SearchFest 2016 Mini-Interview: Allison Hartsoe

Allison Hartsoe will speak about “The Rules of Data” at SearchFest 2016, which is being held March 10th, 2016 at the Sentinel Hotel in Portland, Oregon. For more information or to purchase tickets, please click here.

1) Please give us your background and tell us what you do for a living.

I am CEO of Ambition Data, a digital analytics management consulting firm. We frame information around people and what they do. This means we spend a lot of time providing advice on how to shape unruly clickstream data into prescriptive customer insights. The difference is as strong as the coffee you get in Portland.

A descriptive insight sounds like this: We got 20% more page views to our landing page on our last keyword optimization. (Blah! Is this good or bad? It’s impossible to tell from this.)

A prescriptive insight sounds like this: While we did see a 20% increase in traffic, most of those were from people who visited us in the last 30 days. Further, when they hit the page, 50% were still likely to immediately leave but the remaining people divided into 20% who beelined to a specific product and 30% who floundered in the site, looking lost and eventually leaving. We might consider two routes from the landing page, one for people who know us and one for people who don’t. (Hooray! I see people and how to help them.)

I like to say it’s all about people, not page views.

2) How can one make the business case for social given that social metrics can be difficult to translate into sales?

This is true. Social is difficult to translate into sales. We once did an analysis that showed the initial social touch was 7 visits away from purchase. So the first way to solve this problem is to stop using the term “social” as if it were one generic universe. Social is a super-flexible tool to move people along the consumer journey. I believe it is particularly powerful for re-engaging existing customers by increasing their purchase volume and frequency. There are some very good customer lifetime value equations (see Peter Fader’s research at Wharton) you can use to project the value of re-engagement.

Statistically speaking and oddly enough, if someone ever purchased once from you, they never drop to a zero likelihood of re-purchasing. Yet people who have never purchased who are starting at zero is where we spend a lot of our marketing time. So my advice is to flip it around. Use social to nurture and care for existing customers first. That reputation will in turn drive new acquisitions and create a strong business case for social.

3) Is Google Analytics adequate for measuring social, and if not, what other tools would you use?

Again, this is “social” as a generic term. We want to measure people first because they move the business forward with their purchases. And this is a key difference, because how we frame the data matters. To that extent, Google has been looking hard at customer lifetime value, unifying customer data, allowing uploads of identifiers, all with the goal to provide a clearer view of customer behavior.

So back to your question, if you had a clearer understanding of how many of your existing customers interacted with you on social channels versus how many you didn’t know at all, then you could shape your messages and judge performance a lot better.

General social media “analytics” tools are rife with junk food metrics. These are things that measure action but not necessarily meaning or business impact. They are things that the tool finds easy to measure but the business cannot translate into value. For social analysis, the system is essentially rigged from the start. A better way to go is clusters of text such as using social listening tools like Clarabridge to evaluate a product launch or to tie into website behavior and calculate the social “heat” versus the product sales. One company I know used so much social heat they blew out a product from their online store leaving a trail of 17 unfulfilled orders for every 1 fulfilled. Now that’s a social success but a business failure. The ultimate social media tool would keep both in line.