Product Management Insight

Emails have been an integral part of communication since a long time on the Web. It is scary to even think of a world without emails. "Over 50% of Internet users check or send e-mail on a typical day" (Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-mail_marketing). In the world of Web Analytics, emails plays a very important role in advertising, bringing in fresh traffic to a website or enhancing customer relationship. This particular branch of direct Online Marketing/Web Analytics is known as Email marketing.

Just like Affiliate marketing, Contextual marketing, Offline marketing etc, there are huge advantages of leveraging email as a powerful medium for advertising purposes.

Advantages of using Email marketing:

1) Low Cost and Reach: Email campaigns are much cheaper to implement in comparison to Banner campaigns or contextual ads. Its accessibility and reach make it a front runner in inciting traffic and creating awareness about your website.
2) Quick and Easy: Email campaign/newsletter is usually very easy to implement and is the fastest medium to send a message across. Email Campaigns can be easily customized with graphics, video etc.
3) Tracking is Simple: There are many tools available which are specifically designed to track email campaigns. You can also track email campaigns yourself. I will be explaining how we can track email campaigns ourselves.
4) Test email for best results: Email campaigns can also be subjected to AB tests incorporating different subject lines, different content of email or different call to actions. You can measure the open rates or Click through rate of each test email campaign and measure efficiency.

Disadvantage of Email marketing:

Prone to Spam and Phishing attacks: Emails are often notorious with spam/junk sent to your inbox which causes frustration among customers. Hopefully the Spam filters of email clients do a good job to an extent but usually good emails might get filtered too. So there is always a trade-off. Similarly spammers/hackers might create Phishing/Fake email campaigns and incite you to go to a different website which might look like a legitimate website.

Email Marketing Metrics:

There are many metrics that we can measure to gauge the success of an Email campaign. Let’s try to understand this from a conversion perspective as shown below.

• Emails sent
• Emails sent successfully (Non bounce emails)
• Bounces
• Unsubscribes
• Emails opened (Open Rate: emails viewed/emails sent)
• Clicks on link in the email (CTR: Total Clicks/Emails Opened)
• Visitors redirected to target website from email campaign (Landing page Visitors or Visits/Emails sent)
• Conversion rate on target website (Confirmation page Visitors or Visits/Emails Sent)

Email Marketing deep dive and best practices:

1) Open rate is considered to be an important metric while measuring an email campaign but tracking it has some constraints. Mostly all email campaigns are created in HTML and tagging them with a JavaScript snippet of Google Analytics/Omniture will not cause the image pixel to be fired. The reason why it happens is because email clients don’t run JavaScript. A potential workaround that can be to include a .gif image call in the HTML email to get the impressions of the email/opens. Based on the read emails, calculate the Open rate: opens/emails sent.

2) The target outbound link embedded in the email should always contain respective URL parameters to track that the campaign is email specific. Visitors landing on the target website should be attributed to the email campaign based on these tracking parameters. A perfect method for tracking emails yourself can be tried with the Google URL Builder tool found here:



As shown in the image above, when we click on the ‘Generate URL’ button the URL generated is http://rkapoor.blogspot.com/?utm_source=rohanblog&utm_medium=email&utm_content=textlink&utm_campaign=testemails which can be placed as a text link in your email campaign to track a particular campaign. You can then go to Google Analytics and view your Campaigns report.

3) If you do not want to use tracking parameters in your URL, then you can create separate landing pages only specific to your email newsletters. Once you start getting traffic, then you can measure the Visits on the unique email landing page to measure your campaign response to get data for the newsletter clickthroughs.

4) Opt-in is another metric that you can measure to gauge success/response of email opt-in links present on your website. You can measure how many visitors click on a check box to opt-in for an email newsletters. The metric here can be Email Opt-ins/Page Views.

There are various tools available to track email campaigns in the market. Some of those are Madmimi, Aweber, Icontact and Jangomail. Please let me know if I need to add more.

It was really nice writing about a successful, yet underrated topic of Email marketing. I hope you like this post and will highly appreciate if you can share your feedback on this topic.

Web Analytics is not just pulling numbers from the Web Analytics tools and reporting numbers, it is much more than that. As an Analyst, your task is to report the numbers in a presentable and descriptive manner with analysis but also give suggestions on how to continuously improve the website in terms of appeal and ease of use. This article will touch base on the 3 major website conversion testing methods: AB Testing, Multivariate Testing and Segmentation Testing.

AB Testing or Bucket Test as you might call it is a way to test 2 variations of a page in order to determine which page is more successful in terms of pulling people towards a website goal. We split traffic on each page based on a defined proportion (50/50, 90/10). Usually the first step where there are most chances of convincing a user to buy something is the homepage as this is the page that defines a website in terms of visual appeal, product listing, ease of navigation, color scheme and even text. These things go a long way in generating a sense of trust in the users. For e.g. we have a website whose business model is selling books and there are 2 AB Test pages with the first page being the Control (original) having a discount offer banner on the top and the second page doesn’t have any discount offer banner but a slideshow listing the top selling books. We will then put tracking codes on both these pages and identify each page with a unique identifier in order to measure each page’s success. This success is usually measured in terms of the Conversion ratio which can be measured as: Visitors on the Conversion page/Visitors on the Test/Home Page. Some tools that can help you achieve AB Testing are Google Website Optimizer, Verster, SiteSpect and SplitAnalyzer. Below is a screenshot depicting a typical AB test report.


The second and the most efficient method to optimize your page is known as a Multivariate Testing. In this method, we don’t use multiple pages to determine a higher conversion rate but we test the same page by changing the elements around. For e.g. we can test headlines, colors, buttons and images on the same page by correlating each element with each other to find the best possible combination/element. The method used to achieve this is known as the Taguchi Method. This method takes into consideration the sample size and how long a test should run in order to have a clear winner. Google Website Optimizer uses this method to measure a multivariate test. This tool lets you view the various combinations and elements separately and then based on the Taguchi method decides the winner. All you need to do is add a tracking code on to your page and Google Website Optimizer will then split the traffic equally on each element separately. Please look at the below screenshot to understand how Google Website Optimizer measures a multivariate test. Some other tools that can help you achieve multivariate Testing are Google Website Optimizer, Optimost, Memetrics, Verster, Maxymiser and Omniture Test&Target.


Another form of testing which can be used to target specific segments like country, keywords, referring domains and direct traffic is known as Segmentation. In this we split the traffic based on a defined segment and then track the success factor/behavior pattern of each segment. This is the first step to achieve Behavioral Targeting which is in itself a very powerful way to understand user patterns. Please look at the below mockup segmentation test report screenshot.
Again the best KPI to measure the success is the Conversion rate. Some tools that can help you achieve Segmentation are Google Analytics (Free), Kefta and Maxymiser.

A Content Management System is used to handle website content which can include text, images, audio, video etc. A CMS allows you to create a website without having any prior knowledge of programming. For the past couple of weeks I tried my hands on open source content management systems. The 2 premier open source content management systems in the market are Joomla and Drupal. The names sound funny but these 2 tools are one of the most robust tools available which can give any other CMS tools a run for their money. It was a tough couple of weeks to figure out the installation process of setting up the Content Management systems. After going through tons of articles on the Web, I managed to successfully install these on my machine.

Through this article I’ll try to share my experience in setting up the CMS tools in a local environment. Following are a few tools you would need on your machine in order to properly configure these CMS tools:

1) IIS (Internet Information Services/Apache Web Server: You can install IIS on your Windows XP machine by going to Control Panel -> Add or Remove Programs -> Windows Components Wizard and select IIS from the list as shown in the figure to install it. IIS is a Web Server which enables you to publish your webpages in a local/global environment. I didn’t use Apache but you can use it instead of IIS.


2) PHP (Hypertext Preprocessor): PHP is a Server Side programming language used to produce dynamic Web Pages. We don’t need PHP to do any sort of programming in this walkthrough but it is pivotal as the CMS tools we are using contain pages created in PHP. PHP can be downloaded at www.php.net. Once you have installed the PHP executable and setup your IIS Server, you can test whether your PHP is working correctly or not. You would need to create a document test.php and enter the following text in it: ?php phpinfo();? included in <> tags. Save the test.php and place it in this folder: C:\Inetpub\wwwroot\test.php which is your IIS Server’s root directory. Once all the above steps are complete, test your PHP installation by going to this URL http://localhost/test.php. If you see the page as shown in the image, it means that PHP is successfully installed on your machine.


3) MySQL Server: MySQL is a free open source database that has all the features that an expensive server can have (For e.g. SQL Server, TeraData costs can go up to thousands of dollars). Joomla and Drupal make use of MySQL as the back-end which provide storage for all text content and configuration settings. You can download MySQL Server from www.mysql.com but don’t forget to download the MySQL administrator (Image below) as well which will provide a front end GUI (Graphical User Interface) for your databases. Configuring and Installing MySQL is very simple and easy but if you do face any problems, you can always search the Web. It is however mandatory to create a username and password which you will have to use in order to install Joomla and Drupal. (Note: One of the biggest problems I faced after the installation of MySQL and PHP was getting MySQL compatible/talk to PHP. Basically there are a lot of extensions or Dlls that you might have to play with or change in order to create a successful connection between MySQL and PHP. I still can’t figure out which exact extension was responsible for making these 2 tools compatible but it is either php_mysql.dll or php_mysqli.dll. So if you are unlucky, then you might have to wait a little longer than expected to make Joomla or Drupal work. However, I finally managed to make these 2 tools talk by installing EasyPHP which is explained next.)


4) EasyPHP: This tool allows quick compatibility of PHP with the Web Servers and databases. It was only after installing this tool was I able to access Joomla and Drupal on localhost. This tool will install all the extensions that PHP needs in order to create a connection with MySQL. You can install EasyPHP from http://www.easyphp.org. Once you have installed and executed EasyPHP, you can see an E icon on the taskbar (bottom right of your screen). Right click on that and go to Configuration -> PHP Extension. Once you see the box as shown in the below image, you should select all the extensions listed in the box as it will install the necessary Dlls.


Once you have completed the above steps, then you need to install Joomla which you can download from www.joomla.org and Drupal from www.drupal.org. Choose the latest installation versions (I chose these files Joomla_1.0.15-Stable-Full_Package.zip and drupal-6.1.tar.gz) and extract these files in the root directory of your Web Server (C:\Inetpub\wwwroot\joomla and C:\Inetpub\wwwroot\drupal). Once you have extracted these files, you would need to create respective databases for these 2 tools in MySQL Administrator as shown in the below image.


Finally you would need to go to http://localhost/joomla/index.php and http://localhost/drupal/index.php in order to install these 2 tools on your machine. While installing these tools, it would be required to create a connection with MySQL Server in order for these CMS tools to publish their files on the database by entering your MySQL credentials as defined earlier. Once your installation is complete, you should see the following pages as shown in the last 2 images.




All in all it was a nice experience learning the CMS installation procedure as it has added a new dimension to my career and also a skill-set. Hopefully you like this article and let me know if you have any questions regarding the rigorous installation process as I’ll try my best to help you.

I read an interesting post regarding the Page View KPI no longer being part of the Web Analytics metrics in the future as Nielsen/NetRatings have decided to scrap Page views from their rankings. The article alleges that the Page View metrics is incapable of telling us about the overall user experience as nowadays most websites make use of widgets, videos , flash, AJAX content etc and it is impossible to measure those attributes with the use of Page Views. The article mentions “If you have widgets, you don't really have page views. If you do videos, you don't have page views.”

Will Page Views suffer the same fate as the Hits metrics? In the nascent stage of Web Analytics, Hits used to be the key metrics tracked in place of Page Views but as the Web Analytics community became mature, the Hits metrics was found wanting. This is because Hits measured everything from loading of images, CSS to JavaScript which meant that Hits will count all the individual requests and report them seperately which in turn was termed as inaccurate. One of the reasons why Hits noticed a quick exit was due to the fact that it could only be tracked via Server Logs and with the advent of conventional Web Analytics tools, it was easier to find a replacement in the form of Page Views.

Are Page views dead? Personally I think it is too early to say that. I say this because around 90% of the companies today would be using Page Views in their day to day reporting/dashboards and also all the major Web Analytics tools report this as a prime metrics. Page Views have been widely accepted as an industry standard and it would be really difficult to replace it immediately as a suitable replacement would not be easy to find. Though we have noticed in the past that Visits and Unique Visitors have been considered a better metrics than Page Views but it doesn’t really mean that we can totally discount Page Views as they have their own value in Web Analytics.

What can be the possible replacements for Page Views? I don’t think the existing prime metrics like Visits, Visitors would replace it but I agree with what was written in the article about User Engagement. User Engagement according to me is the Visitor experience on a webpage ranging from clicks on specific links, interaction with the embedded applications like Videos, Widgets etc and most importantly Time Spent. Based on my experience, I’ve noticed that majority of the exits on a website happen within the first 15 seconds and it is crucial for us to decrease the exit rate for this time range. Ideally in case of eCommerce websites, a user session should range between 5-10 minutes as I think by this time the user is well adept with the website interface. He would then decide to perform the appropriate task like filling a form to buying something. Similarly the user engagement metrics would be different for a content, classifieds and News website. So the Time Spent metrics is in a way a subset of User Engagement.

All in all I think it is too early to totally discount Page Views from Web Analytics but sooner or later the industry will decide to replace it. But whenever that happens, I sincerely hope that Page Views would be given a graceful exit unlike it’s predecessor Hits.

Microsoft Excel is the lifeline of most of the reporting done these days and it is imperative for an Analyst to present the data as visually as possible. So I’ll change gears this time and write about a very useful feature I learnt last week which I call as Excel Alert. This is not an in-built attribute in Excel but it resembles the properties of an Excel feature known as Conditional Formatting. This characteristic allows us apply formats like color, bold text etc on values in a cell or formula. For e.g. if we have 2 cells containing ratios, conditional formatting allows us to determine which is greater by highlighting either of the 2 cells in Red, Green or some other format.

This article will help you get introduced to yet another Conditional Formatting feature which will add more visual appeal to your reports. Instead of using CF we will make use of AutoShapes to determine a change in cell values. To accomplish this, let’s look at the below steps and screenshots:
1) Open Microsoft Excel and go to Insert -> Picture -> AutoShapes. Choose Basic Shapes and select Isosceles Triangle from the list (You can choose the shape of your choice). Select a cell and draw the shape in that cell (I have merged 3 cells and accommodated the shape) and rotate the shape of the Triangle if you want. Right click on the Triangle, select Format AutoShape and under the Fill section choose the color of your choice which in my case happens to be Red. Copy the Red Triangle, paste it in another cell and change the color of the shape to a different color. So now I have 2 shapes in Red and Green. Look at the screenshot.


2) Next you need to go to Tools -> Customize and select Tools on the Left to view the goodies in the right section. Choose the Camera tool from this list and drag it to the Menu bar. Now select the cell with the AutoShape and click on the Camera icon. Start drawing the shape again and you will find a replica of the AutoShape you first created. Then as you can see in the screenshot, right click on the newly captured AutoShape and choose Format Picture. In the Colors and Lines tab, choose the No Fill and No Line options from the Fill->Color and Line->Color drop downs respectively. This will get rid of the outer boundary of your captured AutoShape. Have a look at the screenshots below to follow the steps.



3) Then we need to name our 2 AutoShapes which we can do by going to Insert-> Name-> Define. Once there, we need to define the cells where the 2 Shapes are placed. In my case, I have referenced the cells and named them according to the color of the Shapes. This step is really crucial because we uniquely define the Shapes as these are the definitions by which we will be referencing them.


4) Now let’s look at the final step which deals with the definitions of the Alerts. First we have to define the cell where we will be displaying the number with name ‘Score1’ and statement = IF(Cell-value>5, 2, 1). The simple IF statement in the example validates the condition which in this case means if number is greater than 5 then choose 2 else choose 1. Finally we need to define the Alert which will be displayed next to the number validating the condition. Please look at the Step 4a image which shows that we have defined the Alert1 with the formula =Choose(Score1,Red,Green). This formula is helpful in providing an alias for the numbers used in the previous IF statement. So 1 means Red and 2 means Green.



5) Now if we change the values in Cell C3 to a number lower than 5, we will see the Alert as Red and vice versa. Please look at the final 2 images which will give you an idea as to how these changes will take effect.




You can also download this file here. I hope you like this post as I think it was a refreshing change from the usual topics.

I came across a question on Yahoo Web Analytic Group regarding debugging tracking code on a webpage without having access to the Web Analytics tool. The answers to this question can be more than one but based on my experience, the best way to check Web Analytics code on a page is to use a Packet Sniffer.

A Packet Sniffer or HTTP/JavaScript Debugger as it is known is a tool that analyzes and parses network traffic. There are many other uses of a Packet Sniffer but in this case we are only looking at capturing HTTP/JavaScript packets. So if I have a webpage containing Google Analytics code, all I need to do is activate this software while the webpage is being loaded. Once the entire code snippet on the page has been loaded, you can go to the Packet Sniffer tool and search for the Google Analytics code from the list of captured packets.

Let us look at an example by going to www.msn.com and capturing the Omniture Web Analytics tag on their webpage using a tool called Fiddler. Please look at the 2 screenshots captured after the MSN-US page load was complete.


The first image is an overall summary of all the code being rendered with the Omniture code highlighted in Blue. Please note that for an Analytics JavaScript code to be successfully rendered, it has to make a ‘Status 200' call to the respective Datacenter meaning the request has been completed. Now double click on the captured snippet and look at the second screenshot for the next step.


After double clicking on the Omniture code, you will have to click on the Web Forms tab on the top right in order to view the various parameters being passed onto Omniture. You will notice all the various parameters being sent to Omniture like the Page name, Language, Screen resolution and so on. This step will also tell us whether the custom variables we passed on the analytics code are being sent correctly or not.

Packet Sniffers have a very important role to play in Web Analytics as they can help fix issues like data not being present in the reports to discrepancy in numbers. Finally listed below are a few more HTTP Debugger tools that I’m aware of:

1) Adobe Experience Cloud Debugger
2) Charles Proxy
3) Debugger for Adobe Analytics

My last post mentioned the various Web Advertising deals that take place between advertisers and publishers. This post will help us understand what is pivotal in ensuring that these deals are successful. You must have come across various advertising banners displayed on websites like Yahoo, MSN etc. We will now take a closer look at the different kinds of Web Banners present today.

1) Banners and Skyscrapers: Banners were one of the first Web Adverting units introduced in the Internet. They are complied of specific measurements which can range from 234*60 to 468*60 pixels. They are created from JPEG, GIF images and will generally be displayed on the top just below the heading of a website or at the bottom. However while scrolling down the webpage we might loose sight of them as they are mostly displayed on top. Skyscrapers/Sidebars on the other hand are tall Ad units displayed on the right or left portion of the webpage making them visible throughout the scrolling process. They are mostly displayed as 120*600 pixel banners. It is therefore essential to select the kind of banner you want to display on your website depending on its CTR (Click through Rate). Google Adwords and Adsense make use of various banners that are displayed on its search results and publishing websites respectively.

2) Floating Ad Units and Multimedia Ads: Floating Ads are displayed once a visitor lands on the homepage and these units are known to travel on the page during the scrolling process. They are usually designed in Macromedia Flash to draw the attention of the user and entice him to click. However they can be annoying for a lot of users as they completely superimpose the text area on the Webpage. Multimedia or Unicast Ad is typically displayed as an animated video/audio message designed especially to replicate a television.

3) Popups and Pop Unders: Popups are banners that are displayed in the form of a new browser window displayed onto our screen. It is immediately displayed after a user visits a website. However a Popunder browser window opens itself underneath the parent website usually getting unnoticed during the initial entry to the website. Again they are designed primarily to grab the user attention and encourage him to click. These Ad units are known to be more successful than Banners and Floating Ad units in terms of getting more clicks.

4) eCommerce Widgets: A Widget is a snippet of code that can be embedded in a website and it is the latest inclusion in the ever-growing Web Advertising field. For e.g. An Amazon widget can added to a webpage for selling books, software etc. The Widget advertising model almost follows the PPA (Pay per Acquisition) which is described in my last blog post. So if a user buys a book through a widget embedded on a website, the publisher will be entitled to receive a portion of the Book cost. I recently read an article mentioning about a Widget called the ‘Paypal Storefront Widget’ which is especially made for Blogs and Social Networking websites. This widget offer services such as in-widget shopping carts, product description, thumbnail gallery etc. Unfortunately this widget is only available for Typepad Blog users. Widgets like these help tap the enormous potential of eCommerce and with such tools Internet can only get better.

These were some of the banners which are the most prevalent today and it should be noted that there will be newer and more creative Web banners that will hit the Internet sooner or later. Having more and more of these banners on your webpages will obviously enhance your earnings but we should always draw a line between the acceptable and uncomfortable user experience which according to me is of the utmost importance. I hope you like this post and if possible share your opinions.