Seth Godin's Meatball Sundae part 1

Seth Godin is clearly the new wunderkind of online marketing. So much so Omniture has invited him to speak at the upcoming Omniture summit.

I figured it would be interesting to take a look at his book, Meatball Sundae, and see what I can glean from it. Unfortunately I'm not one for buying every book that comes from the next big thing, if I did I'd probably be significantly poorer than I am now so what I propose is to look at Seth's excerpts and see whether it looks like a good buy.

Let me tell you what I hoped the book would be about after hearing the title. I assumed that it was an analogy to show how customers when faced with confusing content, messages or indeed food courses might not produce the desired outcome of a pleasurable eating/online experience. (as a side note, it is exactly this kind of mixing of foods combined with excellent execution that sparked the public interest in Heston Blumenthal with delights such as bacon and egg ice cream and snail porridge however I doubt Seth realised this when considering his title)

I'll also be honest and say that by writing about Seth I am essentially trying to ride his coattails a little but I believe this kind of reviewing is exactly what blogs are ideal for.

Lets begin with a quickie.

"The Most Important thing Understand that you don't get to decide what the market demands. The market does."

In my mind, if you take this as his first point, I think the second that Seth needs to add is that you are in control of how you react to market demands - and thats where marketers add value.

Does this mean marketing is always reactive to market demands? Of course not. Thats what market and product research is all about, giving you as close an view to whats really going on in the market place as possible.

However, what it does mean is that we have to put in place

• checks and balances to ensure we capture when our marketing begins to perform poorly. (measurement for management)
  
• processes that will ensure maximum return when the market does indeed swing our way (cross channel optimisation).
  

Fallout, Pathing & Clickstream over multiple visits

I think I need a bit quicker turnaround on my blog posting.

So here's a quick one.

Clickstream analysis or fallout report is very useful on a specific set of sequential actions but it is overrated in many of its applications in web analytics tools.

When analysing your clickstream data it should be at the visitor level with the option to look at the visit level if need be.

By looking at visit level data, yes you will be able to understand what parts of the process are letting you down but you will struggle to place an accurate value on this fallout because you will likely be ignoring many of your customers future actions.

Retail example

A good example of this is where a customer is asked for some information they don’t know off hand and their session times out before finding it. They then have to go through the complete process again to complete it. That first fallout was not a “true” fallout and it helps to understand this value in comparison to “regular” fallout.

Knowing you have a 50% fallout rate at a given point means different things if you consider two scenarios 1) where 100% of the people come back to complete the process end to end again 2) where only 10% of people come back and complete the process end to end.

In 1) It’s a temporary glitch in the purchasing process and it might make a lot of sense to develop some save and return functionality to make it smoother for a quantifiable portion of your customer base in 2) its indicative of a hurdle people don’t wish to get over and you need to seriously ask yourself why you are putting your customers through this pain.


B2B example

I’m an executive who downloads a PDF 5 times before becoming a lead. The fact I downloaded the PDF many times is in fact irrelevant (I just happen to be forgetful of where I download it to), the act of downloading is the key action that needs to be connected to the lead. This means for me you only see a lead created 1 in every 5 downloads (really poor lift/high fallout – 20%/80%) whereas in my case the connection between download and lead happened 100% of the time. Multiple me by all the other forgetful executives there are and suddenly you’ve lost insight of the power of one your greatest lead generators!

Hope that helps.

Omniture acquires Visual Sciences

They've done it again.

They've gone and spent a load of cash and I didnt even get a phone call.

So, Visual Sciences is planned to become part of Omniture. Interesting...

We all know Visual Sciences have been on the market. As such their customers have been in a position of uncertainty for a while now and this has also hampered their competitiveness in the market place. My first thoughts were really not

1. "Wow, we just got some cool technology" or
2. "Great, we just gained a nice bit of market share" but actually
3. "Its probably a good job a BI/CRM vendor who concentrates on the offline world didnt buy them with the goal of turning their offerings into actionable insight from a proper 360 view of customer"
   

Taking those points in reverse:-

(point3) The NetGen buyout by SPSS was conceptually quite ahead of its time, but for reasons I'm not going to go into now it failed miserably. This wouldnt have stopped someone now, over half a decade on from making a success of combining an online analytics/operational platform with a offline one. This would have created serious competition for Omniture and indeed all of the online web analytics vendors as well as few offline ones. No company currently has strengths across all channels in both analytics and operational optimisation but it has been interesting to note the slow but gradual improvement of the offerings from some of the offline vendors in this area (Unica, SAS+Speedtrap etc.)

(point2) Omniture just bought itself a lot of customers. 400 million dollars worth of customers? Thats not clear to me, but I dont really tread in those financial circles so find it hard to comment. I expect their current customer base isnt anywhere near that but the removal of competition from future deals and developments probably amounts to an awful lot in this ever increasingly valueable area of business. Had noone purchased VS I would have expected them to have gradually have lost market share anyway with a combination of Google Analytics and Omniture sharing the spoils dependent on customer size.

(point1) I'm not going to claim to be fully versed in their product suite but VS clearly had some cool technology. Will this be incorporated to Omniture? Is that why Omniture purchased them? I expect not - in the realm of real time reporting or making actions based on real time data an application is very dependent on its data architecture and the way data gets into the system. I find it hard to believe Omniture would adopt a completely different architecture in order to benefit in what really amounts to only a few specific bits of functionality, its probably quicker and easier just to development them internally. That being said, there may be some interesting areas of cross over (Omniture Discover vs. Visual Site) and also useful technology from the approaches VS made in the other channels (Visual Call and Visual Mail).

However you look at it, these are interesting times and I expect the consolidation of vendors in the online area to continue (site analytics, adserving, onsite search, email, online marketing etc.).

So, my question is "who's going to buy who next?"