Who needs Exit Polls? How Data Science can run an effective campaign. (No, not THAT campaign!)

I attended Luxury Interactive, and the Velocity Conference, which were both held in New York City within 3 weeks of each other last fall, and while in the northeast area I visited several Internet Retailers that appear in the Internet Top 100. (Of which 58 are current SOASTA customers, just to set the record straight.)

I was there to discuss one key topic to both audiences: Campaigns. Marketing campaigns. LIVE campaigns. LIVE campaigns using Digital Performance Management (DPM) to monitor, measure, optimize, and contribute to their success.

The attendees at both conferences couldn't have been further apart on what is important to them in e-commerce than the two major candidates that just ran for that major office here in the United States. Let's look at what I mean.

When speaking to Velocity attendees, we often speak of things like, page load times, DOM ready, bounce rate, single page applications, above the fold, load times, outliers, custom dimensions, XHR, CSS, etc., etc.   Ask them about revenue performance or campaigns usually resulted in a blank stare almost always followed by, "I am not involved in any of that and I don't really know much about it."

Now flip the event over to Luxury Interactive, which was attended by high-end retailers very focused on brand awareness, marketing and revenue and flip the conversation. And, I was even nice about it by skipping the acronyms (e.g. XHR, CSS, SPA, DOM, etc.) and staying high level: "How concerned are you about web performance in your role in driving revenue to your brand through omnichannel and your marketing campaign efforts?" Typical answer: "Web performance? Not my problem. That's dealt with by the IT group."

The problem here? They are both wrong. Very wrong.

Web Performance IS all about Revenue Performance

As I've seen in my 5 years here at SOASTA, web performance is truly all about revenue performance. Several blog posts on THE PERFORMANCE BEACON have shared our analysis, mostly in blogs written by Tammy Everts (@TamEverts). The faster a page loads, the higher the conversion rate.

Just about all retail customers I work with now have very robust performance engineering capabilities built-in to their e-commerce websites and mobile applications because they understand the relationship of fast page = better conversion rate. These sites are constantly optimized and performance tested, most times using real user experience data from a RUM solution such as SOASTA's mPulse, to adjust their websites based on how users are navigating through the site as well as what they are experiencing while navigating.

So why are we even having this conversation? It's simple. The e-commerce IT team does not control all of the content, nor do they control all of the customer-facing webpages, or even all of the content on all of the key pages (e.g. the product pages, as an example).

So who does? Enter Marketing and Campaign Management. Let's not boil the ocean, however. Let's concentrate on weekly campaigns, "Sunday flyer" campaigns, loyalty campaigns and product promotional campaigns. (Let's put affiliates and SEO, etc. to the side for a moment.)

Marketing Campaign Management is all about Revenue

Now anyone reading this blog knows that the statement above is obvious. IT technology folks, probably not so much. And this is where the problem lies. Campaigns, and by extension, all content and development of campaigns is owned by marketing. Most, if not all, IT ecommerce teams that I have worked with over my 5 years at SOASTA are not involved in marketing campaign development at all. This includes campaign landing pages, content, and product content associated with all campaigns. This also includes the part of the process that pushes the content out onto the websites or into the mobile apps. Why is this a problem? Easy. Because without IT ecommerce being involved all best practices around web performance are typically ignored or bypassed. When asked, virtually every retailer I've worked with do not performance test their campaign landing pages, or even consider web performance when changing campaign-specific content on something as key as a particular product page. So what happens? Here's an example of the performance of a "normal" landing page, owned by IT ecommerce, which rigorously adheres to strict web performance best practices, including rigorous performance testing scenarios, and one "marketing campaign" page owned and operated by the marketing group and not subjected to any web performance best practices, or even basic web performance testing.

See the problem? All that "red" equates to slower page load times, much lower conversion rates, higher bounce and exit rates, and a whole lot less revenue. Of course, your team won't know any of this until its too late and the campaign has already been launched, or, as is the case with just about every ecommerce retailer, until the campaigns have long been completed and the analysis of the data has been completed by the business analytics team, usually compared against previous campaigns, or even last year's campaigns. By that time, it's too late to make any kind of adjustment to right the ship. Today's marketing campaign analytics solutions just do not give the marketing, ecommerce and IT teams the LIVE visibility to campaign performance coupled with the answer to the question: "WHY?" As in, "I am seeing high bounce and exit rates of key campaign pages in my marketing analytics solutions. But, I do not know why."

Enter SOASTA and Digital Performance Management (DPM)

Traditional marketing analytics solutions such as Adobe SiteCatalyst, IBM Coremetrics and Google Analytics have traditionally been used by marketing organizations to set-up, manage and analyze marketing campaign performance. Unfortunately, they lack a key component when trying to analyze a live campaign: The ability to dig into the "Why?" Why are my exit rates on my e-mail loyalty campaign so high? Why are the bounce rates on this same campaign so abnormally high? Why are my conversion rates way lower than normal? These solutions can tell you WHERE customers and users are fleeing with activity maps, exit rates, etc., however, they do not provide the missing component: WHY? With SOASTA's DPM, we provide the ability to join the marketing data for each campaign with the user experience (UX) data collected by our Real User Measurement (RUM) solution, mPulse.

With this data, we are able to answer the "Why?" questions. Why is the exit rate abnormally high? Because the page load time is about 50% slower than normal and users are leaving in droves rather than wait for the page to load and complete the transaction.

Now let's take this a step further. What if we were able to watch the campaign performance--LIVE--and measure its performance against the predicted performance based on the same type of campaign performance over the same period of time for the past 3 years?

In the screen shot below, one of SOASTA's retail customers is watching their Monday morning loyalty campaign launch. The yellow bands in the upper left quadrant represent the predicted activity based on past performance. The white band in the same quadrant is measuring the current activity. In this shot, you can actually see a dip below the lowest expected yellow band. SOASTA's DPM solution tripped an alarm for this particular campaign that was triaged BEFORE traditional APM solutions even picked up an alert in the IT stack, this saving time and revenue to get back to normal.

The upper right quadrant is tracking overall campaign revenue, with the lower right quadrant tracking the revenue from the 4 main campaigns that were making up this week's loyalty e-mail campaign.

In the lower left quadrant, the green band represents with page views to the campaign landing page at the point of launch of the loyalty e-mail. This corresponds with the page view activity spike seen in the upper left quadrant.

Now imagine launching every campaign with the ability to view its performance--with the WHY--to monitor and measure revenue for all your critical marketing campaigns.

Several innovative e-commerce customers asked themselves that same hard question this year: WHY am I not putting this type of revenue emphasis on such a critical part of my business?

Takeaway - Campaign Performance in 2017 should be all about they "WHY?"

As the calendar has slipped into 2017, make it a priority to ensure that you are managing your campaigns with all your data. Performance is all about REVENUE, but to really manage your revenue, you must include a key component of revenue performance--user experience and web performance metrics. Your marketing and IT teams should be joined at the hip for campaign launches.