The “easy” mindset, that you mention, is compounded by the fact that most companies (atleast in corporate America) structure acquisition and on-site customer experience in different organization silos, with goals and compensation structures that reward meeting silo metrics/goals and not necessarily “end to end” metrics.

This results in someone delivering a visitor and claiming success and someone else now responsible for taking it rest of the way. You can see how that would be problem.

In comment 14, I think, Sulakshana alluded to this in her own sweet and cryptic way as well. :)

Put the “easy mindset” and “silo structure” together and you have a rather sub optimal soup.

Overall BT tools or not on-site customer experience needs a lot more love if you/me/they want to move the dial on “conversion” or “satisfaction”.

Thanks so much for the excellent observation.

-Avinash.

I was wondering if for some clients there is a cost issue.

In so many cases traffic generation (acquisition) already has a budget attached to it; spending money to convert traffic less so as demonstrated in your slides.

Do you think there is sometimes a bit of inertia here because it’s often seen as easier, and at least on the face of it less costly and perhaps quicker, to reallocate budget to the most efficient traffic generation sources than spending money on BT tools as mentioned in your post.

Not saying that makes it right….

I’ve worked with BlackFoot earlier; the multi-channel analysis piece has intrigued me since. Part of it is a whole other challenging aspect - changing organizational mindset.

Thanks for the response, Avinash.

SG

The answer sadly is that it is really hard to do at the moment (and if anyone says otherwise then they are lying!).

You can attempt an understanding through a lot of blood, sweat and tears. When I have done it (and seen others do it) efficient media mix modeling was the answer. I’ll recommend this wonderful article that outlines what it is and the challenges you and I can look forward to:

How to Build a Media Mix Model, by Martin Wesley

Thanks so much for the question, it is very welcome.

-Avinash.

In the world of e-commerce, conversion enhancing decisions (on-site optimization) are often being made in a silo. Given convergent media usage, what is the best way to evaluate change in customer on-site usage, cannibalization or traffic mix change between channels?

Your post cracked me up as I have been trying to find a solution/cure to the selective “da bomb” syndrome among certain Management folks:-).

The only thing I would like to add [especially for traditional companies that expanded to online] to your “offsite resources” and “onsite resources” is another dimension — “traditional mass-media resources”.

I have seen folks spend millions on a TV ad and/or print ad but balking on spending a fraction of it on web analytics or in trying to better understand their customers. Of course, I would unabashedly admit that I am biased against those big-spending TV ads that have low conversions (or looking at the half-full picture — biased totally towards using market research and webanalytics to drive customers in and improve conversions) …:-))

Great post.

-Ned

Usually though companies are already over investing in off site optimization and under investing in on site optimization. My hope here was to push us all to compute the on site and off site resources and $$ investments and hope to strike a balance (it will never be 50-50, and perhaps it should not be, but it can’t be 98-2 which seems to be the case a lot).

I bet you if your client (the one optimizing only the ad) allowed Otto Digital to implement Offermatica on that landing page then your improvement in conversion would have been 70%!!

I love the term “optimization gap”, it is a Jonathan Mendez pretty SES slide waiting to happen. I call dibs on royalties. :)

-Avinash.
PS: BTW that was six uses of the word “optimization” in your comment, you are living up to the name of your blog (optimizeandprophesize.com)! :)

As much as I love on-site optimization I think stating that onsite engagement determines conversion success is not accurate.The greatest gains come from looking at optimization holistically. But even ONLY looking at media we’ve had huge onsite wins from optimizing the offsite factors. It makes perfect sense when you think about it. A few examples:

We did a recent MVT test across an ad and landing and found the ad variables had the highest factors of influence on conversion.

We’ve did a recent test on ads and got a conversion rate increase on the landing page of over 35% based on optimizing ONLY the ad.

It’s great when you can take media and site-side and optimize them together. This is sometimes difficult but we’re seeing a lot more opportunity here as agencies and sites “get it.” I guess we’ll call this the “optimization gap.” :)

You can be “da bomb” at acquisition, but the lesson here is to convince your management that you have to invest in a way that you can be “da bomb” when visitors show up on your website.

Very nice expression! Ive used it before and was told people didn’t say it anymore, but obviously they do ;)

One thing I’d like to mention is that on-page and off-page spending cannot really be seen as completely different:

I think this is extremely obvious in PPC:

The better you make your website (as in the higher the conversion rate/life time value) the more effective you make your PPC campaign as every single keyword becomes cheaper if your conversion rate/LTV increases (it doesn’t become cheaper, but it’s profit margin rises and thus it takes less actual “PPC work” to find profitable keywords)!

This is obviously true for any other form of traffic acquistion..but of course one has to find the right combination of spending and after reading this blog post and the comments obviously people aren’t spending enough on this yet.

I guess any marketer (not web analyst) who reads this doesn’t have a problem with that as they might have just found a new competitive advantage ;)

Simply…brilliant. Nice work. Thanks for distilling this concept into some easy to digest frameworks. Great for getting executive buy in.

Melinda

There is a little box next to the “four men”, it is a bit hard to read but it says “off line customer variables”. In his talk Brent spoke about using other pieces of data to provide the right experience. Things from the CRM system or store visit / purchase data etc. Your add of “buyer personas” and linguistic variables are perfect add’s as well.

So credit to Brent on that, and a ding for Avinash for writing posts after mid-night and forgetting the little box with tiny text!! :)

Bhupendra : The answer, as always, would be: “It depends”!

But for any business my recommendation would be to fist invest in understanding customers (surveys, site visits, testing etc) and it will be pretty clear what they need to do to fix the experience.

This post might also help with prioritizing your efforts (it recommends a particular order in which things could be done): The Promise & Challenge of Behavior Targeting (& Two Prerequisites).

Hope this helps.

-Avinash.