Viper Marketing

For years marketers using traditional communications tools and channels have endeavoured, sometimes without success, to link together the disparate threads of campaigns and projects in the hope that a return on their investment can be proven. With the advent of online marketing through the internet and digital communications the measurement of almost every element of a campaign is possible.

 

Understanding the end to end process through which you are trying to take a customer or prospect is an essential first step in planning how to measure and then analyse the outcomes of a campaign. Firstly one needs to plot step by step every point at which, say a visitor to the website, is required to make a decision to move on to the next stage. The eventual outcome, the point at which an online purchase is made or a visitor decides to leave the site, is the end of this step by step process.

 

Once drawn up the marketer can then see at a glance where and how they should be monitoring activity and customer decision points.

 

How does a visitor come into the website?

What did they click on when they reached the initial landing page?

How long did they stay on this page?

Did they watch a video or download any files?

Where did they go next?

Where positions of particular links on a page more successful than others?

Did the content on the page have an effect on the time visitors spent on that page?

Did it affect their decision making in what they chose to do next?

 

All of these questions require some form of automated measurement to help support the analyse through the step by step process mentioned above. One of the most popular forms of automated measurement is Google Analytics a free website analysis tool that provides sophisticated reports about traffic on a website.

 

How does it work? Google provides a snippet of tracking code that is added behind each page on the website that’s included in the step by step process defined before. Once the tracking is in place web-based graphical and numerical reports are available within hours through a control panel on the Google Analytics website.

 

The data presented by Google Analytics can be integrated with a number of other tools including for example, existing CRM (customer relationship management) software and Google Website Optimiser. The essence is to ensure data being collected will be used within a return on investment analysis and not simply collected for its own sake. That’s where the step by step process comes into play.

 

Advertising ROI

Measure the success of your display, search, new media and offline advertising efforts.

 

Cross Channel and Multimedia Tracking

Compare your site usage metrics with industry averages and track Flash, video, and social networking sites and applications.

 

Visualizing Data

Uncover trends, patterns, and key comparisons with funnel visualization, motion charts and mapping.

 

Customized Reporting

Create the reports, dashboards, and segments that make the most sense for your business.

 

Sharing and Communicating

Administration controls and email reports allow you to share data across your organisation.

 

For more detailed and advanced analysis deeper reporting including things such as geotargeting, conversion funnels, e-commerce reports and visitor/customer segmentation allows the next level of refinement of both the website structure and content as well as in some cases, the step by step process itself.

 

Integration, which is an important concept in various parts of digital marketing and media, applies to web analytics in that for example a user of Google Analytics can automatically configure an import to the keyword list for a Google Adwords campaign, ensuring that the return on investment metrics for each keyword can be monitored as well as for the entire campaign.

 

Non-proprietary analytics tools include Piwik an open source solution providing similar and ever-evolving data feeds.

 

What makes Piwik unique from the competition:

 

Piwik's features are built inside plugins: you can add new features and remove the ones you don’t need. If you are a developer, you can easily build your own web analytics plugins.

Because Piwik is installed on your server, the data is stored in your own database and you can get all the statistics using open APIs (publishing the data in many formats: xml, json, php, csv)

The user interface is fully customizable: you can drag and drop the widgets you want to display and create a report especially tailored to your needs

Real time web analytics reports: in Piwik, by default reports are generated in real time. For high traffic websites, you can choose the frequency for reports to be processed

 

Other Alternatives

 

Chartbeat 

Reinvigorate 

Mint 

Woopra

Clicky

 

Simpler alternatives include Statcounter and Sitemeter which are free realtime visitor trackers that allow viewing of visitors on the site right now.

 

There are few if any limitations on what can be monitored, measured or analysed. The key is in understanding the desired flow of digital activity from the visitor/customer’s perspective because that afterall is behaviour that the digital media is trying to influence.

 

Ultimately the most successful use of web analytics is when a digital marketer accepts that one size doesn’t fit all and uses the data they capture to refine and improve both the marketing processes and systems they are using at the same time as the customer’s perceived experience, not just on a mass market basis but almost, where possible, down to the level of a market segmentation of one.

 

Further Reading:

 

Web analytics best practice from the Web Analytics Association

http://www.webanalyticsassociation.org/en/articles/search.asp?category=Best+Practices

 

Google Analytics product tour

http://www.google.com/analytics/tour.html

 

Mashable.com 50 Ways to Track Website Traffic

http://mashable.com/2009/01/12/track-online-traffic/

 

Brian Clifton's off-site versus on-site metrics diagram

http://www.advanced-web-metrics.com/blog/2008/02/16/accuracy-whitepaper/