Datalicious Blog - Data Driven Marketing

Adobe mobile commerce survey shows marketers plan to use combination of mobile sites and apps

Adobe just published the results of their latest Mobile Commerce Survey which include a few interesting nuggets for all marketers who are thinking about going mobile in some form or another.

Key findings of the survey include

  • Mobile websites are the predominant presence of businesses in the mobile channel not downloadable application. More than 80% of respondents were planning or have already deployed a mobile commerce website versus 8% with a downloadable application-only strategy.
  • Marketers identified four key areas of execution for their mobile strategy: 1) promotions, 2) commerce, 3) product information display, and 4) branding. Promotions emerged as the top strategic element, followed by online commerce.
  • Rich, full-screen image zoom and videos are the most effective ways to browse or display products, according to a majority of the respondents. Grid viewing of thumbnails is deemed most effective for browsing multiple product images.
  • Overall, visual merchandising features are deployed by less than one-third of the respondents. However, as many as 81% of the respondents indicated they are planning to deploy those features, suggesting richer mobile experiences will be created over the coming months. 

The below chart qualifies the above somewhat as it shows that many marketers (50%) actually embraced a combined mobile website and downloadable mobile application strategy. Very few (8%) had a strategy based solely on mobile downloadable applications (i.e. without a mobile website). Only 3% had an iPhone application-only strategy, while 1% had a combined iPhone/iPad-only strategy.

If you were wondering how your mobile websites or applications are stacking up you might be interested in the below chart which shows the percentage of online traffic used by each mobile website/application. Of all mobile traffic, mobile websites drew the most traffic; mobile applications’ traffic across the various platforms collectively lagged the mobile website traffic, ranging as low as 1% to as high as 8% of the total traffic.

Roy Morgan research showing Australian internet consumption increasing for Gen Y/Z and mobile

The below chart shows that although Australians as a whole still spend more time viewing television than consuming other media, Generation Y and Z are now at a level that is comparable to television. The amount of time spent per week on the Internet has in fact increased by 71% over the past 5 years compared to a decline of 4% for television.
Roy Morgan also found that an estimated 13% of Australians (2.25 million) have participated in some type of online activity using their mobile phone in an average four week period, up from 8% in 2008. The top 5 mobile phone internet activities participated in by Australians 14+ years old are: Email (5%), Social networking (5%), General browsing/surfing (4%), Weather (3%) and Instant Messaging (2%).

Gigya and Compete report on increasing importance of social network referral traffic over Google

We all heard the news when Facebook overtook Google as the most popular website in the US in March this year according to Hitwise but now the guys at Gigya have released a research report based on Compete data that adds an interesting new perspective to this trend suggesting that social networks are becoming the next/new search.

Although Facebook has overaken Google as the most populate website, marketers were wondering if that would actually translate into increased traffic to their sites which according to the Gigya reports is exactly the case. The below chart clearly shows that referral traffic from social networks has become a major traffic source that rivals Google and marketers would be well advised to develop suitable strategies to address this trend.
A social revolution is dictating dramatic changes in how companies run their websites, and their business. With the advent of social feeds - a live stream of friends’ activity shared on social networks like Facebook and Twitter - consumers can more easily rely on trusted personal relationships to determine what’s worthwhile to read, watch, play and buy online. For many, the conclusion is startling; referral traffic is as significant from social networks as it is from search engines, making Social the next Search.

GetResponse study on impact of social sharing features in emails shows 30% increase in CTRs

GetResponse just released an interesting new study on the impact of social media sharing options in email.
 
Among other topics the study investigated if social emails improve click-through rates and found that if you let readers share your email messages on their social pages, they’ll generate on average 30% higher click-through rates. The click-through rates also varied by social network with Twitter and Facebook leading the field.
 
Download the full report here

New Syncapse empirical research on Facebook fan value, additional product spend and brand loyalty

"A fan base is a self-segmented group of highly valuable customers."

After all the buzz about the value of a Facebook fan, Syncapse just released the first proper empirical review on this topic which I encourage everyone to read (and it's free anyway). Especially the figures on average additional product spending by brand are pretty interesting (see below chart).

Summary of key findings
  • Fans spend an additional $71.84 on average compared to non-fans
  • Fans are 28% more likely than non-fans to continue using the brand
  • Fans are 41% more likely than non-fans to recommend a product
Many brands overcomplicate their measurement requirements by tracking dozens of independent variables. Many oversimplify by trying to apply a single number concept of value, and far too many fail to quantify ROI in such a way as to convince a CFO of the merit of increasing or shifting investment towards Facebook marketing. [...] This study will examine the five leading contributors to Facebook fan value. (1) Product Spending (2) Brand Loyalty, (3) Propensity to Recommend, (4) Brand Affinity and (5) Earned Media Value.
Download the full Syncapse research report here

Tracking unique visitor without cookies by analysing browser configurations with over 84% accuracy

For all of you online analysts out there that are scared of cookie deletion rates, private browsing modes and increasingly restrictive privacy laws, there's hope!

The EFF (Electronic Frontier Foundation) has an interesting project called Panopticlick that determines uniqueness of visitors without cookies by analysing the exact browser configuration of a person (i.e. version, fonts, plug-ins, etc). I just did the Panopticlick online browser uniqueness test and it seems that my browser configuration was unique among the so far tested 993,912 people. Go do the test now and help these guys increase their sample size.

EFF found that 84% of the configuration combinations were unique and identifiable, creating unique and identifiable browser "fingerprints." Browsers with Adobe Flash or Java plug-ins installed were 94% unique and trackable.
 
Of course the whole thing falls down if people use more than one browser or multiple computers and I'm one of these people (I'm actually running Safari, Chrome and Firefox at the same time sometimes which is sad, I know). Anyway, still a great idea if you ask me so check out the actual research paper below if you want to find out more or read the official press release.

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Awesome new research: Measuring twitter user influence from Meeyoung Cha, Max Planck Institute

This is an awesome piece of social media research from Meeyoung Cha from the Max Planck Institute for Software Systems in Germany, a must read for every marketer that takes social media seriously.
The paper makes three key observations based on the analysis of 2 billion follow links among 54 million users who produced a total of 1.7 billion tweets (pretty solid data, visit http://twitter.mpi-sws.org/ for a detailed description and the data sharing plan). 
  1. Popular users who have high indegree are not necessarily influential in terms of spawning retweets or mentions. 
  2. Most influential users can hold significant influence over a variety of topics. 
  3. Influence is not gained spontaneously or accidentally, but through concerted effort such as limiting tweets to a single topic.
Below are a few extracts I found especially interesting, but I would recommend to also check out the Harvard Business Review interview with Cha and read the full research paper if you have the time. The project webpage is http://twitter.mpi-sws.org/ for a detailed description of the dataset and the data sharing plan. 
People have different levels of expertise on various subjects. When it comes to marketing, however, this fact is generally ignored. Marketing services actively search for potential influencers to promote various items. These influencers range from “cool” teenagers, local opinion lead- ers, all the way to popular public figures. However, the advertised items are often far outside the domain of expertise of these hired individuals. So how effective are these mar- keting strategies? Can a person’s influence in one area be transferred to other areas? The answer is yes.
Our study provides several findings that have direct implications in the design of social media and viral marketing: 1) Analysis of the three influence measures provides a better understanding of the different roles users play in social media. Indegree represents popularity of a user; retweets represent the content value of one’s tweets; and mentions represent the name value of a user. Hence, the top users based on the three measures have little overlap. 2) Our finding on how influence varies across topics could serve as a useful test for answering how effective adver- tisement in Twitter would be if one is to employ influential users. Our analysis shows that most influential users hold significant influence over a variety of topics. 3) Ordinary users can gain influence by focusing on a single topic and posting creative and insightful tweets that are perceived as valuable by others, as opposed to simply conversing with others.
The most followed users span a wide variety of public figures and news sources. They were news sources (CNN, New York Times), politicians (Barack Obama), athletes (Shaquille O’Neal), as well as celebrities like actors, writers, musicians, and models (Ashton Kutcher, Britney Spears). As the list suggests, indegree measure is useful when we want to identify users who get lots of at- tention from their audience through one-on-one interactions, i.e., the audience is directly connected to influentials.
The most retweeted users were content aggregation services (Mashable, TwitterTips, TweetMeme), businessmen (Guy Kawasaki), and news sites (The New York Times, The Onion). They are trackers of trending topic and knowledge- able people in different fields, whom other users decide to retweet. Unlike indegree, retweets represent influence of a user beyond one’s one-to-one interaction domain; popular tweets could propagate multiple hops away from the source before they are retweeted throughout the network. Further- more, because of the tight connection between users as sug- gested in the triadic closure (Granovetter 1973), retweeting in a social network can serve as a powerful tool to reinforce a message—for instance, the probability of adopting an in- novation increases when not one but a group of users repeat the same message (Watts and Dodds 2007).
The most mentioned users were mostly celebrities. Ordinary users showed a great passion for celebrities, regularly posting messages to them or mentioning them, without nec- essarily retweeting their posts. This indicates that celebrities are often in the center of public attention and celebrity gossip is a popular activity among Twitter users.
Finally, we found that influence is not gained spontaneously or accidentally, but through concerted effort. In order to gain and maintain influence, users need to keep great personal involvement.
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Dwell rate: New display advertising metrics and benchmark report from Eyeblaster

Eyeblaster just launched an interesting new report that shows a correlation between dwell time for interactive ads and  increased conversion rates. 

The connection is sort of obvious but nevertheless good to see some confirmation and wonder if we will see some more mini applications within display ads now comparable to Facebook apps.

Highlights of the report include
  • Ads with a high Dwell Rate are more likely to have a high Conversion Rate.
  • A new study by Microsoft, comScore and Eyeblaster shows Dwell’s effectiveness.
  • High Dwell triples brand related search, increases traffic by 69% and brand engagement.
  • Placements in which users spend ample time on the web page increase Dwell Rate.
  • Ads that are more visible over the publisher’s content have a higher Dwell Rate.
  • Combining video into creative increases Dwell Rate by 29% and doubles Dwell Time.
Download the full research report here.
http://bit.ly/benchmarkByEb

Study and poll: Privacy regulations on behavioural targeting won't help consumers but harm companies

There's a new study from the think tank Technology Policy Institute which concludes that new online privacy measures won't help consumers but hinder online companies. 

"Regulation should be undertaken only if a market is not functioning properly and if the benefits of new measures outweigh their costs," states the 56-page report, "In Defense of Data." "Our analysis suggests that proposals to restrict the amount of information available would not yield net benefits for consumers." 

The paper pretty much reiterates known statements from a decade ago but it's a good summary anyway. Have a read and please comment on this post or at least participate in the poll, would love to know what you think about behavioural targeting online. 

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McKinsey: Building an integrated end-to-end consumer experience to increase overall revenue

McKinsey has published a really great article outlining four ways to get more value from digital marketing, a must read for all marketers (worth subscribing for, it's free anyway).

Although the whole article is a good read, I specifically like the part on coordinating the consumer's end-to-end experience more. How many times does it happen that one part of a company doesn't know what the other is doing resulting in questions being asked multiple times as well as irrelevant messages being pushed out (my favourite example is HSBC sending me direct mail advertising their credit cards although they already rejected my application).
Whether by receiving marketing e-mails, searching for products online, or using mobile devices to find retail coupons, customers today continually interact with brands as they move closer to making purchasing decisions. Yet completely different parts of an organization manage most such contacts. Digital channels can unify that experience and prevent the leakage of opportunity. Across a range of B2C and B2B clients, we’ve seen companies accelerate revenue growth by tightening the coordination of the end-to-end experience (see below graph). These increases represent the cumulative impact of capturing more online traffic, engaging consumers effectively, raising sales conversion rates, and then deepening bonds with the brand after sales are made.

Although not the only options in this space, Omniture's Online Business Optimisation platform in combination with Aprimo's MarketingStudio could help coordinate the majority of the below customer experience outlined by McKinsey. Email us at insights@datalicious.com if you would like to find out how to enable this for your business.