Nancy Pekala is the AMA's Director of Online Content and Editor of Marketing Matters
An often overlooked and undervalued element of a digital media strategy is measurement. Speaking on “Digital Marketing Analytics and ROI B2B,” at the Mplanet 2009 pre-conference Digital Marketing Lab, Jim Sterne, Chairman of Web Analytics Association, stressed the importance of accurate web measurement.
Sterne suggested that many marketers today are relying on misleading metrics. He quoted a Forrester Research study, Redefining B2B Marketing Measurement, which reported that “The metrics that most B2B marketers say they use — like number of leads generated and cost per lead” — rank in the lower half of the effectiveness list.”
He also offered up the following revealing statistics:
• Only 11% of executives believe they get a complete picture of marketing ROI
• 70% of executives find it “difficult” to measure marketing campaign ROI
• Only 5% of search marketers bid on keywords based on ROI
• 44% cite “demonstrating ROI” as the top challenge in managing their web site
• More than 70% of companies do not deliver web data to executives
The challenge for marketers, according to Sterne, is integrating the data to enable effective measurement. There are an increasing number of disparate applications, each with its own dataset, which can lead to high levels of subjective decision making and too much time spent on synchronization.
“Integration of search, bid, content management, and offline media will become a necessity for marketers who will otherwise be unable to manage the mix,” Sterne added.
Sterne stressed the importance of effective measurement in order to validate a website’s investment. He suggested the following Top 10 list of measurements for evaluating online success.
Top 10 List of Successful Online Measurements
1. How Fast Is It?
Download speeds remain a thorn in the side of many website visitors. Despite the proliferation of broadband use, today’s websites are filled with content and functionality that put a strain on download speeds. It’s important to assess the speed of your site and determine how long it takes to download content, access features and process transactions such as credit card payments.
2. How Many Error Messages Does Your Site Produce?
If your website is too slow, not only will your visitors give up on you, your server will give up, Sterne acknowledged. It’s important to assess the type and frequency of timeout errors, Not Found errors and other site errors. Keep track of how many error messages your site serves, investigate broken links and resolve error messages as quickly as possible.
3. How Many People Show Up?
Although web measurement is still imperfect, it is critical to obtain a measure of how many people are visiting your site. Sterne explained, “While today's number may not be exact, if you count them same way tomorrow, then the percent difference will be true. `There are 5% more visitors here today than yesterday,’ is a very valid and useful number. `We got 15% more visitors with keyword X than with keyword Y,’ is also useful. So count those visitors. Graph the line over time and pay attention to spikes and troughs so you can repeat the former and evade the latter.”
4. Which Are the Most Popular Pages?
What content on your site is attracting the most interest? Identify the content gaps on your site and work aggressively to fill them.
5. Which Way Did They Go?
Monitoring the path analysis and navigation patterns your site’s visitors are taking is also critical. Make minor changes to the elements on the pages along that path and track whether the result of each change was good or bad.
6. What Are They Looking For?
For most website users today, it’s all about the search. Analyzing traffic-driving search terms for your site is a good way to fine-tune your site’s content in order to generate more traffic. In addition, analyzing the search queries your site visitors are entering on your internal search engine is also invaluable in assessing what visitors are most interested in. Where are the most click-throughs? What do those results pages look like?
7. How Did They Get Here?
If your website strategy involves paying for traffic-building tactics such as banner and newsletter ads and keywords, it is essential to assess the cost of each visit and the associated value. The process of continuous improvement assures that you will steadily increase your return on keyword investment.
8. Did We Achieve Our Goals?
In order to determine whether your website is a success, you’ll need to clearly identify those criteria against which you are measuring effectiveness. Does your company even have a clearly delineated set of desired outcomes for your site? Taking goal tracking all the way to best practices, the sites that consistently achieve their goals and do so quickly have correlated their goals with their compensation plans.
9. Are They Happy About Their Visit?
Surveys, questionnaires, and usability studies can all help you understand your visitors better. “People will express confusion, frustration, and exasperation at what you think are your best web features. They will show you where your website is hurting your brand and may actually be encouraging your would-be customers to click over to your competitors. Listen to them complain - they will expose your site's weaknesses and identify the places where a little attention can go a long way.”
10. Are We Using Our Own Metrics?
How do you know if your measurements are working? Increases in outcomes may be all you're after, but you can't know that those outcomes are connected to your metrics unless you measure the number of times your metrics are used.
“Set goals. Make changes. Track results, Repeat. Those are the instructions for a bigger, better, faster, stronger website,” Sterne said.