Does your web marketing get the credit it deserves?

When times are tough, there is clearly a greater need to ensure that all marketing activities deliver the best Marketing Return On Investment. (Marketing ROI) which is simply about getting the most for your money or making every £ count.

This is easy to say, hard to do and challenging to measure. What was the uplift in sales (or value) achieved by that directory ad, direct marketing campaign or Google Pay Per Click campaign?

Web marketing is more accountable

One of the advantages of web marketing is that it can be much more accountable than traditional media. With my e-commerce clients I am able to allocate sales by source and even by keyword. e.g. Keyword X delivered 20% of sales with an average cost per click of 50p and an average revenue per click of £1.50. 

This analysis of key web metrics help guides my clients' future web marketing investment strategies.

Do web metrics always tell the full story?

However, despite the excellent web metric data available does it always tell the whole story? One of my new retail clients achieved over £60,000 sales through the online shopping basket in the first month that our new web strategy and e-commerce store went live. We were delighted, as previously their online sales were zero!

However, their total sales had increased by over £110,000 in the month so with the website accounting for £60,000, what had generated the extra £50,000 sales? The new web marketing strategy was the only thing that had changed. 

Analysis identified that the additional £50,000 of sales had come from telephone sales and 'bricks and mortar' stores. Further investigation identified that these extra telephone and store sales had been made by people who had first visited the website but wanted to either talk to someone on the phone or try the productin the store before making a purchase with a value of £400 - £1,000.

So just allocating the sales by channel would have given a false view of performance with the web marketing not getting the credit it deserves. By digging a little deeper and adding smart tracking techniques provided additional insight and a more robust view of Marketing ROI.

Key learning for companies big or small

• Use web metrics to analyse your key performance indicators on a regular basis 
• Tools like Google Analytics are great but with hundreds of data points (thousands when evaluated by different segments) it can be hard to see the wood for the trees. Having a piano does not necessarily make you a concert pianist. Consider what it would be worth to your business to get a 5% or 20% or 50% improvement in web performance? If you can't see the wood for the trees, it's worth choosing a web analytics expert 
• If you have more than 1 marketing channel and/or more than 1 sale channel, incorporate techniques to help identify the source of the sale. e.g. if you have telephone and web sales channels use a different telephone number on your website to isolate web generated calls / sales
• Include a 'obscure' link on every web page and get your telephone sales people to ask 'web callers' to click the link (to a telephone sales thank you page) which will aid web metrics tracking

Remember...web marketing is about solving customers' problems profitably.

Peter Hawtin is an internet marketing specialist with Brand New Way, a UK web marketing agency which helps companies to attract and retain valuable customers online.