Marketing: Demystified Blog

Last Wednesday night (16th July 2008) saw me and SCL Analytics host our 9th successive bi-monthly London Web Analytics Wednesday event.

Web Analytics Wednesdays (WAW) are a free to attend networking event, that are held globally, traditionally on a Wednesday Night.

Background on the London WAW events

We began them back in march 2007 and have been running them bi-monthly ever since. They have gone from strength to strength and at last count, we have had over 400 web analytics professionals attend a London WAW event at some point, with many returning time and time again.

Testimony to the event’s success is the fact that we have had regular attendees from places as far flung as Sheffield, Edinburgh, Europe and even the USA, with Web Analytics Wednesdays very own Eric T. Peterson kindly agreeing to be our guest presenter at our March 2008 WAW event, presenting on ‘the future of Web Analytics’. Eric helped us pull in our biggest crowd to date, with over 200 people registering to attend and approximately 110 people turning up on the night!

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Inspiration for this blog post came from some work I have been doing recently on optimising SCL’s Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising campaigns in Google Adwords and Yahoo!. I have been using a portfolio-based bid management tool called SearchForce (who SCL has recently formed a partnership with to represent the tool within EMEA) as well as our Web Analytics tool Unica NetInsight, to help with the streamlining process …Ok endorsement over!

Keyword Research

I set up a new Google Adwords PPC campaign within the SearchForce tool and conducted some keyword research with the aid of the keyword generation tool in SearchForce (powered by Keyword Discovery) and also used some other free tools, including a nice free keyword research tool from Wordtracker.

Its important to try and use more than one keyword research tool when conducting keyword research, allowing you to use a triangulation approach to your research. Also remember that these keyword tools are there to provide suggestions, but it is always worth including some of your own knowledge of your products or service when building your keyword lists.

Once I identified some keywords to bid on, I set the keywords predominately as broad match keyword terms and decided to let the new campaign run for a few days to collect some data and allow me to further refine my keyword list.

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Since the dawn of the web and the birth of web analytics, some webmasters have reported back to their respective businesses, the number ‘hits’ their websites were getting, as a measurement of success.

I still see some businesses reporting ‘hits’ as a measure of success today, especially SMEs, where they have had little exposure to Web Analytics or little education about it. This was highlighted to me very recently and inspiration for this blog post came from a headline that caught my eye in a local business magazine, that found its way to my desk a few weeks back.

The headline read: -

200,000-plus hits on our website!

Every time I see ‘hits’ reported as a measure of success, it makes me both smile and cringe at the same time. I think over time, some people have misinterpreted this metric ‘hits’ to mean the number of visitors a website has had over a particular period of time. This is a very inaccurate interpretation and can give a false sense that a website is performing well, when someone is shown a graph plotting ‘hits’, which over time goes up to the right.

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A theme that will run throughout this marketing blog and a fundamental and founding principle in Marketing and in particular, Web Analytics, is that if you do it, measure it! If you spend time, effort and/or money on a marketing campaign, whether it be online or offline, then you should do everything in your power to track it’s success.

You can’t optimise what you don’t measure

If you don’t know whether a campaign or channel is successful in comparison to another, then how do you know where to spend your finite marketing budgets to maximise Return On Investment (ROI) and meet those ever important Marketing objectives?

I know half my Marketing budget is wasted, I just don’t know which half

A common ideology held by those who are not tracking and analysing everything they do. Without some form of Web Analytics, knowing which parts of your Marketing budget is being wasted is practically impossible to accurately answer, when driving visitors to your organisation’s website.

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Hello World and welcome to the Marketing: Demystified Blog! This blog aims to shed some light on the different areas of marketing, with a slight bias to Online Marketing and in particular, Web Analytics.

So why did I decide to start this blog?…

I recently organised the London May 2008 Web Analytics Wednesday event (WAWs are designed to bring together anyone interested in Web Analytics for an evening of drinks and Networking) in Conjunction with the eMetrics Summit. Due to not having enough time to run a Web Analytics vendor panel during the day, they had changed the evening’s schedule and swapped out Jim Sterne’s (Founder of the Web Analytics Association) presentation to accommodate the eMetrics 2008 vendor panel discussion.

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