they wanted was traffic, and matching cost to revenues was impossible – the revenues had yet to come… My feeling is that this confident analytics-driven approach had made the financial success of the site, and we can understand how the profitability of Kijiji is dependent on a perpetual loop of acquisition-optimization.

Patrick Glinski & Andrea Peckham – How Social Media Measures Up When Giving Away Half a Million Dollars

This one was refreshing! We had Andrea, who is the client, and Patrick, the agency, teaming up on stage. The case was how to help Aviva increase its aided and unaided brand awareness through social media (brand recognition and brand recall, for the jargon haters). Patrick was pushing number & experience sharing, and explaining why it was crucial for the industry to share. He gave us a full understanding of why and how this campaign was successful. Basically, Aviva gave away ½ a $m to the best charity idea, thanks to a dedicated portal where people could submit ideas and vote. The campaign was aligned with marketing goals (marketing research highlighted the need for community support) and budget cut due to the recession (be more creative! TV spend is not efficient enough!)

It was a huge success in Anglophone Canada, the metrics improved big time, the exposure was more than satisfying, but above everything, user engagement was the highest surprise. As Patrick explained, they had to micromanage tons of interactions between the brand and the consumers, and sometime really unexpected. It could happen through any social networks (not only the dedicated portal) and active listening was not an easy task.

Now, what happened to Quebec? Well it didn’t work very well. Few interactions, little exposure and not that much of a change in brand awareness in the end. I talked to Andrea at the end of the conference, and she confirmed my thoughts: launching a national campaign from Toronto requires you to have the manpower to manage and understand the specificity of Quebec’s market. They’ve been overflown with user engagement, and what would have been likely to help, is a community manager dedicated to interacting with Quebecois

Talking about community management, that was the lesson from this experience, when aiming big, and when you want engagement, you have to be prepared, because it’s a world of time-consuming micro-management, and having your customer engaging in a conversation with the brand means a gazillion of micro-conversations!

It’s overwhelmingly fun!

Adviso & NVI on Multi-lingual PPC/SEO

Because I was curious to hear my fellow Quebecois speak, I had a sneak peak at an SMX presentation held by Marc-Antoine Lacroix from Adviso and Guillaume Bouchard from NVI, also including Jon Guljord from expedia.com and Sulemaan Ahmed from Harlequin, unfortunately I missed the last two.

Multi-lingual strategy is tricky, it requires preparation, from a technical standpoint (choosing domains & structuring the architecture of your website), as well as a strong content strategy. What I remember from Guillaume was the importance of “long-tail” non-english search. The English web is saturated, but there is room for translation. As he pointed out, he had the experience of the same page translated from English, generating Adsense revenues of $3/day in English, $30 in Spanish, and $50 in French. At the same time, traffic acquisition cost is lower (less bidding on non-English keywords/key phrases). That tells you a lot about volume!

The rest

I’ve seen many other really interesting presentation, but let’s be honest, this post is long enough… and my memory fails me anyway.

So, like, people do that as a job?

Yes, but consider this, some people would do accounting for a job. It’s alright to love bar charts and compute ratios, you do that because you know it makes the world better. One report at a time.

The almighty WAA is aware of that, so they created the Certification Test. After all, why would Accountants have their certification and not Web Analytics Practitioners? eMetrics Toronto was the first occasion to “Test the Test”. Thanks to Jim Novo, I had the chance to spend an hour being tested. Alright, it should have been an hour, I took 1 and ½ hour but that’s ok, I just pretend to be a slow reader because I’m French.

The test consist of multiple choice questions only, the first part is mainly knowledge restitution, and the second part consists of case studies. Honestly, it’s tough! Mainly because it primarily consists of all right answers, and the questions tend to be “what is the best…” or “most appropriate…” solution. As Jim put it, you don’t expect the analyst to be a textbook, but an analytical mind. What you have to do is consider a business situation, and select an appropriate way to solve/improve it. Thus, I would expect to have a surprisingly decent score, even if I lack the particular technical knowledge and I’m only halfway through Avinash’s book, my BComm background with business case study experience added to my experience in web design/development was definitely helping.

In the end, the test was of great help for me to understand what defines a Web Analytics practitioner, and get a picture of what I needed to improve. Namely, a bit of technical knowledge, and a lot of experience! I’m confident that it’s what I want to do, at least part of what I want to do, and acquiring skills in that field is of primary concern when you want to work in online marketing and e-commerce (ok, vague definition, but you don’t need the full buzzword tag cloud to get it). There is no excuse in 2010 to manage and produce online initiatives without a proper way to measure and improve. Faith-based marketing is smoke and mirror sold by overpaid lazy creatives who just want to get laid on your bucks. Or at least, the truth lies in the middle.

Don’t you have to go to school before being tested?

Yes and no. I applied for UBC’s Award of Achivement in Web Analytics because I wanted some formal education in the field + a signal to others. So once I’m done, I’ll probably take the test, the real one. But I’ll wait a year or two, I need to get experience, otherwise formal knowledge won’t help much. It’s about getting your hands dirty.

Yes, but does it gives you dates?

No, not really, but I made a couple of friends at eMetrics. It’s a friendly crowd, you’ll see passion and dedication. People are approachable and eager to share their experience.

Now, let’s give a broader conclusion on WA. First of all, if you read Avinash, you know the Trinity Framework. It’s the base of Web Analytics thinking, and how it fits in the process. Let’s get a picture of what WA people think their practice is.

On a more verticaly integrated way, from Avinash’s 2nd book, here is in what the value of WA lies:

After you’ve meditated on that, here is my thought. Do you see the obsession for revenue-generating measurement? Do you see how it sweats pure business thinking? Something is missing here. WA people, in general, critically demonstrate a lack of interest/knowledge for the field of User Experience Design (IxD, IA, UCD, UX, Usability, you name it). They somehow don’t want to hear about qualitative research and design thinking. I was surprised to hear over an over the term Voice of Customer and see that it was related to Surveys. And when panels where held about the quantitative/qualitative mix, still, little talk about the world of qualitative data and user research. I mean, really, online surveying as a mean to answer the Why question? That’s such a narrow and limited channel. And about the field of design, there so much to share. As I was telling John, I wish he included a sense of UX in the skillset of the perfect Web Analyst. It’s not necessary, and you can’t expect people to do and know everything, but why are those discipline ignoring each others?

Last month, I attended UXTalk, a (young) conference/discussion gathering UX practitionners in Montreal. A roundtable of 24 persons talking about “How UX fits in the process”. So naturally, after a long discussion about designers vs developers vs clients, selling usability, agile environment, and benefits of UX for helping businesses, well I asked the question, “Who/How/When integrate Web Analytics in the process”. I had a mixed reaction of confusion/disinterest, on a defensive tone. I heard “data can tell anything”, or “the clients does not understand, it’s not helping” and what not. Despite some interesting thoughts, I noticed how much UX people feel either disinterested or threatened by WA practices, and this does not make any sense.

It’s like everyone knows better what customers want and shows no trust in the other one’s voodoo.

So that was my biggest disappointment, until the end of the summit, when I met Patrick Glinski at the lobby bar, whom I had the best conversation with. He is the Ad agency guy, the creative, UX designer, social innovator, talented marketer but… web analyst! And that gave me hope. Hope for a possible world where the two can cohabit and live in harmony, perform better, achieve optimal results and make a world of happy customer-users. You know, Drucker said:

Because the purpose of business is to create a customer, the business enterprise has two—and only two—basic functions: marketing and innovation. Marketing and innovation produce results; all the rest are costs. Marketing is the distinguishing, unique function of the business

It’s darn valid and we are at the crossroad. Now, Patrick had a nice way to put it, we need the industry to adopt design thinking.

And I was happy until Patrick told me he was done with the WAA. As he put on his blog:

On the “dread” side, I can’t help but feel this conference is going to be the end of my formal association with the digital measurement community.I’ve been a practicing Web Analytics analyst for about 6 years now – an old guy in digital terms. But even in that space, I always felt a bit like an outsider as a user experience strategist (researcher) first and an analytics practitioner second – a divide that is becoming an argument of validation versus prediction.

Meanwhile, many of the dominant conversations are distant and foreign. As Web Analysts, we focus our efforts on what will derivate the largest impact. Usually that means optimizing the user experience around the highest revenue-generating opportunities. Rather than focus our efforts on any one individual, we analyze patterns because it’s a better use of our time. But it seems as though we’ve lost our own way – now focusing in on technologies and methods designed to derive actionable results around strategies that most clients can’t afford to build in the first place.

And while you think everything happens at the lobby bar, sometimes you find answers on blogs. Christopher Berry, whose first encounter I’ll never forget, has a nice thought development on WA, UX and design thinking to answer Patrick. Christopher is the ceiling cat of Synapse, he is really brilliant (or just sound so, beware of marketers), and that’s a shame he overuses internet memes for all purposes because it severely hurts his credibility I met him at the registration desk where I was volunteering, first thing he told me was, in order to get the official WAA stamp on his badge, “hi, can I haz my golden star?”. It was utterly frustrating to see him leave the lobby bar very soon, after dropping some thought on why Microsoft sucks, which is the least interesting conversation you want to hear from such a bright funny dude. Shame on you Chris. As you put it this way:

I would hate for the perception of the newcommers to be that we’re all crusty, exclusive, and inaccessible. After all, I was a newcommer once too. And I benefited incredibly from having access to those experts.

Well the newcomer I am wanted to have a conversation but you left that damn lobby bar! (fail)

Anyways, one other thing Patrick was interested in, and brought to light during the last panel discussion, was information visualization. He is passionated about it, and he has a good reason for that: for him, dashboards and report are a way to tell a story, like anything else. I think he is sort of the marketer of Web Analytics, he’s using persuasion and story telling to make management understand by themselves what they have to do. Ok, sounds sexy, I’m waiting for examples of that now

On the topic of data/info visualization, beyond all the hype, I recommend anyone to read Stephen Few, an old-timer statistician and BI expert, his article “Information Visualization, Design, and the Arts: Collision or Collaboration?” is a pure wonder.

Talking about BI, wait, there is more!

Some BI to kill the BS

As nicely put in this tweet from Philippe Denis, Senior Web Analytics Consultant at Bell Solutions Web:

Interesting: pure business intelligence people start showing up at conferences like #eMetrics. We are slowly starting to WA / BI gap.

Indeed, I had the pleasure to meet / hear some of those people, and I was curious to see how the fields are merging. Why not, after all? Perhaps a question of maturity, or openess, on either sides.

Stéphane Hamel, whom I was really glad to meet, and I recommend anyone to follow on twitter, just wrote an excellent post about the topic of BI+WA

Alright! What do I do now?

• Join the WAA, become a Web Analytics Practitioner, change your organization, adopt a data-driven culture, be a rock star!
• Get educated at UBC and/or get yourself the right books
• Like Guy Kawasaki said, “Beware of bozos”. It’s new and exciting, try to filter the noise, beware of those who want to sell you tools, value education and curiosity, question the gurus, and get some field experience.
• Get in touch with me through twitter, facebook or linkedin (I love making new friends!)
  • Social networks are fun, but if you’re in Montreal, let’s have a beer!
• Follow the eMetrics speakers on twitter, full list here
• Check what other people are saying on twitter by looking at the #eMetrics and #measure hashtags
• Read other reviews here:
  • Rommil Santiago – My thoughts of eMetrics and the future of web analytics
  • Christopher Berry – eMetrics Toronto Summary, Segmentation and Future
  • Patrick Glinski – Hopes and Fears from eMetrics Toronto
  • Marc-Antoine Lacroix – SMX Toronto: tools, search and dollar bills
  • Gil Reich – Best of SMX Toronto
  • Garry Przyklenk – eMetrics 2010 Toronto Recap: 3 themes, multiple evangelists
• Comment that post, I’m eager to hear what you have to say!

More About eMetrics Toronto

• Brought by Andrea Hadley to Canada in 2007, first produced in Toronto in 2008.

• The Web Analytics Association is a Lifetime Sponsor of eMetrics, and eMetrics is also a sponsor of the WAA

• The WAA often host an industry meeting at eMetrics the evening before the conference, essentially the opening event. This was the case on April 7^th in Toronto.
• It is the 3rd Canadian edition of eMetrics, organized with the support of the Advisory board consisting of
  • Stephane Hamel
  • Alex Langshur
  • June Li
  • Patrick Glinski
  • Mike Sukmanowsky
  • Kelly Kubrick
  • Sionne Roberts
  • Jacques Warren
  • Marco Bailetti

Being a project manager, I have seen my fair share of difficult projects, and the biggest mistake that I see clients make is that they have a complete lack of interest or understanding of the technology being used to build their website! But what they don’t realize is that technological choices are the biggest reason sites become outdated so fast.

In order to avoid getting caught, try asking these 10 questions to your Web agency before giving them a project:

1. Which technologies (programming language, framework, database, web server) will be used on the server-side and why?

This is a key question. The choice of technology will have an impact on hosting: if you were previously hosted on a PHP server and your new site is in Rails, you will have to switch servers. Also, open source technologies such as PHP and Rails are used more widely than proprietary ones such as .NET. If all of these things sound like encrypted hieroglyphics, know this: make sure you have someone on your team or a consultant that understands technology, and ask your agency WHY they are choosing certain technologies. This will give you a good idea of whether they understand your needs or if they are simply trying to recycle another website they developed three months ago.

2.  On what browsers will my website work?

It is important that this be addressed before the project starts. If fact, this question can be turned into: will my website work in Internet Explorer 6? Despite being one of the worst piece of software ever written, IE6 is still used by close to 10% of Internet users according to the latest figures. The answer to this question depends on your target audience. If you are targeting 40+ government employees, it might be a good idea to have an IE6 compatible site. In almost every other case, you should avoid IE6 like the plague: it reduces graphic possibilities and increases the production time of any website by at least 25%. If you choose not to support IE6 though, make sure your boss is not running it from his home computer…

3. What will be done to make sure my site is indexed by Search Engines?

Search Engine Optimization (S.E.O) has become of the key factors of success of website. You need to make sure that your site’s developers use unique page titles and meta descriptions for every page of your site. Your homepage should have as much indexable content as possible. Each image should have an <alt> tag that can be read by Google. Make sure you have Google Webmaster Tools installed and that you submit an XML Site Map to search engines. In fact, the SEO best practices deserve their own blog post, which I will make sure to write in the next few weeks. Suffice it to say, an agency does not deserve its title if it is not very knowledgable about how to improve your site’s position in search results.

4. How will I be able to update my content?

In this day and age, no one wants to have to rely on his agency in order to update a sentence in his website. Make sure you have a Content Management System (CMS) that lets you edit your site’s text content, as well as its images and other multimedia files. But remember one thing though, a CMS does not mean you can add new sections, change your logo or change the site’s layout – unless your agency plans on building you a very advanced system. A CMS will often increase your budget by at least 50%, but this investment will ensure a longer lifetime for your site, and you will no longer need to beg your agency in order to make a change that your boss requested “for yesterday”. And if you want to save some money, ask your agency if they can use an open-source CMS such as drupal, spip or even wordpress.

5. How will I be able to track the performance of my site?

This one is easy to adress. Just make sure that your agency knows you will be using google analytics s0 that they can include the tracking code on every page of your future web site. Oh and make sure they install the code a few days before you launch your site, as there is nothing more frustrated than knowing hundreds of people are viewing thousands of pages on your site but that information is being lost down the drain because a developer forgot a coma… (yes this has happened to me before)

6. What will my urls look like?

Most clients and even agencies will never even discuss this point, but your url structure is very important, first to your users, who can use it to understand your site’s navigational structure, but also because urls with important keywords will help improve your position in search results. Make sure your urls will look like “www.site.com/category/article-tile” and not “www.site.com/somthing/pages/category/somthing.jsp?catid=8&pageid=87…

7. Who is responsible if I find a bug after my site is launched?

A very important point. What if you launch a website, and two months later you realize that there is a bug that was there all along but that you did not see because it is the first time you’re going on your site using Internet Explorer 8… will your agency assume responsibility for this? Well this all depends on your contract. What, you didn’t sign a contract with your agency? Now you’re asking for trouble… In general client/agency contracts should include at least a 90 day unconditional warranty on bugs and defects. Beyond that, you’ll have to negotiate. But remember this: bugs aren’t equal to changes. No matter what, if you want to change your logo or add a section, you will have to pay extra.

8. What will my website look like on a mobile phone?

Too many mid-level managers who are just starting to understand why they should spend some time worrying about the Web forget that the Web is no longer the exclusive domain of browsers. An increasing number of users are accessing the Web through their mobile phones, whether IPhones, Blackberrys or Androids. And this is a trend which will only accelarate in the coming months. Make sure you plan some budget for a mobile version of your site, with a nice url like “mobile.yoursite.com”

9. Do I own the code?

This is another vital contractual issue that you need to address before signing anything. General wisdom says that as long as you pay your agency everything that you owe them, you are the sole owner of your code and are free to retrieve it, back it up, and send it to another agency to be re-used. The one thing you cannot do, however, is take the code and sell it to another company. You basically own the right to the code, but not to exploit it commercially.

10. How will the code be commented?

This is every developer’s nightmare: having to work on code that was written by someone else, and which is so poorly commented that it’s impossible to understand. Ask your agency to show a sample of how they comment their code and show it to another developer. Oh, and make sure that part of your agency’s deliverables is a technical guide to how your site was built, whether database structure, CSS framework, logic behind dynamic contect etc… Hopefully, you will never have to use this guide, but they day you want another team to work on your site, this document will prove to be a life-saver.

My last point is: if after reading my post you feel like you’re so far from understading a tenth of what I talked about you would rather trust your agency because they are nice people, hire a consultant. This is the best way to make sure you won’t have to redo your site entirely every other year.

Using Google’s oh-so popular adsense program, he created the following ad:

The ad linked to a small blog created for the occasion which explains why the Habs are so much better than the Leafs. The ad targeted websites and search terms revolving around the keywords “Toronto” “Leafs” “Maple Leafs” and some of the players on this year’s roster (can you name more than 3?)

The ad was served 135,395 times and had a click-through rate of 0.04%, which means 51 users actually clicked on the ad. What’s interesting is that the average CPC was around 0.60$, so for a grand total of 30.60$, my friend was able to piss off close to 150 000 Leafs fans!!! Much cheaper and safer than buying a habs jersey and going to a game at the Air Canada Centre, no? The ad could even be seen on the Toronto Star’s website.

Of course, you’re going to tell me that a lot of people don’t read  or even see banners and google ads when they’re navigating through a site, but even if you figure that 1% of users saw the ad, that would still be over 13,500 pissed-off fans for 30$! And just to prove how pissed some of these fans were, read the comments that were left on the blog post.

The experiment was also repeated on Facebook, with AN EVEN BETTER AD (sorry for the poor quality screenshot):

Here the stats were even more impressive:

For exactly 20 euros (don’t ask me why this is quoted in Euros, but this equals to roughly 32 $) the ad was served 265 866 times! Note that the cost-per-click is much cheaper with Facebook (here it was about 8 cents per click).

Three conclusions about this experiment:

• The ad approval system for Google adsense and Facebook ads is really far from being flawless. These ads should never have been approved. They serve no purpose other than to anger a category of Web users (fans of the Toronto Maple Leafs)

• In some rare cases, such as this one, the objective was to have the lowest click-through rate so that the ad could be served more times for fewer dollars, the idea of course being that even if a Leafs fan reads it, he isn’t likely to click on the ad. Maybe there are real-life cases where this could be applied?

• Leafs suck…. science proves it!

1. Pour une fois, je dis qu’une conférence infopresse était très intéressante. C’est rare, parceque le mot “très” est plus souvent remplacé par le mot “un peu”, ou “pas mal” ou bien “assez”. Mais cette fois-ci, ça mérite un peu plus d’enthousiasme.
2. Je viens de me rendre compte que je suis en train d’écrire en français. C’est drôle ce qu’un peu de PR avec les gens du milieu montréalais peut faire. Bon je me lance donc dans mon premier post en français! Vive la blogue 101!

En rafale donc, 3 phrases à retenir pour chacune des conférences de la journée:

Patrick Beaudoin de chez Cossette sur le thème “les nouvelles pratiques de la communication culturelle”:

• Les institutions culturelles québécoises sont en retard de 15 à 20 ans par rapport au marketing culturel en Europe ou au États-Unis
• Les institutions culturelles québécoises doivent faire un meilleur usage du Web et des réseaux sociaux afin de faire parler d’elle et de se rapprocher de leur public
• Il est tout à fait possible d’envisager une stratégie de communication basée entièrement sur le Web, bien que ceci ne s’applique pas dans tous les cas

Mon cher boss Fady de chez Bluesponge et John McDonald du CCA, présentaient “le Web pour redéfinir la personnalité d’une instituiton: le cas du CCA”

• La nouvelle vision du CCA est axée sur l’extension du bâtiment physique du CCA en ligne afin de rendre  plus accessible les 500 000 items de la collection, surtout au niveau international.
• Le CCA va bientôt entamer une phase de sondage avec le public de son site Web (qui a grandi de 30% depuis le lancement de la nouvelle version) afin de guider les prochaines évolutions de sa présence en ligne.
• Au lieu de garder son riche contenu pour son site Web, le CCA est présent sur Youtube, Facebook, Itunes etc… afin qu’un maximum de gens puisse le consommer. Etre accessible sur le Web ne veut plus simplement dire avoir un bon site Web, mais bien rejoindre son public à travers une multitude de plateformes.

Martin Merlino de chez idéacteur (et ex-Audiogram je présume) sur le sujet “Mettre en marché un artiste: les nouveaux enjeux”:

• L’industrie de la musique va mourir si celle-ci ne s’adapte pas à la nouvelle réalité du Web.
• Le Web a permis de faire de grosse économies au niveau de la promotion d’un nouvel album, notamment en évitant d’envoyer des CDs aux critiques qui peuvent maintenant avoir un accès exclusif à la musique sur le site de la compagnie de disque.
• Afin que les blogeurs et médias Web de type MSN et Cyberpresse parle d’un artiste, il faut leur donner du contenu riche qu’ils vont pouvoir s’approprier. Le problème est que ceux-ci font de l’argent grâce à la pub sur leur plateforme alors que les artistes qui ont produit ce contenu ne touchent rien.

Mathieu Stréliski et Matthew Forsythe de l’ONF ont présenté “Comment les médias sociaux transforment-ils votre réputation?”:

• Un grand nombre d’internautes est intéressé par l’aspect “making of”. Dans le cas de l’ONF, cela veut dire des conseils afin d’aider de jeune réalisateurs à commencer une carrière dans le milieu.
• Il est primordial d’être transparent et d’accepter les critiques lorsque on intervient sur les médias sociaux.
• Une règle importante est de ne pas confier à une agence le rôle de gérer sa communauté car c’est un travail journalier qui demande une bonne connaissance de la personalité de l’institution; et à long-terme il est beaucoup plus rentable d’avoir des ressoures à l’interne.

Pierre Vachon de l’Opéra de Montréal sur “comment rajeunir une instution?”

• Au début 2006, l’Opéra de Montréal faisait face à un grave déficit provenant du fait que le nombre d’abonnés diminuait d’année en année, alors que le coût de production des performances augmentait régulièrement et que les subventions gouvernementales stagnaient
• Trois ans plus tard, le public de l’Opéra de Montréal s’est beaucoup rajeuni, et bien que le nombre d’abonnés n’augmente pas, c’est le nombre de billets individuels vendus qui a permis à l’institution de survivre
• Ce n’est pas seulement le Web qui a permis de rejeunir le public de l’Opéra de Montréal, mais bien la combinaison du renouvelement de  son identité de marque, de l’organisation de  nombreux événements originaux à travers la ville et d’une plus grande présence en ligne

Ok, this post has nothing to do with SEO per se, but I needed a catchy title. The point is: I couldn’t care less about this year’s game. I haven’t watched an NFL game in 3 years, I really don’t feel like eating chicken wings and I took a sobriety vow for the month of February (true story). So instead of looking at the team’s rosters, let’s look at both team’s online presence and decide who the winner of the game will be:

Official websites:

The New Orleans Saints website is built in asp, its design is relatively ugly, it has a typically high ratio of advertising vs. interesting content, and there is so much useless information it’s hard to read anything. The only good point is the multimedia section, which has a good number of audio and video clips to satisfy the average fan’s needs.

On the other hand, the Indianapolis Colts have a much better looking website, with optimized page titles and meta descriptions, properly organized information, a mobile version and a ton of video content, including cheerleader interviews (now you’re talking!). Touch down Colts!

Indianapolis 7 – 0 New Orleans

Facebook

The New Orleans Saints Facebook page has 411,163 fans while the Indianapolis Colts page only manages 300,287 fans. Touch down Saints!

Indianapolis 7 – 7 New Orleans

Youtube

None of the teams have an official Youtube channel, so this one will be determined by the number of search results and the video with highest view count. “new orleans saints” yields 13,900 results, and the video with the highest view count is a little over 500,000 views, while search for “indianapolis colts” gets you a mere 7,060 results while the video with the most views (apart from commercials) has around 150,00 views. Touch down Saints!

Indianapolis 7 – 14 New Orleans

Twitter

@Colts has 6,615 followers while @TheSaints has 7,306. Another touchdown for the Saints!

Indianapolis 7 – 21 New Orleans

LinkedIn

86 members of the Indianapolis Colts have a LinkedIn account, while after searching for five minutes I could not find any results for the Saints. Touch down Colts!

Indianapolis 14 – 21 New Orleans

And now, a blast from the past… will the Colts come back in the game? Let’s see how Alexa.com compares the “reach” of both teams’ websites…

A slight edge for the Colts to send the game into overtime!!!

Indianapolis 21 – 21 New Orleans

It’s time for overtime. The last chance to determine the winner… type in “winner of Super Bowl 2010″ in google image search… who’s the first person you get? Payton Manning of course (even I know who he is). That’s a touch down for the Colts to win the game!!!!

Final score: Indianapolis 28 – 21 New Orleans

The Colts win the first edition of SEO Super Bowl!!!

An obvious question, since for a product page with 10,000 fans, getting 10% of users to read, interact with and click on the link provided in an update means getting an extra 500 clicks compared to an update with a 5% CTR (I know, at this point you’re either wondering how come your product does not have a fan page yet, or why I feel the need to explain how a better CTR helps a brand)

Now back to the question at hand, with a typical yet oh-so-true answer: The best time to post depends on who your fans are! For example, if your fandom spreads accross the seven seas, you might have to think about timezones before publishing an update: If you post at noon in Montreal (lunch time), it will be 9:00 am in California (start of business day), 6:00pm in Western Europe (as people come home from work) and midnight in Japan (a little late, but perhaps just before going to bed?). Moreover, if your target audience is comprised of 13-17 year olds, posting at lunch time is useless as they are in school and won’t access their Facebook account until the early evening. Anyways, you see my point: there is no formula, so you should adapt to your audience.

However, if we were to define a rule (and I will), it goes as follows: the ideal moment to write your post  is when the proportion  of people reading their Facebook news feeds vs. those updating their status is the greatest. Indeed, the faster updates are being published in a user’s live feed, the faster yours will get bumped down the list. And if you aren’t on the live feed of your fans, you won’t get enough interactions and won’t have a chance of making the news feed of users who log on a few hours later.

Fictitious data showing that the ideal moment to update your status is when number of users (blue) is the greatest compared to the proportion of status updates (red)

So when exactly do we reach that moment of climax?

First an intersting graph taken from onehalfamazing.com shows that on average, fan pages get the best CTR from monday to wednesday, and the worst is from thursday to saturday.

Basically, most users update their statuses when they’re bored at home instead of being out enjoying themselves (or a few too many drinks).

What time is the best time if most of  your fans are in the same timezone. There is no rule, but from my personal experience and the above-stated rationale, the ideal point is probably in the late afternoon (between 3:00 and 4:00 pm) as a majority of users will start checking their accounts when they come home, but they aren’t likely to update their status until after they have read their news and/or live feeds.

Until Facebook releases a better analytics tool to track the CTR on Facebook page updates, you’ll have to take my word for it, or just try different options and adjust to the results!