Strategies for CRM and Direct Marketing Analytics - Critical Approach and Guidelines

(It is all in the clicks, pixels, and cookies is only half the understanding)

Key words: web log data, web visitor analysis, marketing relevance of web sites, measuring the effectiveness of web creatives, ROI of a web site, web sales, error codes, targeted and un-targeted reach of visitors

Analysis of Web Marketing and Web Creatives using web log data:

The above is just the tip of the iceberg

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Analysis of web data:  Some very interesting questions that web owners or entrepreneurs need to be asking:

First simple questions

- How many are coming to your site by country, IP, robots, month of the year, week of the month, day of the week and time of the day (marketing relevance)

- What are the search phrases or key words people use to reach your site (marketing)

- How many keep them as favorites (effectiveness of relationship)

- Which pages are more often visited (marketing relevance)

- Which search engines send you the most traffic (marketing relevance)

- Where do they drop in their visit or while they are moving around with the cart? (sales and creative related)

- broken links that most often visitors look for and miss (creative site management)

- which browsers are more often used by your visitors (site optimization)

- which sites are sending you most often (potential affiliate marketing opportunity) or partner news letter participation

- How not to overestimate web traffic from internal activities, partner visits, vendor visits, and robots? (Web ROI, optimizing site management, creative management)

- How to track customers so that you know exactly the effectiveness of your web marketing budget, using actual sales data? (Web ROI)

- Do you have to spend more money to keep with the growth of the visitors and when? (site optimization and cost management - ROI)

- Are there any unfocussed pages in the site which gets lot of traffic but of no consequence? (creative site management)

- What is the commonly used navigational path before customers buy products and services?  What are the weak links in the path? (site management, creative management, ROI)

If you like to explore, we will provide a free analysis after a weeks time of web log data.  Please contact:

Nethra Sambamoorthi (crmportals@gmail.com or nethra@crmportals.com - mention "I Want to Leverage Web Analysis" in the subject. (I need this to get through potential spam)

Know how to do web analytics for measuring the effectiveness of web campaigns.

This is not a technology question, this is the age old approach for deciphering intelligence as to how to improve your business through marketing.  It is true, largely, that all the web analytics intelligence is available in the clicks, cookies, and pixels. However, we need to build some key bridges letting clicks, pixels, and cookies to speak & justify marketing using hard numbers, namely ROI calculations.  In the following we will provide very critical guidelines as to how to do this.

• Combine the web data, with sales data

• Establish ROI based on hard sales data, not hits, not pages, not IPs, ... Web analytics using these is the basic and first order.  These are good to start the process especially to understand quickly where the web site should be evolving into.  The next step is getting this integrated with sales data.  How do we do this?

• The outputs should be available on a daily basis (automated process will provide this). This is well and good; how do we do this?

• How do we do the same thing for each of other channel, so that I know where to spend more marketing budget amount?

• For basics on interpreting log file elements see this article; a simpler article is Web log data elements remember log file is the first basis, but your actualized ROI and understanding and challenging the web marketing activities and associated budget decisions, go well beyond this. 

Know how to do web analytics for creative messaging and positioning:

The answers to the questions mentioned in the beginning should help us to redesign and to introduce creative communications to get visitors attention for specific desired sales related action.

Think about the following:

What are the questions to ask your analysts?

What are important marketing questions the web based solutions do not answer?

Does real time analytics matter?

How to evaluate ROI when people are coming from different channels?

What are the standard web diagnostics one has to do to see where a web site stands before one can derive benefits?

-more to come