• by Steve Smith , Staff Writer @popeyesm, March 14, 2008

Traditionally, Web analytics of on-site behavior and email metrics have peacefully co-existed in separate silos. Once a message gets its audience to a site, many email marketers believe their work is done. Stefan Pollard, director of email marketing best practices, and Dan Miller, manager of professional services, both of Lyris, Inc. argue for a real marriage of the two disciplines. Lyris, a combination of several recent acquisitions, tries to bring some of these metrics together in its own Lyris HQ dashboard. Pollard and Miller walked us through how email clickthroughs need to be followed and understood after users get to the site.

Behavioral Insider: How are email and Web analytics different?

Stefan Pollard: Segmentation from an email standpoint is really around identifying what group of consumers a particular message should be delivered to, and then what action you want that group to take. The only action from an email is to click through to the Web site. But the other half of that is getting the right message to the right audience. Often the information available to an email marketer is very restricted to information the consumer gives at the point of acquisition. With the addition of Web analytics, you get more in terms of the behavior that a person is taking. You sent them an email, you put them in a target audience and sent them a piece of creative that directed them to take an action with your Web site. Now they are performing a series of behaviors. Not only is one of their behaviors to not go at all, but another behavior is to visit and to not take the action you want -- but to look at other things within the Web site.

Dan Miller: So Web analytics historically is based on server performance, quantity of traffic, and basic numbers like that. Basically visitors are a series of clicks. Web analytics currently is really taking all this data and session-izing it, looking across all the sessions and visitors to determine which clicks go together to form a session. And then we can start drawing some conclusions from that. We really parallel email without usually crossing paths. In email terms, segmentation means people having in common similar attributes when they signed up. In Web terms, it can be exhibiting similar behaviors. Let's look at customers who reach a certain point in a conversion process but didn't actually purchase.   

Pollard: The opportunity is people who have visited the Web site taking a behavior and you feeding that information into your email application to trigger an event-based message. Someone downloaded a white paper. You want to pass that information back and send a transactional response message, and might want to use it as part of a drip campaign. People who downloaded this are also interested in that. And maybe three days later you follow up with them based on whether they clicked on any of those categories people click on. And you may see they haven't responded to them, so you can present them with a different set of articles.

BI: How many site and publisher are actually integrating Web analytics and email?

Miller: The two separate pieces are common. Tying them together, I found, is rare. Traditionally, the Web analytics side works with blinders, focusing on one or two metrics that are common for that marketing channel. Customers who manage Google AdWords PPC campaigns focus on CTRs, and once the visitor reaches the site they might hope to tie a conversion rate back to that and at least know what percentage bought something. But they really don't pay attention to what happens in between.

Likewise, email marketers are used to email metrics -- open rates and CTRs. They judge success by how many people click through. But if a lot of them immediately leave the Web site then it is a false indicator of success. We are advocating tying these two tools together. Between those stated preferences [email] and implied preferences through behavior [on-site] we can fine tune a more targeted message.

BI: Do particular kinds of metrics come naturally from this marriage? Like users not staying long?

Miller: We call it a "short visit," someone who views one page and doesn't click on any links. That would be the starting point, at least finding out whether the landing page they were directed to from the email was a consistent enough message and a compelling enough call to action that the visitor felt they wanted to invest in clicking deeper.

Another common practice in Web analytics world is to assemble what we refer to as a funnel report. Often the data will take a shape similar to a funnel, in that you are assembling a series of pages or groups of pages that you would like the visitor to proceed towards conversion, and analyzing how many of them actually make it there and at what point they fall off.

To apply segmentation -- to only look at email visitors from particular campaigns -- can help tie these applications together. We can go back to the concept of follow-up messaging, possibly targeting specific visitors based on the point where they fell away from the process. A classic example would be, I added an item to my shopping cart, shipping was calculated, and I stopped. You might infer that I objected to the shipping prices. So maybe you follow up with a free shipping message.

BI: What are the challenges for implementing integration in the organization?  

Pollard: It becomes a different way of thinking about your market. Often you have a marketing department with five to 10 people each responsible for a small piece.

Miller: Not only do you have this siloed approach, but Web analytics historically has been looked at more as a technical application. So IT is running the tools. Even if the marketing people are consumers of the reports. they don't have a real interactivity with the reports. They get numbers spit out with some pie charts. They don't really use it to evaluate the individual campaigns -- much less to potentially extract certain visitors based on their behaviors.

BI: With that in mind, who can best make use of the integrated data?

Pollard: Hopefully it starts more at the senior level, and you have someone who can at least wrap their head around the concept of a truly integrated campaign. It is not just gauging the success of the email on how many clicks it drove -- but how the landing page converted, how we re-messaged people who didn't do what we wanted them to do. I think the opportunity cost of not doing segmentation is starting to catch up with email marketers. Marketers who are still trying to focus on list size and one-message-fits-all strategies are having all sorts of problems. Those programs are not as successful as they were several years ago.

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