Ten
Questions with John Marshall
I've been
reviewing a site analysis tool
called ClickTracks.
I like it. A lot.
I can see
this program having three main
benefits for Search Marketers:
- Measuring the real value
of search engine visitors
- Evaluating site paths -
find out where the best place
is to locate your money pages
- Providing your clients with
best of breed marketing analysis
in the form of clear, concise
visitor behavior reports.
But
there's a lot more to this
clever product that this, so
I thought I'd go straight to
the horses mouth in order to
find out more. Welcome ClickTracks
CEO, John Marshall, who
tells us why ClickTracks is
the first "right-brained" site
reporting tool.
Hi
John. Firstly, can you tell
us a little about yourself?
What is your background? I
understand You used to be
at Netscape?
I have an odd mix of both sales/marketing and programming. I started out programming
on 8bit computer game systems and wrote a few commercially successful games.
During the process I found that I could generate ideas and map those to solving
real world problems, but it was better to have the programming implementation
done by someone else.
I founded a company that developed
high performance color printing
software, and ended up at Netscape
having sold it. At Netscape
I did some OEM business development
and then moved on to evaluating
technology companies for possible
investment or acquisition. The
common thread in my background
seems to be identifying a business
problem that isn't being adequately
addressed, and thinking of a
better solution. Building a
better mousetrap, as it were.
Ok,
here's your chance to plug
;) What is ClickTracks and
why should people consider
using it? What makes it different
to other
tracking tools?
ClickTracks solves two problems: understanding the behavior of site visitors,
and then comparing that behavior across different groups of visitors. The behavior
of visitors can be distilled down to two fundamental actions: clicking on page
elements and looking at the page between clicks. So all you need to do is track
the clicks and away you go - user behavior data. For a human to understand
the complexity of this data is very hard - unless it's given context. So that's
what ClickTracks does - it tracks the clicks and gives context by displaying
the click patterns directly on the pages of the website. Underneath each clickable
element you get a little bar that shows the % of people navigating that hyperlink
from the current page. It works like a browser, so you can pick a hyperlink
and go there, and you'll see that page and how people navigate. All this is
done on the fly.
The second problem ClickTracks solves is where the software really shines.
When you see the navigation patterns and flow through the site, it opens your
eyes. When you see that people really don't navigate as you expect, you start
to wonder if all visitors do the same thing. You ask 'what about my search
engine visitors, and my PPC visitors? What do they do'.
ClickTracks has a set of tools
that make it easy to first identify
those different visitor groups,
and then highlight them or as
we term it 'tag' them. Conceptually
you attach a colored tag to
all the visitors from Google,
for example. You can now see
them distinctly, and see where
they go, where they linger,
etc. Tagging can be performed
on broad categories such as
'did they see my checkout page'
or on very specific things like
'those people from Google that
searched for the keyword 'pineapple'
It's certainly marketer friendly.
The graphical representation of user behavior is
a very interesting aspect Did you find that existing
tracking tools were lacking in this regard?
At former jobs, I was trying to do analysis of websites, and was very frustrated
with the tools available. The web is very fluid and adaptable and right-brained,
and I felt all the available analysis tools were trying to force that fluidity
into a set of flat reports with pie charts - very left-brained in other words.
As I used the tools, I just kept thinking of how I would design them differently.
When you keep saying that to yourself you finally realize that other people
must be just as frustrated, that a market exists, and that that market will
buy a solution if it can be built. I contacted Dr. Stephen Turner, who is perhaps
the world authority on the process of website statistical analysis (author
of the granddaddy program of web metrics, Analog), and we have built the company
from there.
Analysing
Visitor information is key
to successful online marketing
campaigns. What advice can
you give the traditional search
engine optimization specialist
who might be looking at delving
into Search Marketing? How
should they be measuring the
success of these campaigns?
What metrics should they be
providing to clients?
We have spent a lot of time investigating this. It's really interesting to
look at the psychology of the end user. For search listings the site publisher
has limited control over what appears in the listing. Some kind of summary
but that's about it. The user accepts the imperfections of each search engine
and knows that results may or may not be what they want. The site creator can
do little to change this.
For PPC it's very different.
The publisher can make claims
about the site and offer promises
and enticements if users click.
You'd better meet those promises
when users arrive at your site.
This is so fundamental that
we added a feature to divide
and compare SEO and PPC visitors.
It's no good looking at behavior
patterns for the two combined,
because the expectation of the
user is so different. ClickTracks
now has a simple button you
click and you can see all the
navigation paths and exit points
distinctly for each, and there
are big differences.
Right from the front page you can see how users exit. Many sites have what
we term a 'goal page'. This is a page that represents the goal of the site.
In ClickTracks you'll want to tag the visitors that see this page. From that
the software will work backwards to the search keywords used and the navigation
paths taken. It's all disarmingly easy to find out.
How can a search marketer
use ClickTracks on a day-to-day basis?
Marketers using ClickTracks begin by looking at how people navigate the site,
broadly. The next step is to identify some key visitor groups and examine how
they behave in comparison. This is where the information becomes most interesting:
differences when groups are compared. As you introduce new campaigns you'll
want to tag those visitors coming via that campaign and see if they navigate
the site differently, or exit, or are more likely to get to the goal pages.
ClickTracks works best when used as part of the 'measure - adjust - repeat'
cycle. On a daily basis just looking to see if your graphs are 'up and to the
right' is not enough. You use the data to influence the site design, the layout,
navigation structure, PPC buys, SEO work. As we noted earlier, the web is wonderfully
fluid and right-brained. Keep it that way - learn to flow with it.
Also
interesting is the fact the
product combines usability
analysis with marketing analysis.
This is an effective way to
pinpoint exactly how usability
translates to the bottom line.
Can you talk a bit about how
this tool can help people
sell the benefits of better
usability to their clients?
For so long, site improvements have been a 'best guess' sort of cycle. Web
marketers and designers get together with their rows of numbers and endless
reams of reports and try to make some sense of them. In ClickTracks, this
task is made much easier, and offers more of an educated hypothesis as to
where site improvements can be made.
Many
of our clients use ClickTracks
to test assumptions about navigation
and usability issues. If the
design team believes that there
is an underused or confusing
link in the nav menu, they can
use ClickTracks to benchmark
visitation to that link and
then make changes. After they've
made the change, they can go
back a week or two later and
see if their change has made
a difference in the use of that
particular link. This is particularly
helpful when working with clients
who need 'proof' that something
is or isn't working…ClickTracks'
highly visual nature offers
indisputable evidence as to
whether a link on the site is
being visited or not, and how
often.
The first release of the product
didn't include much reporting, but you appear to
have beefed that aspect up for the latest release.
Was this in response to customer demand?
We try to make sure all the reporting we offer is valuable and that it solves
real business problems. We felt navigation structure and visitor behavior
analysis was the most pressing need - the creative people that build the
site and write the copy were flying blind before ClickTracks because no product
could easily make sense of that. That was the top priority for the tool,
and we think we've done a fair job of addressing it. We have listened to
what customers want, and many said they wanted PPC ad tracking, for example.
So we went away and worked out how we could present visitors coming through
certain ads in a powerful yet right-brained way that fits within the interactive
model we have for reporting.
We think our approach here
is pretty good, but we are dependent
on customers telling us what
their business problems are.
We take an unusual approach
to customer support via Instant
Messenger (AIM, MSN Yahoo etc.)
For the customer this is great.
They use these services already
so it's very easy for them to
ping a message to us. This makes
it easy for them to ask a question
- and through this process we
get to learn what features people
need. By making it easy for
customers to present their business
problems, we can easily work
on software tools that solve
them.
How do you
see the online marketing world
in general? What trends do you
see as being important this
year? I'd be interested in hearing
where you think Search marketing
is heading.
Certainly the recent acquisitions
by Overture are deeply significant,
as are the defensive moves we
see Yahoo! making. Both these
are really just shoring up the
existing businesses - generating
more revenue by owning more
of the same pie. The Pyra/Blogger
acquisition by Google is very
interesting. While Overture
is getting deeper and deeper
into search, we see Google stepping
into uncharted territory. We'll
be doing analysis of our own
ads that appear in those blogs.
You should not be surprised
to know that we use our own
software to do this!
We tried text ads on some community
sites a while back - Kuro5hin
and others. We had really poor
results though. When you think
about the psychology of the
user this makes sense - they
often go to these community
sites precisely to escape corporate
speak. A user may accept ads
in search results because they
are actively looking for something
- usually a solution to a problem.
On a blog they are noodling
around. Perhaps it is specific
to a certain topic, but you're
not getting people there that
want a widget, and want it now.
The best you can get is to brand
your widgets and hope they remember
the brand later. Isn't this
what PPC ads were supposed to
replace? Are we taking a backward
step here?
</end>
Thanks John, much appreciated.
If you'd like to evaluate ClickTracks
for yourself, here's
the link....
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