This document provides an overview of various analytics techniques including testing and targeting, surveys, email marketing, competitive intelligence, and RSS feeds. For testing and targeting, it describes A/B testing and multivariate testing to evaluate different page variations. It also discusses re-targeting visitors based on their behaviors. The document outlines best practices for conducting surveys to understand user intentions. It then reviews metrics used to measure email marketing effectiveness. Next, it discusses sources of competitive intelligence data including toolbar, panel, and search engine sources. Finally, it presents methods for tracking RSS feed usage including pixel images, third-party services, unique URLs, and analyzing subscriber logs.

1. OTHER ANALYTICS
Module 5

2. Agenda
 Section 1: Testing and targeting
 Section 2: Surveys
 Section 3: Email
 Section 4: Competitive Intelligence
 Section 5: RSS feeds

3. Section 1
Testing and targeting

4. Introduction to testing
 Testing is the technique used to know the
actual intent of the customers who are visiting
a web sites
 Though a website has a major goal
like, content production or e-commence or
engagement. There are micro elements that
are also part of this. Ex: Looking for careers
link in Amazon web site.
 So its important to know how each group of
users are responding to different group of
people.

5. Types of tests
 There are many types of testing techniques
that are used. Most popular are,
 A/B testing or Split testing
 MVT testing or Multivariate testing or bucking
testing
 Any testing technique requires to have the
hypothesis ready and the have a clear
definition of test elements
 By testing, you cant derive new learning’s
other than the elements that we have
hypothesis for.

6. A/B testing – Details
 AB testing compares the effectiveness of two
versions of a web page, marketing email, creative
images, landing pages – in order to discover
which has better response rates, better conversion
rates, etc.
 AB testing will test two samples of the test –
Control and test groups, to see which single
variable is most effective in increasing a response
rate or other desired outcome
 To be effective, the test must reach an audience of
sufficient size that there is a reasonable chance of
detecting a meaningful difference between the

7. A/B testing – Tools
 Example: A company want to test two banners
of a creative reaching out to 5000 people.
 First 2500 people got a offer with CTA “Buy now”
 Next 2500 people got a offer with CTA “Learn
more”
 All other elements of the creative remain the
same
 Record CTR for each banner and that will be the
winning banner
 Tools that provide that reports are, Google
Analytics content
experiments, Optimizely, Visual website
optimizer, Unbounce, Omniture

8. MVT testing – Details
 Multivariate technique for testing hypotheses on
complex multi-variable systems, especially used
in testing market perceptions
 Multivariate testing is usually employed in order to
ascertain which content or creative variation
produces the best improvement in the defined
goals of a website, whether that be user
registrations or successful completion of a
checkout process
 Testing can be carried out on a dynamically
generated website by setting up the server to
display the different variations of content in equal
proportions to incoming visitors

9. MVT testing – Details
 Dynamic creative optimization is the
application of MVT testing. An automatic
system will show the high performing creative
to audience by testing the algorithm for
targeted profiles
 In a nutshell, multivariate testing can be seen
as allowing website visitors to vote with their
clicks for which content they prefer and will
stand the most chance of their proceeding to a
defined goal
 This is one of the high growth area in digital
marketing in the current digital marketing. All

10. Re-targeting – Details
 Re-targeting is the technique of identifying the
group of audience which fits the segment
definition and giving them a relevant message
for their next visit
 This targeting can be applied on specific web-
site or on an ad-network or with specific
publisher website
 Retargeting can happen based on many
action. Ex: Click on the banner, drop out from
the cart, visit to the site etc.

11. Re-targeting – Tools
 Retargeting can be done four segment bases:
demographic, geographic, behavioral, psychogr
aphic
 While using this technique, you can use the
same message or different messages fine
tuned
 Currently all ad serving platforms are
supporting re-targeting for media
 Web analytics tools like – Omniture and Google
Analytics has also that capacity

12. Section 2
Surveys

13. Surveys – Introduction
 Analytics tools provide the data what has
happened in the past. It does not really help us
understand why people are doing what they are
doing.
 Data by itself does not give the “purchase intent”
 With customer actions, we try to figure our this
indirectly
 The direct way of figuring this out is – Surveys
 Surveys can be done to address a specific need
or can be conducted as a general feedback
mechanism , i.e at site level or at a session/page

14. Surveys – Details
 It helps to understand – what are the macro
and micro conversions that are happened on
the site
 Surveys can happened at any point of the visit
of the user. However its been identified to have
the survey happened at the end of the visit or
entry of the visit.
 With technology you can have surveys or
feedback taken even on the display banners
 You can conduct these to all users or only
specific group of people selected based on
segmentation

15. Surveys – Details
 With a simple survey, you can get the data related
to
 Why a user has visited the site
 Were they able to complete the task
 If not, why not?
 Guidelines for conducting surveys:
 Don’t make surveys an obstruction to the user
experience
 Don’t collect personal level information of users
 Always provide an option of opting out of the surveys
 Don’t make surveys long. Limit them to a max. of 10
questions
 Use industry benchmarks to design and evaluate your

16. Surveys – Details
 Companies who can help you do the surveys –
 Iprospects – Paid
 Surveymonkey – Free
 Forsee results – Paid
 The data can be in the form
of, desirability, preference, Discovery, was it
helpful etc. depending on what vendor you are
using
 Surveys can collect the both positive and
negative feedbacks

17. Section 3
Email data

18. Email marketing – Introduction
 Email marketing also know as permission
marketing is one of the old forms of marketing.
 There are two types of email marketing.
 Explicit permission marketing
 Implicit permission marketing
 Both are powerful marketing forms, but there is a
good probability people will consider them spam if
the messages are not relevant over the time
 Using the tracking parameters, we can collect
different metrics, however these are very different
from normal metrics that we collect via websites

19. Email marketing – Metrics
 The metrics that are used for email marketing
success are,
 No. of emails sent
 No of successful emails sent
 No of emails opened
 Open rate
 No of emails read
 CTR from emails
 No of responses
 Response rate

20. Email marketing – Details
 Email marketing is very effective if maintained
as an integral communication channel of
campaigns
 Its little costly compared to the remaining
forms of marketing and need to be maintained
for valid customers
 Its powerful channel to increase the loyal
users and keep them for up-selling and cross-
selling
 This is also very good medium to conduct
surveys

21. Section 4
Competitive Intelligence

22. Competitive intelligence –
Introduction
 Competitive Intelligence is the process of
defining, gathering, analyzing &
distributing intelligence about
products, customers, competitors and any aspect of
the environment needed to support executives and
managers in making strategic decisions for an
organization
 Key points of CI are,
 Benchmark the effectiveness of your existing customer
acquisition strategies
 Determine what is driving competitors’ success
 Use historical consumer data to forecast future trends

23. Competitive intelligence –
Details
 The data can we collected from,
 Toolbar data: Toolbars are add-ons on web
browsers, which are used to collect limited information
about the browsing behaviour of the customers who use
them, including the pages visited, the search terms
used, perhaps even time spent on each page, and so forth.
Typically, data collected is anonymous and not personally
identifiable information. Ex: Alexa
 Panel data: A company may recruit participants to be in a
panel and each panel member installs a piece of
monitoring software. The software collects all the panel’s
browsing behaviour and reports it to the company running
the panel. Additionally the person is also required to self
report demographic, salary, household
members, hobbies, education level and other such detailed
information. Ex: Comscore, Neilsen

24. Competitive intelligence –
Details
 ISP (Network) data: Network provides collect
data from server logfiles. The data collected by
the ISP consists of elements that get passed
around in URLs, such as sites, page
names, keywords searched etc.. The ISP servers
can also capture information such as browser
types and operating systems. Ex: Hitwise
 Search Engine Data: Search engines, such as
Bing, Google, Yahoo! and Baidu, are logged by
those search engines, along with basic
connectivity information such as IP address and
browser version.

25. Competitive intelligence –
Details
 Benchmarks from Web Analytics vendors:
Web analytics vendors have lots of
customers, which means they have lots of data.
Many vendors now aggregate this real customer
data and present it in the form of benchmarks that
you can use to index your own performance. Ex:
Google Analytics, Omniture, Coremetrics
 Self-reported data: Some websites can report
their data intentionally to panel data collectors to
attract more advertising

26. Competitive intelligence –
Details
 Hybrid data: Any mix of above collected data can
be used for the analysis. Google Trends for
search is one of the freely available tools which
helps to provide the search query analysis based
on keywords
 External voice of data: You can upload data that
is collected offline to support the online CI
 Any of these methods has its own
advantages, short-comings and privacy related
issues. So its advisable to use a collection of
data sources to have the best solution
possible

27. Section 5
RSS feeds

28. RSS – Introduction
 Rich Site Summary is an aggregator that used
to publish frequently updated works such
as blog entries, news headlines, audio, and
video
 RSS Tracking is a methodology for
tracking RSS feeds
 This tracking is tricky when measuring the user
usage
 We discuss these methods in the following
slides with its advantages and limitations

29. RSS – Tracking Method
 Method 1:
 Transparent 1×1 pixel images - These images
can be embedded within the content of the RSS
feed by linking to the image which should be held
on the web server. The number of requests made
can be measured by using the web server log
files. This will give a rough estimate as to how
many times the RSS feed has been viewed.
 The problem with this method is that not all RSS
feed aggregators will display images and
parse HTML

30. RSS – Tracking Method
 Method 2
 Third-party services - There are services
available on the Internet that will syndicate RSS
feed and then track all requests made to their
syndication of RSS feed. These services come
in both free and paid forms.
 The problem with this method is that all
analytical data about the feeds are controlled by
the service provider and so not easily accessible
or transferable.

31. RSS – Tracking Method
 Method 3
 Unique URL per feed - This method requires
heavy web server programming to auto generate
a different RSS feed URL for each visitor to the
website. The visitor's RSS feed activity can then
be tracked accurately using standard web
analytics applications.
 The problem with this method is that if the feed is
syndicated by a search engine for instance then
this will defeat the purpose of the unique URLs as
many people could potentially view the RSS feed
via a single URL

32. RSS – Tracking Methods
 Method 4
 Estimating number of subscribers from the log files.
Some aggregators (For ex: Bloglines and Google
Reader) include a number of unique users on whose
behalf the feed is being downloaded in the HTTP
request. Other readers, such as web browsers, can
be counted by noting the number of unique IP
addresses that retrieve the file in a given period.
 This provides an estimate of actual
readership, although it is probably higher than the real
number because people may sign up for accounts
with multiple aggregators and never delete their
subscriptions and because they may read the same
feeds at different computers, or the same computer
may have a different IP address at different times.

33. For Q&A:
Contact: gayatrichoda@gmail.com
Thank you