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What is the difference between segmentation and personalization? This is the question that came up during one of the webinar on personalization by Optimizely. This blog post is for those who have the same question. Basic definition of Segmentation is  - division into separate parts or sections.  For the purpose of marketing, it is a processing of grouping customer and prospects into similar groups based on various criteria such as demographic, geo, behavioral and psychographics.  You can use one or more of such attributes to define your segment.  The purpose of segmentation is to understand about a group (segment), and develop marketing strategy to better target those segments.  Personalization is providing marketing messages and/or experience that is tailored based on a customer’s needs or preferences.  Personalization can be very basic that can start from simply recognizing the person by name or it can be very complex that includes all sorts of data abou...

Those who know what internet bots and spiders are, know that know that spiders and bots visit your site very day and multiple times a day.   For those who don’t know here is the definition of bots according to Wikipedia :  An Internet bot, also known as web robot, WWW robot or simply bot, is a software application that runs automated tasks (scripts) over the Internet. Typically, bots perform tasks that are both simple and structurally repetitive, at a much higher rate than would be possible for a human alone. According to a recent survey , on an average about 51.8% of the website visitors are bots. Source: https://www.incapsula.com/blog/bot-traffic-report-2016.html One assumption many digital analysts make is that the JavaScript based analytics solutions such as Google Analytics , Adobe etc. either stop bots from executing the script or filter them out before calculating the metrics.   Well, this assumption was true years ago, it was one of the selling points of JavaScri...

Struggling to drive conversions?  The issue might be with customer experience. After having worked with several brands, big and small, I can assure you that you don't have to make sweeping changes to drive better results. Many times even small changes and little bit process can lead to happy customers and big impacts. In this post I have complied 11 tips that you can use today. If you need help then don't hesitate to reach out to me. Easy to fill forms  – How many times have you come across a form field where you don’t remember what the field was about?  Many designers/developers use the default text in the form filed as the filed label. Once you tab into that field, the default text is gone and now you can’t figure out what that field was about.  That is a very bad design which will likely cause customer frustration and kill conversions. No more unnecessary form field formatting and validations - Other than Captcha validation, you are likely using form field valida...

It is no secret that Amazon is a data driven organization.  The culture of testing is ingrained into pretty much everything Amazon does. However, a company like Amazon also makes mistake as I learned from my recent experience with Amazon Videos. I have two Amazon Fire TV Sticks, one attached to each TV that I have. Both are tied to the same Amazon account.  Using my Amazon Video account, I started watching a movie on one TV, turned it off halfway through and then a day later tried to watch it on the other TV. Guess what? I could not find that movie in any of the obvious menu options. I was expecting it to show up in my stream or at least in the same place where I found it last time.  Nope.  Amazon changed the order of movies on me. It’s not like it added new movies to the lineup and this movie got pushed down. They just reordered the existing movie selection. It appeared to me that some kind of movie display sorting experiments was going on. However, that experiment,...

Web Analytics and Digital Analytics are quite often used interchangeably.  I have been asked, by my students and some clients, about the difference in these two, so I decided to write this short post to clarify the terms. As you can see from the Google Trends graph, Google searches for “Digital Analytics” were nonexistent till Web Analytics Association changed its name to Digital Analytics Association. Since then the term "Digital Analytics" has started to pick up. In early days of internet, companies started to analyze website data such as users, visitors, visits, page views etc. and the term used to describe this analysis was called “ Web Analytics ”. Then came other forms of online (digital channels) such as email, search, social, mobile etc. and increasingly Digital Analytics folks were including this data and analysis of all these channels to provide a complete view of the “Digital” channels, marketing and customers. To fully include the scope of work of “Web Analysts” ...

People have short term memory (or selective memory), when they can’t remember things they will resort to how they think something should be. Recently Facebook was in the hot seat because of this very reason.  Facebook metrics definition issue Facebook has a metrics called “Video View” for video ads.  In this metric they only counted the video as viewed if it was watched more than 3 seconds by the viewer.  In other words, if someone watches a video for 2 seconds then that video view won’t be counted as a view in this metric. Facebook also has another metrics, called “Average duration of Video views”, the “standard” definition of it should be Total Time spent watching video divided by Total Viewers. However, that’s not how Facebook defined it.  In Sept Wall Street Journal reported that Facebook "vastly overestimated average viewing time for video ads on its platform for two years.”   This lead to an apology from Facebook About a month ago, we found an error in th...

I started writing about personalization ever since I started this blog, back in 2006. I wrote extensively about privacy and how marketers should address it to engage in personalization. Consumers are now more at ease with online purchases, they have moved past initial p rivacy concerns of online tracking and now expect personalization .  Personalization is no longer optional. According to an eConsultancy report, 94% of the companies realize that personalization is critical to current and future success. However many can't move forward with personalization because of many barriers they face in implementing personalization.  The biggest being IT, Technology and Budget. (see below). Charts from eConsultancy Reports - The Realities of Online Personalization Many marketers don't realize that personalization does not have to be complex. A recent study be Accenture shows that consumer are likely to buy from a retailer who provides some level of personalization (see below): As y...