WebTrends is becoming quite dominant in the Global Travel Industry. Selected as their vendor of choice, travel sector heavyweights are beginning to rely on WebTrends products such as WebTrends Marketing Warehouse and SmartView in order to better understand user behavior. These products allow users to perform deep segmentation techniques in order to gain much insight on their potential clients.

Here are some well known Travel Industry clients in WebTrends’ portfolio:

- AAA
- Air Europa
- Carnival Cruise Lines
- Flybe.com
- Hilton Hotels Corporation
- La Quinta Corporation
- Lufthansa
- SAS
- Sandals Resorts
- STA Travel
- Swiss International AirLines

I think it’s very beneficial to establish presence in a vertical target market because it allows a company to truly understand their client’s pains and needs. This is because the same pains and needs come up again and again therefore one can apply similar strategies for different clients.

The Travel Industry is gigantic so I think this will continue to bring great success for WebTrends.

After having much success with SearchCenter in North America, Omniture recently launched its PPC management product in Europe.

SearchCenter provides the ability for users to implement rich segmentation allowing them to make educated decisions from a PPC perspective. Some of the engines it supports include: Google, Yahoo, MIVA, Enhance

Source: http://www.internetadsales.com/modules/news/article.php?storyid=7602

There has always been a certain buzz in the online marketing industry regarding metrics; namely, which metrics to measure and how to accurately track them? I find, more and more that many business owners are sometimes paying attention to metrics that make their business look appealing from an image perspective, rather than to metrics which actually show value to the bottom line. Sort of harkens back to the old adage: “numbers never lie, but you can always use numbers to make lying easier”.

Link: metrics to measure

Where to Start

I am going to begin by addressing metrics that I hear about all the time, these metrics may seem important against competitors or from a traditional SEO perspective, but oftentimes these metrics don’t accurately help a business determine online success, or make successful informed decisions. Instead, more often than not, with these metrics as guides, businesses make misinformed decisions and wonder why they aren’t gaining any online successes.

Google’s PageRank is pretty much a household name. The millions of users who have the Google toolbar installed know that when they are looking at a website, the more green they see in that tiny bar, the better – the more relevant the page is. PageRank is not a good measure when trying to determine how successful your online campaign is. It does let you know how authoritative your site is, but it doesn’t provide you with any data that you can monetize and use as a baseline to drive conversions or increase retention rates…

Warning

If your marketing metrics consist of you receiving a monthly report on how your websites’ page rank of 6 has stayed steady over the last 12 months, while your main competitor’s has fluctuated from 4 to 5, then you better start questioning the value of your search engine marketing firm.

…The next 2 things measured after PageRank are usually backlinks and pages indexed. I don’t want to downplay their importance because in order for websites to rank well on search engines they do have to have prominent PageRank, backlinks and pages indexed. However, measuring strictly backlinks and pages indexed doesn’t allow a marketing manager or search marketing company to draw any conclusions about your site’s success rate. A site could have thousands of backlinks and millions of pages of content, and this may result in 250,000 unique visitors, but if the majority of the sessions are single page visits, is this kind of revolving door successful?

Search engines perform periodic updates so it’s important to stay on top of these numbers but you shouldn’t let only these numbers drive your online strategy.

Page views and visitors go a little further than search engine statistics by measuring traffic on your website. However, I find that page views and visitors can be very deceiving because neither explain what visitors are doing when they get to your site nor do they explain the types of referring sources that are sending these visitors (to help qualify the traffic).

Measuring a metric as basic as page views still has to be specific to your business. For example, a high number of page views are good for online publishers if it means many articles are being read and their revenue model is ad based. Whereas high page views for a customer support site could mean that people are having trouble finding what they are looking.

If you have invested in web analytics and measure only page views and visitors on your dashboard, please do yourself a favor and ask for your money back, because you’re basically using 1% of the software; you might as well only be analyzing log files. And if you’re only using these metrics to guide strategic decisions, prepare for the axe, because there is no doubt that it is coming your way.

The Right Answer

Metrics should initially be defined by the type of site you have (e-commerce, content, support or lead generation). Stakeholders should then takes those metrics, condense them further, and select metrics that can be monetized so your company can make educated business decisions.

Take simple metrics like page views and visitors, add a pinch of time spent and a dash of referring source (in order to help you understand the referrers that are driving visitors who are actually engaging with your site) and you will have derived an important mix.

Why is this important? Because these metrics, or rather, this combination of metrics can help you pinpoint areas of your site that need work, maximize conversion triggers on areas where visitors spend the most time, and even reveal the types of campaigns you should be spending your budgeting dollars on.

In Conclusion

Key metrics allow you to quantify results, but measuring the right metrics allows you to monetize the decision making process – meaning that your business not only grows, but it also gets more and more profitable.

The metric that I feel is most important, no matter what type of website you have, is visitor retention rate. Everyone knows that it’s less expensive to keep and convert an existing customer than attract a new one.

Any metric that directly affects the bottom line should be at the top of all marketing managers’ dashboards.

I challenge you to revisit your metrics dashboard and ask yourself: Do these numbers actually tell me how my website is performing? If not, start tracking the right type of metrics… you will be surprised how much more accurate and effective all of your strategic decisions become.

Interactive media is emerging as a prominent feature of websites these days. From AJAX to Flash to streaming movies, they all provide a rich user experience that having text and images alone cannot match. When applied correctly, these types of media can be invaluable in terms of engaging users; however, media files do to take up valuable page real-estate and aren’t exactly at the top of any search marketing company’s recommendations list.

Search Marketing

Most search marketing companies have it ingrained in their minds that media on a site is considered a negative feature because search engine spiders can’t index the content. It is true that when most spiders are crawling through a website’s pages and notice Flash or a media file, they will simply skip over them. If they can’t find your content, there goes the relevance that could otherwise have influenced your rankings.

However, search marketing firms have to begin recognizing that there is more to an online strategy than getting top rankings and the initial click-thru. The other part, maybe the most important part, of the strategy has to be user experience. Wouldn’t it be more beneficial to a site owner to have 500 visitors who view 10 pages per visit while average 3 minutes on the site rather than 2,000 visitors of which 90% exit as soon as they hit the home page?

Metrics alone can paint a picture of success that conversions and ROI do not match, and in the end, any online strategy should be oriented to increasing revenue. This does not mean that site owners should drown their sites with Flash and AJAX, rather, they should use these media types thoughtfully, in order to strike the right balance between getting users to their site in the first place, then keeping them there to close the deal. Successful car salesmen don’t work the parking lot, they make it attractive for buyers to come into the showroom and not leave without a new set of car keys.

An example of using media thoughtfully would be to externalize Flash and use a simple line of JavaScript to display it. Another way would be to develop your site’s entire search functionality in AJAX but also create search-criteria specific, static HTML pages for the search engine spiders, to help promote a deeper crawl through your site. In the end, the focus should be just as much on the user as it is on the spider; otherwise you will build a website with amazing visibility that nobody goes to – not because it’s not relevant, but because it’s not enjoyable – and as any marketer will tell you: emotive connections facilitate all sales.

Tracking with Web Analytics

How many site owners actually know how much ROI they are receiving from their interactive media? Specifically, how long are users watching the digital marketing file? How many presentation slides did users make it through before exiting? How many users made it through to the AJAX developed product search funnel?

It is important that you establish key performance indicators before you launch your site and that you implement web analytics in conjunction with interactive media. By doing this, site owners can work with development teams to ensure that they add conversion triggers inside of the media’s code so that it can communicate with the analytics tracking software.

Web Analytics companies are seeing the need for site owners to track media metrics, therefore, organizations such as WebSideStory have released software such as HBX 3.5 to do this effectively.

Cost

There are many costs associated with having media on your website. In addition to having content writers creating text based content, site owners potentially have to pay for things such as: design/development for Flash, optimizing audio and video, programming/QA for AJAX, and increased monthly bandwidth charges (media files have greater size than text and images).

With the help of web analytics, site owners can monetize the value of having interactive media on their websites. Some analytics packages are advanced enough to correlate their users’ behavior with interactive media with the conversions such as form completions or purchases. I recommend that all site owners take advantage of this so that budgeted dollars toward media aren’t wasted.

Future

I predict that the interactive media sensation will continue to grow and this type of functionality will become a standard feature of many websites. Users will begin preferring AJAX-based sites for which browsers don’t have to completely reload pages. Companies will one day offer all of their text articles through video and audio files, and the development of Flash will become so simplified that any user will have the ability to embed files into their website within minutes.

In order to stay up-to-date, search engines will release spiders that will be more intelligent and able to easily index content found within Flash and media files. We found indications that Google’s spider is already that intelligent when we saw occurrences of excerpted text from within Flash files on Google’s results page listings.

By employing a media-conscious search marketing strategy and relying on web analytics to help make educated decisions, all companies can take advantage of increasing the quality of their end users’ website experiences while also keeping their ROI in line.

I can’t count the number of times I have been asked how one analytics package compares to another. Well, Marketing Sherpa has made it simpler by publishing a Buyer’s Guide to Web Analytics.

For $249, you can compare 39 different vendors. The report includes items such as: Comparison Charts, Influential Factors, Mistakes people make, Cost, Scalability, Functionality, etc…

This article is part 3 from a series of articles talking about Key Performance Indicators

In the previous segment in this series of articles, we talked about identifying the most important Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) to track, based on the type of website you have.  We also touched on the notion that different roles with an organization will only want to see the KPIs that are important to them.

In this article I will illustrate how to accurately measure KPIs by using a fictional company called Jasra Corp., identifying the company’s needs, and then accurately measuring specific KPIs to help to solve its needs.

I’ll start with a brief background of our fictional company.  Jasra Corp. is an online publishing company in the health care industry.  It has loads of content, written by hundreds of industry experts on topics such as medicine, patient care, pharmaceuticals, etc…Their website receives 120,000 page views a month and their revenue model is advertising based. Their monthly online revenue is approximately $50,000.

Jasra Corp.’s stakeholders have little understanding of how their website is performing (in terms of the effectiveness of ad placement in driving leads to advertisers) and how they can show value to their advertisers (being able to bring business to them).  Currently, Jasra Corp. does not have any web analytics implemented but are tracking page views and referrer data through log analysis.

Needs Identification

Our first step should always be to sit down with stakeholders and identify their needs.  This is important because it will help us establish KPIs that matter to the client.  I recommend that you narrow the list down to only 3 or 4 major metrics; otherwise tracking so many numbers becomes misleading, obscuring the few metrics that truly provide a clear picture of how the site is performing, based on the client’s business model.

Jasra Corp. has 2 major needs:

• The ability to show their clients ROI
• Measuring the effectiveness of their Website to generate ad revenue.

After speaking with Jasra Corp.’s stakeholders, we determine that our KPIs will be:

• Ad signups – to measure the site’s ability to generate revenue
• Time spent on site, Ad Impressions/Clicks – to show advertisers ROI
• Unique Visitors – to measure potential revenue and ROI (if these visitors were to convert)

Tracking KPIs

Anyone with an online business should have some form of analytics set up on their websites.  Without analytics, it is very difficult to measure how effectively your website is at improving your business’s bottom line.  As mentioned in a previous article, "Analytics: you can’t afford NOT to track", there is no need for business owners to make decisions blindly when they have the ability to make educated decisions using analytics.

In the case of Jasra Corp., my first recommendation is that they purchase some Web Analytics software that has the capabilities of tracking conversions and visitors paths.  Major players such as SiteCatalyst, Web Trends, and HitBox all offer good solutions.  There are also free solutions available through Google Analytics, StatCounter, and ClickTracks.

While implementing tracking, Jasra Corp. should make sure to set-up conversion triggers on the final page of the ad sign-up event; to accurately track ad sign-ups.  It is also recommended that when implementing analytics code, they code the pages they’re tracking using meaningful page names for each page.  When they are reading their dashboard reports, these meaningful page names will make the reports more intuitive to understand.

Strategically using KPIs

After viewing our new Analytics reports we can begin to make some conclusions about current site performance, and confidently identify actionable items that will help us improve each KPI going forward.  We can start by looking at the ad sign-up conversions reporting we’ve set-up.  The reports will be able to tell us the exact number of sign-ups we had for any date range.  If we dig a little deeper, we should be able to see the referring domains that helped drive the conversions, and if we drill even farther, we can begin to see where in the conversion process users abandoned the form.  Some analytic tools allow users to create custom conversion funnel reports which immediately identify the rate of abandonment per conversion step.

The other two metrics, Time Spent and Unique visitors will be important to Jasra Corp. because they will help the stakeholders understand how engaging the website content is.  These 2 metrics are also useful because they can act as marketable numbers in order to help entice future advertisers.  Advertisers are more likely to purchase ad space from a website if it continually receives new visitors who are engaged longer than 30 seconds with the website.

Tracking ad impressions and clicks is the only way Jasra Corp. can show value to their advertisers, who will want to know if they are actually receiving any return on investment.  Ad impressions and clicks can be tracked individually and can also be tacked to form a ratio of the number of times an ad was shown compared to the number of clicks.  Jasra Corp can show their advertisers the click thru rates for their ads, which will help the advertisers determine how effective their campaigns are.

Jasra Corp. (as well as all other companies) should take their KPIs and set up dashboards to help them stay on top of the stats, in order to analyze trends and identify follow-up actions.  This can be done manually by exporting numbers from the analytics into Excel, or if your analytics package offers it, customized dashboards within the software’s reporting framework.

KPIs should be revisited and fine-tuned periodically because the needs of stakeholders and end users (in our example, advertisers) are ever-changing.

A Search Marketing firm out of South Africa, iLogic has recently launched a new analytics product called iLogic Analyze. It was developed entirely in-house and they plan on integrating it with all of their clients’ search marketing strategies.

Standard features such as: visitor paths, e-commerce tracking, and campaign ROI are included. They also mentioned visitor behavior but didn’t go into much detail about it. I tried looking on the website for further information but when I landed on their home page I ended up playing with a flash made rubix cube for a few min and forgot what I originally came there to do. Actually, there wasn’t much on the website besides a summary PDF file.