Online Marketing Blog

The second workshop of the day at Web 2.o Expo, “Startup Metrics 101: Product & Marketing Workshop” provided attendees a glimpse into the vast depth of knowledge from Dave McClure of 500 Hats who offered some pirate speak, “AARRR” to help delegates remember his model for building web businesses.

Hiten Shah of CrazyEgg and KISSmetrics provided practical examples and Vanessa Fox of Ignition Partners and Nine By Blue offered a combination of SEO centric tips, analytics and examples.

First up was the Web 2.0 Pirate, Dave McClure with his “AARRR” model:

• Acquisition - Where users come to your site from the web

Big conferences like Search Engine Strategies NYC are great when you can get your boss to splurge for a week away, but if you can’t, (shame on you) then ClickZ Events might be a consideration.

Next up on the ClickZ schedule is, “Web Metrics: an online marketer’s best friend, or worst enemy?” at the Hilton, NYC May 2nd. This event includes sessions from the likes of Jeff and Bryan Eisenberg “Turning Data into Dollars”, Heidi Cohen “Competitive Intelligence” and Jim Nail who along with Shane Atchison is presenting “How to Measure Blogs, Buzz, & Brands”. Sounds like a pretty good program to me. There’s an early bird discount for that one if you register before April 20th.

I was recently taking a survey from Jupiter or ClickZ (I don’t recall which) and one of the questions asked about measurement of success for search marketing. While a lot of what you hear from search marketers involves talk about fundamentals ranging from links to rankings to visitors and conversions, the answers offered in this survey included a pretty interesting mix:

• Increasing brand awareness
• Building buzz
• Search share of voice
• Improving brand favorability
• Increasing intent to purchase
• Maintaining brand exposure alongside competitors
• Engagement with rich media (i.e. video, animation)

Members of the Minnesota Interactive Marketing Association and the local interactive community in the Twin Cities will be getting the lowdown on web analytics next week. Eric T. Peterson from the Visual Sciences division of web analytics firm, WebSideStory and author of several books on web measurement will be presenting, “Making Your Web Analytics Work. Hard”.

From the press release:

‚ÄúFew organizations fully realize the potential of their investment in web analytics technology,‚Äù said Peterson. ‚ÄúWeb analytics applications provide truly actionable data that can be used to positively impact an organization‚Äôs bottom-line but companies need to treat web analytics as a business process, not simply an ad hoc endeavor. My work at Visual Sciences, and my MIMA presentation, revolves around how companies can treat web analytics as a business process and dramatically improve the return on investment.”

Measuring success of your online marketing efforts is a critical, but often underutilized in many web marketing initiatives. Recently I took a survey for Jupiter Research and one of the questions got me thinking about the different metrics that companies use:

• Brand impact (i.e., increased brand awareness, intent or favorability)
• Number of impressions
• Position of paid listing
• Number of clicks
• Ratio of new to returning visitors
• Amount of increased website traffic
• Duration of website visits
• Amount of increased traffic to physical store
• Amount of increased volume to call center