Tagging Culture

 When you spend months designing and implementing a page, spend thousands of dollars on revamping a page, don’t you for once feel, let me measure my effort not just in terms of hours and cost, but in terms of revenue or benefits? For God’s sake you are making a web page, not a baby, that however it looks, you just feel its the prettiest and want everyone to feel the same !!!

With hundreds and thousands of lines of code written to launch a page, will a few more lines of codes of tagging feel so tough that your developer will overshoot the deadline ?? If yes, then fire your developers, they are just whiling away their time in coffee bars while charging you for their over estimated project plan and asking for another sprint to put tags in place just to hide the fact that they had enough time and resources to code two more projects in the same timeline. And if they are genuinely struggling to put in ready code  with api calls to tag manager along with all the stackoverflow code that they copy from Google and need an extra two weeks sprint just to do that, you just need to up your interview process and hire better coders... or may be just stop outsourcing.

All I say to developers is, be curious : tech job is good, It might feel nice to see your website page launched, but wouldn’t it feel even better to tell someone that everyday a million people visits the page that I developed or that the change I made on the page saved my company a million dollars this year !!! Isn’t it cool !!!

Tagging is so simple, yet so effective and every persons curiosity to measure should drag them to the correct team, instead of the other way round. 

Tag... Tag.... Tag.... Tag everything and measure. There is story in every number. 

 

Referring Domains

In the recent past I have researched a lot about referrer and referring domains and all the adobe links never gave a straight forward answer. I always had to deduce it so thought why not put it up like a simple 2 line answer instead.

Have you ever noticed in Adobe that  referrer report just reports a lot of URL traffic which is your own website traffic and not where they came from to that URL. If that is not the case in your adobe then your adobe admin has set up the internal URL filter list correctly. 

Internal URL filter is a list of URL's provided to Adobe saying, this is our own website that we are measuring so ignore these URL’s and tell me all the other URL’s which are from other websites. If not already done, then ask your admin and get this one set up for an accurate referrer report.

Once you have set up the internal URL filters, have a look at the referrer report. The first thing that comes to notice is the totals. The visits in this report do not match the total traffic to the website. This took some research to find out as to why the totals don’t match. Eventually google helped me find out that the visits with previous URL as internal URL will never get reported in referrer report, obviously we told them don't report my URL's.

Now what could be a part of this report. Visitors who got logged off and logged in using the logout page, or if your business has multiple websites, then someone who came to this website from your other website would have referrer as internal URL and the filter that you added will stop traffic getting reported in this table. So the difference in the traffic can be assumed to be internal URL traffic. 

How to do a double check  - In the marketing channel report. Marketing channel processing rules also have a rule to capture internal URL list traffic under a bucket called internal traffic.  So go ahead and set up your marketing channels report too in adobe and use these in conjunction to look at your referrer traffic.

App Vs Browser

 App is always better starting with the Verdict, but what if your mobile browser traffic is much more than app. What should your strategy be?

There are only two solutions either you let them be or you try to shift them to the App. Let’s look at pros and cons. 

We know app users are sticky. They like our brand and gave a special place for us on their phone and who would not want to be on that spot, but are they happy with the app? Can the App do everything? Or does it actually limit people with their tasks and also avoid them to visit the website?

On the other hand, the browser users who do not want to give you permanent space on their mobile but are high mobile users and choose to perform their task on the small mobile screen than a comfortable laptop screen, do you love them as much as app users ?  They get their tasks done and forget you. 

Should you really try to push these browser users to App? May Be yes, if you are capable of providing every functionality that a browser can then why not ?? after all app are supposed to be simple and easy, only if they don’t hang ! Else just let them be, if you feel your app is incapable. 

Segment Segment Segment !!! Not everyone who uses a mobile browser the same.  There are people with lower memory on phone who cannot afford too many apps, there are people who just don't like performing tasks via app because of all the kinds of terms and conditions put up during installation. There could be a lot of loyal sticky users among them.  You should not just ignore them. Make their mobile browser experience better, after all they chose to go digital than calling you to perform the task. 

Single Matra - Only Digital, app or browser how does it matter? If your app or browser does not lead to a phone call you are good. Do not worry about the stickiness. Think about the people and their phones. Finally there are too many brands in a persons life one can’t always have all the apps with them all the time. Will you get a permanent space on their phone or just be a passing browser, appreciate them and cater to them in their ways. Don't push your KPI's on them. 

The World of Bots

Bots/Robots are not just human shaped machines that we have seen in some Facebook or Whatsapp video. They could also be just a piece of code trying to be a human in front of the computer. 

With Zillions of websites on the Internet, there are bots going probably into core of every website, every content and probably every discussion or a conversation. Isn't that scary?

It’s scary, because bots can be good or bad. 

Good bots - It’s a multi-billion dollar business to be a good bot. Aggregator companies have become very popular since past few years where the company has no product to sell. The whole business is based on selling products of other companies on their own website and how they do it is using a bot/crawler.

Bad Bots - If your website is not a secure one and is an important one, then there are always people trying to use a bot to try various combinations of ID’s and passwords to hack into the website.  I am sure I don’t have to talk much about this, you see, we have a moral science classes in school, because good needs to be taught, bad comes automatically. So lets talk about the good bots. 

In a lot of banking sites, (as secure as a banking site),  customers themselves provide the ID and password to the bot companies to login an access their information. Is it scary , yes!!! Is it bad for the bank, I say yes !! Is it bad for customer, may be - may be not !!

So, who are these so called aggregator companies? These are well established and very reliable companies with top class security and awesome looking website with all possible options or all possible information at one place. It surely does make the customers life easy !!! But on the other hand hackers don’t have to hack into 5 of your bank websites, they just have to hack into one of your aggregator servers to steal all possible information they can put their hands !!! That's a very pessimistic thinking, I know !!

So, how does it impact the real business???  I say it is a sad story for the business in most ways especially if you are dealing with customers. 

• Customers are people who already have an affinity towards your brand, and when they visit the website, one can use this opportunity to cross-sell their products without any competition and if they don't visit you, but the aggregator then you are now competing with the world in a 300*250 pixel on someone else's website to cross-sell your product. Forget the complex personalization algorithm you are planning to use for targeting.
• These aggregator companies hit your website a lot of times in a day/week/month which seems like unnecessary traffic, as a real human would probably not login everyday. The increased website traffic is a burden to the back end servers, costing you a lot of money on the infra side.
• With aggregators, customers become lazy to login into website, forget their passwords, which costs the organization. They will be able to access little information from aggregators, while for tasks, they will choose a phone or some other costly channel than logging into the website and if you need something from the customer then you also will have to use the costly channel to reach out to them.  

On the other hand, Prelogin aggregators are profitable from marketing perspective. If you are a well established company with a good product, the customers will surely choose you comparing the features of other companies, and if you are a newer company you still get an equal opportunity and a platform to sell with your well established competitors.  

That's on the good bots. The bad bots as I said I don't think I have to talk a lot about, as you know they do the bad stuff. Well, recently came to know about a new kind of bad thing that bad bots do... There are bots that just download your app multiple times and rate them bad just to spoil your business. Never thought of using bots to do something like that !!!