John Roa » The Blog

YouTube is great. It has a multitude of fantastic uses. It can draw hundreds of thousands of new fans for musicians. It can make you famous – or infamous. It make you laugh. A lot. YouTube stands tall while so many others have fallen.I have recently realized another unique, and unexpected, role that YouTube plays in our culture: a smoking gun. There have been more and more examples lately of YouTube being the ammunition for justice – something that simply couldn’t have happened a decade ago. A few recently:

1. Feline Abuse

About 8 days ago, there was a horrible video posted on YouTube of a cat being abused by two young men hidden by dark masks. I first caught mention of the video on Digg early Sunday morning. It goes without saying – the video was absolutely awful. Internet vigilantes from around the world – united by a common anger – were doing detective work that would make Sherlock proud. Within hours, with the help of the infamous hacker group known as Anonymous, we knew everything about our abusers – full name, address, age, home phone, cell phone, email address, parents’ names, parent’s work information, etc. Not more than a day later, after being picked up by news sources from the abuser’s home town to Russia, we got word that the cat has been rescued and the boys had been arrested by local police.

2. New York Policeman Abuses Cyclist

Patrick Pogan, a 23-year old rookie police officer, was caught on camera literally bodychecking a cyclist off his bike in an unreal act of violence. At first, the police officer told administrators that the cyclist was “obstructing government administration and resisting arrest”. A decade ago – it would have been the officer’s word against the victim’s – and we all know how that ends up. Enter YouTube. Months later – it is reported that ex-officer Pogan has been fired from the force and faces up to 4 years in prison.

3. Huff Says, She Says

Huffington Post, the popular left-wing news aggregation portal, is often criticized for .. well .. just about anything a news organization can be critisized for: agenda, bias, hate speech, stealing material, etc. However, thanks to YouTube, they can add one more to the list – doctoring video. I’m as anti-Fox News as the next guy, but the detective work done over at johnny dollar shows just how far Huffington will go to vilify Fox. In short, multiple audio/video clips were spliced together to put some racist/damning words in the mouth of John Gibson - that were never actually said. Huffington publicly apologized and said the video had come from another online source. This is probably the first and only time in my life I will defend anything concerning Fox, but journalistic integrity is something even they deserve. 

It is amazing to think that chances are none of the aforementioned events would have been rectified and had justice served had it not been for groups of determined internet users and tools like YouTube.

I had a great dinner last week with Sachin Agarwal, CEO of dawdle.com. I was helping Sachin brainstorm new ideas for improving the e-commerce aspects of his site. While a lot of ideas were exchanged, there was a consistent theme of the conversation: Actionable Data.

What is Actionable Data you may ask? (Actually, I bet a lot of my readers aren’t asking since many of you are fellow marketing-geeks … but anyway … )

Actionable Data is customer focused and includes customer input, organizational knowledge, interpretation, evaluation and eventual decision making

Sounds complex. Let me oversimplfy it, in terms of web analytics:

Actionable Data is data derived from well-executed analytics that allows you to make strategic business decisions based on behavior, trends and actions. This data can be isolated, analyzed and tested.

How does this apply to us? Web and e-commerce marketers love analytics. I’m convinced there is nothing sexier to my kin than a colorful bar chart or a funnel visualization report. Hint: looking to pick-up a web marketer? Let me suggest grabbing an outfit like this and heading to your closest Tweetup:

Many web and e-commerce marketers love analytics so much, we can get lost deep in the gaze of pie charts until we forget a crucial rule of thumb: all data is not created equal.

Web analytics software, ranging from Google Analytics to Omniture SiteCatalyst, should be where your e-commerce rubber meets the road. If you are running Google Analytics with the sole purpose of watching your daily visits … save Google the bandwidth and find the icon for Webalizer in your cPanel. A well-oiled analytics machine should be the driving force behind prioritizing site changes, tracking marketing efforts and creating ways to listen to your users.

How is this done? Here are a few tips:

1. Optimize your analytics: In terms of e-commerce, make sure that you are utilizing all of the features that are being offered for the broadest insight. In terms of Google Analytics, these are things like Goals, Funnels, e-Commerce Tracking (integrating with your cart), etc.
2. Know the benchmarks: When you are sifting through your analytics, do you know what to look for? Is your .85% conversion rate competitive in your market? Should you be getting 70% bounce rate from paid search? It will take some research and networking, but the answers are out there. Google Analytics folks: they have made your job even easier. But, be careful not to get sucked in. Rather, use benchmarking as a way to prioritize your data and find glaring concerns.
3. Be smart about positioning data: When #1 and #2 are good to go, the next step is to position the data to tell a story. Position your data against actionable factors: marketing efforts, site changes, product merchandising, promotions, etc. Knowing ‘why’ supersedes knowing ‘what’.
4. Create Key Performance Indicators (KPI): While we are all focused on the bottom line, your analytics should be used to track what is important to you. KPIs are strategic calculations derived from your analytics that speak to specific measurable areas. For instance, Overall Business Performance (most profitable products, new vs. returning customers), Online Sales Activity (conversions, visitors), Marketing Performance (up-sell orders, coupon conversion), etc. Here is a great resource to learn more.
5. Put your data to use!: Time to put the ‘action’ in Actionable. Even great data is worthless if you don’t act on it. When you find the KPIs you want to manipulate, formulate strategies based on your data. For example, if you are trying to manipulate cart abandonment, find the data! Your analytics should show you that 90% of your abandonments are happening during the 3rd of a 4-step checkout process. Wow! Now test a solution – in this case, removing/optimizing your process down to a 3-step checkout. (Remember, testing doesn’t mean changing a whole process and watching your analytics for a week. There are much, much better ways to do it). And when you have data on the performance of your test – react to it! Implement that new shiny 3-step process if that is what your data is telling you. And when that is off and running, test and react again! And again! And again! (There is a trend forming here).

Data is great. Actionable Data is divine.

That was just the tip of a big data-filled iceberg, but hopefully that creates some food for thought. I am off to patent the funnel visualization report suit.

Learn more about Dawdle: Online marketplace for new and used video games, consoles, portables, and accessories