The multichannel funnel will give clear indications on how customers interact in different channels during the buying cycle. To understand more about the process we will first look at the customer buying cycle.

The internet channel closed the gap between the manufacturer and the customers their by now manufacturer can remove lot of parties in the distribution channel. A typical example here is DELL, they removed most of the retailers in their distribution channel and saved a lot of cost. With the help of social media the gap become even more closer, manufacturer can now communicate directly with the customers and convert them. Customers have the flexibility to communicate directly with companies even after sales. The main thing to remind here is social media is just an enabler so it is very important to make it right and communicate right message to the customer through social media.

It is very important to understand which channels are playing their roles in customer buying process. The internet helps customers to do research by reading reviews, asking opinions in various social media and other internet channels. They can easily come up with list of potential options with their criteria such as where to buy, which brand to buy, which site suites their requirement etc. The channels may vary according to the products, customers requirement, and customers attitudes. For example a life time product like refrigerator may require good after sales support so it would be a primary requirement for a customer, others might be looking for discounts so they might go to affiliate sites to get a discount. So according to the products, channels like search engines, social media, affiliates, review sites, may play some role in the customer decision process.

What Multichannel funnel trying to achieve is helping us to understand how customers are using various marketing channels during their buying process. It would be good to read my previous  post about understanding e-commerce channels to learn more about different channel effects and KPI’s in ecommerce marketing. Often paid search marketing, organic search marketing play some important role in educating about the brand but if customers prefer to get discounts they may go to an affiliate site. Although search engine marketing plays a critical role in brand awareness but the last conversion came from an affiliate channel the credit for conversion will go to the affiliate which is not good to optimise your marketing campaign. To understand more about how multichannel funnel work it is would be good to watch the video provided below.

In the figure below you can see that display ads and paid search played a big part in the brand awareness which later became a direct visit at the buying stage.

Now let us do some optimisation for your marketing campaign in Google Analytics. If you have affiliate channel in your marketing campaign make sure to add new digital media channel for each affiliates that can help to pin point which affiliate is giving return. Google Analytics by default provide most of the media channel but affiliates sites often show as referral, it might be good to add your affiliate in the analytics. This can be done by editing channel groupings in the Google  Analytics.

Add a new custom channel by adding relevant regular expression on the source where conversion / traffic come from.

That is it you are done, keep an eye on this and see who is performing and rearrange your marketing budget / activities according to the result.

If you like the post don’t forget to share it with your friends. That is a motivation for me to write more!

In this post, I am going to explain different channel effects, how to understand different channel effects, strategies to improve various e-commerce key performance indicators (KPI’s) etc.

There are mainly two things that affect online retail economics

1) “The Cross Channel” effect

2) “The mobile effect”

Both of them may play a significant role in your e-commerce revenue.

The Cross Channel Effect

There might be customers who prefer to research online and purchase offline (ROPO)  or research offline and purchase online. How you are measuring this? It is very critical to understand how your customers are responding to this effect. It is advisable to add measurable element in offline marketing so that you can understand customer economics when they buy products or service online. The same is applicable if your customers are doing research online and doing purchase offline.

The Mobile Effect

Because of the growth in mobile devices including iPhone, iPad, Android phones customers are using mobile phones for doing commerce or doing research about the product or service. How effectively you are understanding this effect with your customers. Similar to ROPO there might be customers who prefer to buy using their personal computer but would prefer to shortlist the products or services when they travel or when they are free using mobile devices. It is recommended to add easy “add to cart” feature in mobile website so that it can be easily tracked when they go online to purchase the product.

It is essential to back up customer behaviour with data and retool the business strategy accordingly. I am going to explain how you can easily analyse the growth of different channels and its impact on the revenue.

Analysis

For example I am going to analyse the growth of mobile traffic in one of my blog over the past 54 weeks. Download the data from Google Analytics and plot a scattered diagram in excel, you can refer second part of my post about study buying behaviour of customers to do this.

You can see in this diagram the slope (R Square is 0.7) that means that there is a strong correlation that traffic is growing.

Draw the same scattered diagram for the last 54 weeks this time the revenue corresponding to each week. Consider the R Square again, if that slope is greater than 0.6 then there should be a strong growth in revenue during the past one year.

If there is not enough growth in revenue further investigation should be done, it could be due to mobile effect. A simple wishlist implementation in mobile site can help to investigate further if the customers are actually buying from the site or they are just browsing from using their mobile devices.

You can do the same analysis for affiliate channels and other channels including offline channels that drives revenue to the e-commerce site.

Understand fundamental KPI’s and think strategies to improve it

E-marketer should understand the basics of a business then only you can understand and improve various KPI’s properly. It is rather very simple if you think for a moment. I would ask you to think from the gross trading profit level below that, it is with finance and account managers to manipulate and adjust revenue. Gross trading profit is trading profit per order multiplied by number of orders. Number of orders is conversion rate multiplied by online visitors. Trading profit is gross profit per order – delivery cost – promotional cost (coupon code or anything) – marketing cost per order. Like wise design the entire KPI tree and find strategies that can increase “gross trading profit“. The tree look something similar to the diagram below.

Adopted from ecommera

Now be ready to take bold decisions.

So if you are able to increase Average order value (AOV) your gross trading profit will increase. How you can achieve that? Is it possible for you to provide free delivery for purchase, for instance £100; this will increase AOV. How can you lower down cost per visit. Look at different channels that drive traffic to the site which among them is most cost effective. Think whether increase marketing budget on cost effective channel increase revenue? Is it possible to pull out promotional coupons or codes will that decline revenue or increase revenue? Like this unravel and identify different strategies to improve revenue.

This is not a one time process you have to do it continually and optimise your revenue and marketing spend. You have to cover your e-commerce site with your own funnel and improve it perpetually.

I would like to learn more from my reader please add your thought as a comment and dont forget to share in Facebook and Twitter.

What are the core competencies of Google?

These are the core competencies that made them successful in all search related products, image search, maps, Gmail, mobile search etc.

Google added new arsenal mobile operating system by acquiring Android, the idea was to benefit from cloud productivity and enterprise applications. But the reality is mobile manufacturers are more benefiting using Android operating system. Later now Microsoft and Apple coming out with cloud enterprise and productivity applications and they can acquire majority of the market. Here also Google didn’t acquired the competency required to sustain and make money from the mobile market. But Android is growing very fast and has been made positive impact on mobile manufacturing companies like HTC, Samsung, Motorola etc.

Now for Google Plus, Does Google have competencies to acquire the market share or Can Google build the competency to make that successful?

Facebook was successful because it was new to the customers and they build the competency of being the social network giant. Facebook played with human emotions because people like FUN, but people would not like it when it is repetitive. With the core competency to spreading content viral made Facebook so successful.

All of us know the rationality behind Google to become a social network giant. 25% of the display network is US is currently owned by Facebook. Google started social network Orkut before and failed the reason was the Google was not ready to be a market leader because of the lack of competency.

People use Google search because Google provide the best search results which is their core competency. If Google want to start un-related product or service that doesn’t require current competencies they have to find a way to build the competency before thinking of a product or service.

Adding friends into a circle or hanging out with friends through your webcam is no more FUN

Now consider our scenario Google Plus a hit.

Let us consider Google can build competencies to influence human emotions and become a social network giant. Google is promoting Google Plus to regain the display market share and produce more social friendly search engine results. In that case what are the competencies they can use to make Google Plus a good social network. One of the main competency they can leverage is the customers, they already have access to huge customers. They have to build a strategy to influence the customers using Google Plus. This competency should have to be build and use other competencies like skills of Google engineers, ad inventories to promote the product.

If Google Plus become success, people will start sharing contents naturally search engine results become more semantic which is a future of search engines. The success can produce good search results for customers. In that case, Google may become a threat to themselves.

Why Success of Google Plus may backfire?

Till date, Google’s most revenue generating platform is Google Adwords. Almost 95% of the revenue of are through adwords. By the success of Google Plus customers will prefer to go to the links that are shared by their friends. So Google will be able to produce more user friendly semantic search results. In that case, what will happen? Google Adwords revenue may go down because then users prefers to see the search results which are shared or recommended by friends through Google Plus.

I would like to hear your comments about this. Please share this post and leave your thoughts as a comment.

One of the economics concept in the book was thought provoking. The definition of economics given by most of the economists as the “study of societies allocation and distribution of scarce resources”; scarce resource can be money, food, equipments, land, fresh water, oil or anything. But Is that definition true?

According to Paul Zane Pilzer economics is not at all the study of scarce resource instead it is the study of “abundant resource”. Because there are no resources to be scarce, the resources we called today are inventions of human mind. Through out history, if any resource run out human being will define new resource. For instance, 5000 years ago sea oil was something that polluted the water but today it is considered as a great resource. Oil became resources only when human learned how to refine oil and use oil to drive machines so as the land. Land was originally a place to kill animals and go on. Another example is whale oil, in 1850 we harvested lot of whale oil and finally it ended up everyone predicted it as the end of the economy because we don’t have oil to make things. Finally in 1859, we drilled first oil well so we defined new resource then. Considering the same example, oil is now running out so human being are moving into more efficient nuclear system, solar systems, electrical systems etc. So before any resource run out human being will define new resources.

So there are no resources to be run out because they all are fictional inventions of human mind before anything got run out we apply our mind and invent new resources.

The supply of the resource that you have deal with any moment or time is defined by the technology with which you use it. When ever you want to find how much resource is available what you will do is count it, but it is fundamentally wrong. In 1973 average mileage of the car 9 miles a gallon but within 10 years we retool our engineering and made car more efficient to 22 miles a gallon which is still continuing using various electronics systems. So we doubled our resources more  than our supply.

In early days wealth were equivalent to your physical resource available, whether you as an individual or a country.

But today Wealth can be calculated as = P (physical resource) times T (Technology), so the technology with which you use that matters. In the past technology changes happens very slowly, but today it happens every seconds so you have to retool yourself to become competent. Let us consider with a classical example, In 1980, Russia was the country one of the wealthiest nation in terms of land and fresh water. Meanwhile, Japan was the country which has less fresh water and land but today Japan is third largest economy. What they did was they increased and developed new technologies.

Do you still think Economics is the study of scarce resources allocation and distribution? We are living in an economy where we have unlimited opportunities and resources. So all of us have opportunities out there retool yourself to find the best opportunity for you and become a millionaire.

You can add new segment on the top below analytics menu in your account. If you are using old version of Google analytics you can see a link called “Advanced Segment” on the left bottom of the account. I am considering Cochin Square for my analysis.

Regular Expression

Regular expression is one of the best way to extract different information from analytics account. There are some wildcards used to extract information from Google Analytics.

“.” this wildcard matches any single including alphabets, numbers, or symbols

“*” this wildcard matches one or more instance of previous item.

More wildcards and expressions are available here.

For instance :- assigning a regular expression Cochin [.]* matches all keywords like “Cochin news”, “Cochin Events”, “Cochin Shopping” etc. That means all keywords after “Cochin” will be caught by the regular expression. Some of the customer type misspell “cochin square” as “cochin sqaure”, “cochin squre” etc, this can be extracted using the regular expression “cochin sq[au]*re”.

I am going to find out all keywords user searched and reached some landing pages related to “IPL” matches on Cochin Square. We can do it in two ways one using regular expression and using “containing” criteria in advanced segment. I am considering regular expression as it is more powerful which can be used for lot of other purposes.

This is very effective to analyse the impact of any campaigns you can exactly pinpoint how user behaves on your website. The above regular expression yield all user searches related to IPL in Cochin Square.

In this way you can segment any information in Google Analytics. If you have any doubts please drop a comment I will reply to your queries. If you like the post please share with your friends using twitter and Facebook.

The tool we can use here are excel, correlation coefficient, graphs etc.

Please download the  data dump from Google analytics and temperature information from metgov or any other source to an excel. I usually monitor and log temperature in the database.   Go to data tab and click on the data menu on the top right of excel. Click on the image to see it in full.

If you are doing offline business gather the data which has product sales and corresponding temperature information.

Now select the correlation from the data analysis window.

The next step is to select the data range and output range.

Now you will get the correlation of different variables as the output.

Now the main part is to understand the value and infer from the correlation coefficient. The correlation coefficient ranges from −1 to 1. A value of 1 implies that a linear equation describes the relationship between X and Y perfectly, with all data points lying on a line for which Y increases as X increases. A value of −1 implies that all data points lie on a line for which Y decreases as X increases. A value of 0 implies that there is no linear correlation between the variables.

Now what do you think about our data?

There is a slight negative correlation between temperature and Product A and B sales; however, the relation between temperature and Product C is positive. This means that as temperature increases the product sales decreases for Product A & B but increases for Product C. The linear relation is however weak in both cases.

There is a strong positive linear dependency between sale of Product A and Product B; however, this inference should be investigate further to understand the other factors that affects the buying.

Most of the managers are quite comfortable seeing the output in a graph to understand different relationships. The best way to do this is to plot scatter diagram in excel.

Change the scatter diagram with layout slope and function that represent the linear relationship line.

Once you select the layout with line and equation of line you will get your graph something similar to below.

I hope you understood the post, please share it with your friends via twitter and Facebook. I will be writing about advanced segmentation analysis in Google analytics in my next post. Until then keep tuning to iamaceo and share your valuable feedback to me.

One of the main reason for considering macroeconomic impact on digital marketing plan is that, the organisation may not be able to control the macro economic factors. But if the factors are considered properly the decision making of where and when to invest become much more easier which will avoid potential risk also. One of the good analytical tool to understand macro-economic impact is the PEST tool referred to political, environmental, social and technological factors that affect your campaign.

A tool to jolt down PEST factors is mind map. I often use mindmeister for mind mapping. Another traditional handy tool for marketers is post its.

Some examples of macro economic factors that should be considered during while making digital strategy are given below. The macro economic factors will solely depend on your product or service.

1) Weather impact on your product or services. This is quite important because in countries like UK, Canada, Germany etc during the winter season customers often prefer to shop online more than visiting a shop.

It is very  important to analyse your existing campaign and weather impact on consumers buying. I will write a separate post on how to analyse weather impact on product purchase. When ever you decide a digital plan you should be validated with data. The high accountability of online transactions can help in this regard.

2) Festival seasonal impacts, some of the product might have very good online sales during the festive season.

3) Currency stability, if you are offering services in different countries how you are minimising the risk of changing currency value.

4) How well you are coping your campaign with advertising guidelines in your countries? There are several strict guidelines in the UK decided by Advertising Standard Authority. This is especially very important if you are working with alcoholic brands.

5) This year when the VAT rate increased to 20% there was difficulty in online sales for companies according to RSM Tenon; however, there was an increase in online sales before year ending. Lot of companies capitalised the market, for instance John Lewis benefited a lot according to BBC.

If you like the post please share it your friends. I will be writing how to use Pearson coefficient to understand customer buying behaviour and weather in my next post so keep tuning in to iamaceo.

As the part of his MBA project at Strathclyde Business School, he conducted interviews with various agencies and companies in Canada. He now published the article which is available free of cost, you can now download it by tweeting or sharing it to friends.

The true value of a whitepaper is how it reflects on the organisation (or whoever wrote it). Whitepapers add to company becoming a “thought leader” in the specific field. The golden rules of white paper are shown in the figure below.

Addressing the right topic is very essential, frequently lot of white paper address topic that are neither useful for sales people as well as for prospective buyers. So it is very important to select the right topic initially. If the white paper is intent to generate leads it is a good idea to involve sales people in the early stages of writing because they know what customers talk about think about the sales process questions etc.

The type of the white paper is another consideration, it can intend to generate leads, projecting organisation as a thought leader, strategy, market trends, industry overview etc. White papers vary in their structure, and the best type of white paper to accomplish goals and appeal to stakeholders should be carefully considered.

The white paper should write after understanding the customers. You should provide the right amount of information in the paper. Lengthy white papers sometimes not good to target the customers. Effective white papers information in a compelling way that helps potential customers understand both how and why the offering will benefit them.

Unsubstantiated claims about the service or offering may alienate the objective of the white paper and the customer may become more dubious about the problem or solutions which you offer. To improve credibility of white paper it is very important to cite third party research papers, articles, industry reports etc.

Finally but most importantly it is very effective if you choose a veteran writer to write the article, a white paper is doomed to failure if the writer lacks the exceptional writing skills, technical savvy, and marketing experience that these documents require.

How to market a white paper?

This is a very important consideration to market the paper. It is very important to choose the right channel for marketing. Sometimes if the white paper is a blatant info capturing tool, customers just skip over it. There are often different reason for this, customers may not want to spend time to fill the form or they are not ready to reveal the the personal details to the white paper providers.

Some of the mechanism, I normally use are:

1) Organic marketing through B2B social tools like LinkedIn, Xing etc.

2) Email marketing, which is very efficient to market white paper actually, Tools such as Jigsaw, Zoominfo, Pearlfinder, Hoovers are very useful to get email address of target customers.

3) Viral Twitter campaign using PaywithaTweet This is very effective mechanism to capture information and reach mass.

1) How to do Scenario Planning?

2) How to improve cash flow in your organisation?

3) Total Quality Management (TQM)

4) Marketing Healthcare services

5) Multi-criteria decision analysis (MCDA)

6) The Power of an MBA

7) ROI calculator for SEO consultants.