Marketing Metrics on Ricci Street's Port 80: Docks: Marketing

Humans love patterns. They make us feel as though we can understand and predict. Business managers sleep better if they believe that changes are part of a cycle which can be comprehended and has repeated itself in multiple industries.

Now here comes a big change: the Internet. How do we measure it? What everyone wants to know:

As with any measurement of people and behavior, we aren't even sure how to ask the question. For example, "58% of Americans are online."

Does "are" mean now, as in how many people this very moment are sitting at a computer? Does it mean how many people use the Internet regularly? Define "regular". Does it mean how many people have ever used the Internet personally even once? What about level of expertise? What about attitude? An eager, risk-taking person is a different market from a reluctant, risk-averse person.

How do we measure?

Nor are our numbers complete. ... Hard questions of definition and measurement will still have to be resolved, however, before we can understand the full impact of these changes on our economy.
-- U.S. Secretary of Commerce William Daly, Digital Economy 2000

An important new study based on a rarely done, but highly regarded form of media research - direct observation of media consumers - is raising new doubts about the veracity of conventional forms of audience measurement, and is providing new ammunition for proponents of new methods, especially Aribtron's portable people meters. The study, which was released Wednesday by Ball State University's Center For Media Design, also suggests planners and buyers may be grossly misallocating advertising budgets across the media mix based on actual media consumption patterns.

Direct Counting

the Web now contains about 7 million unique sites

the public Web -- sites that offer content that is freely accessible by the general public -- constitutes about 40 percent of the total Web

the Web continues to expand at a rapid pace, but its rate of growth is diminishing over time

A Window into the Soul of the Consumer:
New Approaches to Gaining Marketing Insights from Online Behavior
(Webcast requires free WebEx registration and play download)
by Daniel E. Hess
AMA / comScore Networks, October 24, 2002

Recent innovations have taken consumer and market research to new heights across virtually every industry, with direct impact on business results. This online seminar will provide concrete examples of this new research in action.

Every day, the majority of U.S. consumers use the Web in ways that used to be reserved for offline media: car shopping, job hunting, health research, travel planning and much more. The extent to which the Internet has so deeply woven itself into consumers’ everyday lives has created a wealth of consumer knowledge that to date has remained largely untapped.

Recent advances have created the ability to deeply understand consumer segments that were previously difficult or impossible to measure. And breakthrough analytical models can now predict offline economic trends based on online consumer behavior.

ClickZ

Driving web traffic, increasing sales, personalizing content, or cultivating relationships with customers doesn't happen in a vacuum. To achieve business goals, you need to make informed business decisions. Knowing your customers is a prerequisite, and the best way to get to know your customers is to analyze customer data. But when, where, how?

Ad Metrics takes hard facts and statistics about online advertising from leading market research firms and draws practical lessons from them. Those lessons inform decision-makers in the Internet advertising community.

The Industry Leaders

Server Logs

Beyond Hits and Page Views
by Ivars Peterson
The Journal of Electronic Publishing, March 2000
how Science News Online uses server logs to improve their site.

What path did the packets travel?

Who owns that domain name?

With a web page showing in Microsoft's browser, pull down the Tools menu and select "Show Related Links".

The domain business has been deregulated... For the first time, many different domain registrars are granting domain names.

But there is a problem, the standard WHOIS domain search used on thousands of web sites is no longer accurate. Why? Because each domain registrar now keeps their own WHOIS database which doesn't include domains registered by competing registrars.

Better-Whois searches shared database registry and queries appropriate registrar.

Surveys

How many hours a week do you spend at work goofing off online? Clearly, surveys are less reliable than direct counting and server logs. (A test in school, by the way, is a survey with One Correct Answer and is even more unreliable for that reason alone.)

A terrific source for this soft data is provided by an Irish company called Nua. I recommend it most highly. Much of the trade press online consists of reporting on surveys.

ad metrics

Rich Media Study
by Millward Brown Interactive
Advertising Effectiveness Research: January 1999

Building A Better Yardstick: How advertisers can tell whether they're getting what they pay for
by Nikki Goth Itoi
Red Herring, January 1998

As a researcher by training, I typically love data, but never have I seen a metric responsible for more confusion and poor marketing choices. Clickthrough is a treacherous metric that ought to be abolished.

Conversion rate incorporates the total user experience, and advertising metrics alone do not.

If you want to increase your online sales, reduce your cost of customer acquisition, increase your customer retention rate, and increase your average order size, ... use these free tools to establish a baseline for your site as well as to track your efforts to help your Internet business grow.


systems and processes on the Web


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modified: April 14, 2002 by Douglas Anderson http://RicciStreet.net/port80/docks/marketing/metrics.htm