Not personalizing? You are leaving money on the table.

I started writing about personalization ever since I started this blog, back in 2006. I wrote extensively about privacy and how marketers should address it to engage in personalization. Consumers are now more at ease with online purchases, they have moved past initial privacy concerns of online tracking and now expect personalization.  Personalization is no longer optional.

According to an eConsultancy report, 94% of the companies realize that personalization is critical to current and future success.

However many can't move forward with personalization because of many barriers they face in implementing personalization.  The biggest being IT, Technology and Budget. (see below).

Charts from eConsultancy Reports - The Realities of Online Personalization

Many marketers don't realize that personalization does not have to be complex. A recent study be Accenture shows that consumer are likely to buy from a retailer who provides some level of personalization (see below):

As you see in the chart above, simply recognizing the customers by name will get them to buy more. So start there if you are already not doing it, that won't require big IT infrastructure or budgets or data. Don't be bogged down by the hype created by press releases or marketing presentation about the sophisticated personalization few companies are doing. Many of the personalization techniques don't require big budgets or IT infrastructures.

Start simple, understand the value personalization brings, show case the value to your internal stakeholders and make a case for getting more funding for more sophisticated personalization tools and technologies. I will be writing more about personalization so subscribe to my blog if you are interested. If you need help feel free to reach out to me. I would also love to hear from those who are currently involved with personalization or have a good story to share.

Article referenced in this post

• Behavioral Targeting 101
• Web's New Gold Mine Personalization

Personalization is no longer optional

I started writing about personalization ever since I started this blog, back in 2006. I wrote extensively about privacy and how marketers should address it to engage in personalization. Consumers are now more at ease with online purchases, they have moved past initial privacy concerns of online tracking and now expect personalization.  Personalization is no longer optional.

According to an eConsultancy report, 94% of the companies realize that personalization is critical to current and future success.

However many can't move forward with personalization because of many barriers they face in implementing personalization.  The biggest being IT, Technology and Budget. (see below).

Charts from eConsultancy Reports - The Realities of Online Personalization

Many marketers don't realize that personalization does not have to be complex. A recent study be Accenture shows that consumer are likely to buy from a retailer who provides some level of personalization (see below):

As you see in the chart above, simply recognizing the customers by name will get them to buy more. So start there if you are already not doing it, that won't require big IT infrastructure or budgets or data. Don't be bogged down by the hype created by press releases or marketing presentation about the sophisticated personalization few companies are doing. Many of the personalization techniques don't require big budgets or IT infrastructures.

Start simple, understand the value personalization brings, show case the value to your internal stakeholders and make a case for getting more funding for more sophisticated personalization tools and technologies. I will be writing more about personalization so subscribe to my blog if you are interested. If you need help feel free to reach out to me. I would also love to hear from those who are currently involved with personalization or have a good story to share.

Article referenced in this post

• Behavioral Targeting 101
• Web's New Gold Mine Personalization

Bootcamp and Courses for Digital Analysts

I have been working in Digital Marketing and Analytics fields for more than 10 years now. Started my career in the field by playing with HTML, developing website and looking at server log files to parse the data to calculate metrics such as sessions, users, page views and many other metrics and KPIs that you see in your tools like Google Analytics, Adobe Analytics etc.

All through my life I have been passionate about teaching.  As a kid I used to teach other kids as a tutor and then I taught as a teaching assistance in graduate school.  For past 10 years or so I have been involved in speaking, teaching and tutoring in Digital Marketing and Analytics at schools, colleges and events. Some of the places I have taught and spoken at are, University of British Columbia, University of Washington, Bellevue College and eMetrics.

Recently I have started developing courses that can be delivered on-demand online as well as immersive bootcamps to develop new Digital Analysts.

The purpose of this blog post is to connect with individuals and organization (for profit or non-profit) who are interested in helping shape these programs.  Specifically, I am looking for:

1. Input on what course should be developed? I have a long list of courses but would like to see which ones should be developed first, where are the gaps in what current programs teach. The idea is to augment what current university programs teach and not replace them.
2. Find likeminded folks who have a passion for teaching and training.
3. Connect with organization (for profit and non-profit) that are interested in partnering with me in providing real business problems and data for students to work on.
4. Connect with schools and educational institutions that want to enhance their Digital Marketing and Analytics programs.
5. Connect with organizations that are willing to provide internships and job opportunities for the students.

So if you are interested in helping develop new Digital Analysts then please contact me at batraonline at gmail.

Web Analytics Under the Hood

Do you understand the mechanism of Web Analytics? Do you understand how data is collected and translated into the nice reports that you see in Google Analytics, WebTrends, Adobe etc.? Now you can.

Signup for my online course - "Web Analytics Under the Hood".

This Online course will go under the hood and show you how the data gets generated, collected and processed to generate beautiful reports that you

see in your Web Analytics tools.

Having a good understanding of what happens behind the scene will provide you the confidence you need to support your understanding of the reports and provide a fresh new perspective on Web Analytics reports.

This course will be helpful for both newcomers as well as seasoned professionals. I will cover topics that I ask in interviews while hiring a web analyst. This course will help you:

• Understand how browser/server communication happens.
• Understand how data gets passed to server.
• Understand how data is collected ( Javascript, server logs) - Basics of Data Collection Javascript using Google Analytics as example.
• Understand how cookies are used (we will look at Google Analytics cookies)
• Understand how data is stored in the back-end.
• Understand how data is processed.
• Understand how data gets Converted into Visits, Visitors, Page Views, Referrer and various other reports.

Signup below to be notified when the course becomes available in Mid-July.  You can also pre-order this course for $50 (instead of $100). You will get a link for payment after you signup.

Signup to be notified of the availability of this course

As many of you already know, I teach few courses in Digital Marketing and Analytics at various universities and colleges including University of Washington and Bellevue College in Seattle area.

Last year I was asked if I can design a course on Data Visualization using Tableau. Since we were actively using Tableau at work I decided to do it.  I have taken that same course, that I taught, and developed an eBook. The audience of this eBook is beginners who want to learn the basic of Tableau and get familiar with various interfaces and terms used in Tableau.  If you are someone who wants to learn Tableau or have looked at Tableau but don’t fully understand it, then this eBook is for you.

I am giving away few copies of the eBook in return for the feedback.  If you are willing to provide me the feedback on this book within a week, then email me at batraonline at gmail.com or tweet me at @anilbatra and I will send you a copy of it.

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Want to learn Tableau but don’t have to provide me the feedback on eBook, here are few Tableau Books on Amazon

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What does 1st, 2nd and 3rd party data mean?

1st, 2nd and 3rd Party Data Demystified

I have referred to 1st party and 3rd party data in a lot of blog posts. Based on the queries I get, both via email and in the classes I teach, it is time to clarify what various data sources mean.

1st Party Data

1st party data is the data that you (brand/publisher/retailer) have collected about your visitors, customers, shoppers etc. You own the data outright and all the rights to it. You can use it for any purpose you want based on the agreements with your visitors, customers, shoppers etc. as specified in your data collection and use policies. Some examples of 1st party data are:

• Site registration data – name, email, address, gender etc.
• Visitors behavior data on your site – time of visits, minutes spent, products looked at, source of visits etc.
• Shoppers/customers purchase data – products purchased, transaction amounts, coupons used etc.
• Email data – emails sent, opened, clicked etc.
• It is most widely used data for the marketing purposes. Generally, you use the 1st party data for customer retention using email marketing, retargeting and onsite personalization.

2nd Party Data

2nd party data is the data that is collected by some other company and shared with you(brand/publisher/retailer), in other words it is their first party data. A strategic data sharing partnership between two brands/publishers can help both of them grow their customer base and monetize that customer base.
You can generally use 2nd party data to:

1. Augment the data you already have about your customers (or visitors) – for example, if you do not collect “Household Income” during customer registration/signup data but have a need for that data you can partner with another brand that collects that data to get that data to enhance user profile. Another example is Google Adwords sending the keyword/campaign data to enhance behavioral data collected on the site.
2. Add a list of new customers – for example, if you are hotel booking site, you can have a partnership with airline to share information about customers who recently booked. If a customer books a flight, then you can use the data from partner to reach those customers and offer them hotels. Similarly, the airline partner can reach the customers who have booked hotel on your site.

3rd Party Data

3rd party data is the data collected and aggregated by someone other than the 1st party (data collector). In other words, the data aggregator doesn’t directly collect the data from customers/shoppers/visitors but have relationships with several companies/sources that collect the 1st party data. Some examples of the 3rd party data provider are BlueKai, Acxiom and i-behavior. These data providers aggregate the data from different sources to build a comprehensive profile of a customer/person. These enhanced profile let you understand a visitor/shopper more than what a 1st party or 2nd party data sets can provide.

For example, if you are a Financial institution, it will be very helpful for you to know which of your customers travel frequently, this will help you offer them a credit card that provides added travel rewards and benefits. This is where 3rd party data becomes useful that can provide such information based on data collected from various data sources such as hotel booking sites, airlines, location based data on several other places, other credit card providers etc

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One huge targeting mistake and how to avoid it: Understand the context beyond few keywords

Contextual advertising is not new, when I first started writing about targeting advertising the technology was new, the concept was new and few bold marketers were trying and learning from their mistake while helping others teach on how not to make this mistakes.

A post by Kevin Hillstrom, Highly Targeted Digital Ads That, Well, Just Read The Article., tells me that we have yet to learn from the mistakes that have been made since the early years of online ad targeting.

I remember when we are first dabbling withdisplay ad targeting and retargeting back in early 2000s, one of the things we were trying to solve for is to understand the full context of the content you were reading.  We saw many marketers making the mistake of not understanding the negative context of the content and wasting their ad dollars on wrong content. For example we saw an ad targeted (I believe it was served by Google) on a page talking about plane crash that showed an ad for carry-on luggage. When you are reading such a tragedy, last thing you want to see is an ad about plane travel. Technology and best practices have come a long way since then but the same mistakes keep happening.

Here are two things you can today to make sure you do not make the same mistake as VW dealer (or their agency) made:

1. Filter ad placement on negative context: If you are going to show an ad about your brand then understand the whole context and then filter out any content that has negative context related your brand. For example the whole context of that video was about negative to VW because of recent emission scandal. You as a marketer need to know that a lot of recent content (video, articles, blog post etc.) are going to be about this scandal, so keeping this context in mind, create a list of negative keyword list e.g. emission, scandal, problem etc. Now filter out the ad targeting on the content which contain “Volkswagen” and these negative keywords because if you place your ads on such content it is likely not going be very effective. Stop wasting your dollars by targeting the wrong context.
2. Show Ad to counter the negativity around your brand – If there is a message that you have in response to the negative press then use this opportunity to put your message in front of the customer and prospects.

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