What makes Internet eCommerce tick? Scott Fasser knows it all starts with a single click.
As the founder and chief digital strategist of digital marketing firm BrandDigital, Scott is an online marketing expert who has honed the fine craft of Web analytics. His journey has allowed him to analyze the life-cycle of the click from several distinct vantage points. From launching a global online gaming network (Won.net) for Sierra Online, to creating an analytics toolset from the ground up for online media maverick Avenue A, to refining the art of Website cross-selling for the patent holders of the OneClick purchasing system at Amazon.com, Fasser has tracked the elusive click across the Web’s topography. Most recently, he is helping to manage RealNetworks’ latest campaign into search engine pay-per-click (PPC) marketing and Web advertising.
To find out what makes your Website tick, and visitors stick, Scott would advise you to analyze what’s behind every mouse click. Armed with the knowledge of how visitors act and react, you can then connect more of your Website’s traffic to those actions that generate the most revenue.
Web analytics, or the analysis and application of e-commerce statistics to actionable marketing plans, is exploding on the Web. New tools, such as those from traffic analyzers like ClickTracks, WebTrends and Urchin, to PPC keyword bid management tools that go by the names of MAESTRO and GO TOAST, let you track and understand Web traffic like never before. Still, as legend has it, wisdom is “data plus insight.” Through Web analytics, you can begin to theorize why a Website shopper clicks on a particular product link, or chooses a particular keyword listing on a search engine, and then apply that theory to practice.
Aimed at the bottom line, Web analytics is targeted at understanding the ultimate conversion of a prospect to an expected sale or behavior. It seeks to explain the differential of someone who clicks on, for example, a link to Eminem content on your site, compared to someone else who clicks on a link for Norah Jones or Tony Bennett. The difference means money in the bank to Web merchants seeking to buy their share of Web search engine traffic in a competitive marketplace.
“If you’re going to go out and spend some money on something,” says Scott, “tie it to where your revenue is. Whether what you’re paying for is a piece of email, some pay-per-click search terms, or a banner exchange, make sure you understand how that marketing spend translates into revenue.”
Scott started digging into Web analytics at Sierra and building Web analytics tools while sitting on a mountain top of data, the ad tracking server stores of Avenue A. “One of the things we realized at Avenue A was that we were collecting a lot of information that was not attached to Web impressions or client-generated ad impressions. We went out and bought an OLAP tool and basically built a set of Web analytics reports that allowed you to drill-down based on the “action tag” data that we had been collecting. We built it out for the agency side of Avenue A and they still sell it today on the Atlas DMT side.”
Seattle24x7: How long have you been involved in Search?
Fasser: I’ve been doing search in one form or another for a few years now. I worked closely with the search team when I was at Amazon to learn how I could use their search engine to promote the products I was working with, including the apparel store and electronics. I’ve worked on external search with a number of my clients.
Seattle24x7: Amazon has elevated Web analytics to a science — what was your experience as a product manager there?
Fasser: Amazon does a great job of putting the tools and the freedom to do things in the hands of its employees. For example, they have a tremendous data warehouse with a user interface they’ve developed that allows product managers, merchandising managers, and customer managers to be able to find and manipulate data very easily. If you have access to this tool, you have a lot of freedom to understand how things are working, to do data-centric models to prove a case, or to test things.
The biggest challenge for Amazon is that there is only one home page and millions of products. The whole find and discover has to be made very easy for someone. How do you sift through the millions and millions of products in a way that shows you a product that you might be interested in? The better product selection that is brought up, whether it’s a featured product or something that’s based on a past purchase of the customer, the higher chance you have of actually purchasing that product.
Seattle24x7: In your opinion, is the Amazon analytics effort in a class by itself?
Fasser: Amazon is definitely in a league by itself in terms of putting their analytics into a production mode. At any one point in time there could be dozens of tests going on at Amazon’s site. What Amazon has done, far and away better than anyone else I’ve seen, is to be able to take actual purchase data, put it through a series of algorithms, and place it in a format that can be quickly accessed. So when you visit the site and log in, it quickly knows who you are, and it knows which products to serve you next based on those factors.
Jeff Bezos calls the site “the most customer-centric site in the world” and, from the standpoint of delivering you content, (i.e. things you might want to purchase based on previous purchases), no one comes close.
Seattle24x7: What is BrandDigital’s secret weapon and what kind of company would most benefit from your services?
Fasser: There’s not a lot of help out there for small and emerging businesses to use the integrated services of an outsourced digital marketing agency. There are experts in search marketing, or Web media, or site conversion, but no one that puts it all together in a way where businesses can understand the connections.
My goal is to help these businesses understand what their options are, understand which options are the most effective, and also help guide them in terms of how to spend their money and get the biggest bang for the buck. For instance, I think a lot of businesses right now are doing pay-per-click search engine marketing but they’re not tracking the conversions and connecting the two. I think tools like GO TOAST and MAESTRO are serving a huge market in that area. But it is an enormous waste of money if companies are just tracking their clicks and not tracking through to the conversion. Everybody talks about ROI but nobody really takes the time to explain it. I spend half my time executing programs for clients and half my time teaching the tactics and strategies of digital marketing.
Seattle24x7: Thanks for sharing your time, Scott. [24×7]
Scott Fasser has been the Web analytics marketer behind such Northwest digital brands as Sierra Online, Amazon.com, Avenue A and RealNetworks. Here he gets behind a relative newcomer in the product life cycle.
