Tag Archives: analytics

Dropbox and Xobni at Web 2.0 Expo

05 Wednesday May 2010

Posted by in Analytics, Technology, Web 2.0 Expo

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In the first session I attended on Day 2 of Web 2.0 Expo 2010, Dropbox and Xobni shared their stories and lessons from launch.  It was a really good presentation (Adam Smith from Xobni posted the slides on his blog post, linked above).

A lot of the advice is stuff we’ve all heard before: make sure you have a great product, test a lot, get user feedback, create scarcity to build buzz, be responsive and bold, focus on doing the critical few really, really well.  Even if that advice has been beaten to death, I still find startup success stories inspiring.

One thing that caught my attention was an almost throw-away statement that Adam (I think it was him) made at the end.  He said that users they acquired through PPC didn’t convert to paying at a very high rate, but they tended to refer a lot of customers who did.  He also mentioned that Zynga measures referrals through Facebook as well.  The interesting thing is not that the referrals happen, but that they measure it and account for it in the ROI analysis of their marketing campaigns.

I might be reading into his really brief comment, but if it’s true, that’s definitely an area where I could learn a lot more.

At Homestead and mostly at Intuit, we only do the first level accounting in measuring the ROI of campaigns. That is, we count the number of users who are directly attributable to the campaign.  It’s definitely easier measuring users by their propensity to sign up/purchase than measuring users by their propensity to refer others.  All referred sign ups are really just considered gravy. This first level of ROI accounting has been really successful for us as it still continues to scale.  But the question remains: are we leaving money on the table?

There are a lot of questions in the details of how you’d go about doing this “second level accounting”:

  • What are the best ways to track a second level user back to the referring user and then back to the originating lead gen source?
  • Assuming we would track using links of some sort, should we try to account for “offline” referrals (using untracked links)?
  • What is a reasonable time frame to count the referrals from a first level user?
  • Does a first level user get any credit for third level signups?
  • Do you account for the speed of the referral?  For instance, you could credit the first level user with all $ collected from the second level user within 12 months of the first level user’s signup, thus rewarding those who refer faster.

I’m sure there’s more.

If we can figure this out with any reasonable amount of accuracy, this could significantly change the economics of how we do acquisition marketing right now.

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Thoughts from Web 2.0 Expo: Communilytics

03 Monday May 2010

Posted by in Analytics, Social Networking, Technology, Web 2.0 Expo

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My first day at Web 2.0 Expo 2010 was spent in the Applied Communilytics Intensive workshop.  Basically, it was a look at how and why you should look at the analytics of social marketing campaigns and was headed by Alistair Croll and Sean Power of Watching Websites.  Here is their rundown of the day.

My take?  It was too high-level for me and didn’t really get into a lot of details.  Maybe I’ve been living in the world of web and business analytics too much but there really wasn’t much new or ground-breaking here.  But there were some interesting points.

For example: the primary point that Sean kept referring to all day was that you should know your business goals before you embark on any social campaign, so you know what to measure and whether or not you’re succeeding.  Seems obvious and, well, is obvious.  Ryan Kuder, one of the panelists who was recently laid off from his company due to an acquisition (awkward!) harped on that point, too.  This sounds like the gripes from marketers who are asked to do work because some exec thinks it’s interesting instead of knowing why it’s important.  I feel your pain; I know I feel it all the time.  But unfortunately, that doesn’t make for an interesting presentation about communilytics.  That’s really just Project Management 101: be very clear about your goal.

In the defense of the presenters, I think they really did know what they were talking about and if I had a particular question, I think they’d be great resources.  Which leads me to believe that the lack of detail in the presentation stems from one of two things:

  1. It’s difficult to create a detailed presentation with truly actionable ideas in this area for this broad of a group.
  2. Communilytics really is just a flavor of web/business analytics and there really is no other special sauce.  Know your goals, translate to KPIs, and you’re off to the races.

So which do I think it is?  At the end of the day, we joined with the Lean Startup Intensive by Eric Ries.  At the end of that session, Eric said that those of us in attendance were at the cutting edge of this stuff, the earliest adopters, the trail blazers.  If that’s true, then it’s #2.  And I tend to agree.

Here at Intuit, it really doesn’t feel like we’re doing anything that cutting edge in tracking or measuring our social efforts, but Kira Wampler  told me that everyone told her that we were cutting edge, too.  Maybe I’ve been living and breathing analytics and optimization so much that I’ve lost sight of that.

I’ll just spew out my other observations… uh… now:

  • Referring URLs are useless (or becoming more useless) as people follow links found in apps (like desktop/phone Twitter apps).
  • Alistair and Sean defined your message as becoming “viral” when the average number of people who repeat/amplify/retweet your message is > 1.  Maybe not a new definition, but I hadn’t heard it before.
  • A lot rides on your ability to get your followers/fans/users to “retweet” or otherwise amplify your message (in Facebook, would that be “like”?).  So watch and track that carefully; learn from what does and doesn’t trigger a retweet from your base.
  • Successful social campaigns are not about me (the company) or you (the user) but about something else. Get the user into a safe conversation where they don’t feel they owe you anything in return (money, time, etc.). Not terribly new, but illustrated amusingly by Alistair with a story about picking up women in Las Vegas.
  • Tactic: send meeting requests to bloggers to get on their calendars. Makes sense to me; that’s how to make sure I do something too!
  • You can’t really A/B test Twitter messages (it’s a broadcast medium so everyone gets it). One alternative: use PPC ad copy and measure click-through rate to test your message if you really want to.  Or as Hiten Shah from Kiss Metrics suggested, just send it out and apologize if it bombs.
  • Alistair predicted that we’ll go from a PPC to a PPA (acquisition) to a PP-change-of-opinion model.  That is, as social sites get better at measuring your brand value on their network, they could charge you based on that increase, not just per impression, click, or acquisition.  Interesting to consider.
  • And the people who impressed me were the presenters, Alistair Croll and Sean Powell, as well as Hiten Shah, Erin Hunter, and Dave McClure.

And that’s it!  Looking forward to tomorrow!