The Direct Marketing Association released their "Web Analytics Report" this week. The survey of marketers overwhelmingly rated web metrics as the most important key to campaign evaluation, scoring 5.8 out of a possible 7.0.
Duh! At the very least, and for most SMBs, having minimal website metrics is a crucial aspect of evaluating website performance. You should know how many unique visitors your site gets and how many pages they look at, at the very least. If you use landing or squeeze pages as a destination for any on or off-line marketing, knowing how many visitors landed there help measure a campaign’s effectiveness. Then knowing your conversion rate, or how many people bought something, registered, donated, etc, you can make some decisions about improving performance.
Monitoring certain metrics ratios is important for tweaking campaigns, assessing marketing initiatives and budgets or determining when something has run it’s course. For instance, if you want to double the results of a campaign, it might be as easy as doubling the efforts and budget of a certain marketing initiative. To operate more profitably, you’d want to assess which campaigns have a higher cost-per-customer-acquisition and eliminate or cut back on it.
None of this can be done without web metrics.
We once had a customer who brokered golf course real estate. He talked
about having placed ads in a popular golf magazine. I told him that I
could probably tell him when the ads ran based on traffic reports for
his website. He was surprised when I told him that it appeared that
the ads ran about the 15th of the month in September, October and
November. He had purchased ads in September and October and the
magazine had run a smaller make-good ad in November for a minor mistake
in the initial ad. Not surprisingly, the number of visits for the
first 2 ads was bigger than for the third smaller ad, but to measure
the overall visits to his website over and above his "normal" traffic
gave him an idea of how well his marketing dollars were being spent.
Later, he placed similar ads in a different magazine and measured his
results with the first publication. The lower cost ads resulted in higher traffic, which resulted in lower a cost-per-prospect. That’s the sort of benefit you get from a very simple analysis of web metrics.
We’ll take a look at some of the kinds of information you can get from website metrics in an upcoming post.