There’s a saying, “If you can name it, you can tame it.” But in today’s wild world of marketing, the key to taming the beast isn’t to name it; it’s to measure it.
There’s a direct correlation between measurability and profitability, which is why, in the future of marketing the Web sits squarely at the center. The Web can also pull, rather than push, customers to your business. CMOs understand this: over half of executives recently polled indicated that the Web would be the hub of their marketing strategy.
Online marketing is growing, and with the Web central to offline as well as online activity, accuracy becomes critical. Why? Because we need accurate metrics that measure unique visitors to solve the common problem of double-counting. Unique visitor-based metrics are not only more accurate, they’re also the basis for relationship marketing.
You can leverage visitor intent in order to build relationships that turn visitors into customers with a Web analytics solution designed to measure and report at the visitor level. Because it’s no longer just about Web analytics. Web analytics is evolving into marketing performance management, which focuses on measuring, managing, analyzing and optimizing ROI. It is about building relationships with customers and increasing their lifetime value.
Let’s look at the components of MPM, and how WebTrends customers are leveraging integrated metrics, consistent key performance indicators (KPI) and customer relationships across their organizations.
The Strong Foundation: Integrated Metrics
The fundamental building block of MPM, integrated metrics let you consistently measure every marketing initiative. It’s important to not only have a common language to communicate across your organization, but also to ensure you’re comparing apples to apples in order to optimize your marketing spend.
When Microsoft.com launched a search for a third-party Web analytics solution, it evaluated a number of vendors to replace a variety of tools in
use throughout the organization. The goal was to select a solution that would offer enhanced reporting functionality and consistent metrics across functional groups within the company. Microsoft could clearly see the advantages of standardization-and metrics they could trust-to ensure that various groups compare and optimize their initiatives using a unified framework and trusted metrics.
The Clear View: Consistent KPIs
Marketers also need easy-to-understand performance dashboards so the whole organization can stay on top of results. At NBCOlympics.com, for example, NBC executives, local affiliate station managers, and the Internet Broadcasting web team all needed their own performance dashboards to stay on top of viewership patterns in order to measure success during the 2006 Olympic Games in Torino, Italy.
Real-time metrics with detailed reporting showed high-le
vel results to executives and provided staff and station managers the details necessary to optimize advertising and editorial objectives for all types of content-including rich media like slideshows, videos, and the first-ever live online streaming of an Olympic sporting event.
The Customer Focus: Relationship Marketing
Smart businesses are using the web to target customers more effectively. Until now, web data has been largely aggregated. That’s going to change-marketers of tomorrow will deliver on the promise of the right message to the right audience at the right time through the right medium by getting insight into visitor intent, as well as objections, motivations, and preferences.
Take Orbitz. Their web site says it best: “At Orbitz, the custom
er relationship doesn’t end when you hit the ‘purchase’ button.” Their mission always has been to develop a travel web site that would serve people better, which makes WebTrends Marketing Lab a great choice. They’ll be able to take advantage of its customer segmentation and business intelligence capabilities for targeted, one-to-one relationship marketing campaigns that increase customer satisfaction and improve ROI.
[DM News’ Special Report on Web Analytics is available as a PDF file. To download the article click here or on the image.]The evolution of web analytics to Marketing Performance Management makes this an exciting time. As the web helps shift marketing from an indirect to a direct approach, marketers can take precise action to continually improve results. With integrated metrics, consistent KPIs, and relationship marketing, you can measure-and tame-the wild marketing world.
