Archive for the ‘User Experience’ Category
The Future of Market Research: 5 Innovations to Watch for in 2012
The great David Ogilvy once said, “I notice increasing reluctance on the part of marketing executives to use judgment; they are coming to rely too much on research, and they use it as a drunkard uses a lamp post for support, rather than for illumination.” Those words from the great David Ogilvy are as true today as they were then.
Market research professionals, firms and organizations from IBM to Forrester Research are projecting the next trend in market research to be “making the transformation from research to insight.” If you ask me, that’s what market research has always been. An effective market researcher should be able to plan, conduct, analyze, and report actionable market insights and solutions to clients.
If you can’t do that, you’re probably just sharing stats that you found on eMarketer. I’m not discrediting eMarketer, which is an excellent research provider, but I see many advertising and marketing professionals searching for and relying too much on the latest stat or trend instead of taking that data point and translating it to something of value. Does that trend even make sense for your client’s unique situation? Or are you simply trying to impress them? This is not a problem with the research provider, but the researcher himself.
Instead of projecting the next trend in market research to be “making the transformation from research to insight,” which should already be innately infused into the mantra of the market researcher, I project the future of market research to be the convergence, or mash-up, of emerging technologies and lateral creative thinking across industries with the discipline of market research.
We are all living in a perpetual state of beta. We all have the ability at any time, to analyze our past and present to optimize for the future. And for market researchers, now is the perfect time to seize the opportunity to innovate the industry in ways George Gallup could have never imagined. So borrow from other competitors, borrow from other industries, borrow from culture – use lateral creative thinking to expand your potential and create new methodologies to reveal new insights and solutions. Below are five examples of this approach, which will continue to grow, especially in 2012.
Continue reading The Future of Market Research: 5 Innovations to Watch for in 2012
Better Marketing Through Personas
It’s no surprise that advertising has gotten more complex in recent years. With the emergence of unique digital opportunities, mobile, and a more competitive, complex marketplace, brands need to do a lot to avoid getting lost in the crowd. One of the simplest, most effective ways to make products and communications efforts stand out is by understanding the target audience. One way we examine and define the target audience at the Adcom Group is via persona development.
The ‘Wow’! It isn’t about the homepage.
Three seconds if you’re lucky. It’s all you’ve got.
You only have a few seconds to gain the interest of your visitor. It’s important to make those few seconds count when making a first impression. However, those few and precious seconds don’t always happen where you believe they are going to happen. Continue reading The ‘Wow’! It isn’t about the homepage.
Google Analytics Setup
As mentioned in my previous post, Making an Analytics Choice, every marketer needs to be able to measure their online marketing campaigns and website performance in order to improve and succeed.
Using Google Analytics is a great way to get started tracking your web stats. Google provides the tool online at no cost. The web-based tool allows you anytime, anywhere access to your website analytics information. Before you can get started with looking at your stats, you need to create an analytics account and get the tracking working on your website.
First, you will need a Google account. If you don’t have one, it is the first step. After that, you just need to sign into the Google Analytics. Google will ask you a few simple questions to create your account.
Next, you will need to install the tracking code provided by Google at the footer of your website. If you have a website that is a series of standalone HTML pages, you will need to install the script on every page in order for it to be tracked. You just need to copy and paste the script just above the tag. If you have an include that automatically generates information for the footer of every page, you will most likely need to put it in there.
On the tracking code screen, you will notice a lot of options including Advanced and Customer Options. We will cover more advanced configurations of Google analytics and when to use those features. Once you get the script installed, you can come back and check to make sure it is tracking correctly. Once your script is tracking, you can start to use the Google Analytics reports and all of your website visitors.
Now that you have analytics up and running, we will start to focus on the Google Analytics Reporting Interface during the next post. Until then, keep measuring!
P.S . . . If you ever need to back to your account to find your tracking code, it can be a bit tricky to find it. Here is how you do it:
- Log in to Google Analytics
- From the Overview page, select the account that has the profile for the tracking code you’re looking for, as the code is profile-specific.
- Select the profile from the accounts Overview page.
- From that profile’s Actions column, click Edit
- At the top right of the ‘Main Website Profile Information’ box, click Check Status
Your tracking code will be on this page.
Getting Visual Feedback from Online Users
Sometimes is hard to see what people are doing from looking at Web Paralytics. There are people who can look at the numbers and understand the user experience picture. Even if you are one of those people, my guess is that your manager or your client isn’t.
It can be really compelling to take a look at what users are doing on a page. Recently, we started making some information architecture changes based on analytics. However, we wanted to have a more visual proof for the client to see that the parts of the site that were strongly active were the ones we knew should be kept prominent. It also allowed us to see other activity on the site.
The strong button clicking was an ah-ha moment because none of the headlines were linked – robbing users of the common activity of clicking headlines.
When you work on a site over a long period of time, you get used to how it works and have the “curse of knowledge” regarding its use. Even as a usability practitioner, there is a certain interpretation of what users are doing.
For this project, we used Crazy Egg to capture the click heatmaps. For $19 a month, we got invaluable insight into the user experience of the site. By installing javascript code on the key pages we wanted to test, Crazy Egg will render these click maps and will also do scatter maps that allow you to filter by new and returning visitor, search terms and geography.
Being able to slice the date in multiple ways is very powerful, but in general the master heatmap is more than enough for management.