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Online Analytics: From click-through to conversion
By evaluating the data from your show Web site and e-mail marketing campaigns, you can understand your customers’ online behavior, measure your return on investment, and increase registrations and revenues.
By Cathy Chatfield-Taylor
Be honest. After your last cheap-and-easy e-mail blast, did you check to see whether your message got through the spam filters? Do you know how many people opened your message, then clicked through to learn more? Have you tracked how many people started to fill out the online registration form, then stopped?
Ideally, an in-house online marketing expert analyzes these statistics and makes the changes needed to convert more clicks to customers. If, like most show organizers, you don’t have someone dedicated to this task, don’t panic. You don’t need to be a math major to use these metrics effectively. But, you do need measurable goals — generate leads, register attendees, sell exhibit space or sponsorships — and a willingness to test, test, test.
It starts with an offer — a value proposition that’s so irresistible, response is inevitable: Open. Click. Submit. Test and tweak the campaign to mazimize conversions. It can be as simple as a word change, and results can be nearly instantaneous. Split the list, test multiple versions, compare response rates, then roll out the top performer.
Using a marketing dashboard, you can quickly evaluate campaign results at any point in time and track activity — everything from whether e-mails are opened to when registrations peak. By evaluating the data from your e-mail marketing service provider and Web site hosting service, you can track each touch point along the way to customer acquisition, measure your return on investment, and capitalize on opportunities to generate new revenue.
“If you’re ROI-centric and inclined to test and track everything, then you can identify where your greatest opportunities are to create customer relationships,” says Paul Soltoff, Chairman and CEO of SendTec, a direct marketing services company based in St. Petersburg, FL. “You can bring that back to a dashboard and evaluate the scalability of the approach.”
Web analytics measure online behavior by tracking aggregate visits, unique visits, page views, page views per visit, top keywords, top referrers and click streams — the paths of pages visitors click-through. Granted, these statistics can be overwhelming. The key is knowing which numbers to watch.
“Look at trends and anomalies, outliers and frequencies,” says Judah Phillips, Director of Web Analytics for Reed Business Information, New York. “For example, if you have a burst of traffic on a given day, you investigate the referrers and find out your content was syndicated. Then you can find opportunities for a partnership or media buy.” Reed has used Web analytics to roll out new template-based sites such as JCK Online, including the JCK Invitational events, with new blogs, e-newsletters and affiliate advertising targeting the community’s highly qualified niche market.
“With the redesign of the user experience, we hope people will stay longer and go deeper,” Phillips says. “As the time spent on our site increases, page views increase, which causes rises in other metrics like impressions served and leads generated.”
By focusing on just the metrics that are the best indicators of success, you can achieve measurable results at very little expense, in time or resources. Here are the numbers online marketing experts tell us to watch.
Excerpt from "Online Analytics: From click-through to conversion," EXPO Magazine, May 2007. Copyright 2007 Ascend Media, Overland Park, KS. |
