Adotas

Where media buyers start online

Featured Author

Author Photo

Tim Kopp, Chief Marketing Officer, is responsible for all WebTrends marketing efforts including overall strategy, brand identity and awareness, and demand generation. Prior to joining WebTrends, Tim served as Vice President of Worldwide Interactive Marketing for The Coca-Cola Company, responsible for gaming, mobile, web, CRM initiatives, as well as managing key partnerships. He also worked at Procter & Gamble for nearly eight years, leading P&G's Interactive Marketing Program for the entire Global Beauty Care division. Tim is a frequent speaker at key industry conferences and events and has served on the advisory board for AdTech and other industry committees.

More articles by Tim Kopp





Features

Building A 360 View Of The Customer

Written on
July 9th 2007
Author
by Tim Kopp  |
Feed
   XML Feed

tim_kopp.picToday, most adept online marketers utilize performance measurement to compare campaign response rates, evaluate web site conversion processes, and ultimately determine where their marketing dollars produce the greatest returns. Yet all too often, the analysis of “what happened” gets priority over “what happens next.”

From hectic schedules to boardroom justification, many marketers are at risk of using metrics primarily as a report card rather than realizing the tremendous optimization opportunities that can be achieved. As 19th century poet Andrew Lang put it, “He uses statistics as a drunken man uses lamp posts — for support rather than illumination.”

True, many web analytic solutions on the market are just reporting tools. Marketers know which campaigns produced the highest clickthroughs, sales and profit, but aside from running the same top-performing campaigns through the same top-performing demand channels, the high-leverage steps that should be taken next are not always clear.

A new generation of analytics solutions focused on customer-centric insight is shifting the metrics paradigm, enabling marketers to leverage past performance and current customer activity across channels to drive future actions.

Take for example, a situation where marketers see a significant percentage of web site visitors dropping out of a conversion process at step four. In the old metrics world, marketers would move beyond reporting by running tests to reduce abandonment. Perhaps they’d find that a “satisfaction guaranteed” offer on this step most positively affects overall conversion rates. In the new world of customer-centric insight, marketers have much more information to holistically diagnose issues and prescribe remedies at a more personally relevant level. For example, marketers may track what visitors viewed after abandoning the process and on subsequent visits, combined with their past campaign responses and offline purchases, to reach highly defined audience segments with targeted offers and messages that incite the desired action.

At the end of the day, web analytics will continue to provide the numbers by which online marketing ROI is gauged and the prowess of digital marketers is assessed, but the new world of customer-centric analysis is not about numbers, nor is it channel specific. It’s about people. By understanding the behavior and actions prospects take across all channels, marketers can tune-in to the affinities and motivations of different audiences and have the insight necessary to overcome conversion obstacles and grow customer value.

A consumer-centric approach to analytics provides exponentially more opportunities to influence marketing results, where even negative visitor actions such as abandonment can be turned into positives by leveraging a greater understanding to drive customer conversations and build stronger relationships.



Tags: , and
Article Sponsor

More Features

Reader Comments.

Web Analytics is major process of Online Marketing and Promotion.
I have been recently educating myself on this arena and have subscribed to GoStats.com , they provide a comprehensive visitor log for 1000 visitors.

Posted by AD | 4:38 am on July 10, 2007.

Leave a Comment

Add a comment


Spotlight

GlobalSpec: Firing Up the Vertical Search Market ADOTAS EXCLUSIVE — GlobalSpec is a leading vertical search, information services and e-publishing company that serves the engineering, manufacturing and [...] more...

Adotas Partnership