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CREATIVE AND OPINIONATED: ‘Web analytics is dead, long live MPM’
Nick Sharp VP and General Manager EMEA at WebTrends genuinely believes that web analytics as a standalone discipline is no longer relevant to today’s marketers.
Marketers have turned their focus away from examining the activity on their website to include the results they’re achieving in other areas of online marketing, such as search campaigns, banner ads and email tools. As a result, they’re not just looking for tools that measure their site performance, but also a way of bringing together the solutions they use to measure and track their online marketing in one single system.
This is why we see web analytics evolving into marketing performance management (MPM), which gives marketers a complete picture of their online marketing performance so they can manage and improve on campaigns across their web site, online marketing channels and customer marketing programmes.
The problem most marketers have at the moment is that they don’t have complete visibility into their online marketing activities. Data from different campaigns is measured on different systems, so there’s no opportunity to compare apples with apples and valuable insights are lost every day.
Marketers are already busy people, so they simply don’t have time to collate all the information themselves, measure the results accurately and compare them against Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), which measure the strength of their business. Many marketers are also unsure how to respond to the data they’ve received or what they should be looking for from the results. The end result is inconsistent KPIs and poorly targeted campaigns.
MPM overcomes these challenges by providing a consistent metrics framework for all online marketing channels so marketers have one source of data and can target segments of customers with relevant marketing messages. This means marketers can optimise their online marketing activities to ensure only the most profitable and effective channels are used.
It also puts control and ownership of online marketing back into the hands of those directly responsible for it – the marketing department – rather than the IT team, which initially looked after web analytics because it fell under their technical remit. But as online has become an increasingly valuable marketing channel – with marketing spend online now overtaking that of national press, outdoor, consumer magazines and radio advertising – interest in online has extended beyond the technical wizards to those working in the commercial and marketing departments.
MPM puts the Internet at the hub of an organisation’s marketing activities. This mirrors consumer behaviour, with younger generations in particular choosing to search and buy online – even if the initial campaign that inspired them was through offline media.
The information MPM delivers marketers complements customer information held in a company’s CRM database. The benefit of CRM systems is that they provide marketers with lots of useful information on their client base, but where they fall down is in providing information on people that aren’t already customers who visit the site. MPM plugs this gap and provides a way for organisations to reach out to these people, so they can be targeted more effectively through online campaigns.
Naturally it requires a leap of faith for marketers to put their trust in technology to manage a task most organisations have carried out manually in the past. But with the Internet becoming central to marketing activities, organisations will soon discover that if they want to stay ahead of the competition and engage with consumers effectively, MPM is the only way to improve their online marketing performance.
WebTrends has been established for more than twelve years, The company is focused on delivering the most accurate and actionable metrics, WebTrends seeks to enable thousands of organisations to improve campaign performance and web site conversion as well as build stronger relationships with customers. With WebTrends Marketing Lab, the company stands alone in offering comprehensive, flexible and scalable web analytics as well as sophisticated, data exploration and customer targeting solutions for relationship marketing. Companies such as Microsoft, Ticketmaster, IKEA, Reuters, General Mills, US Bank and more than half of the Fortune and Global 500 rely on WebTrends as their standard.
Marketers have turned their focus away from examining the activity on their website to include the results they’re achieving in other areas of online marketing, such as search campaigns, banner ads and email tools. As a result, they’re not just looking for tools that measure their site performance, but also a way of bringing together the solutions they use to measure and track their online marketing in one single system.
