Introduction – Engaging Your Web Audience

This note is for the CFOs of firms with a web presence and would like an outline roadmap for investing in that presence and the associated analytics. It is not addressed to people in digitally led, consumer-oriented businesses for whom digital is a strategic concern who will find other useful resources on this site. This note is to help you think ahead about how you might develop your web presence, identify and address your target audience, to the point at which you will want to bring together data on the people you engage with digitally and in person.

Website Analytics

Every business with a web presence begins with setting up a basic website. It is cheap and setting up the analytics for it is also cheap. There are tools like Google Analytics (GA), MixPanel or Adobe Analytics that you can connect to your website. Each tool has a wizard to help you connect. It connects to your website by inserting tracking code on the pages. The tracking code sends back data, that can then be analysed in analytics tools, such as Google Data Studio, Power BI or Tableau. If your visitors agree you can set up cookies so you can gather data on their individual activity and interests.

For a basic website you may be interested in basic information, for example, how many visitors you have, how they found you, and how many of those visitors return, which pages they visit and how long they spend on those pages. Essentially you can see how many people are checking you out and can assess the level of interest in you and your business.  

Analytics for Content-rich Websites

However, Google Analytics can analyse a lot more than these basic measures. And this will be important if you are using your website actively to attract business. To attract visitors, you might be investing in creating relevant content so that visitors will find when they search for information. You might be investing in AdWords, in paid search, to stand out from the crowd and alert people to your relevant content. You might get visitors to share their contact details with you. You can set up Google Analytics to work out how your investments in attracting visitors might be paying off.  This requires some thought about your goals and how to measure how well you are performing against them. (It also helps in analysis if you make sure that you are using a logical structure for the URLs of your content pages, so similar pages can be grouped together.)

Google Search Console

You can also install Google Console on your site, which is also free, and this includes Search Analytics which helps you see, among other things which search terms (keywords) that visitors are using when they find your site in the search engine results page. You will also be able to use Google Search Console to check that your site content is easy to find.

Investing in Content and AdWords

You are competing for people’s attention. There is no substitute for investing in the quality and relevance of your content and in quality advertising. For example, high cost AdWords are expensive because they are effective. Data analytics will help you to compete effectively and check that you are getting what you are paying for, and an expert internal team or data analytics consultancy can easily set this up.

Analytics and Tagging

If you would like to see in more detail how people are engaging with your content and perhaps downloading documents, then that will require investments in more sophisticated tracking of visitors’ activity and actions. This is done by “tagging” elements of the website with snippets of code so that when the visitor clicks on a tag this triggers the sending of data to Google Analytics. You will need the services of an experienced developer to set up the tagging. The developer will use Google Tag Manager (GTM), a tool that assists with the task of adding Java code snippets using GTM tags which Google has pre-validated. Google Tag Manager coverage of tagging requirements improves continuously and GTM could already cover most, if not all, of your tagging requirements. Where it does not, custom code/plugins are also available on GitHub to an experienced Java developer.

More extensive tracking is usually only required if you sell products, either digital or physical from your website (This might include branded promotional goods for example). This requires the tracking of transaction information. This has three elements; data about the transaction (held in a central repository or data layer), a tag for the transaction and a trigger to bundle and send the data about the transaction to Google Analytics. GA is readied to accept the data by enabling the Google E-commerce plug-in within GA settings.

There is a more advanced plug-in that helps to give better information about the shopping behaviour of visitors to the site and a more extensive range of reports on the purchasing funnel. (For example, enhanced e-commerce provides more tagging options around shopping carts, promotions, discounts and check-out behaviour than standard e-commerce and has additional standard reports.)

Even if you don’t want to sell on your site, you can “hack” the enhanced the e-commerce tracking plug-ins and use the standard funnel reports to give more information about the “funnels” visitors move through on your site and how engaged they are with your content.

If you seek to attract customers through display advertising, you may also use automated platforms, to push ads to your target audience. These take only milliseconds to identify a high value prospect online from data, complete a bidding transaction and select and display your ad. Then you will also get data returned from the platform on the performance of your advertising.

If you are spending advertising money through multiple media channels, then you will need to bring together data on spend on, for example, social media, electronic media, print, TV and radio and to have a method of attributing the value of the business you are generating to your spend in each of these channels.

The more important your web presence and web reputation, then the more important it becomes to listen. Social media and web monitoring services will tell you what people are saying about your company and your brands online. And give you time to respond. Generating another source of data.

You will wish to combine web data with your other data on customers and prospective customers from your CRM and financial systems. Bear this data integration step in mind and keep all this data compatible with shared data disciplines across responsibility areas. Make sure people in different functions use the same identifiers for critical data elements like the names of customers, prospects and campaigns across all channels and systems otherwise you will have an extra mapping task to do when combining the data.

At this point, data from media, social media and web sources has become just another element of your data strategy and your use of analytics, data science and AI. You might want to check out our White paper on Analytics, Data Science and AI or our blog Guide to investments in data analytics and digital.

Conclusion

Though this note has been addressed to businesses that currently are neither strongly digitally led nor consumer oriented, the use of digital media continues to grow strongly. It is hard to overstate the potential for a firm to use digital channels to have “conversations” with its audience.  In the direct to consumer sector, such “conversations” with consumers have been the basis for product and brand innovations that have rocked some of the big established brands. There may be more opportunities for your firm in increased digitisation and digital data that you would like to explore. For some firms, digital and web analytics have been the foundation on which to evolve a broader data strategy and digital strategy including the application of data science and AI to data from all sources.

There are more than a thousand different digital marketing automation tools available. There are few entry barriers into the digital marketing technology business. The underlying technology is cheap, the skills are readily available in the global gig economy, it is easy to scale, and the risks are low. So, the number of firms competing in this sector has grown rapidly. Prices are highly competitive.

However, a hidden cost in these tools is the cost of integrating the data from each of them. Recently, we’ve been helping firms find “work arounds” to enable them to access their data from highly inaccessible tools. Their frustration is significant: After all the investments and efforts they have made in their digital marketing initiatives, they now find that they can’t easily access the data they need to make decisions, tune their approach and understand what’s working and what isn’t. A frustrating situation that can be avoided by appropriately selecting marketing tools and having a cohesive data strategy.

 So, when your firm is making a choice of marketing automation tools, screen them first on one simple criterion. “Is it easy to extract my data in a suitable format and combine it with data from all my other marketing sources”.  If not, then that tool will be undermining the biggest advantage of digital marketing, the ability to interrogate data in order to optimise marketing spend. A poor choice will mean that you will waste money on data integration and/or will have poor analytics that lead to wasteful marketing spend.

The care that a marketing automation tool has taken to ensure that users have painless access to their own data is an important guide to the quality of the design. If the tool has an inadequate or poorly supported API or application programming interface, used to extract the data, avoid it. It will handicap your digital marketing efforts

However, if you can get out the data you need, even as a csv or Excel file, then you will always be able to automate the transformation with generic tools and load your data into a cheap cloud database; you will build a valuable data asset and be able to apply any data analytics tool you wish. You will have a cost-effective digital marketing data strategy that will scale with your business – not a poor strategy that will handicap your firm.

The problem is prevalent enough for a new industry to have sprung up that offers connectors to help you extract data. If you have made a poor choice, then these will be your best option – at a price. Why put yourself in the position of needing them in the first place?

Given the fragmentation, sector consolidation is in progress, and proprietary marketing platforms are available that offer both data and analytics tools. For these options consider that they have your data, not you, and that the future license costs will reflect that fact that you will be locked in by the cost of switching away from the platform.

An alternative strategy that puts the data in your teams hands, gives you the freedom to use the best analytics tools, gives you the best chance of creating intuitive analytics and that supports the sort of creative and innovative marketing that will help your firm stand out. Having marketing data analytics, that is purpose built and meaningful to your team, will drive that differentiation. You can do this with an internal team of data experts, an external data analytics specialist or by upskilling team members with assistance from a data strategy consulting firm.

As digital marketing is an area where returns compound over time, the decision to invest in marketing automation is strategic. This means that it is best approached with a view to the longer-term development of a cost-effective data strategy and to the development of valuable data assets, not for the sake of short-term expediency.

So, what are the trade-offs in each channel and how do we understand and manage them to optimise our investments? 

Channels  

For a long time, brands have both cooperated and competed with channels; multi-channel business is more complicated. Each channel creates different challenges for the brand owner:  

• Some are opportunities to build brands 
• Most create short term returns 
• Some carry the risk of undermining the brand and eroding margin 
• Some are the source of crucial consumer intelligence 

Each channel generates different data and if we want to manage our brand and channel strategies effectively, we must be able to look at our channel data and digital marketing data together and apply some suitable analytics. Doing so will allow us to understand and manage channel relationships.  

The challenges in each channel are unique, so let’s take a look at some of them.  

E-Commerce Retailers  

These offer reach to brand owners. Amazon is reaching nearly 197 million unique visitors per month, but offers little influence over assortment, pricing, or presentation. Although for big brands it is possible to embed brand teams with Amazon which can help to optimise brand visibility criteria, position on the webpage, customise the brand presentation and understand the impact of competing brands.   

Brands, however, cannot be built in this channel. Dynamic pricing and price erosion will undermine brands with premium positioning. Monitoring presentation, pricing, share and margin data are critical to analysing the risks to brand equity. Price data is also needed to analyse the cross-impact on price promotions in any bricks and mortar channel.    

E-Commerce Store-in-store and Online Marketplaces 

More than 150 online marketplaces offer reach, with more control over pricing and presentation than is offered by e-commerce retailers. Each brand can give consumers a stronger brand experience and generate valuable consumer feedback on which to assess brand health and product innovations.   

These channels support consumer dialogues which can have measurable impact on brand health, and which can spill over into other channels, helping to lift brand share and category sales. These marketplaces also offer attractive economies of scale, such as shared fulfilment services to help support margins.   

Some marketplaces have been poor at controlling grey market or parallel trade activity which is a price erosion risk to monitor.   

The data captured on performance, pricing, margin, presentation, brand health, consumer sentiment and digital conversations with consumers can be rich and help to produce valuable brand analytics.   

Direct to Consumer Websites 

Used initially by established brands to showcase products and engage with consumers these are increasingly being used as direct sales channels. The sites generate not just data on consumer attitudes and relationships but also on purchasing behaviour. The channel offers the ability to collect data from market tests of innovation, pricing and merchandising. These sites also benefit by providing exclusive offers, premium and personalised products to engage consumers, build loyalty and differentiate the channel.  

Direct to consumer websites require considerable investment in content and marketing to drive traffic and develop customer loyalty, so some analytics activity is aimed at optimising site performance against the ranking algorithms of the search engines. However, perhaps more important is measuring the effectiveness of the site in building the brand and consumer loyalty. The ultimate potential of D2C sites and consumer loyalty is perhaps demonstrated by the Apple D2C website which generates substantial revenues.  

New digital-first brands with distinctive offerings also use D2C websites to build relationships and sustain digital conversations with their target segments, permitting them to cut into the share of bigger brands without incurring the costs associated with supporting other channels.  However, such firms usually go on to develop a presence in bricks and mortar channels to enable consumers to experience the product and will see increased conversion rates in all channels as a result. 

 The consumer intelligence that can be accumulated through the digital conversations encouraged by D2C sites is a long-term strategic asset for brands. Both new and established brands have used D2C channels for encouraging users to share ideas for new products and marketing messaging. 

Bricks and Mortar Retail 

Most brands using this channel have established account management processes for negotiating with bricks and mortar retailers over assortment, pricing and presentation. This channel provides consumers with the opportunity to experience products in a way that is not possible online. Store-in-store works for higher margin brands that can support the additional marketing costs. Analysis can indicate how the consumer confidence created in bricks and mortar channels can be shown to influence online conversion rates. Data captured on sales and share are the basis for revenue growth management analytics and for managing the relationship with the retailer using trade profitability analytics. 

Analytics Challenges 

Analytics offers help with managing these complexities. The ability to integrate data from multiple sources to measure returns is fundamental. The data is usually integrated within a cloud service such as those provided by Google, Microsoft and AWS as these are eminently scalable and low cost. 

Where analytics services are used it is important that they provide access to raw data via APIs or other interfaces. Data strategy policies should be established that prevent valuable information being rendered inaccessible in any internal or external silo, which would inhibit the development of consumer intelligence as a strategic asset.   

From the CFO’s perspective, expenditures on digital marketing and channels produce both short term returns and create strategic assets – brand equity and consumer intelligence – that are the foundation for future growth.  The investments also involve trade-offs and cross-impacts. By using an integrated approach to analytics, this complexity can be effectively managed.

Oddly (and fortunately), for our team at Oxi Analytics and a number of companies like us, Coronavirus COVID-19 hasn’t changed the way we work. We’ve been using a remote globally distributed workforce since our founding in 2015. Remote working has been presented as a challenge for businesses, but we chose this model pre-pandemic because we believe that it has a number of advantages which lead to better client, team and business outcomes. Our people can work from wherever they like as long as they can get a reliable internet connection. For us, “digital first” and “digital by default” are not Buzzwords they are the stuff of everyday working.

I find myself wondering whether the “challenge of remote working” might force a cultural shift that will result in a number of advantages, that companies might not have expected.

The Competitive Advantage of Remote Working

Our experience is that clients respond to our model, as it offers excellent quality at significantly lower rates than our competitors, as well as providing a highly responsive service. This means our clients trust us with critical work and it is the remote globally distributed model that has helped produce these results.

We’ve had clients we have only ever met over Skype or Zoom – and our relationships with those clients are strong. It is working together on problems, helping each other and being available when your client needs you that builds relationships and you can do those online, often more easily.

So, how can this be the case? What are the advantages that made us choose this model? Why does this way of working result in better client, team and business outcomes?

Trust is Key

Firstly, let’s talk about trust, because it underpins this way of working. Trust is vital, between the team and between clients and the team – trust in people, in their commitment, in their skills and in their efforts and in shared work standards. This trust also enhances peoples focus and dedication to their work and their colleagues. Building a culture and managerial style that supports this is a key part of reaping the benefits of this model – and when it is lacking, none of the benefits will be seen and problems will develop.

People are still accountable. But now, it is the quality of outputs they deliver that they will be evaluated on, not the time they are watched in the office. This promotes efficient use of time and higher productivity, shifting the focus to deliverables and outcomes rather than office dynamics and politics.

Flexibility and Responsiveness

Giving a team the responsibility of working from home remotely and flexibly can in our experience deliver fantastic results. It is liberating rather than oppressive. It means you can go for a walk, visit the gym or do essential tasks when it suits you. This means the team optimise their personal time for their well-being, which in turn supports their productivity at work, but also means that the flexibility is there to ensure that client needs are always able to be prioritised. This also increases flexibility and responsiveness in communicating with each other and clients, something especially important when working with team members and clients across time zones.

The results of the model for our team have been:

• Improved productivity
• Improved responsiveness to clients
• Improved team member well-being
• Improved coverage of working hours

From a client perspective there are a number of linked benefits. Responsiveness, even from a small team working from home can be high and any issues, quickly responded to and dealt with. This responsiveness and high level of customer support has a major impact on strengthening customer relationships and building trust.

Furthermore, having a remote global workforce means costs can be lowered and at the same time development cycles reduced. Work handed off at the end of the day to a different time zone can be progressed overnight, saving client’s time as well as producing results more quickly.

The results for clients are:

• Reduced costs
• Reduced work cycles
• Improved trust
• Improved availability of support

Talent Selection and Retention

The other significant advantage is how such a model opens up a global talent pool. No longer constrained by office location, the best individuals can be selected for. These are often the types of individual that will see flexible working arrangements as a great benefit. The model, therefore, not only helps attract top talent, but can help to retain it, as it will allow them to integrate work with changes in their personal life such as moving home, getting married or moving to a new country  to name a few.

“But we need someone onsite… don’t we?”

We have sometimes found clients ask about the need to be on site. We have worked on-site and do meet clients from time to time, usually as part of attending their on-site meetings when required. Our experience is though that the increased cost associated with being on-site, combined with the reduced flexibility and the fact that once we start working together trust is rapidly built, usually means clients move to a fully remote model pretty soon after a project kicks off.

There is one occasion on which clients tend to feel more strongly about this and it is usually when technical teams are looking to achieve some skill transfer. This can be because they want to develop new skills or to be able to pick up the systems themselves after the handover of a system or project. However, in reality this is also something that is better managed online. Remote working relationships and arrangements are far more flexible for supporting people in acquiring new skills. This is because the support is available when you need it, just a call away, rather than having someone on site who you watch. Skill transfer is achieved by being supported when you need it, as you try for yourself and get stuck, not when watching someone else work (that’s what resources such as Tableau’s training videos are for – and they are free!).

Evolving Business Models

The IT sector includes large Indian outsourcers who operate at scale. Reports suggest that they have struggled to switch to home working in response to Coronvirus COVID-19 and are seeing significantly lower Productivity. Their established cultures and ways of working don’t seem to be compatible with remote working. They will need to make a significant cultural and managerial transition. For people used to turning around to talk to a colleague, there is we accept a learning curve, but if you can adapt to writing a chat in Teams  or Slack or Skype (and making sure you respond to them), or jumping on a call – it’s just a question of habit.

Remote working is clearly safer in a world which is vulnerable to pandemics like Coronavirus COVID-19. But as mindsets evolve and remote home working becomes more prevalent it will prove to be cheaper, easier, simpler and greener. Much existing infrastructure can be simplified and replaced with more cost-efficient web services. Simplifying businesses makes them more focussed, reveals activities which add no value, makes such activities easier to drop, making it easier to reorganise and realign people and activities, making companies leaner and reducing fixed costs.

Cyber security and privacy are a potential issue, but not insurmountable. Our information policies are already built around remote working and remote data access. Our people are all savvy professionals. Our policies follow the regulations and high standards of the UK, the jurisdiction in which our company is registered. Our clients’ data rarely strays beyond their firewalls; as we remotely access it, transform it and develop applications within it.

However, there is one accessibility issue in which remote working causes significant difficulties which are hard to address. And the problem is caused by the accessibility of snacks in the home fridge. That is where there is the greatest challenge to self-discipline in remote working. Everything else is easy by comparison.

Warren Buffett recommends that consumer firms “put a moat around their brands”. But the arrival of digital-first competitors means they might need something more up to date. Consumer firms’ strategic positioning rests on the power of brands – so everything depends on a firm’s ability to defend its brands. We discussed recently how strategic dashboards can monitor and drive performance of  brands, but to defend a brand against digital first competitors needs something more.

The Digital Defence of Brands

Let’s look at a modern military analogy. The military look to detect threats as early as possible and invest in monitoring and early warning systems. Scenarios are prepared for and responses are planned and rehearsed.

Often in commercial settings incursions by digital first competitors will only be recognised once brand performance is suffering. By this time, much of the damage is already done, market share will be affected, and more time will be lost  while a response is formulated and implemented. To effectively defend a brand against digital attacks, firms need something more.

The good news is competition from new digital first brands is distinctive, and elements are predictable. Therefore, scenarios can be planned for, early warning systems set up and defensive responses rehearsed in advance. For example, a competitor launches a new offering which is a better fit for our consumer’s preferences and uses digital channels to target that segment at low costs. Our priority is to detect this competition from the start, not when the competitor starts to take share. What we need is a response time that can be shortened to match the problem.

So how can this be achieved? The answering is in designing analytics differently.

Designing Analytics for Digital Defence of Brands

Analytics for brand defence should be designed for specific scenarios. For each scenario we use analytics to;

• Develop scenarios
• Prepare a response
• Provide early warnings

Developing Scenarios

A variety of possible scenarios are developed during the design process. Subject matter experts should be consulted to identify scenarios. They share their experiences of damaging events and situations in which competitors exploited weaknesses. They are asked how they would attack our brands if they were a competitor. They are asked how they would identify an opportunity to take share from a competitor. Analytics supports this exploration, with techniques such as segmentation analysis, used to identify any mismatches between evolving needs and offerings. Analytics can also quantify the brand vulnerabilities as well as the overall likely impact of the scenarios.

Preparing a Response

Analytics also supports the subject matter teams in preparing a response to the scenarios. Hypotheses can be generated and tested and plans evaluated. Actions that could be considered and evaluated could be; releasing budget reserves, actioning digital marketing teams to engage the target segment with counter messages and counteroffers, paying special attention to early adopters, or tasking product development with creating spoiler offers. The costs and impacts of each of these actions can be modelled in advance and selected.

Providing Early Warnings

Once the scenarios that need to be detected are understood, monitoring of web and social traffic to detect the new competitor can be established. Listening out for digital conversations that are related to the characteristics of your scenario, will provide an early warning system and help you assess if it’s time to put the responses into action.

Digitally Empowered Fast Responses

Fast responses to events have value in many settings. Analytics is used, for example, in electronic trading rooms to spot arbitrage opportunities, in process industries where process parameters are continually adjusted to optimise yield, in demand side advertising platforms where ad buying opportunities are seen and taken in milliseconds.

In these situations, analytics can identify a pre-defined issue or opportunity, classify it and select a pre-programmed automated response. While brand defence is more complex and defining the scenarios and preparing the responses is more challenging, the principle is the same. We just need to apply it.

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Analytics designed for digital defence make your brand defences stronger, and your responses to any threat faster and more effective. The vision is to reduce the vulnerability of your brands and make your defences so fast and intense that you will deter any attack. Perhaps that would constitute Warren Buffett’s moat after all.