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.
No Excuses - Tracking Can Offer Great Insight
It’s surprising how many marketeers I meet who still don’t have a complete grasp of this concept of tracking everything they do or who cannot, with any level of certainty, answer which Marketing activities or channels are giving them the best ROI. I guess being lucky enough to work for a Web Analytics company has meant that this concept has been ingrained into me since day one.
Now clearly, tagging up campaigns is never 100% foolproof, as some individuals will remove tracking codes and head straight for the destination URL, in a stealth like fashion. However, there are still no excuses for not tagging your marketing campaigns, as it is so easy to do and often yields some fantastic data and a great insight into what’s working and what isn’t or how visitors from different campaigns or channels interact differently with your website.
For example:
- Do visitors from a Google Adwords campaign spend more time on your website than a visitor coming from a banner campaign placed on an advertisers website?
- Are Google PPC campaigns more effective at targeting a certain demographic than say Yahoo or MSN?
- Do visitors from an email campaign look at different areas of content to someone coming from an organic listing?
- Which email creative works better or does email link placement matter?
- Over time does one channel convert a higher number of visitors than another channel?
- Which Paid (PPC) keywords have the most conversions and what are their conversion rates? (illustrated below)
Sample report showing top paid keywords by conversions
(click image to enlarge)
If you effectively tag up your marketing campaigns, then the level of analysis open to you once a visitor lands on your website is enormous. But remember… as with everything data related - the more data you have, the greater the level of statistical significance and as a result the higher chance you have of making a sensible and informed decision.
Offline Channels
Now arguably, offline channels driving visitors online can be much harder to track, but not impossible. An offline channel could still be tracked by publishing a vanity URL (e.g. www.example.com/vanity) and then using an automatic 302 redirect and appending a query string to the end of the destination URL (e.g. www.example.com/destination?campaign=XYZ), allowing your Web Analytics package to attribute a visit to that particular marketing campaign (illustrated below).
Diagram illustrating a query string being appended to a destination URL, using a vanity link and a 302 redirect (click image to enlarge)
Another common offline channel you may use as part of your marketing mix might be TV advertising. Although TV advertising is likely to form part of your brand building strategy, as apposed to a direct response strategy, you should still think about tracking visitors to your website as a result of the TV commercial. There is nothing stopping you from using vanity URLs to do this or maybe even registering the .tv extension for your domain e.g. www.example.tv and promoting this solely via your TV advertising. This way, you know that anyone who arrives at www.example.tv is as a result of having exposure to your TV advertising campaigns.
Tracking offline campaigns can never capture every single visitor who came to your website off of the back of being exposed to an offline campaign, but it will give you some useful data and give you some indication as to the success of an offline campaign.
Tracking offline campaigns will also allow for some useful trending and comparisons, if exposed to a sufficient number of people.
For example:
- Did print creative A perform better than print creative B?
- Did showing a TV advert on the weekend result in a bigger spike in traffic to the .tv domain than showing the TV ad in the week?
- How well did your full page print advert perform over the last three months? (illustrated below)
Sample report showing the success of a full page print advert
(click image to enlarge)
This sort of trend data, gleamed from tracking offline campaigns will allow you to make some informed and data based decisions on your offline campaigns, providing you have a reasonable amount of data to base those decisions on. The chances are, with a national TV advertisement for example, over time you are likely to be able to use your Web Analytics data to help shape your future TV advertising campaigns.
Statistical Significance
As mentioned earlier in this post, when using Web Analytics data to help base decisions about your Marketing campaigns, ensure that your data has a degree of statistical significance. Clearly basing a decision to change or axe a Marketing campaign based on how 10,000 visitors behaved on your website, is much better than basing that decision on only 100 visitors.
You may be thinking… but my website doesn’t get 10,000 visitors a month?
A level of statistical significance is going to be unique to an individual business. Basing a decision on a few hundred visitors might be enough for a low traffic website, however if you have huge traffic volumes then you are going to want to base that decision on thousands of visitors. Work with what you have and trend data over weeks and months, this will help in your Marketing decision making.
You may also be thinking… will looking at just Web Analytics data give me enough information to make an informed decision?
It is certainly much more reliable than making a decision by sticking a finger in the wind or throwing a dart at a dart board, but obviously the more different types of data you have, the better the decision can be. Think about integrating other data sources into your Web Analytics where possible or maybe surveying your website visitors, as they will tell you when something is good or bad, enriching your quantitative data with some valuable qualitative - iPerceptions 4Q offers a great little free on exit tool to survey your website visitors.
Summary
Tracking your Marketing campaigns should be at the forefront of every marketeer’s mind when planning and creating your campaigns and should never be left as an after thought. As once the campaign has been launched and traffic is coming to your site, if you haven’t tagged that traffic then you can’t accurately attribute it to a particular campaign.
Arguably there are exceptions to this, in that if you are only running one banner creative on a particular advertiser’s website at a certain time and there are no other links to you on that site, then you could use referrer data to track this. But why risk inaccurately tracking and attributing the success of that banner, when it is so easy to just add a tracking code, allowing your Web Analytics package to uniquely identify visitors from that marketing campaign.
Also, think about levels of statistical significance when analysing your Web Analytics data. Make sure you have sufficient data for your business ,when making decisions on optimising the ROI of your Marketing spend. Clearly the more data you have, the better.
Final thought of the day… If You Do It, Track It!
What are your views? Have I missed anything? Do you agree or disagree with me? Please let me know by adding a comment… 
June 2nd, 2008 at 2:59 am
[...] [...]
June 20th, 2008 at 1:44 pm
[...] do it, measure it! If you spend time, effort and/or money on a marketing campaign, whether it be ohttp://www.marketing-demystified.com/2008/05/web-analytics/if-you-do-it-measure-itUS WorldMeds Completes Phase III Trial of Lofexidine for Treatment of Opiate Withdrawal Symptoms [...]
June 28th, 2008 at 9:13 am
[...] [...]
July 10th, 2008 at 6:42 pm
I enjoyed your writing style and I’ve added you to my Reader. Keep these posts coming.