Web Analytics: A Foundation for Integrated Online & Offline Marketing

By Mikel Chertudi, Vice President of Demand and Online Marketing, Omniture

Most marketers have typically heard the cynical saying, "Fifty percent of marketing programs work, and fifty percent don't. The problem lies in knowing which were successful and which were not." For traditional marketing campaigns, this has often been the case because of the difficulty in collecting and tracking marketing campaign data. How did the purchaser of your product or service learn about it? Was there a particular promotion that prompted their purchase? What caused them to purchase from you over a competitor?

Collecting this data solely through off-line marketing channels can often be cumbersome, time-consuming and involve a lot of guess work. A recent industry research study indicated that 70 percent of executives find it difficult to measure their marketing return on investment.

Enter Web Analytics

The online world has changed this paradigm with Web analytics helping executives to know exactly where they are gaining their greatest return on investment from their online and offline marketing spend. Web analytics has become the foundation for online marketers because all of the information from email campaigns, search marketing, behavioral targeting, surveys and all other forms of online marketing are funneled through Web analytics to make sense of everything that is happening with online customers.

So if Web analytics is the foundation for online marketing, then what are the keys to success in using it? It really comes down to six steps.

1) Integrate all of the data from your marketing applications to enable measurement.

Too many companies use a variety of marketing applications for email campaigns, search marketing, user experience, direct mail, automated dialing, CRM, and others without integrating the data from these various applications. Why would a company invest in all of these really useful tools without integrating the data to know exactly what's happening on their site? Integration is key to having one set of data to measure from or what I like to call "one version of the truth." There's no better place to integrate them than in your Web analytics solution, which really becomes a customer analytics solution.

2) Measure what matters by capturing those key metrics or key performance indicators (KPIs) that are most critical to your business.

KPIs are typically what you would tell someone in a 30-second elevator pitch-the three or four things that are absolutely most critical to your business. No one should waste their time measuring data points that don't matter in the grand scheme of things. Which page on your site is most popular? It doesn't really matter if it's not producing revenue or your desired results.

3) Report throughout the organization with automated dashboards and alerts to share the information that is being obtained through your Web analytics solution.

Automated analytics really makes it easy to democratize data throughout your organization so everyone from the CEO to the entry-level analyst knows exactly what is happening with the status of both online and offline marketing campaigns. What was typically a manual process only a few short years ago is now automated through top analytics solutions. Armed with this knowledge, companies can realign their personnel, products, services and resources to focus on growing their revenue.

4) Analyze what is driving success in your marketing efforts and what is not.

There are several areas of your online marketing efforts that you can analyze and adjust according to what's happening. You might analyze your search activity and find that you can quickly identify which search keywords are most effective at driving revenue and/or have the least cost per acquisition. Another report might tell you how effectively you are cross-selling customers on your website.

5) Optimize your site to exploit winning promotions, improve others, and abandon stragglers.

This is the fun part where Web analytics really starts to pay off. Someone once said, "If 80 percent of your sales are coming from 20 percent of your items, then just carry those 20 percent." While it's not realistic to drop 80 percent of your inventory, it's worth considering where your sales are coming from, how you can promote those items more heavily, cross-sell other items to improve sales and abandon promotions of products that aren't moving.

6) Innovate based on what you know to experiment with new ideas.

Innovation differs from optimization in that in this final step, you're actually driving new initiatives based on your data. So optimization is really improving what exists today, whereas innovation is experimenting with new ideas and concepts that didn't exist before. So what does that look like? You might use A/B and multivariate testing or onsite behavioral targeting to promote products and services in different ways on your site to see which creates the best conversion rates.

Web analytics takes the guess work out of what's working and what's not in the online marketing world. With all of this information at your fingertips, marketers can be better prepared to know what's happening with their online audience, focus on what matters, and make adjustments in real-time. I hope you'll find success using it as the foundation for all of your future online marketing initiatives.