Measure | WSI eBusiness | Digital Marketing Solutions

Tagging and tracking – just do it!

January 25, 2012 By Peter Leave a Comment

With more and more communication taking place across the social web, the need to find a means of measuring the value of all of the effort put in, increases. Every day, it seems, new tools are emerging that promise to help you measure your social influence. At the same time it seems there is still much wringing of hands whenever ROI (return on investment) is mentioned, because this holy grail of social measurement remains elusive.

In the midst of all of the hype and enthusiasm about quantifying social capital, it appears that some of the basic things that can be measured are being ignored. I guess this is because they are just not exciting enough and aren’t dressed up with fancy labels. However as dull as tagging and tracking can sound, these simple techniques actually provide useful information. What’s more some of the information gathered can actually be linked to business outcomes! [Read more...]

Filed Under: Measure Tagged With: campaigns, Facebook, goals, Google, Google Analytics, linkedin, Measure, measurement, Social Networking, twitter, Web Metrics

How to measure the success of an internet marketing campaign

November 22, 2011 By Peter 1 Comment

Unlike many forms of traditional marketing where the size of the target audience is often a key measure, the success of an online marketing campaign can and should be measured by business outcomes.

The key to achieving this being to use and exploit the rich functionality provided by Google Analytics. There are just a few simple steps to take which will get you under-way and then you can start to measure the success of your campaign:

Set measurable campaign goals
Determine the cost per conversion
Determine the value per conversion

That was easy wasn’t it! Let’s look at those steps in a little more detail though. [Read more...]

Filed Under: Measure Tagged With: business outcomes, campaign goals, goal completion, goal definition, Google, internet marketing campaign, measurable goals, Measure, online purchase, target audience

Actionable reporting is essential

April 21, 2011 By Peter Leave a Comment

It’s quite common to be given Analytics Reports as part of the package you receive from your web services company, but do check out what you are going to get.

Quite often you will receive an email once a month accompanied by automatically produced reporting. This is fine as long as you have the time to trawl through the mass of data and charts provided, in order to firstly work out what it all means and, secondly work out what you should do about it. All too often this challenge is very daunting, and many people settle for checking if visitor numbers are on the increase or not, and do little more.

There is a real need to interpret this data if your marketing campaigns are to be properly managed and optimised for your business. So don’t assume that being sent analytics reports will provide the answers, check to see if the company has analytics savvy staff who can interpret the data for you, and give you actionable recommendations to help improve your marketing efforts. The investment will pay for itself many times over by ensuring your marketing spend is driving [Read more...]

Filed Under: Measure Tagged With: actionable recommendations, business benefits, business outcomes, Google Analytics, marketing

Analytics Dashboards

February 11, 2011 By Peter 1 Comment

Next Analytics – an excellent Excel Plug-in

For quite [Read more...]

Filed Under: Measure Tagged With: Brian Clifton, Dashboard, eMarketing, Google Analytics, Microsoft Excel, Next Analytics, Web Metrics

Interpreting Analytics

December 15, 2010 By Peter Leave a Comment

Turning analytics data into business information

We all instinctively know the importance of metrics to help us understand how well our websites perform. Measuring the effectiveness of our marketing campaigns is a particular focus of our attention. To that end most websites now enjoy the benefit of having some form of analytics tracking code busily collecting data in the background.

But what, typically happens to all of this data? In many companies the focus is just on the headline numbers – how many visits, how many pageviews, how much time on site, etc. Sometimes the web design agency will send out a report each month, however this is rarely a considered analysis of what happened, and usually falls far short of providing insight and recommendations for improvement.

Web Analytics and Segmentation

August 12, 2010 By Peter Leave a Comment

Getting past the headlines

Output from website analytics can look really impressive. It can tell you how many visitors you’ve had to your site; the countries the visitors have ‘come from’; how many pages they’ve read; and much more. It can present the data in all manner of charts and graphs, with sub-charts and statistics galore. But what does it all mean?

The truthful answer is, quite often, not a lot.

When trying to evaluate the performance of your website, what targets do you set? What data do you gather? And what do you measure against? If you are unsure of the answers to these questions and simply gather statistical data without truly understanding its importance or value, you’re effectively wasting time and effort.

Planning your use of Analytics

April 28, 2010 By Peter Leave a Comment

Before commencing work with a new client where analytics is to be deployed for measuring and analysing website performance, there are a few things I like to check out first. Many websites now have Google Analytics tracking code installed as a matter of course, however it is rare to find that any effort has been made to configure analytics to ensure that real value can be gained from reviewing and interpreting the reports. Quite often the first step is to set up a couple of profiles within the account, so that internal usage of the site can be filtered out for example. Setting up some conversion goals is usually the next step, so that contact form or shopping cart completions can be tracked. If the site contains documents for download, or video clips to play, then additional tracking code may be needed so that these ‘events’ can also be recorded. [Read more...]

Filed Under: Measure Tagged With: analysis, conversions, goals, Google, Google Analytics, KPI, KPIs, landing pages, marketing, Measure, measurement, measuring, segmentation, segmenting, web analytics

Measured Internet Marketing

April 15, 2010 By Peter Leave a Comment

In my version of an ideal world, every new website development would start with a definition of the marketing objectives for the site. These, in turn, would be described as a series of Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) that were meaningful to the business in question. At this point key areas of the website could be specifically designed with the KPIs in mind.

The KPIs will comprise a number of different behaviours of website visitors. Some will be relatively high level such as:

Advanced Web Metrics – Second Edition

March 31, 2010 By Peter Leave a Comment

Back in January I was delighted to receive a preview of Brian Clifton‘s new and fully revised book – “Advanced Web Metrics with Google Analytics “. I was fortunate enough to see Brian presenting at a WSI Excellence and Innovation conference in 2009 and had the chance to speak with him afterwards. His presentation motivated me to put some effort into setting Key Performance Indicators to provide improved business information. Many of my clients now benefit from much enhanced and more meaningful reporting as a result. [Read more...]