Sunday, May 22, 2011

Week 5: Web Metrics and Marketing Research Wrap up

Resources consumed:

-Chapter 4: of Web Analytics: An Hour a Day
-Video: Kimberly Clark and Virtual Reality Simulations
      The wrap up to this week was easy again as I found a couple of interesting optional learning links to bolster my nascent knowledge of web metrics. My team and I are busy wrapping up our online marketing assignment and I think we will be ready to turn it in tonight, after a bit of final editing. I am enjoying the assignments intermixed with the blogging and normal learning assignments but I think I will be glad when I am not trying to juggle both on a beautiful Sunday afternoon.
      I read the chapter concerning web analytics and found it useful for my e-commerce professional development as a resource that I will most likely either do myself or hire out for my own business. Given the costs quoted in the article as well as an IT estimate that my friend sent to me when I outlined the business plan from the IT perspective, these things can cost a lot of money! I will have to be very good at providing a high volume of sales given my low margin business model. Through this article as well as some of the research on web analytics companies that I mentioned in my last post, I am getting a feeling that if you can draw more useful traffic to your site than the next guy, you will be better off competition wise. Of course, the old adage applies that you have to spend money to make money, but some of the scales of money needed to be spent in producing a quality website, marketing it effectively, and then analyzing traffic to further increase the customer flow were, I admit, a bit off by several magnitudes in my head. I was happy to see the author use actual example numbers for a hypothetical position for a large firm because at least that puts some ballpark numbers in my head. The article was very informative for a large company looking to hire a senior analyst, and I can certainly glean the lessons such as the 10/90 rule but as a small business owner, would have trouble applying his exact advice and would more likely go the consultant route to initiate traffic and analysis if I couldn't do it myself. The final aspect that I enjoyed about this article was the fact that in the very least, he blows apart the notion that extremely costly and complex analytics tools are always necessary and free tools such as Google's can easily produce usable results. And free is always my favorite brand.
      I enjoyed the video on Kimberly-Clarke and was impressed first off, with the quality of the video and the editing to include seamless slides and videos. I think the Kelley school productions are far superior to most of the KD videos that professors provide and I don't know if the trend is towards a production quality like this or if it just a resource limitation normally allocated to videos like the GLN network. It really does provide for a much better learning experience and I was glad to see a type like that again in this course. I have had videos, not in this class, where the professor looks about 8 years younger that in his photo in the syllabus, and the video is grainy, misaligned audio and video, and the content is years out of date with current events such as the Great Recession. Moving on to the content, I thought he was an engaging speaker since I became attentive in a subject that I have not any experience in and came away impressed at the ideas and the news coverage that they garnered. I was a neuroscience undergrad and we studied the physiology of the eye and tracking eye movements and I was excited to see the connection they drew in the video between what people will say they are interested versus what they unconsciously fixate on. The best part of the video is that some of this biology based research that could not have been possible several years ago is producing good statistical results and enhancing branding in extremely low margin, competitive shelf stores. There is always something to be enhanced by technology, even something as seemingly settled as fast moving consumer goods marketing.

Ready for the final week.

1 comment:

  1. We appreciate your critique of the course and program content. In many respects, you're spot on! I think our enthusiasm for material often causes us to neglect or overlook the importance of the caliber of the presentation--especially when our KD students are regularly exposed to top flight content in the corporate world. It's become the norm and the academic world needs to keep pace.

    I also continue to appreciate your practical perspective. Reviewing course material with a goal or purpose in mind sharpens the evaluation process. Someone considering a future business venture has a much different perspective that definitely adds value.

    Finally, Kimberly-Clark and others have made significant inroads in better understanding consumer behavior. But, there will always be a stochastic element to consumer choice and while we gain insights about reactions with eye-trackers and the like, new sources of stimuli (e.g., digital billboards, smartphone apps, etc.) remind us that it's an ever changing dynamic world.

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