Measuring the Effectiveness of Internet Marketing Programs

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Measuring the Effectiveness of Internet Marketing Programs

To best determine the effectiveness of an Internet marketing program it is important to understand the difference between metrics and analytics and when to best to utilize them. Metrics are informational, focusing on counting, tracking, and presenting data. Metrics are helpful when needing a perspective on a business because the information is tangible. Analytics are strategic, looking at both past and present data, helping with powerful insights, optimization, and predictions. Since analytics use both external and internal sources they provide an “outside-in perspective.” For example, metrics provide the information as to how many sales reps left in a specific time period. The analytics would help to predict why top performing employees are leaving (Strickland, 2014). Using various informational tools, such as metric and analytics, will provide marketers the opportunity to create effective Internet marketing programs.

Metrics and analytics are a vital part of determining what, where, and how to deliver a marketing program and then measuring its effectiveness. Integrating business metrics and analytics help determine and measure Internet marketing programs. Depending on the goals and objectives of such programs will determine the metric and analytic tools used. Some businesses are interested in improving customer service, while others are interested in sales effectiveness. The means on which the Internet marketing program is delivered will also affect the metrics and analytics tools used. For example, using a webinar as the marketing program delivery choice with the objective of a specific percent of attendance as the goal, the metric provides the tracking of past webinars. The analytics will show how long each attendee remained engaged in the webinar. Analytics can also indicate if any attendees dropped during a specific exchange of information. The metric then compares the attendees of this webinar to past webinars. The analytics results determine if the marketer needs to change or refine any of the content in order to build longer attention times by the user.

Analytics help predict the design of an Internet marketing program and when it is best to deliver it. Metrics determine the target market thereby identifying the audience.  Analytics help to predict the best vehicle and time for the Internet marketing program. For example, our target market is High School teens (metric). The message to be delivered encourages sports participating after school. The message needs to be delivered before or after school hours through the use of cell phones (analytics).

Metrics can capture performance results to determine if the tactical and strategic business goals are met. Although, metrics are important often they are challenging to obtain. Metrics indicate customer behaviors when offline, engaged with social media, and during website visits. Additionally, there are performance comparisons available that include channel and display advertising performance, and marketing campaign effectiveness (Roberts & Zahay, 2013).

Offline is difficult to measure since marketing research or third-party data is most often necessary, while behavior metrics are easier to collect online. Overall, anything that represent and integrated view of various channels and multiple touchpoints are usually more difficult to collect. Conversely, single-channels, campaigns, and website tracking are relatively easy to obtain (Roberts & Zahay, 2013).

Developing new sets of metrics to become more relevant to the evolving Internet marketing efforts will be inevitable. Although almost an infinite number of metrics are available, the key in successfully using them will remain the same. That is to match marketing metrics with marketing objectives. Using SMART objectives, Specific, Measurable, Achievable, and Realistic along with a Timeline helps to obtain information to base business decisions upon. A robust metric platform such as Google Analytics, offers an explanation of how to use it and at times assistance for new users.  Google Analytics as well as virtually all metric platforms provides opportunities to segment data. By doing so, businesses uncover most and least profitable market segments while providing data about marketing approaches that work best and are most profitable (Roberts & Zahay, 2013).

As business goals and technology continue to change it will be inevitable that additional measurements will need to be developed as marketers gauge consumer’s consumption, engagement, and attention. As such, developing new metric tools will be instrumental as business models expand their markets, change their tactics, and use metrics and analytics to increase sales.

Two levels of change will affect Search Engine Marketing (SEM) in the future. Search engines will continue to tweak their algorithms to provide more relevant results. Innovations like vertical, local, social, mobile search, and other yet unseen will proliferate for year to come (Roberts & Zahay, 2013).

Moving forward marketers will no longer simply want clicks, but rather the viewer’s time and most important, attention. Future marketers will look at attention metrics, those measurements that track “total time the audience spends with content and their level of engagement,” Smith, 2015. Attention metrics will measure the time spent with content. Viewability determines whether the message was seen and longevity is the amount of time spent with the content (Smith, 2015). Overall the importance to marketers is to evolve using metrics that translate into something meaningful and material.

References

Roberts, M. & Zahay, D.  (2013). Internet marketing: Integrating online and offline strategies (3rd ed.). Mason, Ohio: South-Western, Cengage Learning.

Smith, N. (March 19, 2015). Attention Metrics: The Future of Measurement in Marketing. Direct Marketing. Retrieved from website, http://www.dmnews.com/marketing-strategy/attention-metrics-the-future-of-measurement-in-marketing/article/404273/

Strickland, P. (July, 10, 2014). The difference between Metrics and Analytics. Retrieved from website, https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/20140710112644-12003927-the-differences-between-metrics-and-analytics