Using SiteCatalyst to Build Media Mix Models

- Trevor Paulsen

Adobe’s Digital Marketing solutions are now opening doors to predictive marketing optimizations that were previously only available to huge companies that spend millions of dollars constructing complex economic models to explain the reach of their marketing spend.  These large models typically include surveys, studies, panels, and hosts of other expensive outside resources to deliver statistical optimization to your marketing budget that will maximize your return on spend.

With Adobe’s recent acquisition of Efficient Frontier and recent advancements in predictive consulting, SiteCatalyst customers are able to unleash the full potential of their web analytics data in ways that have not been possible before.

One particular customer Adobe Consulting recently engaged with wanted to determine how to best allocate their digital marketing budget based on several years of historical performance.  Their digital marketing channels included SEO, SEM, affiliates, media advertising, social media, network partners, and email campaigns.  Because the performance of these channels had been thoroughly recorded across several years, Adobe Consulting was able to use this data to form statistical performance models around each of these marketing channels.

...

---------

Read the full blog post at Adobe Digital Marketing Blog.

Unleashing the Full Power of eVar Subrelations

- Trevor Paulsen

Time and time again I’m amazed by the power that a subrelated eVar report can provide.  Believe it or not, if you’re clever (as you will be after reading this), you can actually use Adobe Report Builder to find interesting data anomalies for you!  First of all, if you’re not familiar with what an eVar subrelation is, let me explain:

...

--------

Read the full blog post at Adobe Digital Marketing Blog.

Ben Gaines mailbag #6

- Ben Gaines

Mailbag time! It’s been quite a while. I’ve been getting some great questions from really talented analysts and marketers. Seriously, everyone is getting smarter. I’m barely keeping up. Here are just a few of these questions, collected from e-mail, Twitter, and in-person conversations… and here’s hoping I don’t go another 17 months between mailbags, eh? Please send me your questions via the comment form on this blog, or tweet at me (@benjamingaines).

...

--------

Read the full blog post at Adobe Digital Marketing Blog

SiteCatalyst Finance Fundamentals: External Campaign Performance (part 2)

- Tucker Christiansen

Welcome back to the SiteCatalyst Finance Fundamentals blog series.  In this series we are discussing the implementation basics and example analysis of each fundamental solution that Financial Services customers should consider leveraging.  Stay tuned and please feel free to contribute your thoughts/experience as we discuss each solution.

In the previous External Campaign Performance post we covered implementation.  In today’s blog post, we will dive into the reporting/analysis side of this fundamental solution.

...

--------

Read the full blog post at Adobe Digital Marketing Blog.

SiteCatalyst 15.4: Rollups, Mobile Networks, and More

- Ben Gaines

If you use SiteCatalyst 15 regularly, you may have noticed when you logged in for the first time on July 20 that we did another product update in the late afternoon MDT on July 19. This introduced a number of bug fixes as well as some new functionality—and also some old functionality that we’re brought back by popular request. In this post I will briefly introduce some (but not all) of the changes that we made. You’ll see more on these features in subsequent posts on this blog and elsewhere. As always, if you have any questions feel free to leave me a comment or hit me up on Twitter (@benjamingaines)!

...

-------

Read the full blog post at Adobe Digital Marketing Blog

SiteCatalyst Finance Fundamentals: External Campaign Performance (part 1)

- Tucker Christiansen

Welcome back to the SiteCatalyst Finance Fundamentals blog series.  In this series we are discussing the implementation basics and example analysis of each fundamental solution that Financial Services customers should consider leveraging.  Stay tuned and please feel free to contribute your thoughts/experience as we discuss each solution.

The bread and butter of SiteCatalyst is measuring the effectiveness of campaigns against downstream conversions.  With this fundamental (and applicable downstream conversions) implemented correctly, organizations can understand the effectiveness of external marketing campaigns on driving both traffic and conversions.  Today’s post will focus on implementation best practices and a future post will cover reporting and analysis tips.

...

---------

Read the full blog post at Adobe Digital Marketing Blog.

Mobile Analytics Advances via SiteCatalyst 15.4

  -Ray Pun  

We have all seen reports that smartphones penetration is rapidly rising and according to eMarketer, approximately 48% of the mobile subscribers in the US will have a Smartphone by the end of 2012. In their “US Mobile Usage Forecast for April 2012”, eMarketer indicates that a 48% penetration rate is equivalent to over 115 Million people. Since each Smartphone purchase requires a mobile data plan, leading mobile carriers such as Verizon, AT&T, Sprint, and T-Mobile have seen significant growth in data usage as consumers access the mobile internet on a daily basis to connect with websites or apps.

Because of these industry drivers, media companies and major advertisers have been pursuing co-marketing opportunities with mobile carriers that share common audience segments. For example, sponsorships may exist for major events, shows, and advertising campaigns that are designed to drive audiences to a mobile experience. Consequently, marketers need to understand the size of the audience segment that is engaging with mobile content via a particular mobile operator in order to quantify the effectiveness of a sponsorship.

To help media companies and advertisers address this mobile analytics question of sponsorship effectivness, Adobe SiteCatalyst is now providing the following new report:

...

--------

Read the full blog post at Digital Marketing Blog

Idea Exchange goodness: two new metrics in SiteCatalyst

- Ben Gaines

Shortly after we launched the Idea Exchange in early 2010, a submission floated to the top and has stayed there ever since. Carmen Sutter asked—nay, demanded—“Make Bounce Rate a default metric!” Our customers agreed en masse, with 238 people voting for the idea. We took a step toward responding when we released SiteCatalyst 15 by removing the need to build calculated metric after calculated metric to examine bounce rate in Pages reports, but we knew we weren’t done.

The next time you log into the Idea Exchange and click “Top Ideas,” you will see a big fat “Implemented” under Carmen’s idea. Between adding Bounce Rate to most SiteCatalyst 15 reports (including eVars) and the new Total Time Spent metric with all that it enables you to do, today’s SiteCatalyst release is definitely something to be excited about. Here’s a brief rundown of what we’ve done.

...

----------

Read the complete post at The Digital Marketing blog.

What’s the Difference between Reporting and Analysis – A Question I Get Asked a Lot

- Seshu Guddanti

In my last blog, I mentioned Insight as an analytical tool for big data and differentiated Insight as an analytical tool, not a reporting tool. The key question is, what is the difference between reporting and analysis? This is an important distinction for digital marketers. We, as digital marketing consultants at Adobe, get asked this question all the time. It is a difficult question to answer, because there is quite a bit of overlap between the two from one perspective and significant differences from another viewpoint.

.....

------------------

Read the complete post at The Digital Marketing blog.

Merchandising variables: Understanding a Retail Fundamental

- David Yoakum

Merchandising variables are fundamental to any successful retail web analytics implementation. Adam Greco has a great post about the technical details of how to set Merchandising variables (with great follow-up comments from our own Kevin Willeitner).

For this post, I wanted to back-up and give an overview of why merchandising variables are so important to retail merchants, and what insights you can get for site optimization.

Merchandising variables can be drive important insights into your customers’ behavior. They can help answer key questions that you cannot get from any other internal reporting tools. For example:

  • How much revenue is being driven by internal search vs. traditional browsing (or other methods)?
  • What web categories are driving the most revenue? Top categories for a given product (if that product is shown in multiple categories)?
  • What site features are customers using (e.g. zoom, alt views, size filters, refinements)?

...

-------

Read the full post at The Digital Marketing blog.