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° Cons:

Specialized - yet another vendor to manage

Has to wear many hats (eat what they kill)
Physical limitations on number of clients that can
be serviced
Can be more expensive per hour
Limited in the number of things that can be done
well
    ihat can big
companies do today? Organize. Hire an in house
search specialist or project manager, who should be
a strong communicator along with a strong
understanding of SEO
° Establish an internal team may include

  
()
& 

 " 
 

Then analyze the data and the roles,- the goal is to
not
become beholden consultants. Lastly, ‫ز‬educate,‫س‬
and make sure to follow up and stay current.
 ihen to seek outside help?
° For a core competency outside your
department. If you do not have the time
and resources, a ³buy in from the top,´ it is
not worth the time to bring in a consultant
or imbedded There has to be a strong
commitment from leadership to
perform.
 here are 3 options that should
be considered to be the best
model for the company.
° ³All outsourced´ (what most people do)
° ³Hybrid,´ and ³all in house.´
° People have started to think along the lines of ³I
can build a great team for the $2 million that I am
spending on Project Management
° his is a growing problem for agencies that need
to provide value
° Another question to consider: ³is the current
model working?´
° ihat is the culture? iill vendors fit in, and how
are they managed? For the execution, ask ³what
is the labor resource required? ihat are
customized tools«do we ³need something
custom?´
° For cost efficiency, ihat is the total cost of each
program? ihat are the barriers to
implementation and what will the costs be to
overcome them? In measuring/predicting time
and success,, he feels that in the end some form
of hybrid marketing will rule.

° You can do well completely in house, especially

for the low-hanging fruit
° hen there are more advanced things that may
require help such as architectural issues and more
advanced coding problems.
° So, if you are going with completely in house:
spend time at conferences, understand you
market share. ihat are you getting versus what
your competitors are getting.
° Completely outsourced: It is nice to have
someone to assign the work to, but you still
need to remain educated, in order to not go
in the wrong directions. Remember that you
will also have to guide the consultant,
especially for keyword selection and
copywriting, as well as link building.
° The larger the company the more complex
the politics, usually.
° ihat are the questions to figure out before hiring
someone? ³ihat is the staff t- client ratio?´
³ihat is the employee turnover rate?´
° ³ihat is the level of customization?´ ihat is
the standard deliverable, and what will cost
extra? How does process, training, and on
boarding work? Lastly: Meet your team. At
the end of the day it is about the people who
are working with your business.
°
hare data. It may take longer to
become comfortable with sharing
sensitive data, but when you can, it will
improve performance. Invest in
learning, and plan for long term gains.
Reward success ࣗ structure something
in the contract to give agency extra
based on performance. Push for
innovation and exceptional results.
Summary of the pros and cons
of being in-house:
°
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 Cons to being in house:
° Many of the best consultants are extremely
competitive individuals, yet internal positions do
not usually foster this competitive spirit.
° here is often a sense of boredom and eventual
lack of motivation that comes with continually
working on the same site as opposed to new
challenges and opportunities.
° As part of a small internal team there is often a
lack of informal learning opportunities which
inhibits professional growth and the ability to
deliver in a rapidly changing environment.
° iith a single in house resource, you will be
constrained to a single set of strategies, as
opposed to best of breed solutions that result
from an integrated team approach.
° Professionals are rarely equally trained or
experienced in both organic optimization
and paid search marketing
° You may be sacrificing by relying on one
resource or investing in a larger team. It is
often difficult to drive organizational
change from within.
° External resources are needed to justify
priorities, directional change, and budgets.
° At the moment across the ecosystem
there does not seem to be a single
model that is totally dominant. ie have
some web analytics teams in
companies that are all in-house. ie
have a whole bunch that are sort of a
hybrid, some work done in-house but
most of the work done by individual
outside Consultants or via one of the
larger web analytics consulting
Companies. There are fewer
completely out-sourced models for
some reason.

o here is a framework to think through stages
of the journey and some characteristics of each
stage.

tage One: Birth
ihat does it look like?
° Úou have nothing, no web analytics
implementation or a really new one.
Úou are just getting started but have
some support from management.
° ihat do you need?
° 1) ieb analytics tools implementation.
2)
how promise from data and
convert the masses.
° ihat is your role?
° 1) Find the most senior person who
owns your company policies and
assign them the accountability for
deliverables.
2) Donࣛt expect perfection and donࣛt
pick the most expensive tool and donࣛt
pay the consultant lots and lots of
money upfront (youࣛll do that later).
3) Ask to speak to a client that the
consultant has recently lost.
° ihat is the consultantࣛs expected role?
° 1) Talk to the client owner a lot and
some data consumers.
2) Help you find and implement the
best fit first tool fast. (
uggested
vendor selection process.)
3) Teach you not to make mistakes all
their other clients make.
4) Do lots of training sessions and dog
and pony shows around your company
(makes you look good and shows
promise of whatࣛs possible).
° ihat should you be careful about?
° Most of what will be done in this stage will be
thrown away later, and it is ok. Make sure
you set that expectation with your internal
company customers / partners. As your first
phase targets choose people who have data
affinity and your friends (so theyࣛll stick with
you through the birthing pains), most
definitely donࣛt over-stretch and give 500
people login accounts to your new web
analytics application.
° ihat do you pay consultants?
°
mall dollars, more frequently.
  -# -  
-
° ihat does it look like?
° Úou have won over a few converts, the
consultants are pumping in reports that
people are using and you are drowning in
questions, some people have started to
complain about the fact that they donࣛt know
what action to take, the VP of Marketing is
wondering why we keep changing the site
but the analytics tool is not telling them why
conversion rate is tanking.
° ihat do you need?
° 1) Consider hiring a ieb Analyst to be the
in-house resident expert, someone whoࣛll
collect tribal knowledge and be on the beck
and call of the VP.
2) Customized solutions for your business
(because you have realized you are unique
and standardized KPIࣛs from books donࣛt
apply to you).
3) Úou will find lots of data is missing and
the tags are not right so you will need a
massive effort to update your tags and
collect new data (say site structure, site
outcome details, new cookies/parameters,
campaign meta data etc).
° ihat is your role?
° 1) Help fill the Analyst position as soon
as you can (look for acumen, curiosity
and simple web smarts).
2) Have the consultant spend a lot of
time on the problem talking to the
people who run your businesses.
3) Find out what the financial goals are
for the project or problem, look for
benchmarks, find out how the success
of others channels is being measured .
° ihat is the consultantࣛs expected role?
° 1) Really understand your business
and your business success criteria and
bring their business acumen to the
table (vs. tool expertise in
tage 1).
2) Create those aforementioned
customized solutions that incorporate
core financial or other goals for key
metrics to show real success.
° 3) Help you put standards in place to
capture meta-data that you need to do
optimal analysis (meta data round
campaigns, products, website
customers etc). The consultant has to
help you nail all the data problems
(either missing data or bad data) in this
stage.
4) Teach you how to do reporting for
yourself.
° ihat should you be careful about?
° This is a very painful stage for you, the
client. There is more data than you can
digest and yet it means little. Be patient,
practice zen. Úou very deliberately want to
bring reporting in-house now mostly because
it will be cheaper for you to do (and a great
way to train your Analyst) and you really
want to focus the consultant on doing true
and powerful analysis (and teaching you that
as you move from toddler to a teen).
° ihat do you pay consultants?
° Medium sized dollars, less frequently.

tage Three: The Wild
Youth
° ihat does it look like?
° Problems and analysis rule the roost.
Úour conversion rate (or Problem
Resolution Rate for support sites) has
doubled from 1% to 2%. Úour decision
makers have realized that Path
Analysis is a waste of time.
° Úou have extracted all you can from
your data Analytics tool.
° ihat do you need?
° 1) Experimentation and Testing
expertise, to realize you are wrong
about what your customers want.
2) Úou need to start moving into
collecting Qualitative data (for example
surveys).
3) Help creating a strategy that would
integrate all the new pieces of data you
will capture.
° ihat is your role?
° 1) Expand your team in the company to
get other bright people involved on
problem and solution analysis.
2) Identify decision makers who „

Customer Centric Decision Making and
cozy up to them (youࣛll need their
sponsorship / air cover / money).
° ihat is the consultantࣛs expected role?
° 1) Bring tools and expertise to the table
for these new things you know nothing
about.
2) Knowledge transfer (because soon
the general ideas wonࣛt bear huge
fruits and youࣛll have to bring business
expertise to the table) and
implementing best practices.
° 3) Help you integrate your various data
sources so that you can do analysis for
survey responses or figure our multi-channel
impact of your experiments/tests.
° ihat should you be careful about?
°
tart with modest goals and donࣛt
underestimate the immense resistance youࣛll
get from your company culture. It is very
hard for companies to truly have a customer
centric mindset and at very step you should
be prepared to massage egos and re-frame
things so that they let you bring customer
voice to the table and not just kill it because
of their opinions.
° Create case studies when you do a
great test or find out a huge nugget of
information via the Research work.(it
will pay you back big).
° ihat do you pay consultants?
° ïig sized dollars, a bit initially and then
only periodically.

tage Four: Maturity

° ihat does it look like?

° Úou have truly implemented something
akin to the Trinity. Úou donࣛt have
enough people to do the analysis work.
° ihat do you need?
° 1) New and different ways to capture data.
2) More people.
3) Create self sustaining processes that feed
active decision making.
4) Maybe another challenge! : )
° ihat is your role?
° 1) Chief Cheerleader.
2) Find the right talent.
3) Find Insights from
ix
igma and Process
Excellence (books maybe).
4) Truly consultants who really donࣛt do
much work except come talk to you and give
you ideas.
° ihat is the consultantࣛs expected role?
° 1) For the new technologies you are trying
you will need help in understanding
them and instrumenting new ways of
capturing data.
2) Bring truly radical outside perspectives
(that a select few consultants in the world
have) that will both energize you but also
help influence strategy (vs. KPIࣛs or page
design).
° ihat should you be careful about?
° Úou are going to be in very rarefied air,
make sure your organization has the
appetite for risk and they back you. Úou will
make more mistakes here (but you will also
win big), be prepared for it and make sure
that that is ok. Ensure that you donࣛt go so
ࣞprocess crazyࣟ that people have meetings
and do graphs just for the sake of process
meetings (this happens all the time). Úour
personal job is to motivate your team
(analytics/research/web/whatever) and keep
the organization on the right track time and
people evolve.
° ihat do you pay consultants?
° Huge sized dollars, infrequently.
° ct‫ذ‬s that simple.
° There are many great consultants /
consulting companies.
ome of them
have different sizes and specialties but
they all know what they are doingࣧࣧ
 6


— The numbers of both in-house and
agency will decline; this drop will be
partially countered by growth in self-
employed consultants.
° An interesting uptick in the number of
those "not employed" in Induvidual
advisers(IA¶s). Considering how this
number had steadily declined, this is
somewhat surprising, but many
respondents indicated that they'd move
into management, broader work, or new
activities altogether. This is supported by
predictions in what portion of our jobs
will be dedicated to IA in the future. IA
ain't the end-all-be all
hank you