Occam’s Razor by Avinash Kaushik

Google’s Ad Planner is less a competitive intelligence tool and more a tool that gives fantastic insights into understanding behavior of visitors to your website in context of the broader ecosystem.

It also helps answer critical questions that have thus far stymied Online Marketers of all shapes and sizes (especially those in charge of acquisition).

For example, ever wondered not just how many Unique Visitors your competitor got but also if there is any overlap between their visitors and those that visit your website?

Or what are the demographic and psychographic attributes of those visitors?

Or you need to boost revenue by 900% in one week and what websites should you target in terms of purchasing ads so you can find the right audience and get those relevant conversions?

Or compute the amount of potential exposure your ads can get across a complex media plan (which you have created and saved for future reference in a free tool)?

If the answer to any of the above questions is yes then my dear dear friend the missing ingredient from your life is the Google Ad Planner! :)

This is the second post in our recent Competitive Intelligence series. The first one was on Google Trends for Websites , check that out for awesome true CI insights.

As in that case my hope here is to share with you the unique data and functionality that the Ad Planner provides, but more than that I hope to teach you how to think uniquely.

The Basics: Research Your Website / Your Competitor’s.

So this is the nice stuff, click on the Begin Research button in the Ad Planner and you are all set to go when it comes to understanding the basics of what the tool can offer.

[sidenote]
Google’s Ad Planner is currently in a Beta program and you have to apply to get access to it. The wonderful folks on the team tell me that access is provided to anyone who applies, and the process takes just a few days. This week they’ll try to be extra diligent and get everyone in as soon as they can - and we will send warm hugs to them for helping readers of this blog.
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In the left nav type in the name of the website and hit Add and boom (!) you have your first taste of data representing metrics for the last 30 days. . . .

Here’s how to read that data:

• www.omniture.com was visited by 150k Unique Visitors who were from the United States
• This audience represented a 0.1% reach of the US audience (not bad for web analytics!)
• This audience also represents consumption of approximately 210 million page views from all their browsing behavior (obviously not just on omniture.com, though I am sure that would make Omniture very happy! :)).

In the right frame of the page (which is a lot more useful later in your analysis) the data is represented thusly. . . .

Now you also have a feel for Omniture’s page views there.

Next up the wonderful feature where you can get a much better understanding of the demographic and psychographic attributes of the Visitors to Omniture’s website. Simply click on the icon above next to the website’s name, and you get this. . . .

So these kinds of people like to pay lots for web analytics. :^) Just kidding!

One important thing to note is that it would cost you lots of money to get this kind of data with any degree of confidence, it is now free. So use it.

The wonderful thing about this is you can start to form the basics of a persona of the kind of people who visit Omniture’s website. I was for example really surprised about how many were there from the lower household income ranges.

Perhaps they are there to learn from Omniture (validating Mr. Funk’s strategy of having quality educational content on the website).

Perhaps it also indicates that people who actually sign large sized chq’s could not be bothered with learning anything themselves. Zing! : )

But it is in the contrast that this data shines.

For example visitors to coremetrics.com are a lot more likely to be highly educated (by almost 18%) and with far far higher incomes (by atleast 20%)! That can give you a pause, if you owned omniture.com, and see if your marketing programs are actually driving the right kind of traffic to your website. The hypothesis being that people with higher income profiles and higher education will, supposedly, cut bigger chq’s!

Or why is it that when almost every good Web Analyst I know is a female that there is a grand canyon sized gap between the male-female ratio for www.webtrends.com? Wrong targeting?

You catch my drift about all the things you can do, remember: contrast gives context which gives insights.

Finally you can compare and contrast site traffic data quite easily, just punch ‘em into the left navigation and boom!

Guess which one is CoreMetrics, Kaushik.net and WebTrends?

Yeah baby, www.kaushik.net/avinash, is #2! [Sure a little braggy, but you will indulge me just this once right?]

WebTrends is at 84k worldwide in the last 30 days (I just need another 20k! :)). To get the worldwide data you’ll simply green “graph icon” next to the site’s name in the results.

Again food for thought if you are running those websites and want to get context to your performance against a random blogger.

[sidenote]
Quick update post post posting :), here are links about Ad Planner data:

How is the data in Google Ad Planner generated?

Where does Google Ad Planner demographic data come from?

How does Google Ad Planner use Google Analytics data?

[/sidenote]

The Advanced: Research Ecosystem, Customer Behavior, “Related Sites”.

One of the core drivers behind creation of the Ad Planner was to:

Here is an example, I wanted to compare my own performance, for www.kaushik.net, with the various web analytics vendors, with a eye towards understanding audience differences. Here’s what it looks like [for the US traffic]. . . .

Notice an interesting thing that the Google Ad Planner Tool does. When I typed in the first five websites listed above the Ad Planner it will also bring forth “related websites” based on the audience persona (or technically: demographic and psychographic attributes). The last three above.

So even as you go about your merry business the delightful tool will highlight to you others you might not be thinking of, WAA for example. They were not top of mind, but now I see them there and I can dig in and compare traffic stats and the types of personas etc.

The website’s you notice are sorted by Comp Index. Here’s the definition: The composition index shows how concentrated your audience is on a specific site relative to internet users within the country you have specified.

The higher the number the more overlap in the kind of audience you have chosen.

What the analysis above shows is that audiences who visit kaushik.net are significantly likely to visit the web analytics vendors websites (indextools especially, Dennis you owe me something!). Those visiting the WAA are likely as well, but a lot less.

Let’s apply this to a real world example, after a while web analytics is a boring. :)

I recently had the pleasure of speaking to a august audience at the P&G headquarters in lovely Cincinnati. Wanting to brush up on them a bit (and what better way to do that then use CI tools - free tip for you all), I used the Ad Planner to understand www.pampers.com.

If you type that in you get this nice bit of data. . . .

You get a very fast snapshot of the core metrics of the Pampers website. But more than that I also get a really wonderful understanding of the websites that its audience visit and just looking from the names I can get a feel for the persona of that audience (free stuff 4 baby, freebiecountry :).

The next thing I did was to click on that “green graph” icon next to the site’s name and get the demographic attributes of the audience.

Of course waaaay lop sided towards females (what is up with that, I made all the diaper decisions for our family!). But I was not sure of the context so I compared that data with the one for huggies (the biggest competitor).

It turns out that Pampers gets a lot more traffic than the main huggies website (which seriously could use the touch of a decently qualified UI and UX person), but the demographics show that the persona of the visitors to the huggies website is that of slightly younger women who might have slightly less education and have a slightly less household income.

Interesting.

If I am recalling correctly that is also an audience where the birth rate is higher and growing per the latest US census. So as the highly paid Brand Manager of Pampers I would like to be in front of that audience, and possibly sell lots more diapers.

So what to do? Throw up more tv ads and indulge in other “faith based initiatives”?

Nah!

Go back into the ad planner and create a media plan that you can hold vastly more accountable.

I go back and choose the attributes of the audience that I want to target with my advertising. . . .

And as soon as I hit that last check box I get a list of websites that are visited by the customer profile I have created (approximated 13 million Unique Visitors in the US!).

Perfect for me both in terms of figuring out the unique persona I am interested in. . . .

Nice ain’t it?

I understand my website better as a part of the ecosystem. I understand a specific competitor and their strengths. I can then go in and find the audience that is their strength. All for free. :)

The Awesome: Identify Advertising Available, Create Your Media Plan.

The Ad Planner will not only help you identify the optimal targets for your advertising opportunities (along with key data such as unique visitors and all that nice candy), it also helps you get key data, where available, about options for actual ads you can run.

For the websites above (perfect for the Brand Manager for Pampers). . . .

The last two columns show if advertising is available on those sites through Google and if so then approximately how many impressions and what kinds of ad formats. Text ads, image ads, video ads and gadget ads.

For many sites Google does not have ads to sell (like on cafemom.com or forever21.com above). Nonetheless this data is still very helpful to you in then going and buying that ad inventory elsewhere, while silently thanking Uncle Google for helping you get access to this delightful data! :)

And it goes without saying that you can save your media plan, you can create as many of them as you would like to (say you are a advertising agency with many clients) and yes you can even export all this data into Excel.

This post started by mentioning that the Google Ad Planner product is less a competitive intelligence tool and more a tool that provides you free access to some absolutely delightful demographic and psychographic data that is useful and actionable. Hopefully by walking through the cases above you’ll see exactly how it does that.

Regardless of your use of the Ad Planner I hope that you’ll be a lot more aware of the data that is available to you and exactly how you could use it.

Finally, if you want to learn more about the “unreliable world of online marketing and analytics” then might I recommend my good friend Ian Thomas’s blog Lies, Damned Lies… He has recently switched from a Analytics role at Microsoft to a Advertising role, I think you’ll appreciate his insights and, perhaps even more, his distinct sense of humor.

Ok your turn now.

What do you think of all this? Surprised to find it on a “web analytics blog”? No? Yes? Why? Have you used the Ad Planner? What do you think of it? Tried some other tools? What do you think of them? Notice my distinct lack of encouragement for you to use demographic data in a silo and just on your site?

Please share your feedback, ideas, critique and love.

Thanks.

PS:
Couple other related posts you might find interesting:

• Competitive Analysis: A Podcast & A Competency Model
• Competitive Intelligence Analysis: Why, What & How to Choose
• Competitive Intelligence Analysis: Metrics, Tips & Best Practices
• Competitive Intelligence Analysis: Google Trends for Websites

Ad Planner Help:

• Overview
• Glossary - A must read.
• Searching for sites

If you are on the web, or do Web Analysis, it is a real crime if you don’t tap into the reams and reams of competitive intelligence data that is available online. It is a core component of a successful Web Analytics 2.0 strategy.

A lot has changed even in the last six months in the world of competitive intelligence, this post, the first of three, attempts to share the kinds of analysis you can do in the area of Search, Websites, Display and Ads (content networks).

In the past I have written about the why, what & how to choose Competitive Intelligence Tools [ComScore, Alexa, HitWise, Compete etc]. That was followed by a lovely article on Metrics, Tips & Best Practices in doing competitive intelligence analysis. Finally there was some fun stuff with Microsoft AdCenter Labs in the Advanced Web Analytics post.

But until now not Google.

The reason was that the tools that Google provided were cool but I was unsure how they provided actionable insights. [And I am the Analytics Evangelist for Google!]

That changed recently with a group of tools the provide actionable trends and insights. My hope with these posts is to share what these tools do that I like, but that’s 20%. 80% of my hope is to teach you how to think, and what you can do regardless of what tool you use.

Here’s the first one: Google Trends for Websites .

First thing you can see in the tool: Daily Unique Visitors. And if you are logged in then you see the actual number. And if you eyeball the graph you’ll see the trend, going down over time in the above case and rising like the phoenix in July!

[sidebar]
Long time readers of this blog know that Daily Unique Visitors is not a metric I am too fond of, especially if you are using a web analytics tool on your website. If you want to use a daily metric as a KPI then use Daily Visits (sessions), not Daily Unique Visitors which is sub optimal for a number of reasons. For competitive intelligence it matters less, you are comparing apples to apple.
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It is sad that most people leave the tool with the above graph, for themselves of their competitors. But there’s more. Here are two other things you can use.

Do this simple thing first, switch the geography setting to All Regions and here you go dear, here’s how your competitor is doing internationally:

Looks like WebTrends gets half of its traffic internationally, and it contributes enough to actually reduce the slope of the curve (the one in the US is steeper, reflecting a worse situation in the US).

[sidebar]
Since this will come up in many people’s mind, the Trends data for any site, and obviously not for www.webtrends.com (!), is Not from Google Analytics. The GA team has said in a recent post: “Google Analytics doesn’t share individual, site-level information with Google Trends for Websites or Google Ad Planner.” Read more context on the team’s official blog.

[/sidebar]

So you wonder, what’s the make up of the international markets? Here you go. . . .

The thing to do is correlate this with other pieces of data you have. For example I notice that India has actually become #2 referrer on my blog as well so it is interesting that WebTrends is seeing the same, well, trend. So it seems to be inline with expectations.

You might have other sources of data that you can correlate this with. For example you could look at that data just by the US and match it up with where your competitor has retail box stores, so maybe you can exploit a gap there.

And finally you get sites that Visitors who go to your competition visit, and top search terms they use. . . .

This is getting to know a few different things, mostly around the “persona” and “preferences” of the kinds of Visitors who go to a site. The bigger the site the most interesting this data is (especially when there are more keywords filled out in the Also Searched For part above).

As I look at the data I am very surprised that there is such a overlap between ClickTracks and WebTrends visitors. I would have expected Omniture to be higher in the list. It raises a few questions:

See how that list is making me think about the “persona” and “preferences” for www.webtrends.com visitors? Do that for your competition, there is a wealth of insights (questions you should be asking) in the data.

As you might have guessed by now, all of the above was just foreplay (very important for a higher climax!).

Measuring individual sites (yours or competitor) is good but the real fun in this is comparing trends. That will give you the key context you need to make even more sense of this competitive data.

So I did exactly that. . . .

Ahhh…. sweet sweet data!

Don’t focus on the actual numbers (you’ll notice I say this a lot in this post). You want to compare the trends and each line gives context to the other two. That is deeply meaningful.

So what does it show?

WebTrends was rising like a phoenix in the US in July 2008 but Omniture seems to be rising like a …. hmm …. what’s a bird that is native to Utah? Can’t think of one. But I am sure there is a good one.

Knowing that there is a general spike in the industry that is causing an uptick gives me a new benchmark to compare my own performance. If I had sunk in $5 million in marketing campaigns, as WT or Core, then this graph also gives me food for thought: Were my marketing campaigns responsible for the spike in visitors, or was it Omniture’s campaigns that just caused a industry wide halo effect?

Also what the heck did Omniture do to cause that massive rise in traffic between end of dec 2007 and Feb 2008? Whatever they did seems to have put them on a new curve and they seems to have stayed on it since then.

Good Marketers (and great Analysts) show their true mettle by answering those questions, and then using the answer as information to optimize their own marketing strategies.

Here is one another important question the above graph raises:

For starters they can use their own tools, which are actually pretty good. : )

Did you see all that in three lines on a competitive intelligence graph?

That brings me to a very important recommendation: Doing competitive intelligence analysis without knowing enough context about your competitive space, your general ecosystem, is like going to play a football game naked. Won’t lead to a great outcome for you (even if you paid a ton of money for your players - tools :)).

I can make better sense of those lines because of what I know of the ecosystem, then the visitor behavior screams out the insights.

Last bit of insights you can look for: Are there strengths of my competitors that I can benefit from, are there weaknesses that I can exploit?

The Also Visited report can help a bit.

You can look at this report from the perspective of any site, I am going to look at the data from the perspective of Omniture.

Some of the above is hardly surprising, #1 and #4 for example.

But others are quite interesting.

Omniture’s worldwide series of summits are #2 in the list, and quite a nice amount of traffic at that. Since they are essentially Omniture “propaganda” (sorry Matt), it is great to see that it is effective. It raises the question, do the summits and CoreMetrics and WebTrends do give them a similar share of voice?

I am sure Omniture, WebTrends and CoreMetrics use # of attendees to measure success of their summits. How about using the above to measure success as well? Holistic impact measurement baby!

Here’s another data point that is noteworthy. Both CoreMetrics and Omniture seem to benefit from a big overlap with webanalyticsassociation.org. Why not WebTrends? One of the oldest members of the WAA community and a early founder. Is the WAA biased and sends more traffic to the other two and not WT? Why don’t WebTrends visitors have any overlap with those that visit waa.org? Cause for concern and investigation.

Please try it with different perspectives using the drop down immediately above the report, it can be insightful. Here’s an example of that report and comparison for www.lowes.com and www.homedepot.com. . . .

See the #1 for Lowes? Scary!

Also notice the commonalities between the two and the differences. Each of that is a set of information you can use to your advantage.

Had fun? I want to point out that my hope was less to get you to use Google Trends for Websites, more to teach you how to think as you approach competitive intelligence data. I hope you learned something.

And to the CMO’s of Omniture, WebTrends & CoreMetrics: Analysis like this is expensive! If you found value in this analysis by a expensive Analyst :), please make a donation to the two charities this blog supports (Doctors Without Borders, The Smile Train). Thanks!

Lastly, two important questions (probably on your mind):

#1: Is this data from Google any good?

You know me so well, great question!

For me any source of data is only as good as understanding exactly how it is captured. Hence this link at the start of this blog post: Competitive Intelligence Tools.

Google has publicly stated that it uses multiple sources of data it has access to in order to provide the data you see in Trends. Please check out “Information for Website Owners “.

My personal perspective is that as currently Google is used a decent amount in terms of its products and services which means that it has aggregated permission based non-PII (personally identifiable information) that is useful. The sample size also is favorably positioned compared to other options adding to its usefulness.

It is important to know that each data source has a natural bias.

Panel based measurements use a very small sample of people, capture their browsing behavior using “monitoring software” which means they can give deeper information on a few widely used sites.

ISP based measurements typically have much larger sample sizes but shallower site level data.

Likewise Google’s data, which is a mix of sources, probably has a “searcher’s bias”, i.e. people who use search engines.

Educate yourself and make the optimal decision for your case.

#2: Does this type of product from Google mean the end of Alexa, Nielsen, Compete, HitWise, ComScore?

Hardly.

Each tool provides something interesting of value. Some might become less relevant than others, but I can’t imagine any scenario where there won’t be anything but robust competition.

Here’s how I bucket them by value:

If it is of some value let me do my own personal quick walk thru of the tools (which will also reveal any bias I have).

Alexa was useful in the past but it is a less than optimal source for anything now. Ever since Compete showed up there is no need to use Alexa because compete data is on a bigger sample set, using multiple sources and more accurate. Yes it does not rank but really at the end of the day do you want a rank or better data?

Both Nielsen and ComScore have been under a heavy threat for some time because of the way they collect data (not from other companies!). Panel based measurement using “monitoring software” poses a sampling and population bias that has become much more of a challenge as the web has grown massively and become more rich / fluid / web 2.0.

Compete and HitWise are both ISP based services and frequent readers of this blog know that I am quite fond of them. Until recently when I lost access to Compete I used it all the time here and in my presentations because I think it has probably the most rich set of data sources (ISP, surveys, “monitoring software”, even panels). If you have money to spend on competitive intelligence (and you should) then HitWise with its ISP based data is great source (with one of the largest sample of users in its database).

To help you think here’s a metaphor for Panel and ISP based data:

I think of Panel Based services services as the USA Today method. ISP based as the YouTube method. Not absolutely perfect, but a significantly better signal to noise ratio.

Google’s data is perhaps like ISP data in the sense that it is based on clicks.

I expect Nielsen and ComScore to radically evolve their data capture mechanisms, which would enhance what they provide today (deep site behavior data). Even today if your site gets more than five million unique visitors a month you can use panel based data with some confidence.

I tend to use Compete because it has more metrics and reports, even the free version. And I use it to index against what Google might be providing. Like this:

Long term I confidently expect most tools to thrive and improve. Including Google’s.

[sidebar]
This goes without saying but no tool will actually show you really good data about your blog. In most cases if you don’t get more than 50,000 visits a month even the wrong data won’t be right. Just a quick tip.
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In the next two posts in this series:

• Google Ad Planner (Published!)
• Google Insights for Search (Published!)

Meanwhile I would love to have your feedback on this one.

Did you learn anything? Did you have fun? What do you think of Google Trends for Websites? Or other tools mentioned here? Would you have any other advice for Omniture, WebTrends and CoreMetrics? Should Omniture be scared of Google Analytics? :) What else would you do or look at?

Please share your feedback.