Show Me The Money! 6 Steps To Optimizing Your Payment Process

You’ve worked hard to convince visitors to shop from you — and even harder to get them to the checkout page. So why on earth would you make it so painfully difficult for people to give you their money?
An astounding two-thirds of shopping carts are reportedly abandoned at the payment stage. Given the hoops many websites make their visitors jump through just to enter payment details, it’s no wonder. Few buyers would tolerate such friction at the point of purchase in a brick-and-mortar store. They’d just walk out.
Your payment stage is where visitors become buyers. Here are six steps to streamlining this critical last step in your conversion funnel.

1. Optimize For Clarity & Usability

Whether you employ a single page or a multi-step checkout process, online shoppers will eventually encounter your payment page. Nobody really likes parting with their money, so it makes a lot of sense to optimize the page design to improve the user experience.
Keep Your Payment Form Short, Simple And Clear. The first step in minimizing friction is to make it appear very fast and simple to enter payment details. Perception is critical. If your page layout looks confusing and your forms ask for too much information, you’ll discourage customers from going further.
Reduce clutter on your payment form by including only elements that are absolutely necessary for the transaction. Then, once you’ve visually convinced buyers that the payment step will be quick and painless, make it so.
Don’t require special formats for credit card numbers – if they want to enter their card number with hyphens (or without), let them. Your form should be very accepting of how users enter their data. Help shoppers by auto-populating information where possible (e.g., pre-filling the address field for visitors that are signed into their accounts, or automatically choosing the card type based on the customer’s credit card number).

Cosmetics retailer Ulta.com allows users to automatically populate a billing address with the shopper’s shipping address.

Anticipate And Reduce Frustration From Errors. As an online shopper, I find it extremely annoying when a site wipes out the entire form after I inadvertently type in wrong information in one field. Clearing a form is the easiest way to turn off customers, especially when they’re inputting their credit card details. Luckily, you can easily solve this by submitting your form in AJAX, which allows you to preserve form information without storing sensitive financial data in your servers.

2. Address Security Concerns

Shoppers’ awareness of online shopping-related risks is naturally heightened at the payment stage, so go the extra mile in reassuring them.
Make sure your payment page looks consistent with your entire website and is professionally designed. The last thing you want is to trigger alarms in your shopper’s brain with a payment page that looks nothing like the website they just visited. Any visitor would also balk at giving personal and financial information to a poorly-designed form for fear of an insecure transaction.
Improve shoppers’ perception of security by displaying trust badges and encryption information prominently and in close proximity to sensitive form fields (where credit card information is required, for instance). A study conducted by Baymard Institute shows that the presence of security icons on certain parts of a checkout page served as visual reinforcements for shoppers, which tended to view these parts as more secure compared to the rest of the page.

Notice how prominent the Norton seal is on Home Depot’s payment page. Pre-checkout, the seal is tucked away in the footer, but it takes center stage once buyers enter the checkout process.

3. Offer Multiple Ways To Pay

Accepting a variety of payment methods on your site ensures that your visitors will have at least one viable option at checkout. In addition to major credit cards, consider expanding payment options to include PayPal, Google Wallet, Amazon Payments, Bill Me Later, or BitCoin.
Of course, your decision on which payment types to accept should be based upon your audience profile. For instance, BitCoin may not be used by a large percentage of your visitors, and if you know you get a lot of visitors using iOS devices, you might consider implementing Apple Pay.

Build.com offers Amazon Payment and PayPal in addition to major credit cards. For buyers who are reluctant to enter payment information, having the option of using their existing payment accounts is reassuring.

There is a caveat, however. Increasing the number of payment methods can also increase the complexity of your payment page. Too many choices can hinder decision-making and lead to choice paralysis. So, before you rush into adding a bunch of payment methods to your page, plan your design carefully. Pay attention to steps you can take to nudge users into quickly choosing the most appropriate payment method for them. Then, minimize confusion by showing only the fields relevant to the shopper’s chosen payment method.

4. Fix Fat Finger Challenges

Payment pages are especially tricky on smaller screens. According to research done by SeeWhy, 99.5% of mobile users will bail out before buying. And a major cause of friction is any place where the user is required to enter information.
Here are some things you can do to improve the payment process for mobile buyers.

• Don’t require your customers to create an account to check out, but if you do remember customers’ account details (as is the case with Amazon), give them the option of logging in so they can access stored payment methods, shipping address and other account details.
• Minimize the customer’s effort by using technology to pre-fill information. For example, instead of asking for postal code as the last part of the address, put it before the city and state, and then pre-populate those fields based on the data entered for the postal code.
• Visually reinforce mobile shoppers’ sense of security with well-placed badges, icons and copy.
• Provide shoppers with several payment methods. According to SeeWhy’s Mobile Playbook 2014, mobile consumers are twice as likely to convert when given alternatives to entering credit card details.
• Show progress indicators to set customer’s expectation of how long the process will take, and to let them know where they are in the process.
• Error handling is an even bigger issue given how tedious it already is to enter information on small screens. Minimize frustration by having bigger text fields and buttons and clearly indicating which fields are causing errors.

5. Understand The Needs Of International Customers

If you sell to customers outside of your home country, you probably already know how challenging it can be to process international payments. Credit cards can be hard to authorize for international addresses. And even preferred payment methods will vary depending on the customer’s country.
According to eConsultancy’s “Internationalisation of E-commerce Best Practice Guide,” Germans prefer to pay through ELV and debit card, while Scandinavians prefer to pay by cash on delivery. Not surprisingly, customers will also want to pay in their local market currency, so you will need to work with your payment service provider to make this possible.
Bonus Tip: If you currently don’t process international orders, say so upfront. Don’t wait until customers are deep into the checkout process before telling them that you don’t accept non-U.S. cards or don’t deliver to other countries.

6. Speed Up Payment Processing

Even after your customer has entered his or her payment details, your optimization job is not complete. Payment processing and authorization speed is just as crucial as getting the customer to fill out the payment form.
When customers finally click that “place order” button on your site, do they end up watching a spinning circle for 5, 10, even 15 seconds before being taken to the confirmation page?  The longer the spinning circle goes on, the more anxious customers get.
A study from the Aberdeen Group reveals that a one-second delay in page load time decreases customer satisfaction by 16%. Imagine how much worse this is for people who have just given away their credit card information.
The time between clicking the “place order” button to the confirmation page should almost be instantaneous. Check how long it takes for your payment processor to authorize and confirm payments on different internet providers and devices, and address any performance issues you notice. If necessary, get a new payment processor.

Conclusion

Optimizing your payment process may be one of the least exciting projects you take on during this final pre-holiday push, but it can easily deliver the most impact. With all the effort that goes into offering the right products, optimizing conversion funnels, designing campaigns and driving targeted traffic, you owe it to your company, and your visitors, to make it as easy as possible for buyers to give you their money.

What Is Tag Management & Why Should You Care?

Over the last 15 years, marketers have seen an explosion in the number of digital marketing tools available to them, from a few dozen major email, analytics and advertising services at the beginning of the century, to as many as 2,000 marketing cloud applications today, according to Scott Brinker of ChiefMartec.com.

Sounds great for marketers, right? Yes and no.

While marketers now have nearly unlimited choice in the number of solutions they can use to engage new customers, they are also increasingly bedeviled by the management of all these sophisticated applications. More than ever, they must coordinate with their company’s software developers and IT department to get these applications up and running.

Throw in the number of fragmented customer data sources that each of these siloed applications generate, and this may not be the “Golden Age of Marketing” that some believe it to be – at least not yet.

That’s where tag management comes in.

What Is Tag Management?

Tag management is a new foundational platform that enables marketers to easily connect, manage and unify their digital marketing applications (e.g., web analytics, search engine marketing, email service provider, advertising, social technologies, etc.) without a lot of ongoing development work.

A tag, in this case, is simply another name for a piece of data-collecting code that a vast majority of digital vendors now require their customers to embed on their web pages and mobile apps.

These tags often collect visitor behavior information, but can also be used to launch product functionality such as live chat, advertising or surveys.

With tag management, marketers or developers deploy one single tag on their pages – a master tag, so to speak – and then use an intuitive web interface to add, edit or remove any additional vendor tags in a fraction of the time it would take via manual software coding.

Many tag management solutions have a “tag marketplace” that enables marketers to click on a vendor logo, add their account details and other information, decide which sites and pages to load the tag on and hit publish. The vendor solution is automatically deployed via that master tag without touching the web pages.
Tag management also works with mobile apps, where the same agility applies – install the tag management solution once and reduce the cycles needed to change analytics data points or deploy mobile solutions.
The real star of tag management, however, is something called “the data layer” — the behind-the-scenes data that drives customer interactions in web, mobile and other digital channels.

The data layer resides between the application layer, comprised of various mission-critical digital solutions, and the experience layer that users interact with. Through the creation and optimization of this data layer (via tag management), organizations can easily standardize the data definitions used by each application, which enables them to sync their applications more easily.

image courtesy of Tealium

Think of the data layer as a “control plane” that allows marketers to correlate and share customer data between applications.

The data layer is greatly enhanced by complementary visitor segmentation and profile enrichment tools, such as those offered by some providers (including my employer, Tealium) that deliver real-time segmentation and additional data distribution capabilities.
This is key for creating real-time interactions. For the above reasons, the data layer is a highly strategic part of the modern digital marketing technology stack, allowing these disparate tools to work harmoniously together for the first time.

Why Should You Care About Tag Management?

Tag management offers many benefits across the organization. Below are three core scenarios and related benefits to get excited about:

*Bring Order To Chaos – With marketers using an increasingly complex array of solutions than ever before to engage customers, digital marketing has become a chaotic burden. Tag management reduces complexity for both marketing and development resources, and allows marketers to move faster and launch campaigns easier than ever before.

Tag management can also significantly increase website performance by reducing the number of tags firing on each page (tag bloat is often a main cause of site performance degradation). This, in turn, helps increase online conversions and revenue.

*Build Your Own Marketing Cloud – Some marketers believe they need to be tied to one marketing cloud vendor – such as Adobe, Salesforce.com or Oracle – for both convenience and the promise of simple data integration. But the truth is, no one cloud can be everything to everyone.

Marketers need ultimate flexibility to choose the best solutions for their unique business needs. Tag management, through that unifying data layer, enables marketers to use any solution they want, whether it’s from a marketing cloud or from a best-in-class point provider, and still have them work together.

Additionally, the same visitor profile can easily be shared across your entire marketing technology stack, leading to unified messaging across channels and devices.

*Unlock Your Marketing Potential –Tag management helps marketers and their organizations in more diverse ways than perhaps any other digital marketing solution. At a core level, tag management helps increase marketing agility, reduce costs, and boost web site performance.

At a more strategic level, it helps improve data governance and control, maximize marketing technology investments, streamline data integration processes, and drive more profitable, real-time customer interactions across all digital touch points.

Another under-rated bonus of tag management is that it helps unify internal teams by reducing technology complexity, both in managing mission-critical applications and uniting key customer data.

One of my favorite customer quotes is from a marketing executive at U.S. Auto Parts Network who once told me tag management “is the first solution both marketing and IT could agree on.”

Marketing is entering an exciting new era. Thanks to the emergence of new technologies and best practices, marketers are on the cusp of achieving what some refer to as the “Holy Grail” of marketing — the ability to deliver consistent, personalized, real-time experiences to customers across channels and devices.
Ironically, the only thing standing in their way is too much technology and data, and the inability to effectively manage it. Through tag management and a sound technology strategy, marketers can easily cross into that next marketing frontier.

The Complexity & Confusion Of Tracking Without Tag Management

Tag management is a buzzword right now, but it’s not one of those vaporware phenomena. In this case, the buzz is legit. The tag management space has seen massive growth in the last two years thanks to strong vendors like Tealium, Ensighten and Signal, along with the introduction of Google Tag Manager.
In a survey report from Econsultancy published in June 2012, 73% of marketers using a tag management system (TMS) said it speeds up their ability to run marketing campaigns, with 42% describing it as “significantly faster.”
But to truly understand and appreciate the benefits of tag management, it helps to have a grounding in the traditional underpinnings of online tracking.

What Is A Tag, Anyway?

In the earliest days of online advertising, they were referred to as Web Bugs. Advertising networks needed a way to record interactions and ad activity across thousands of websites. According to Wikipedia:

“Originally, a web bug was a small transparent GIF or PNG image that was embedded in an HTML page, usually a page on the web or the content of an email. Whenever the user opens the page with a graphical browser or email reader, the image or other information is downloaded. This download requires the browser to request the image from the server storing it, allowing the server to take notice of the download. As a result, the organization running the server is informed when the HTML page has been viewed.”

Wikipedia

Today, we speak about tags more generally, such as a snippet of code that is placed on a website on behalf of a third-party to accomplish a specific purpose. There are hundreds, maybe thousands, of legitimate uses for website tags, from analytics to remarketing, conversion tracking to surveys, even A/B Testing.
Nearly every web technology vendor utilizes a tag of some sort. Google AdWords alone has multiple tag types, include conversion tags, remarketing tags and custom audience tags.

The Most Common Types Of Tags

Two of the most common tag types used by many vendors are image pixel tags and JavaScript tags. (In truth, many JavaScript tags also make use of image pixels. For example, did you know that the Google Analytics code snippet actually produces a 1×1 image pixel request to google-analytics.com?)

A Google Analytics Tag

The invisible pixel request method has been around for years, and is still a primary way to transfer data to a third-party. The image pixel request is sent with one or more data-points about the visitor and/or their activity.
For example, when the Google Analytics pixel is fired, the request is sent back to Google’s servers with information like the title of the current page, page URL, screen resolution, etc. JavaScript tags are more complex, and often make use of either first-party or third-party cookies. The tag may set a new cookie, or read data from a cookie that was previously set.
Using our Google Analytics example again, the GA tag sets one or more first-party cookies on the visitor’s browser which contain information like their unique visitor ID, campaign names, date of last visit and more. A cookie is used to identify whether the visitor has been to the website in the past or should be considered a new visitor.

What Has Tagging Looked Like Thus Far?

Traditionally, adding these marketing or measurement tags to a website was kind of a beating — especially for large sites. Why? Because each tag vendor has specific instructions for when and where to install it and, in most cases, marketers have to go through IT to get any changes made to the site.
Here is an actual excerpt from the tag implementation instructions from a leading ad network:

Install tags across all pages of the website where tracking is desired, with the exception of pages that end in .aspx (.asp is OK) or any page that references the Apollo moon landing (this breaks the tag, our engineers are working on it). Further, tags should be placed in the body section of the HTML, not too close to the top but as far from the footer as possible. If you encounter situations where existing JavaScript code interferes with {Vendor Name} tag, please remove the tags from all pages and start over using a newer version of your operating system. Finally, tags must be manually typed in each time. Do not try to copy and paste tag code, as this can result in perfect implementation which might yield unexpected results.

I kid, of course. But in my experience, this isn’t too far off.

A Hypothetical Example

So imagine — you’re a marketing manager who just helped launch a fancy new website. Now you are dealing with the various online marketing vendors your company has contracted with, and each of them are requesting their tags to be installed on the website “ASAP as possible” (as Michael Scott from The Office would say).
Fast forward six months and three IT nastygrams later, and you think 95% of the tags are properly installed and working on your fancy new website. Of course the website is spiffy, but now you are noticing something else… it is SLOW to load.
Hmm…I wonder what could have changed? You only added a bunch of extra browser requests on every single page requesting data from vendors spread out all over the solar system. But never mind…it is worth it because now you have sophisticated remarketing lists, an email marketing system that is integrated with your CMS, an affiliate program that is running on auto-pilot and killer metrics in your web analytics platform.
Fast forward another six months. The affiliate thing didn’t work out, and you’ve outsourced your remarketing campaigns to a high-end vendor (that has its own set of new tags which had to be installed). But did the old tags get removed? Nope.
Why not? Well, you didn’t want to bother IT with “another ticket request,” plus you didn’t feel like absorbing all the negative feelings from IT considering they “did you a favor” by spending six weeks installing the tags initially. Honestly, it’s not going to hurt anything to leave them right? This is what happens — I’ve seen it time and time again.
Give me any ten websites and I’ll show you seven of them that have old or unused tags installed in the HTML code, slowing things down and accomplishing absolutely nothing. (Editor’s note: some in the industry have expressed concerns about that old code continuing to send data to vendors that are no longer partners.)
Hopefully this helps tell the backstory of tag management and why it’s being seen as the holy grail by so many marketers. Stay tuned over the next several weeks as we dive deeper into tag management use cases, challenges, benefits and best practices.

How To Apply Statistical Significance In Business Marketing

Some tests are easy to analyze. Is Superman stronger than Charlie Brown? Maybe we know the answer going into it and just need to prove we’re right, or maybe the data is heavily skewed in one direction.
But some tests are harder to analyze. Who is stronger — Superman or General Zod?
When the data don’t show a clear overwhelming winner, researchers and analysts leverage statistical significance calculators to determine if their findings are valid. But when we use the words “statistically significant” what do we really mean?
The academic definition of statistical significance focuses on the reliability of a statistic. The most common representation of reliability comes in the form of a metric called a “confidence interval”. A 95% confidence interval means that if we repeated a test, the observed result would hold true 95% of the time.

Depending on the application and purpose of the analysis, analysts can be comfortable with a wide range of confidence intervals. But in business, when was the last time you were 95% confident that something was true?

What’s Your Risk Tolerance In Marketing?

Let’s put this in perspective and test your tolerance for risk:

1. If you’re 95% confident that redesigning your email template will yield more secondary purchases, would you make the change?
2. If you’re 75% confident that using a certain ad will yield an improvement in associated transactions, would you use that ad instead?
3. If you’re 60% confident that making a change to your homepage will generate more leads, would you make the change?

Chances are you said yes to at least the first two questions and most folks probably said yes to all three. Does that mean you’re a maverick and don’t care about making responsible decisions?
Quite the contrary.

The Differing Worlds of Business & Academia

A few years ago, I got into a conversation with an old professor about business statistics. I asked him “what’s my target confidence interval for making a good business decision based on statistics?” His response has stuck with me for years as a reminder that business isn’t academia because there’s money to be made on each decision.
He said, “In academics we strive for high confidence intervals because our success hinges on proving a point. In business, if you tell me I’ll have a 51% likelihood of achieving more success with option A over option B then I’m likely to prefer option A.”
While my professor’s response was an exaggerated example, his point was that understanding probabilities and statistics around the likelihood of success enables us to make calculated risks.
If you have a 75% chance to make a million bucks and 25% chance to lose $1,000 then odds are you’re up for the bet. But if you have a 55% chance of making a million and a 45% chance of losing a million then chances are you’ll pass on the opportunity.
My point is that while confidence intervals and statistics are highly valuable tools to improve business decision making processes, your minimum acceptable confidence interval — and the associated tolerance for risk — should reflect your position.
If the proposed opportunity is high risk and low reward then you should be more calculated. But if it’s low risk and high reward then maybe it’s worth taking a chance.

5 Tips For A Successful Conversion Rate Optimization Program

If your business is struggling to compete online, it might have less to do with your competitive landscape than with your conversion optimization program.
The simple fact is that many companies can — and do — impede their website optimization efforts by having information silos, territorial teams, groups with tactical mindsets, aversion to change, and an unproductive focus on vanity metrics.
All of the above derail progress even before you factor in other companies who may have better or more mature conversion practices than your own.
Sound familiar? Here are five tips for tackling these internal conversion killers.

Tip 1: Start Small

People are afraid of change. Business organizations are no different. There’s a good chance that you’ll encounter some resistance while trying to implement your conversion rate optimization (CRO) program. Dealing with internal politics can be stressful, so it’s a good idea to have a plan for handling these challenges early on.
If you’re just starting out, it’s often best to keep your CRO initiatives small. This way, you won’t attract too much attention and won’t be too dependent on outside support. For instance, you can focus on testing and tuning unimportant landing pages first (e.g. a landing page from one of your marketing campaigns) and slowly build your case towards the more important, high-traffic ones.
The key here is to appear as non-threatening as possible. The last thing you want is to attract the attention of risk-averse constituents in your organization and get your project shot down (or shut down) before you have a chance to prove its merits.
Departmental silos and territorial thinking are among the biggest obstacles you’ll face in the course of moving your optimization projects forward. Conversion rate optimization requires a lot of teamwork, often from people who have disparate orientations and agendas. Even if you start out as one-person program, you’ll find that the future success and continuity of your program depends on getting more people on board, especially since the resources you need might be in another department.
By keeping your projects small at first, you can get things done with minimal help from designers or IT folks. Use these opportunities to make enough gains to help persuade the naysayers to support your efforts.
If you want your CRO program to move forward, minimize its scope and concentrate on demonstrating its value to the company. You can always increase the scope of your program when you’ve gained wider support.

Tip 2: Expand KPIs Beyond “Traditional” Conversions

Key performance indicators (KPIs) are metrics which let you know how near or far you are from achieving certain business goals.
Of course, one of the most valid KPIs for evaluating your marketing strategy is your conversion rate. But it shouldn’t be the only one you should be monitoring. It might be paradoxical, but the easiest way to fail in conversion rate optimization is to obsess over your conversions.
Taken as a single metric, your conversion rate won’t tell you about visitor intent, where people get stuck, or why users drop off without converting. Worse, if you have a high enough conversion rate, you can be misled into thinking that your website (or any of your channels, for that matter) is doing well even if your revenues are actually stagnant or down.
After all, you can just as easily increase your conversion rate by eliminating all non-converting traffic or drastically cutting down prices. Both are legitimate ways to boost your conversions, but they’re also not very smart.
If you want your optimization program to succeed, then learn to see how CRO fits into the big picture. And the only way to do that is to use metrics that matter to your business. If you’re an e-commerce retailer, for instance, you’d want to know the effect of your optimization activities on average order value and how many times a customer purchases from you. Or, if you’re in B2B, you might want to track conversions side by side with lead quality or the length of your buying cycle.
The key here is to focus on KPIs that are tied to profit improvements. This way, you’re not only bringing tangible benefits to your company, you’re also strengthening the financial case for conversion rate optimization in your organization.

Tip 3: Review Your Entire Funnel

Another downside to focusing just on conversions — and thinking of only purchases or leads as conversions — is that it’s a great way to chase obsolescence over time.
The top of the funnel matters. Sure, many of the people who visit your site to get a specific question answered will not become leads, and they will not become customers. But providing meaningful answers to people in that stage gives you a shot at getting remembered when the time comes that the visitor gets past the research stage and is ready to buy something.
PDF downloads, time spent on page or time spent reading for informational pages, blog visits – these are all things that you should pay attention to even if your calls-to-action, your lead forms, or your shopping cart were not necessarily in play.
Each part of the funnel has a different strategy attached – the top of the funnel may be search engine optimization and partner sites heavy, the middle of the funnel may involve keeping your promises upstream, and the bottom of the funnel can involve forms that do not ask for the world in return for a PDF, or a cart that people can understand and operate without giving them the urge to physically harm their laptops.
Each part of the funnel will require a different tactic, and a different success metric.

Tip 4: Know Your Tools & Tactics

It’s entirely possible to have a sound strategy but to fail at the tactical level. Companies with successful CRO programs have a knack for selecting and using the best possible tools to support their efforts.
If one of your objectives is to identify the sources of friction on your site, then your tactics could include primary user research and usability testing. If your objective is finding out what elements in your site attract visitor attention, then you’ll need the help of heatmaps and other visual analysis tools. Your tactics would vary depending on the objectives of your program (and, of course, your available resources).

The use of heatmaps like this one created by AttentionWizard is a

good tactic for learning about visitor attention on your site.

In order to choose the right tactic, it’s imperative that you learn the strengths and limitations of the activities and tools at your disposal. Usability and accessibility testing, for instance, is very useful in uncovering the myriad of issues that your visitors encounter on your site; but, they’re not of much help if you’re trying to discover how you can make your website more persuasive in convincing visitors to click the buy button.

Likewise, A/B testing can’t give you meaningful results if your website is making visitors jump through a lot of hoops. Even the most persuasive copy will fail to move the needle if your site is plagued with a haphazard information architecture and visitors can’t find what they need.

So, aside from ensuring that your tactics correspond to specific objectives in your program, you should make sure that the prioritization of your activities makes sense. Remember that like most programs, your conversion rate optimization initiatives operate under certain resource constraints. It pays to pick the right tactics so you can prioritize budgetary and time allocations when implementing your program.

Tip 5: Don’t Forget To Monitor & Evaluate For Impact

Monitoring and evaluation activities basically involve checking your accomplishments against your KPIs. Monitoring helps you learn if your projects are going as planned, and if not, what difficulties are keeping you from doing things that need to be done. Regular monitoring therefore allows you to resolve problems as they arise, change tactics and direction when necessary, and revise and improve your strategy if it seems ineffective in attaining a goal.
Evaluations, meanwhile, are valuable sources of information on the short and long term effects of a CRO program on the organization. Evaluation activities are done not only to gauge how successful your program was in achieving the desired outcomes or goals, but also to identify unintended effects. As such, evaluations often involve looking at not just the financial outcomes but also the influence of the program on leadership processes and cultural elements.
Done right, the monitoring and evaluation of your CRO program can provide lessons for a smoother way of implementing program activities. More importantly, data from these activities can give you insights on which tactics were most effective (and which ones were not) in getting your desired results, which in turn helps you create a better program.

Understanding Your Business

Businesses face different sets of challenges related to conversion rate optimization. Some of them are benign and easy to work through – others, well, not so much. It helps to understand early on which challenges you will be facing, so you can gradually make your CRO program better.

7 Limitations Of Big Data In Marketing Analytics

As everyone knows, “big data” is all the rage in digital marketing nowadays. Marketing organizations across the globe are trying to find ways to collect and analyze user-level or touchpoint-level data in order to uncover insights about how marketing activity affects consumer purchase decisions and drives loyalty.
In fact, the buzz around big data in marketing has risen to the point where one could easily get the illusion that utilizing user-level data is synonymous with modern marketing.
This is far from the truth. Case in point, Gartner’s hype cycle as of last August placed “big data” for digital marketing near the apex of inflated expectations, about to descend into the trough of disillusionment.
It is important for marketers and marketing analysts to understand that user-level data is not the end-all be-all of marketing: as with any type of data, it is suitable for some applications and analyses but unsuitable for others.
Following is a list describing some of the limitations of user-level data and the implications for marketing analytics.

1. User Data Is Fundamentally Biased

The user-level data that marketers have access to is only of individuals who have visited your owned digital properties or viewed your online ads, which is typically not representative of the total target consumer base.
Even within the pool of trackable cookies, the accuracy of the customer journey is dubious: many consumers now operate across devices, and it is impossible to tell for any given touchpoint sequence how fragmented the path actually is. Furthermore, those that operate across multiple devices is likely to be from a different demographic compared to those who only use a single device, and so on.
User-level data is far from being accurate or complete, which means that there is inherent danger in assuming that insights from user-level data applies to your consumer base at large.

2. User-Level Execution Only Exists In Select Channels

Certain marketing channels are well suited for applying user-level data: website personalization, email automation, dynamic creatives, and RTB spring to mind.
In many channels however, it is difficult or impossible to apply user data directly to execution except via segment-level aggregation and whatever other targeting information is provided by the platform or publisher. Social channels, paid search, and even most programmatic display is based on segment-level or attribute-level targeting at best. For offline channels and premium display, user-level data cannot be applied to execution at all.

3. User-Level Results Cannot Be Presented Directly

More accurately, it can be presented via a few visualizations such as a flow diagram, but these tend to be incomprehensible to all but domain experts. This means that user-level data needs to be aggregated up to a daily segment-level or property-level at the very least in order for the results to be consumable at large.

4. User-Level Algorithms Have Difficulty Answering “Why”

Largely speaking, there are only two ways to analyze user-level data: one is to aggregate it into a “smaller” data set in some way and then apply statistical or heuristic analysis; the other is to analyze the data set directly using algorithmic methods.
Both can result in predictions and recommendations (e.g. move spend from campaign A to B), but algorithmic analyses tend to have difficulty answering “why” questions (e.g. why should we move spend) in a manner comprehensible to the average marketer. Certain types of algorithms such as neural networks are black boxes even to the data scientists who designed it. Which leads to the next limitation:

5. User Data Is Not Suited For Producing Learnings

This will probably strike you as counter-intuitive. Big data = big insights = big learnings, right?
Wrong! For example, let’s say you apply big data to personalize your website, increasing overall conversion rates by 20%. While certainly a fantastic result, the only learning you get from the exercise is that you should indeed personalize your website. While this result certainly raises the bar on marketing, but it does nothing to raise the bar for marketers.
Actionable learnings that require user-level data – for instance, applying a look-alike model to discover previously untapped customer segments – are relatively few and far in between, and require tons of effort to uncover. Boring, ol’ small data remains far more efficient at producing practical real-world learnings that you can apply to execution today.

6. User-Level Data Is Subject To More Noise

If you have analyzed regular daily time series data, you know that a single outlier can completely throw off analysis results. The situation is similar with user-level data, but worse.
In analyzing touchpoint data, you will run into situations where, for example, a particular cookie received – for whatever reason – a hundred display impressions in a row from the same website within an hour (happens much more often than you might think). Should this be treated as a hundred impressions or just one, and how will it affect your analysis results?
Even more so than “smaller” data, user-level data tends to be filled with so much noise and potentially misleading artifacts, that it can take forever just to clean up the data set in order to get reasonably accurate results.

7. User Data Is Not Easily Accessible Or Transferable

Because of security concerns, user data cannot be made accessible to just anyone, and requires care in transferring from machine to machine, server to server.
Because of scale concerns, not everyone has the technical know-how to query big data in an efficient manner, which causes database admins to limit the number of people who has access in the first place.
Because of the high amount of effort required, whatever insights that are mined from big data tend to remain a one-off exercise, making it difficult for team members to conduct follow-up analyses and validation.
All of these factors limit agility of analysis and ability to collaborate.

So What Role Does Big Data Play?

So, given all of these limitations, is user-level data worth spending time on? Absolutely — its potential to transform marketing is nothing short of incredible, both for insight generation as well as execution.
But when it comes to marketing analytics, I am a big proponent of picking the lowest-hanging fruit first: prioritizing analyses with the fastest time to insight and largest potential value. Analyses of user-level data falls squarely in the high-effort and slow-delivery camp, with variable and difficult-to-predict value.
Big data may have the potential to yield more insights than smaller data, but it will take much more time, consideration, and technical ability in order to extract them. Meanwhile, there should be plenty of room to gain learnings and improve campaign results using less granular data. I have yet to see such a thing as a perfectly managed account, or a perfectly executed campaign.
So yes, definitely start investing in big data capabilities. Meanwhile, let’s focus as much if not more in maximizing value from smaller data.

How To Create A Content Marketing Culture At Your Company

Creating a content marketing culture at your company can be quite the obstacle. Making even the smallest of modification to company policies and procedures can be extremely difficult, so how do you go about changing the entire company culture?
For most, creating a culture of content will require a shift in mindset from the top down – starting with the executives, and ending with each and every employee across departments and teams.
When you’re seeking such a dramatic shift, begin your campaign with senior management.

Convince Your Boss

Management must be on board to drive the cultural shift and successfully change the mindset of the rest of the company. Because of this, the first step in creating a content marketing culture is convincing the boss to invest in content marketing.
When pitching higher-ups on content marketing, focus on the following:

• Pitch Personalization – Personalize your pitch to your executives. Try to explain content marketing in a way that relates back to their personal interests. Talk to the CFO in financial terms, the CMO in terms of marketing objectives.
• Education – Educate the executives on what content marketing is and what it can do for your business.
• Objection Handling – Come prepared with rebuttals to common content marketing objections, including upfront cost and ROI.
• Competitive Situation – Showcase what your competitors are doing with content marketing. Explain how you can fill the gaps and present the same information better.
• Strategy – Lay out your plan from beginning to end, including timelines, implementation, content creation, promotion, and measurement.

Get Everyone On The Same Page

Once you have management buy-in, take the necessary steps to make sure everyone is on the same page with your content plans.
Explain the purpose of your content strategy. Why is the business getting started with content marketing? What are the business goals and objectives toward which you’re working?
Additionally, be sure to share the content marketing process. How will you brainstorm ideas? What does the creation process look like? Where and how will you promote your content?
Sharing these details will help each employee understand their role in the content marketing process, as well as the “big picture” going forward.

Invest In The Vision

As soon you roll out the company’s content marketing vision to your employees – put your money where your mouth is and invest in the vision. If you truly want to transform the culture at your company, you will need to provide the tools and training your employees need to succeed.
Also, consider investing in new hires – a content leader or better, a content team, to manage the content process. This team will serve as your internal spokespeople for content by illustrating the value of content to the rest of the company.
It should be responsible for content strategy development, ideation, and content creation. Additionally, the team should be in charge of cross-department coordination, and continually developing creativity internally.
Though your marketing team will have to work hand in hand with the content team in order to achieve success with content marketing, employing a team to focus specifically on content strategy and creation has its advantages.
Not only does having a content team tell your employees you’re serious about making this culture shift, but it ensures your content strategy won’t fall by the wayside or get put on the backburner.

Enable & Encourage

Though your content and marketing teams will manage the process from content strategy to measuring ROI, every single employee should be able to and encouraged to participate in the content process. Start by including different teams and departments in brainstorming sessions.
Some of your employees spend more time with customers than others, but each one can bring something to the table. Through these brainstorming sessions, you will you gain new perspective for content ideas while the collaborative environment can be great for team building.
Also, encourage employees to contribute to content creation, and let them know that it’s okay to spend work time doing it. Provide guidelines so the content will be closer to meeting the standards necessary for publishing, but also have members of your content team tasked with editing employee-generated content.
Staying “on brand” through tone, style and voice is important, and your editors can ensure that content created by colleagues fits the bill before it’s published.

Reward Top Participants

Not feeling appreciated is the number one reason Americans leave their jobs, so employee recognition needs to be a high priority. Fortunately, your content culture may create more opportunities for employee recognition. Make it a point to reward your top content performers – first and foremost by recognizing their accomplishments in front of their superiors and peers.
This can be done in many ways – perhaps in a company-wide meeting, or even in a “company announcement” type of email. Be sure to highlight the content created, and any results – traffic, social metrics or ROI – to further showcase the value of content and possibly inspire others to contribute, while giving your employee the credit deserved.

Practice What You Preach

As mentioned at the beginning of this article, creating a content marketing culture at your company starts with management. To successfully foster a content-focused culture, higher ups need to participate and lead by example.
Sure, some employees will participate without needing much convincing, but others will mimic what others are doing – especially upper management.
Like hiring a leader or team devoted to content, C-suite-level participation also sends a message to other employees – this “content” business is here to stay.  When some of the highest-ranking managers start participating in content creation, others will certainly follow suit.
Creating a content marketing culture won’t be easy – but it can be done. From getting management buy-in and investing in the vision to enabling, encouraging and rewarding employees who contribute, successfully shifting the mindset across an organization will take perseverance and a lot of hard work.
While you shouldn’t expect the employees’ mindsets to change overnight, following the above steps will help put your company on track to fostering a culture of content in no time.