Wednesday, July 2, 2014

AMIR14 : Concerts in July ( W17-20 of 52 )

 2014 SUMMER MUSIC FESTIVAL SEASON

Hottest Festivals in July 
 

 TOOLS OF THE TRADE : ANALYTICS

ON-PAGE OFF-PAGE

Web analytics is the multi-discipline art of decoding your winning DNA or your competitors to discover architecture, design, navigation, advertising and marketing optimizations that augment your previous success into the future. Analytics websites and software can help you find these opportunities to monitor how web pages and rich media assets  perform by entering code that will track in real-time the traffic and actions of consumers looking for those solutions from anywhere in the world, at any time of the day, in any language and from every device.  Neat, haa?  

The real fun begins once you collect that data for 1 or 1 million you can create all kinds of reports to begin to gain insights into the customers mindset using a large number of Geographic, Demographic, Psychographic and Psynographic data points which at some point will even include Real-time BIOMETRIC information :-o kinda scary, but hey that's the world we live in. ;-) 

Anyway, on the next page we list some of the more common and beneficial fields available for use but remember there are always new ones being added so be on the lookout. In the end if you are a mensch and believe in treating your customers as you would want to be treated you will wind up using this information to create the perfect balance of giving the customer what they want in order to get what you need. a Win-Win in any book.

ON-PAGE analytics helps you measure how your site is performing in terms of speed, functionality, navigation and ease of use. It measures traffic on your site. Where that traffic came from? How they got there? What computer they used and what language they speak? What they are looking for and what they clicked on? How long they looked at your site and what they bought? If they had purchased before and  when. Finally,  how they left and what they clicked last.

OFF-PAGE analytics measures the world around you. Who is popular. Why they are popular. What customers are looking for. How they are communicating and where they are shopping? How much they are spending and on what? Basically, it delivers a receptive audience for what ever you wish to say because it is exactly what they are talking about as well. That's kinda like preaching to the choir but think of the applause at the end. On the other hand perhaps you are not afraid of confrontation and if it's a tough crowd you want then a tough crowd yee shall have. 

RESEARCH TOOL AD-NETWORKS AD-SOFTWARE                    Multi-Search CODING  

AdPlanner                   Google         Adwords Search                   AOL & ASK Javascript, PHP 
                                                              AdSense PPC

AdsIntelligence           Bing           AdCenter Search                   Yahoo               Javascript   
                                                              Bing Ads PPC

AdsIntelligence           Yahoo         AdExange Search                   Bing                  JQuery        
                                                              StreamAds PPC

QuantCast                   AOL             Sonar Search                                                    JQuery JavaScript
                                                        AdLearn PPC



WEBSITE TRAFFIC TRACKING

There are many Analytics software vendors that help track a companies website traffic and record each visitors geographic, demographic and even pyschographic flow to their online content or products in order to generate a historical and predictive dataset that is used to manage online consumer behavior and sales. However, companies generating more than 10 million in sales tend to migrate to the biggest vendors since they require complex implementations that merge data sets from various ERP systems in order to track their entire business cycle from product to place and promotion. These may contain Human Resources software like PeopleSoft from Oracle, Supply Chain Management applications from companies like SAP along with CRM/SFA tools from IBM and Microsoft, Siebel, Maximizer,  Goldmine, Act and many others.  

Google has been helping smaller companies that simply want to track their website's traffic or social media interactions in order to increase sales without the need for large scale software implementations however cloud companies like Salesforce.com and now Adobe.com are gearing up for the fight by proving integrated solutions in the CRM, CMS and analytics worlds. 

Google Analytics
( FREE but $150K per year after more than 10 million hits per day )

Google Analytics scales extremely well from one to thousands of products, is multi-lingual and multi-channel and can integrate well with third party APIs for ERP, SCM, HR and CRM/SFA while providing a low cost of entry. Because of its popularity and ease of access it has a large community of support along with its user friendly interface and powerful dashboard. Tracking traffic stats like visitor counts, unique visitors, entry pages, navigation flows, page views, time on page, events per page, events per visit, exit links, exit pages, time on site and average visits per day comes natural to Google by way of their search engine knowledge and  they can leverage that experience to help you achieve better  conversion rates and lower bounce rates for any given business cycle objective or marketing campaign. With Google Docs, Google Voice and YouTube they make a very compelling value proposition at the expense of privacy and security.  

Adobe Marketing Cloud
($500k+ per year for Analytics•Campaigns•ExperienceManager•MediaOptimizer•Social•Target)

Adobe has been offering content creation tools for almost 30 years and over the last 10 has been focusing on CMS and website design. Their value proposition lies in their ability to create an ecosystem that includes API integration to back-end systems for ERP, SCM, CRM/SFA and complex data sets along with using proprietary workflows to create, store, collaborate, schedule,  auto publish, optimize and repurpose the front-end visualization of that data for consumer facing digital applications like websites. Further-more they can contextually target ANY DEVICE across channels and leverage their third party acquisitions to provide ad serving and management including  A/B & multi-variate testing, realtime KPI/KBO reporting, off-line and on-line ad hoc multi dimensional projects w/out the need for extensive IT coding and support. Their only missing piece is the experience that Google, Baidu, Yahoo, Bing and other search engines posses. 

CUSTOMER RELATIONSHIP MANAGMENT

You can implement a CRM solution inexpensively on your next Office Depot trip by getting Act, Goldmine, Sage or spend the extra time and money to customize one of the more sophisticated implementations like SAP, Oracle or Siebel. It all depends on your budget and ERP goals as explained on the previous pages.
Regardless of the delivery method they all provide a similar feature-set that includes contact management of companies, departments, people  and groups. A built-in or integration to an email service including calendaring and scheduling. A workflow engine for opportunity management of activities, product development, inventory, pricing, leads, sales funnels, chatter and cases or projects. A campaign management area for advertising, mass mailings and digital marketing and finally a dashboard for KPI metrics monitoring and forecasts. 

Salesforce.com 
($65 per user/month to $1200 per 5 users/year for Group•Professional•Enterprise•Unlimited)

Saleforce is deployed solely the cloud as a Saas or software as a service. While it is the most popular, easy to implement and most cost effective CRM/SFA solution  it comes with a few caveats. For example your data security and service reliability is out of your control to some extent and vertical integration or scalability is outsourced to a third party development community making for limited integration with back-office software like ERP, SCM and HR. Data import is available but field force management and instant messaging can be difficult solutions to introduce and they were not native to the service. Performance can be difficult to anticipate but speed to market is unparralled. Pricing tiers range from $65 to $125 that include marketing lists and mass mailing campaigns as well as territory management and quotas. Customer service is provided using their Service Cloud. Chatter keeps everyone connected with an instant messaging solution and ExactTarget is their 1:1 campaign management tool. Finally Force.com adds application development and  CMS while Data.com houses a large B2B company list.  

Microsoft CRM Dynamics 
($45 - $59 per user/month  for •Professional•Plus - Boxed, Cloud or hybrid Software)

Microsoft is leveraging their existing Outlook user interface and MS Office applications to provide a familiar experience to consumers while including and easy path to online migration with different levels of web based browser, mobile and ofline access. The solution offers a robust customization template for data types, workflows and role-based views while utilizing the popular .net infrastruture and development tools like Visual Studio  and Microsoft SQL Servers. Along with their sales solution they also provide a customer service option, a data driven MarketingPilot tool for traditional advertising and digital marketing including PPC as well as an integrated social media insights option called Yammer that helps you Listen, Engage, Collaborate, Amplify, Solve, Innovate and Analyze along side your loyal customers. Their most recent update also includes a retail option for POS, store operations,  ommni channel SCM merchandising and e-commerce with improved project management utilities and customizable dashboard.

CONTENT / WEB MANAGEMENT SYSTEMS 

A good website is crucial to the success of a business in the 21st century and there's no better way to manage one than through the use of CMS. While there are many features to consider when selecting your software it is reassuring to know that there are some basics that ANY CMS solution must have. For example a solid security protocol with end user access control lists and user profiles. The application should be able to handle secure sockets layer content or https:// along with offering load balancing and database replication. An online administration dashboard is a must as well as a rapid development interface that is drag and drop, WYSIWYG and has templated wizards for standard reusable components. If an abstracted macro language and plug-ins are not available if must at least have a robust object model that can manage the merchandising needs, functions, methods and properties of an e-commerce site.  
    
WordPress 
( Free with Paid Upgrades available )

Wordpress started out as a blog creator but has blossomed into a full CMS application. It can be easily installed on a server in five minutes via a wizard for the core components which can auto update automatically in the background without large downloads. The basic features are free but you can purchase premium features ( $25-$100 1x) as well as third party plug-ins, extra storage, and private domain redirecting ( $5-25 per year ). The site can be hosted for free as a sub-domain.wordpress.com or at a cost from a shared or dedicated PHP server.  These range from $10-50 per month including domain registration for shared space which is less secured so paying for extra security and back-up services is a must. An expert developer/programmer can charge $75 hour with a large third party plug-ins developer community providing premium features at set costs however they can bring potential security risks. There are  many buil-in features in the core like image and multi-media upload support  and a user friendly dashboard for management plus thousands of ready built themes that make the tool fun and easy to use from day one however it's native open source programming language of php can be difficult to learn for many so it is common to opt for a turn-key solution contractor to build  their first website ( 2k-3k for 5 pages ). 

Joomla 
( FREE with PAID extensions and private hosting upgrades available )

Joomla is the 2nd most popular FREE CMS out there requiring the same PAID developer/programmer and hosting upgrades as wordpress but providing stronger security through user authentication via OpenId and LDAP. The Joomla installer is straight forward but very configurable and meant to work on common shared hosting packages.  It comes with an attractive administration interface, complete with intuitive drop-down menus and other features along with EXTENSIONS to its core functionality allowing the creation of great social media themed sites. Development costs range depending on complexity from $100 per page to $500 if training is provided. These may include graphic design and site architecture modules ( home, navigation, slideshows, forums, discussions, captcha, social media, rss, search, virtuemart zoom-ins, merchandising, checkout, payment and PayPal options, shipping, SEM, SEO, PPC, PPP )