Context is King, or at least a Prince

We've heard content is King.
OK, I buy that, but can we have 2 Kings? While Content is a critical focus for making visitors' experiences rewarding, is there an equivalent for us as marketers or business people trying to understand visitor behavior and ultimately influence it? You know, when we have to dig deeper into understanding who came, what they did, and why...basically resorting to using the "A" word, that "Analytics" thing for websites. For me that 'King' is 'context'.

What is context?
What would you think if you heard "Jackie is really fired up!" Is she angry, with smoke coming out of her ears, storming down the hallway? Or is she super motivated, excited about a new idea and eager to tell people? You need more information to make the call, right?



Segway to your website (don't we always somehow end up there?) Avinash Kaushik, the very well-known Analytics blogger and writer, describes web analytics as thought of as having three parts:

1. Clickstream data analysis to infer intent. The classical approach from log files. The "where" analysis


2. Outcomes Analysis. Conversion rates. Revenue. Specific goals. The "so what" aspect.


3. Experience Analytics. This is the "why". Did they leave a page satisfied? Or did they abandon a form and bounce? If so, what was missing that would have made the difference?
   This is the hardest part, and new focus of attention in analytics.

The "Why" question and associated analysis, once you have the other two in order, is ultimately the most important for ongoing improvement. Because if you can answer the "Why", then you have the power to improve improve 1. and 2. Without it, we're just guessing.

Context is really having all three working for you. Context is knowing the referring site they came from, the forms they filled out on your site, the items they searched for and if they found them, the videos or white papers they chose, and even the other visits they made over time. That covers the "where" and the outcomes or "so what".

The toughest is the 'why', which helps you dig really deep. There are several ways to get this.
Feedback in a poll or an 'open' field in a form is a great way to get context in a visitor's own words. A comment to a blog post is another way to see what sparks interest, and how they respond. That voice gives you what the clickpaths miss.

Perhaps the most meaningful way to quantitatively understand a preference is to test, either A/B split testing or multivariate. This used to be characterized by 'easy to say, hard to do'. This certainly was my team's experience in using Google Analytics and Google optimizer to run multivariate tests as a third party to our website CMS. Now with Sitecore's OMS, which combines A/B or Multivariate testing built into the CMS, it is so much more approachable for our team. Our content editors can also set up tests, without programming and hassles.

So now the full context is possible with the same people in Marketing who are helping deliver our content. So while content is King, in order to keep making it useful I think Context at the least deserves to be a Prince or Princess!

The Pitch that curved around the earth

Don't you appreciate things done well? I got a pitch a while back that was perfect, and it happened to also pull in the sales leaders at Sitecore from around the world at the same time. We all thought it looked like an ideal answer, and like a magnetic star pulling our little metal vessels in multiple countries, we got sucked into a consistent orbit.

The product being pitched was actually a GeoIP lookup service that lets you know who is on your website. The sales guy from the GeoIP service did a great job of simulating who our desired prospects would be, and made a nice report of them enbedded in the emails he sent out. And he wrote about the value of knowing what organizations were on your website, what they were interested in, and learning about it -presto! instantly!- directly to you and all the sales team regardless of location on the globe.

I had over 6 emails from our sales leaders - let's see, North America, Denmark , Australia, the U.K, Netherlands and more- all demanding that we get something like this! ...Why aren't my own ideas met with this enthusiam? :-)

Anyway, our product development guys and gals had actually already been thinking about this, and our enthusiasm fastracked this aspect into the first part of our Online Marketing Suite (OMS). But beyond identifying who is on the website and what pages they went to, our full Suite tells where they came from, what they searched for, what they need, and whether they had a successful experience on our website.

The OMS is great for all our web stakeholders. And now we are addicted. And our sales team? You should see the Hall of Fame pitches they are throwing with this- all around the world!