SOPA: A Closer Look

Paul Lima         Government, Industries, Technology

Seemingly overnight, the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) proposed by the U.S. Senate has rocked the online world.  The controversial bill inspired a 24-hour outage of numerous U.S. websites, including Wikipedia, and has even been criticized by President Barack Obama.  Many of the president’s advisors claim the bill will only make online businesses more vulnerable to lawsuits, while also impeding legal activities and endangering freedom of expression.  In the midst of all the emotion, it’s important to ask…What are the arguments against this “soup”?

First and foremost, under SOPA, the U.S. Department of Justice would have the power to investigate, prosecute, and shut down any individual or company accused of uploading copyrighted material, both inside and outside the country.   The law would also compel U.S.-based search engines, domain hosts, and advertising companies to block services to any site under investigation by the Department of Justice for breach of copyright.  As a result, many analysts predict that this legislation would prompt cloud computing and web-hosting companies to move their operations outside the U.S., in order to avoid lawsuits.   In addition to the economic consequences, all the above would also pose serious threats to Americans’ first amendment right to freedom of expression.

The public outcry and numerous protests surrounding these concerns have so far had one major consequence: the Senate has decided to indefinitely delay its vote on this controversial bill.  For now, SOPA will have to wait.

IBM Expands Cloud Based Analytics for Smarter Commerce

Paul Lima         Business Intelligence & Analytics, Business to Business Marketing Funnel, Consumer Packaged Goods, Coremetrics, Enterprise Applications, Online Marketing Strategy, Purchase, Software as a Service, Web Analytics

I think it’s neat to see how companies are getting together in a consortium, if you will through IBM’s Coremetrics product.  Collectively, they allow any client that opts-into the program to view the aggregate averages within their industry.  Summary information is now being picked up in the press as an indication of how Black Friday went.  Pretty cool if you don’t have to share your information.  And that’s where the IBM Acquisition of DemandTek comes into play.

A sample dashboard from DemandTec

So this type of thinking helps companies competing in the digital marketplace to adapt to changes in consumer demands as they occur.  Companies that can quickly and effectively adjust their price points and product mixes in response to ever-shifting customer buying patterns will have a key competitive advantage in the era of mobile and social networks.

That’s why IBM’s acquisition of DemandTec this past Thursday will make the  Smarter Commerce initiative even more valuable to retailers and manufacturers of packaged consumer goods.  The San Mateo, California based DemandTec develops cloud-based analytics software that allows businesses to examine consumer buying data mined from both online and in-store sales.  DemandTec customers can use that information to quickly and accurately identify consumer trends, helping  them make better price, promotion, and assortment decisions.  And because DemandTec’s software is cloud-based, retailers and manufacturers can collaborate to make time-sensitive business decisions instantaneously.

A sample Coremetrics Dashboard

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Adobe acquires Efficient Frontier

Paul Lima         Business Intelligence & Analytics

A thunderclap just rolled across the world of web marketing.

Less than an hour ago Adobe announced the acquisition of Efficient Frontier, the absolute gold standard in paid advertising bid management.
Efficient Frontier is the industry leading bid management system due to the fact that is uses modern portfolio theory algorithms to actively manage paid advertising campaigns.  This is the kind of mathematical wizardy that is used on a daily basis by the titans of finance to manage automated bids and sales of stock.  Literally trillions of dollars are managed on the back of this kind of technology, and now Adobe has brought it into the fold of the Omniture Marketing Suite.
Efficient Frontier will be married with Omniture’s already powerful SearchCenter to create a PPC management system that is quite frankly leaps and bounds past any other solution currently 0n the market.   And as a part of the Marketing Suite, all of these capabilities will automatically integrate into the reporting and tools across the system – all in all, the only way to describe the upcoming behemoth that is Efficient Frontier + SearchCenter is “untouchable.”

What this means for digital marketers is that they will be able to use the top bidding engine in the industry on top of the top analytics tool in the industry to manage their paid media spend.  Having the ability to use a PPC bidding engine to make adjustments to keywords, ads, the ability to optimize your PPC prices dynamically, to the minute and having that data linked to your actual web sales is a huge step forward in the industry.  The rules for measuring and optimizing your Return on Ad Spend have changed.  This acquisition confirm what we’ve been saying for years about the need for bidding platforms to integrate with analytics platforms.  The acquisition is a game changer.

Adobe’s continued aggressive pursuit of the leaders in online marketing realm is truly remarkable.  This year alone they have acquired Auditude, Demdex, and now Efficient Frontier.  Its a good time to be an Omniture user, and looks like it will continue to be for a long while to come.

If you aren’t paying for your email or analytics, then you are the product.

Paul Lima         Business Intelligence & Analytics

Do you own the data in your gmail account?  Does a business that users Google Analytics own their web analytics data?  Since they are not paying for their web analytics, the answer is a “no”.  Google Analytics is built for Google.  Gmail is built for Google.  Keep in mind that Google is in the advertising business.

Over 96% of their revenues come from the ads they display.  Disclaimer: I have a personal gmail account and I still recommend google analytics for many of my clients, they are both great products. Now having said that, I think it is unwise for a company to use either of these solutions if they consider email or their website to be mission critical.

Who doesn’t these days?  If you’re email went down, or your website disappeared, and it wouldn’t phase you, then your email and your website aren’t important to you.  But if email or your website help you increase revenues, decrease costs, or lower the risks associated in managing your business, then you should be paying for these solutions.

If you don’t believe me, consider what you are trading so that you can enjoy these free tools.  Google adwords indexes the content in your gmail account and presents you advertisements based on the very email you are reading in your inbox.  And the data about your website traffic, the conversions you are gaining, the cost per transaction, the cost to acquire an online client, the cost per lead, and other important data about who is visiting your company website is shared with google so that they can incorporate that information when pricing how much you should pay to advertise on their search engine.

After your employees, the next most important assest most businesses have is their data.  It’s so valuable, in fact, that many media companies, financial services companies, and even telecommunications and car rental companies sell it and this data has become a product in and of itself.  Instead of paying google using money, companies that pay google by offering them their data are overpaying in most cases.  That deal works to the benefit of Google.  If you aren’t paying for these mission critical services, which in both cases are cheap and commodities, then you are the product.

10 Most Common Web Analytics Mistakes

Paul Lima         Coremetrics, Flurry, Google Analytics, Microsoft AdCenter Analytics, Omniture, Online Marketing Strategy, SearchCenter, SiteCatalyst, Social Media Engagement Funnel, Software as a Service, Uncategorized, Web Analytics, Website Development, WebTrends, Yahoo Web Analytics

So you want to know the most frequent questions I get about web analytics and online marketing? I’ve tried to present them here and answer a few of them so maybe I can save you, my clients and future prospects some time so we can get onto executing profitable campaigns.

1) Free analytics are good for my business and are just as good as paid ones

Coremetrics Platform offers more than Google Analytics

First, let me say, I like Google Analytics and Yahoo’s Analytics solutions. But Google Analytics was built for Google. It serves their interest, not yours.

This might be the most common myth out there, and possibly one of the most dangerous. First and foremost, to directly dispel this rumor, the truth is that enterprise analytics solutions offer levels of detail and capabilities that free solutions such as Google Analytics don’t. Although free solutions can be hacked to a certain extent to extend their capabilities, at the end of the day they fall far short of the paid solutions in providing meaningful reports to a diversified group of stakeholders. If for example you had any interest in tracking the video drop off rates, or immediately integrating custom analytics events, records or values with a recommendations engines, you can’t.

The Omniture Online Marketing Suite offers a platform to manage the online marketing discipline for sophisticated digital marketers.

Beyond capabilities alone, you also get a lot of important side benefits as well. First amongst them is accountability and support. With free solutions you’re not paying for anything, so you get a community of blogs and consultants, which we belong to actually. If you’re paying for a solution, and if for any reason it has a problem, we’ve got help from the analytics provider to get the job done.

With paid solutions you own your data and can integrate it seamlessly with PPC bid management platforms, multi-variate testing platforms, and a host of other add-ons and integrations like Salesforce, NetSuite, SugarCRM, email marketing solutions, ad-server networks and more.

The future of analytics is in an analytics suite approach, not in point solutions. Of course, if you want to own your own data from Google Analytics, they offer a license to purchase Urchin for approximately $3,400 (the company that Google acquired in 2004 that is today known as Google Analytics). The future of analytics isn’t more data, but instead the ability to act upon that data in an a fast, efficient, and measurable way. Free solutions will never offer the level of integrated optimization that paid solutions do, and due to the great competitive advantage that such features offer, a business should be wary of the risk that going “free” might entail. Bottom line: If your business relies on the internet, you should investigate using a paid analytics platform. I have seen cases where the answer is to stay on a free solution, but more often than not, it’s time to increase conversions and there’s too much at stake to penny pinch.

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Google Announces Analytics Premium

Paul Lima         Coremetrics, Google AdSense, Google Adwords, Google Analytics, Omniture, Search Engine Marketing, Web Analytics

Google developed Google Analytics Premium around these pillars: more data, advanced tools, dedicated support and guarantees. Here’s a summary of what that covers:

• Extra processing power – increased data collection, more custom variables and downloadable, unsampled reports
• Advanced analysis – attribution modeling tools that allow you to test different models for assigning credit to conversions
• Service and support – experts to guide customized installation, and dedicated account management on call – all backed by 24/7 support
• Guarantees - service level agreements for data collection, processing and reporting

Introducing Google Analytics Premium

How much does Google Analytics Premium Cost?

About $150,000 according to sources close to the product.  It is a fixed annual fee and at the launch of the product can only be purchased in the United States, Canada and the UK.

Will Google Analytics stop improving the free version?

I think that every enhancement to the free version will be more closely reviewed and categorized as something that goes into the free vs the paid version.  So if I were the product manager at GA, I would really assess the ROI for various features and of course I would probably be prioritizing the technology roadmap on the product that’s getting the traction and resulting in revenues.  It’s my belief that Google Analytics data is used in assessing the cost of that company’s Price Per Click.  Those websites with the best conversion rates and lowest bounce rates are more likely to be rewarded with lower costs per click.  In other words, the assessment about where to place the efforts for feature enhancements may not be purely based on the revenue opportunity from GA Premium so it won’t be an easy decision for the Product Development teams about where to put their energy.

Will Google Analytics Premium really provide competition to Coremetrics and Adobe?

For some clients that don’t need a platform, it may, but for clients that need an online marketing platform, it shouldn’t.  Both the Coremetrics and Omniture platforms have a recommendations engine, integration with all of the pay per click platforms (not just the Google Adwords platform), integration with dozens (if not close to 100 now) email marketing vendors, CRM systems, landing page optimization platforms, ad-serving networks and many other solutions that sophisticated digital marketers need to acquire visitors, convert visitors and engage visitors.

LCG at Latinos on the Hill

Paul Lima         Uncategorized

Yesterday Lima Consulting Group was represented by Jorge Perdomo at the Latinos on the Hill event in Harrisburg, PA.  This annual event brings together the leadership and members of the Hispanic Chambers of Commerce across the state for a day of networking, relationship building, and advocacy for Hispanic/Latino businesses.  read more