NATIVE has embarked on a project to offer its clients an overview of their digital performance along with complete transparency of its effect on the client’s bottom line.
“Analytics is often the first view a company has into the intricate movements of a consumer through their product interaction,” says Antonio Petra, Head of Insights at NATIVE. “It’s a fascinating journey that is in itself as entertaining to watch as it is to interpret.”
However, Antonio says for the most part much of this interaction is meaningless. Coming from someone who bases most of what he does on analytics, this is a pretty unusual statement. “Basically, most of the data that really intelligent analytics tools use to gather information on your digital customer interaction is a pointless data dump.”
When NATIVE was formed on the back of a merger between C
, the Insights division was formed. With the creation of this division Antonio implemented two critical learnings in all NATIVE reporting:
1) The 90/10 rule as defined by Avinash Kaushik – 10% of web analytics expenditures should be spent on technology, the remaining 90% should be spent on expert human analysts.
2) Data is meaningless without actionable insights and reports.
“With this in mind we created a new way for our customers to view their digital platform data – a way that would cut the clutter, offer as close to pure insight as possible and show how their digital platforms effected their bottom line performance,” explains Antonio. “The only method for doing this was to construct dashboards for our clients. Dashboards that would be updatable and provide complete transparency over online performance at any stage of the project life-stage.”
The concept of dashboards is nothing new and they can be created easily by almost any analytics programme. Antonio and his team took this further and created dashboards as stand-alone elements, which present multiple levels of a business’ data in an easy to understand way. “We have reduced hundreds of complex events on the website into measurable buckets (essentially a measurement framework) which become metrics for consumer interaction and can be tied directly to our client’s bottom line,” he says. “We have given clients a really simple way of evaluating their online performance.”
But that was only the first step. Once the dynamic measurement framework was live and operating in real-time, it became possible to measure campaigns against these metrics.
“We decided to break down campaigns and campaign elements and not only measure them against the normal website metrics, but also by the quality of traffic and how far the campaign took a user through the journey with a brand. Lastly, and this was the most ambitious part of the project, we also decided to add Return on Investment (ROI).”
Defining ROI is a collaborative exercise undertaken with each client, assessing the most valuable form of interaction and then ascertaining the value of the engagement based on how much it cost to achieve the goal. “If the engagement goal is a purchase, as it is on sites such as www.kalahari.net, it’s easy to determine ROI. However, for most of our clients the end goal is not actually a sale, the aim is deep engagement. In these cases, we still have to show how the website has impacted the bottom line and we do this by choosing a point in the user journey which is closest to a sale.”
Clients that have been exposed to the NATIVE Dashboard have found it to be extremely useful, so much so that they have extended it to other parts of their business and measuring data outside of digital marketing.
“The ultimate goal of any digital campaign is to be able to say that either a purchase has happened or deep brand immersion has occurred. The dashboard provides clients with a long-term view of their online activities, giving them a mechanism to determine which campaigns worked and which ones didn’t and then to adjust strategy accordingly,” concludes Antonio.
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