Reading Adobe’s Digital Marketing Blog (Part 3 / End)

Has an Executive Sponsor Got Your Back?

  • Without executive sponsorship it’s hard to overcome organizational inertia
  • Senior executive should within a key stakeholder group for WA (e.g. ecommerce, marketing, etc)
  • They should have enough power and influence
  • Depending on the WA maturity the sponsor executive may vary (tactical to strategic)
  • Executive sponsor responsibilities
    1. Align WA program with corporate strategy
    2. Protecting the WA team from other initiatives/corporate politics
    3. Solving problems like budget constraints
    4. Promoting the success of the WA program
      1. Effective executive sponsor should be committed and involved

Online Accountability: Are You Data-Driven or Merely Data-Informed?

  • Without accountability your organization is just data-informed
  • Establish clear goals
  • Regularly talk about the performances
  • Give feedback and maybe rewards – can be adversarial
  • Accounting should start at the top. Lead by example
  • Expand beyond web KPIs

Soft vs Hard Bounces: A Closer Look at Bounce Rate

  • Hard bounce rate = Bounce Rate on new visitors
  • Soft bounce rate = Bounce Rate on returning visitors

Switching to a Data-Driven Culture

  • You have appeal to the rational and emotional sides
  • Sometimes resistance is lack of clarity
  • Laziness can be exhaustion
  • Tactics:
    • Look at what works well instead of was is not working well – easier to promote
    • Provide actions that have to be taken to change
    • What does this mean for the near future?
    • Surprise people – testing stuff is a great tool
    • Try to achieve lots of small goals instead of one big one
    • See failures in execution as learning not as failing
    • Provide a data-driven environment
    • Build habits – repeat, repeat, repeat
    • Provide workshops for homogeneous groups

Five Times to Test: 4 — When you spot an opportunity in your analytics

  • Often hypotheses drive testing
  • But you can generate hypotheses with analytics
  • They took the ~50 top-selling products and plotter conversion rate and avg. selling price
  • Look for outliers
    • Positive outliers: try to promote them more prominently
    • Negative outliers: Check at least the page – is it broken? No content?

Is Your Data-Driven Organization Heading into a Lake?

  • Data should inform and shape not dictate or control
  • It’s like science: intuition helps to understand and inspire, data helps to check and reject
  • It helps you question your assumptions
  • Data-informed: nice to know this information
  • Data-driven: acting on the information

Are You Using Web Analytics To Power & Improve Your Testing?

  • Don’t test randomly, test with hypotheses
  • Benefits of WA:
    • Helps you to understand your testing efforts in context
    • Helps you to prioritize testing areas
    • Helps you to improve your decision maing
    • Provides insights that help you to make even better tests
  • Things you should do:
    • Analyze your conversion funnels
    • Start higher up the funnel (note: in contrast to previous article)
    • Check your top landing pages that have high bounce rates
    • Check heat maps for your testing pages – what is the customer intent?
    • Set alerts for new highly visited pages
    • Improve your test plans with analytics insights
    • WAs and testing people should work together

Never a Failed Test

  • Testing is a long-term strategy
  • Does every test answer a clear business question?
  • Do you know before the test what you do, depending on the results, afterwards?
  • Negative lift is even good lift – you learned something!
  • Do you think testing is valuable or risky?
  • Do you have to hit the big wins? – This can interfere with your learning ambitions

Why we do what we do: Garbage in and Garbage Out — Congruence Bias

  • “the ten­dency to test hypothe­ses exclu­sively through direct test­ing, in con­trast to tests of pos­si­ble alter­na­tive hypothe­ses”
  • Example: Hypotheses: Button 1 opens the door, not Button 2; Test: Just press Button 1 and check if it opens the door
  • In web testing: Test picture against no picture, or CTA against no CTA
  • It’s easy to get big results but not great answers

Great summary/overview: Digital Governance: Best Practices from the Trenches