IN THIS ISSUE…
This month our e-Newsletter will focus on measuring the effectiveness of your web site. View the case study for Siemens to see how web analytics impacted their business.

NEWS AND NOTES…
The next Search Engine Strategy (SES) event is planned for August 7th - 10th in San Jose, CA. Our CEO, Karen Breen Vogel will be participating in a session called "B2B Tactics" from 10:45 a.m. to 12:00 p.m on Thursday, August 10th.

In September, we'll be speaking with our client, DuPont, at the DMA's B-to-B Interactive Marketing Conference in Scottsdale, AZ. The conference runs from September 11th through the 13th.

If you have the time to attend either event, we'd love to see you there. Drop us a note to let us know you're attending.

MEASURING THE EFFECTIVENESS OF YOUR WEBSITE…
How often do you look at the effectiveness of your web site and begin to wonder…are we generating the optimal amount of online sales leads? Is the click-through rate what it should be? Are qualified prospects visiting our web site? Are they visiting at the right volume? Can customers and prospects quickly and easily find the information they need on the web site? Should we be happy with our cost per lead?

The answer to all of these questions tends to be the dreaded consultant's phrase: IT DEPENDS.

To illustrate why "it depends", consider the analogy of a person trying to lose weight. Let's say the person's initial weight is 275 pounds. How many pounds does he or she need to lose? You guessed it − it depends.

A weight loss goal hinges on a number of factors, such as height, sex, period of time the weight loss is expected to take, and the reason for losing weight. For example, a wrestler trying to drop pounds to make a lower weight class would have very different goals from someone seeking to lose weight for health reasons.

What constitutes success depends greatly on your goals, and how you are doing against those goals to date.

If you want to know whether your web site or campaigns are working effectively, there are several steps to keep in mind:

• Know what business goal you are trying to achieve. It sounds simple, but it’s easy to get so caught up in the day-to-day tactics that you lose sight of why you’re doing what you're doing. You should always be able to clearly assess your progress in obtaining business results, not just performing marketing activities. Your business goals should align with your overall corporate goals related to revenue and profitability, and must be specific, identifying who, what, when, and how much/how many.
  
• Determine which tactics best support your business goal. Before going into execution mode, assess your current marketing tactics to ensure they each directly support and can be correlated directly through a specific metric to the goal you are trying to achieve. For example, a series of whitepapers are available on your web site so you can provide timely, relevant information to your customers and prospects and aid them in the consideration phase of the buying cycle. Make sure that you factor in what percentage of whitepaper downloads correlate to your sales lead goal.
  
• Agree in advance on key performance indicators (KPIs). The benefit of online marketing is that practically everything can be measured; but that's also the downside. Too much data can be overwhelming and lead to "analysis paralysis". Set specific metrics on the HVAs (Highly Valued Activities) that relate back to your overall goal. For example, if your goal is to increase awareness and consideration and thus visitor engagement on your site, it may be the number of page views per unique user. By adequately defining your business goals, identifying the most important metrics to focus on becomes much simpler.
  
• Identify trends and develop benchmarks. After you have identified your KPIs, the next step is to establish a baseline and start looking for trends in your data. Keep in mind that you need at least three data points to illustrate a trend. For example, if you’re reporting on a monthly basis you will need three months worth of data before you can identify a trend. By monitoring trends, you can begin to truly understand your web site visitors, and smooth out any behavioral fluctuations that may be based on seasonality, an event, or day of the week. Once you’ve identified a trend, you can use it to set a benchmark that will help you quickly gauge whether your web site investments have a positive or negative impact on performance.
  
• Optimize, optimize, optimize. Monitoring KPIs will tell you how you're performing against your goal, but they won't tell you why the data is going in that direction. Create a log of all marketing activities or other events that may increase or decrease results in a given time period to help you better interpret and even predict fluctuations in your data. Make sure your analytics reporting is detailed enough to help you diagnose what's wrong (or right!) and take action to improve.
  
• Assess the validity of your goals. It’s important to understand if the goals you have established are realistic. Let’s go back to the weight loss goal. A person weighing 275 pounds sets a weight loss goal of 30 pounds within 6 weeks. He’s established a strict diet plan and rigorous exercise schedule, maintains a daily log of calories consumed, time spent exercising, and activities performed. He also weighs himself weekly to monitor his progress. Like the example, closely aligning your tactics to specific metrics makes it easy to understand if you are within a reasonable range of achieving your goal, or if you need to reset expectations.
  
• Reassess your goals, tactics and KPIs periodically. Corporate goals can change − one year the focus might be on customer acquisition, while the following year the emphasis shifts to retention. Although it's not advisable to change directions too frequently, keep in mind that when the goals change, your tactics and KPIs may also need modification.

When you've taken all of these steps, you no longer have to wonder whether your web site investments are paying off. By setting specific business goals and ensuring that tactics and metrics are properly aligned, you'll be able to more accurately assess your results… and say goodbye to "it depends".

If this topic was interesting to you and you haven't received all of our e-Newsletters, you can view the archive on our site. You can also view our blog for ongoing discussions on this and other topics.