For the past few years Roundarch has been partnering with Avis Budget Group to develop a consolidated digital strategy.   In June, Aman Datta, vice president of Roundarch, and Kathryn Kiritsis, director of online marketing at Avis Budget Group presented at the Association of Travel Marketing Executives (ATME) Travel Marketing Conference in Boston, MA.  AMTE, chaired by Henry Harteveldt of Forrester Research, is a non-profit, professional association made up of experienced and innovative travel industry marketers.  We were very excited to share our strategy and the success of our partnership with Avis Budget Group at the conference.  Roundarch and Avis Budget Group have partnered to focus on a “go to where the customer is” strategy for digital marketing/commerce including a redesigned Web site, mobile apps, fully-functional booking widgets and a comprehensive optimization strategy.

The first step in this strategy was to develop personas to serve as the foundation.

After developing the personas we worked with Avis to completely redesign the car rental experience on Avis.com.  The rental process was reduced from 5 clicks on different pages to 3 clicks all on one page while displaying choices and prices dynamically to improve conversion.  Then we expanded to the mobile space with the first-to-market iPhone app for Avis.  We continue to work with Avis Budget Group to grow in the mobile space with apps on other platforms as well as site extensions that allow Avis to take their experience to affiliate sites.  This mobile strategy has resulted in a 300% increase in mobile revenues.  We have also partnered with Avis Budget Group to focus on optimization including multivariate testing and improved organic search.  The case for optimization is compelling:

• Revenue from SEO has doubled each of the 4 years since Avis upgrades its SEO efforts with a 40% decrease in SEM costs.
• Together search makes up over 25% of online revenue for both the Avis and Budget Brands.
• Budget conversion rate more than doubles for incremental SEO traffic.
• Landing page conversion from search traffic increased by 30%.

Recently, Shar VanBoskirk of Forrester Research published a case study outlining how successfully Avis has used personas to drive SEO, specifically organic search, in the past few years.

“Over the last few years, we’ve invested a considerable amount of money on this SEO project, but it’s still less than 10% of what we spend on paid search.  SEO is more cost-effective than paid search, so we need to strike the best balance.”

John Peebles, vice president of Avis Budget Group

Our partnership with Avis Budget Group has shown that a comprehensive digital strategy is essential in the market today.  We are continuing to not just plan for the future of digital marketing, but evolve with new technologies and design the future of digital marketing to best align with the customer.

If you are a student who has passion for finding out why people do things on-line and would love to analyze online behavior.  Or perhaps you are part of a non-profit with an inefficient website and you wish you could communicate more clearly to those you are trying to help.  Or if you are a seasoned Web Analytics professional that wants to give back to the community and help others.  This is the perfect opportunity in which a little bit of your time and expert advice can pay huge dividends to a non-profit organization and therefore people in need.  We here at Roundarch are now participating in our 4^th project for the Analysis Exchange.   We keep going back for one main reason…it’s a rewarding experience in so many ways.

What is the Analysis Exchange?  Simply a great idea

About a year ago, the folks over at Web Analytics Demystified created a Community called The Analysis Exchange.   The community consists of three participants:

1)      Non-profits and NGO’s (Organizations)

2)      Novice Web Analysts (Students)

3)      Seasoned Web Analytic professionals (Mentors)

The Analysis Exchange offers the opportunity for students/future analysts to perform hands on analysis on real data for real organizations (awesome for your resume, also, if you do a good job, your mentor might just give you a recommendation).  For mentors, it’s an opportunity to build your leadership experience and leverage your unique skills to improve the world (it’s not every day that you can improve the world).  Finally, non-profits and NGO’s can gain valuable insights into their digital efforts without having to commit anything (IT’S FREE!) more than a few hours of your time.

Rewards for everyone

Mentors build leadership skills, students learn, and Charities grow….everyone wins!   So far, Roundarch Analysts have been mentors on three completed projects.  While each project was different, they always had two common attributes…each had excellent students and each had highly gracious and thankful charities.

One added benefit that I personally have enjoyed is getting to know the students and the people at the organizations.   They are folks that have found a noble purpose and are dedicated to pushing their cause forward and helping others.  Even after the projects are over, I found myself staying in touch, attending events and assisting them as they improve their online presence.  Also I admire the students for their dedication (about 30 hours per project) and desire to improve themselves and to help someone at the same time.

The organizations we helped and why it is so rewarding

Dannydid Foundation ( www.dannydid.org ), a wonderful organization founded in 2009 by Mike and Mariann Stanton, is turning the tragic death of their son Danny (of an epileptic seizure while sleeping) into an organization focused on advancing awareness about Sudden Unexplained Death in Epilepsy (SUDEP) and facilitating the improvement and distribution of monitoring devices.

Since 1972, Prevent Child Abuse America ( www.preventchildabuse.org ), has led the way in building awareness, providing education and inspiring hope to everyone involved in the effort to prevent the abuse and neglect of our nation’s children.

Center for Independent Documentary ( http://documentaries.org/ ) was founded in 1981 to collaborate with independent producers to create films and videos on issues of contemporary social and cultural concern. These programs have been broadcast nationally and locally on public and cable television, won numerous awards, and are in distribution to educational markets worldwide.

A little about the projects

While each organization needed help with Web Analytics, each had very different visitor behaviors and technical needs.  The uniqueness of each organization makes the projects interesting and leaves you longing for the next.

Dannydid.org is a young organization and has very active Facebook presence.  Its site traffic is highly dependent on FB activity.  So our analysis was more geared towards Social media.  We analyzed where traffic was coming from and more importantly where it wasn’t coming from and ideas on how to spread their wings.   This included SEO assistance and setting up basic traffic monitoring reports.

For PCAA, the project took a longer in duration than expected (but the usual amount of work) and was more centered on improving the implementation and cleaning the data.  Once we cleaned things up we were able to setup custom reports that help them track the effectiveness key goals of their site.  They are currently in the process of redesigning their site and look forward to working with them again as the new site goes live.

For CID, the site had a Google Analytics account set up but had not had time to sift through the data. The site owner wanted to know the basics of site performance as well as a deep dive analysis into the various social media referrals. The final deliverable included well thought out analyses on the basic metrics, recommended steps to improve the metric’s performance, and valuable tidbits on how CID can maximize social network authority.

The Students

With each of our projects we were fortunate to be partnered with wonderful, caring students.  They were Ann Poritzky, Cedric Williams and Tonia Thompson.  Each did a great job.  They were professional, diligent, dedicated and produced valuable insights for their respective organizations.  It was a pleasure to work with each of them.

Get involved!

Go to the Analysis Exchange and signup.

Chief Business Marketer recently featured a case study about our work with Crowley to boost sales, create a stronger family of Web sites and improve search optimization.

A revamped website better highlighting maritime transport firm Crowley Corp.’s range of services has boosted SEO and conversions.

The new site, redesigned by digital agency Roundarch Inc, led to total organic search referralsincreasing 244% per month, and total non-branded keywords leading to the site rising 68% per month, says Mark Miller, director of corporate communications for Crowley.

A Smarter Family of Websites
With the website, there was a great opportunity to identify cross-sell prospects, and thus better leverage the overall online presence. Building in mechanisms so visitors could easily see related services was crucial, says Frank Baldassare, project manager for Roundarch.

Crowley’s existing site prior to the redesign was nine years old and very outdated. For the most part, any change to content was a complicated exercise and couldn’t be done with any frequency. The main Crowley site is for the parent company, with links to subsidiaries such as Titan Salvage, Jensen Maritime Consultants and Customized Brokers. Each of these has its own unique brand and a specific position in the market. “These sites weren’t supporting the overall brand, and they needed to be tackled from the get-go,” says Baldassare.

Read the full article here.

A look at the user experience visualizing historical data with varying levels of granularity.

Introduction
In the world of rich internet applications a very common goal is taking not easily accessible or multi-point data and outputting reports and visualizations. One thing that rich internet applications do very well is to display data across a period of time, and allowing the user to select ranges of time. Usually the output consists of a numerical report grid and some accompanying visualization. Most if not all, reporting applications focus around this capability.

Recently I had the opportunity to work on a Search Engine Optimization application that is designed to accept analytical and keyword data, then output reports and visualizations. In addition, the application will guide the user in creating keyword segments, and in turn produce personas. These activities will ease the management of campaign by managing segments and personas rather than the possible tens of thousands of keywords. At this time, let’s focus on the first phase of the reporting business process.

The user will upload data to the application and then the application will output reports and visualizations. As we dove deeper we discovered that the analytical SEO Data could be made available to the user on daily, weekly, or monthly basis depending on the client’s business objectives or processes. Thus, the user could upload daily data or summary data for weeks or months at a time. The Keyword data would remain largely unchanged, unless completely new campaigns were created, or drastic changes were made.
The client’s business requirement for this phase is to have a flexible application to allow the user to upload any range of data, at any time.

Design Approach
Keeping in mind the client’s business requirements for flexible data importing and reporting, our design focused around a date range slider to control this reporting interaction. Sliders are intuitive to use and we have successfully implemented them in many of our solutions. We coupled the slider with a report granularity selector for daily, weekly, and monthly reporting. The image below is an example of date range slider:

At first glance, it seemed like a straightforward objective and we did not see any issues with the process nor our approach, but the following is a narrative of the events that took place during 2 days of working through this business requirement, and the use scenarios that resulted from it.

Discovery
As I began to lay all this out, I started to see that the interaction between the data available and the date range slider would be critical. At first I saw two options:
The first option, the date range slider would drive how the data was to be reported, but the data available would drive what reporting options are available to the user. The user could only select by the period the data is available.
The second option was to have all reporting options available regardless of what data is available and normalize the data when applicable. For example, if the user selected to report by day, but the only data available is by week, the application would average the values by day.
To help us through this exercise, we developed a series of user scenarios to test both approaches and weigh the pros and cons of each.

We used this data import condition for all user scenarios:
The user will import 7 daily files, then 3 weekly files for the next 21 days for the first month, and a monthly file for the next.

Visually represented the data would look like this:

User Scenario 1:
The user wishes to view daily, weekly, and monthly data.
We set up this scenario as starting point based on a fairly complex data import. The objective here was to see how the slider would behave for simple reporting requests.

The Issue(s):
How should weekly and monthly reporting options be displayed, if the user selects report by day? The user knows daily, weekly, and monthly data are available.

Our Response – Limit the Reporting Granularity:
We responded to this issue by limiting the reporting granularity selector with daily, weekly, and monthly options based on the data available. Therefore if the user selected daily data only the purple 7 data points would be available as shown in the image below. The same would apply for weekly and monthly data.

We could play around with some visual elements to either ghost the remaining selections, to show the data’s availability but will not be displayed based on the reporting granularity selected. This corresponds to possibly large amounts of data not being available based on the user’s selection. We felt this was a very limiting experience, and not a viable option.

User Scenario 2:
The user selects a period from the middle of the first of the first week to the middle of the next week. There is a mix of daily and week data.

The Issue:
How does the application visualize data with different levels of data granularity?

Our Response – Normalization:
If the user selected a reporting granularity lower than what is included in the data set, the application will average, where applicable, to normalize the data for the block of less granular data.

The image below shows the normalization for the weekly data based on the selected range for by day reporting. A simplified view is available on the right. If the user selected to report by week, the values would be normalized across the entire reporting period and look like the red block of week data.

This would allow the user to see all data in all granularities over the entire reporting period. If we display the previous slider rule as mentioned in user scenario 1 with the normalization options outlined in user scenario 2, the image below displays all the reporting options with and without normalization, which we may allow the user to toggle on and off. The image below displays the possible options.

As a result some charting would require a good amount of normalization and mislead the user in their evaluation. If we refer back to the supporting image for user scenario 1, days 4 through 7 may not be an accurate representation of that period. We felt normalization is a transformation of data, and does not lend itself to good user experience.  We did not feel comfortable proceeding with this option, and dismissed it.

Final Solution and Lesson Learnt – Trade Flexibility for Data Integrity
We found that to deliver a consistent experience, we need to limit some of the options presented to the user. So much of the UI will be driven by the data, and that any amount of data could be available, at any granularity. The primary issue is not adjusting or implementing new user interactions, we needed to address the primary issue of “garbage in/garbage out”. We saw finally that by allowing the user to import inconsistent data, we were trying to control the user experience, rather than fix the root cause.

The Final Solution
We felt that an adjustment to the data import business rule would get the user in the right direction. We concluded by only allowing the user to import data in one granularity and for one calendar period at a time. This means the user has to find one granularity and stick to that. In addition, the user’s import would have to complete a calendar period. The sweet spot is probably a weekly import, but our user interview also points to monthly uploads being common place. By implementing this rule, we would certainly address all the issues listed above but at the price of flexibility and user experience. Sure our application would not be able to bend over backwards to allow all permutations of data and thus report that back out, but it would be consistent and deliver value.

Author Acknowledgments
I would like to acknowledge Gaurishankar Krishnanan and the SEO team for the time and effort during this exercise.