Drowning in numbers? What are the most meaningful measures to improve campaign performance.

            There are certain differences between traditional marketing and digital marketing. One of the main differences is that with digital marketing you can quantify and measure every action that your customer does. Numbers and quantitative data can give you a live image of how your marketing campaign is doing. Successful marketing campaigns rely on numbers in order to constantly evolved and correct their problems.

Stephen Leonard (head of e-commerce of Alliance and Leicester) called this process of improving performance as “Test, Learn & Regine”. Seth Romanow in 2004(Director of customer knowledge at Hewlett-Packard) describe it as “Measure, Report, Analyze and Optimise”. Jim Sterne underpins this term and called it web analytics on his book Web Metrics and on the annual event e-metrics. He summarized the process as “TIMIT”: Try It! Measure it! Tweak it! The web analytics association defines web analytics as:

“Web analytics is the objective tracking, collection, measurement, reporting and analysis of quantitative internet data to optimise websites and web marketing initiatives”

            How can your business improve its web analytics and your digital marketing strategy? A concrete answer: good management. Many e-retailers and online businesses set up their web pages without stating their priorities, not knowing what to measure and how to measure information. The results of bad management in web analytics are listed by Dave Chaffey et. Al.

      ·         Poor linkage of measures with strategic objectives.

      ·         Key data not collected.

      ·         Data inaccuracies.

      ·         Data not disseminated or analysed.

      ·         No corrective action.

        

                Poor management in web analytics is an often problem within businesses and it is normally linked to lack of qualified person, data overload, poor software, and senior management myopia (performance measure not seen as a priority). For that reason creating a performance management system is compulsory. Businesses often make the mistake of measuring any kind of information without going first through the performance measurement process as seen in graph 10.2 (Due to copyright please click the link to see graph ).

             As it is possible to established the performance measurement process is divided in four stages. Stage number one is goal setting; this is usually the strategic internet marketing objectives. Stage number two is performance measurement-collecting and determining the importance of the data. Stage three, performance diagnosis- analysis of results and understanding the reason why  data discrepancies. Stage number four is the corrective action-what should we do about it? And feedback.

               This is a continuous cycle since the goal setting will constantly change depending of the needs and wants of the costumer. It is important to understand that the digital world is in constant change and evolution, new goal settings and dynamism within the company should be seen as normal.

              With a good managerial framework we are prepared to look to the key measures that could improve your digital campaign. It is the responsibility of the manager to connect the objectives of the company with the following ratios and measures and decide which one is more important to look at. 

According to Chaffey et al. these are the key measurements:

     1.      Channel Promotion: Measures that assess why customers visit a site, which adverts they have seen and which sites they have been referred from.

Log-file analysis is a key ratio: It assess which intermediary sites customers are referred from and the keywords they input. Using log-file analysis you can find the percentage of referrals or sales, cost-per-acquisition (CPA) or cost-per-sale (CPS) and contribution to sales and other outcomes.

     2.      Channel Behaviour: Once customers have accessed your web page channel behaviour enables the manager to monitor what content the user have look, when they visit and the amount of time the customer spends in the page and whether these interactions with content lead to a satisfactory marketing outcome.

Key Ration are: Bounce rates; Home page views; Stickiness page view & Repeats.

     3.      Channel Satisfaction: As you have seen in my previous post “Engage your audience to create deeper relationships” customer satisfaction is the corner stone for a successful business. Online methods to measure customer satisfaction range from online questionnaires, focus groups and interviews to assess customers’ opinion and perception of the brand.

Key Measures: Site availability and performance; e-mail response (benchmarking service).

     4.      Channel Outcomes: Record the number of customer actions taken as a consequence of a page view.

Key Measure are: Channel contribution which is conversion rate purchase (visitors over purchases) and conversion rate registration (visitors over registration).

Attrition rate is described as the number of visitors that are lost in the process of making a purchase. Data and personal experience shows that only a very small number of interested customer will actually pay for the good. In the middle of the payment process customers may opt to go out because of high shipping costs or card validation error between many other reasons.

    5.      Channel Profitability: Many commerce and retailers use internet as other channels for profits. It is important that this kind of companies draw a target as of how much profits they want to raise in internet. Having a target will aloud the business to put resources and staff into this purpose.

Key Measures: Discounted cash flow techniques (asses the rate of return for a certain period of time).

So for example you are a start-up e-business who wants to know how effective is your web page delivering your message. You will focus on Channel Behaviour and maybe analyse the bounce rates, page views, visitors sessions and unique visitors. Low bounce rates plus high page views plus high visitor sessions plus high unique visitor means that your web site is customer friendly and you are delivering what the customer is looking for. 
Based on your business' objective tailored your web analytics into the above measurement frameworks. 




Do not forget good management will deliver a successful web analytics that will improve your business performance in the web.