Death of Search?

So the ex CEO of Omniture has produced a blog post.

Its very interesting that it aims to deflate the search bubble, and lets face it, when we say search bubble, what we really mean is Google. To me its like a shot across the bows, a message of intent if you will.

I have for a long time believed that search is over emphasised as a mechanism for sales and I'd like to focus on this "retail" side of search for this blog. There's been a great number of experts encouraging customers to throw money at search - it is after all very "measurable". This "measurability" has made it easy for customers to present to their board and show how "effective" their campaigns have been. The conversion rates often aren't spectacular but when the CEOs compare this to the woeful effectiveness of banner advertising, its seems attractive. For CEOs, search conversion rates are accepted as being the cost of doing business online - an essential, just like your electricity bills.

However I dont think the competition from the new holy trinity of facebook, twitter and iphone that has convinced me of this.

I've consistently said is that search doesn't "sell" - search "finds".

If I'm looking for a company and cant find it through search this will definitely have impact my likelihood to buy from that company. If I've bought a commodity from a company before and had a good service and price, I will return to them for similar items - but that's not down to their search ranking.

If I'm looking for a commodity, a holiday, a new blu-ray player anything like that, seeing a company at the top of paid search will have some impact but it will be minimal. I'll respect them for having money and some targeting, but this alone will not make me want to buy from them.

What I'll want is a mixture of human advice and product information on that commodity. I'll be looking for information from other people (reviews, ratings etc) and price comparison sites that tell me where would be a good place to get it from.

So the next question I would ask of the trinity is can they provide me with that information?

Lets look at them.

Facebook contains communities. Does Facebook have the potential to become this place that I would go to find reviews? Yes. But its still not yet a place I'd go to for reviews, I'd seek out user forums or independent (or supposedly independent) sites that house reviews from industry experts. User forums / sites / applications are invariably more sophisticated and in depth than anything on facebook, although of course this could change if facebook opens up more.

Twitter. Communities? Yes. Reviews? well not really, how much can you fit into the twitter text box that tells you anything other that "its great lol" and "it sux". Twitter is very much about immediate impact and news (hence why it gets so much media attention). I think it could be good for generating excitement of a new product or company, but this would be short lived as the twitterverse moves on. Twitter can of course link to other sites and this is also of great value. If you can get your reviews on twitter quickly then someone will find them when they search in a week or a months time.

IPhone apps? Communities? Yes, you could create that app. Reviews? Yes you could create that app. But how do you get that app on a users phone? That's the tricky part. You've got to create a compelling reason, and that has less to do with the iphone and more to do with what you offer.

So for me, yes there are alternatives to search that google should be worried about, but nothing that immediately threatens it dominance in the online space. I'd recommend reading the Ad contrarian for more interesting articles around the other "dead" channels that seem to be ignored.

I think there is still space for someone to achieve dominance in independent advice.

I think the "old guys" at amazon and ebay offer more interesting and threatening alternatives than the holy trinity.

I think companies like Yellow Pages and Which? in UK are probably missing this opportunity as well, the ability to build these communities and user reviews whilst maintaining a relative air of independence could be done easily given their branding & audience reach.

And finally, I'm also wondering what happened online to all those governing bodies, organisations and charities that certify and review companies offline in the UK. I imagine they could make quite a name for themselves if they had a larger web presence, the likes of Tripadvisor performs the role for me that actually I'd like to come from ABTA. This bodies could be more than just a record of who agrees to their codes of practice and actually contain direct customer feedback.

Anyway, I digress. Is search dead? No. Will the holy trinity replace it? No, but it will divert some of a companies online resources towards it because the next generation are now churning out social media gurus rather than search guru's because for todays kids its the new way to make a fast buck at their elders expense.

So to finish with an example:

Does anyone really need to "search" for "Apple" or "Iphone" in order to buy it, no. But I bet they would search for "cheap Iphone tariff" or "Iphone review". Do apple need to have a big facebook or Twitter strategy? Probably not, because they've got the product and market share.

And what about everyone else? Everyone with a product that less revolutionary, less loved, less well known and more mediocre? Is Facebook and twitter going to make the difference in their marketing and sales over and above any search activity?

The channel is the mechanism of the message. You have to get that message right and deliver it to your audience in order for it to work. Unless a channel defines your audience you should concentrate on the message first, mechanism later.

My Local Sainsburys

My local Sainsbury's has just gone through a makeover.

They've shifted all my usual purchases and I struggled to find them.

I found them eventually but not until I'd seen a load of stuff I don't normally see (or am normally tempted by).

Surely they'd optimised the layout previously, surely everything was perfect, what have they done?

What they've done is amend the layout for a number of reasons both customer and business focused and whilst hopefully considering the risks of offending regulars. They will of course measure and evaluate the changes but I doubt they'll roll back to the way it was unless the takings take a dramatic turn for the worse, and that's unlikey.

And it actually doesn't make a difference to me, I'm still likely to shop there, I've been exposed to a few different things all for the inconvenience of a slightly longer shop for one day. Sainsbury's get a bit more insight on shopping behaviour, more new views of different products and I assume a better functioning shop. I know for some people, change is a bigger deal than others, but seriously, I wonder how many people would leave because of overall layout as opposed to price, location and products.

I was more upset when they stopped producing their mixed-olive humus. No seriously. That pushed me to a few more shopping trips to Morrisons and Waitrose than this change will.

So why blog on this? Well people are often so scared to make changes to their sites. Yes change can have a big negative impact, but it can also reap rewards. Just make sure when you change the layout you don't forget that what drives most customers are the products and their perceived value.

BRING BACK MIXED OLIVE HUMUS!

Is Web Analytics better than everything else?

In joining Adobe, I've just had to redo some HR related work suggesting that I will also act with integrity and not release trade secrets or intellectual property.

I think this a good thing, but I did wonder how it applies to what I know from being in the on and offline analytics industry for 10 years. I was also asked recently by a colleague whether I thought that online analytics had surpassed applications / methods used offline so I thought I'd use this blog to talk about novelty and the differences of the channels without giving away any trade secrets.

My answer was that although web analytics has developed considerably over the last few years, offline analytics has kept pace and there are still areas where its weak, I thought it might be worth discussing.

Data Collection: This is actually hard to compare. Web Analytics vendors strength is its ability to come up with new ideas about how to collect new data - facebook, set top boxes, mobile phones, twitter, search engines, games consoles etc. all these appear to be in the remit of the "web analytics" vendor that surely sets it aside from offline analytics. If you think that people aren't thinking of new ways to track transactions, phone calls, sewer systems (someones got to!) and various libraries of information held in digital channels from the more traditional vendors, you'd be highly mistaken.

Data volume: Are online analytics vendors storing things in advance unique ways? I don't know. I know that cloud computing is a big thing. I know that Google make use of it for their searches, how much they use in their analytics, I don't know but I'd love to find out. Do other vendors use similarly adventurous methods of managing data volumes? I don't know. I know that Omniture Insight (ex Visual Sciences) does some pretty cool things but is this more impressive that anything "offline"? Vendors for Telcos will pitch to record every single SMS, MMS and phone call interaction, a retailer will record every single transaction made at a point of sale, a bank has to record every time you add money to your account, do you not think that is impressive in terms accuracy as well as volume? I don't care if a hit from my site goes missing, but if that's my paycheck its a very different matter. Not only all that, the offline vendors invariably tie into the operational systems, whereas online, importing operational data appears still in its infancy. The "online" analytics that impress me are the huge retailers, Amazon, Ebay, Google's PPC, Gambling sites etc. I'd love to see how they manage things, and if we take data capture aside I suspect what they've built in house with the database vendors are in many ways far beyond anything a "web analytics" vendor offers.

Visual Insight: No. Web analytics data visualisation is not that special, it really isn't. Think about medical applications, pharmaceutical applications, networking applications, hell, think about excel... Yes, online has to handle the volume, but exceptional in its insight? I don't think so.

Trending Insight: Time series - do online vendors even offer time series reporting? Can you do anything more than simply smooth a graph? Can you predict future sales, page views click through etc? Can you do what if scenarios and see what effect campaigns are likely to have on your web performance? I think not, and I think offline has this.

Customer Segmentation: Do online vendors organise the data in terms of customers, then split the customers strategically to enable more effective marketing strategies? Nope. They don't. This is partly technological - still prefer to work with hits, then pages, then visits, then visitors, then users and finally customers but also cultural, a customer database isn't usually plugged into the online system, and besides web vendors prefer to collect data real time, rather than incorporating old data for analysis. Customer segmentation should lead directly to product development and marketing strategy - I don't often see web analytics currently driving this kind of thing hard within the organisations I meet unlike the offline companies I've worked with in the past.

Speed and Flexibility: The web has speed. Things happen fast from a consumer perspective. Stores can change their format overnight, Direct marketing that would have take weeks can be performed within hours, negative feedback can be immediate. Your weeks pay can be deposited in your bank and spent by you before you even leave the office. Admittedly products still have to wait while their are delivered rather than carried out of shop, but on the whole the experience is much more immediate, not only that new channels of information and interaction are cropping up everywhere. This means that marketing and the subsequent reaction to customer has to happen all the more quickly. How you do this and analyse it are actually no different to offline, but the speed introduces a number of other issues, namely that an organisation needs to be more structured, more organised, more focused on its USP and customer segments in order to provide clear messaging. The web has also always led in terms of automating solutions based on analytics when the data is available. (Collaborative filtering was perfect example of this, the likes of NetPerceptions leading before they dropped by the wayside). This is the key area where online is getting ahead of its offline partners.

Analytics: Offline have been producing predictive models that lead to insight, score potential customers, segment a customer base for years. Traditional, models and insight have been the domain of the analytics team. "Offline" software vendors are now realising that their applications must self learn or at least self maintain in order to keep the best figures in the systems. These models may combine propensity scores, risk mitigation strategies, product recommendations, contact strategies across multiple channels, tactical actions etc. Is online really any more complicated? No, I don't think - it has made the leap to automation quicker (think Omniture 1:1) but that doesn't always mean much as it cuts out the learnings to be had from a step by step analytics process. Oh and another thing, direct marketing was doing "MVT" 20 years ago, albeit with longer test cycles.

Market Research: Is tracking someone online as good as sitting down with them and asking to perform an action in front of you. I'm sure this has been documented elsewhere. On the web, if you can get enough users you can observe a multitude of behaviours and probably the ones you need to investigate. When analysing these behaviours online, do we really take the care and look at these things in a way more complicated that the better market researchers with their knowledge of sampling, customer segments, factor analysis? Again, the web has more data, but less quality of analysis, at the moment.

So on the whole, no I don't think that web analytics is better, I never have. Its strengths are 1) data collection 2) speed of interaction with customer 3) automation, but its lack of emphasis around the customer & product and the way these interact to produce coherent product and marketing strategies leads me to suggest there are still things to be learned.

One admirable thing is that the individual web vendors are trying to get good at all of the above, whereas I'm comparing them against the whole of business analytics vendors. That makes it a tough comparison as the hurdle to be climbed by the vendors is a lot higher, I just find it amazing that older lessons always seem to have to be re-learnt on the web.

As I hope above has shown, I think I can afford to keep blogging about process, strategy and analytics based on my years before Omniture and Adobe and still remain relevant without fearing that I will be stepping on any new intellectual property - I'll keep away from company secrets, I promise Mr HR person :-)