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Internet Strategy Forum Summit – Internet Marketing by the Numbers

Presented by Mike Moran, Distinguished IBM Engineer

Yes, an engineer talking to you about marketing.

You need to watch what your customers are doing so you know what to do next.  While there are a lot of things out there that you can’t measure – there are about 20% that you can measure that lead to a sale.

You have a website out there which probably eventually leads to a sale.  What things do you do that lead to that sale?  What things does the customer do that leads to that sale?

Measure ROI in terms of (Gain – cost)/cost. For transactional ROI look at how many transactions you have.  What was the ROI for everything you had to do to make that transaction happen.  For relational ROI, how much did it cost you to acquire this new customer.

Take a look a direct marketers. They understand what works and doesn’t.  How?  They create multiple versions of every marketing piece and analyze the results.  They test the responses to multiple designs and adjust everything based on those results.

Apply this to your website. Define numeric objectives.  Try different approaches.  Get real feedback and constantly look at performance to see what’s working.

For example, you want to increase sales.  For your website there may be two ways to accomplish this – get more people to come or to persuade more of the people that do come to buy.  Measure based on the increase in traffic or the increase in conversions.

Sometimes it’s not clear what metric to use, so just choose one and stick with it.  You’re looking for a trend so just consistently measure the same thing.

Conclusion – Respond to your customers. Change things until you see something start to work.  Do it quickly.  Instead of trying to figure out what to do, just do something.  Let the market tell you what works and what doesn’t.

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Are Your Customers Viewing Your Website With a Fast Internet Connection?

Some 55% of all adult Americans now have a high-speed internet connection at home, according to a May 2008 survey conducted by the Pew Internet & American Life Project. The percentage of Americans with broadband at home has grown from 47% in early 2007 and 42% in early 2005. Among individuals who use the internet at home, 79% have a high-speed connection while 15% use dialup. – Pew Internet

The report also shows that broadband has dropped slightly for households with incomes less than $20,000, which is not unexpected with the economic downturn.  Take this information into account when you decide what features to add to your website and whether your customers will be viewing it mostly at work (where most have broadband) or at home. If your customers are in a lower-income bracket, they may have a slower dial-up connection or no connection at all at home.  Websites which have lots of graphics and Flash may turn away customers with slower Internet connections.

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Adobe Working with Search Engines to Make Flash Content Less Invisible

You may have heard that websites built in Flash or as Rich Internet Applications (RIAs) are invisible to search engines and are not a great idea for search engine optimization (SEO). This is not entirely true as sites which are built properly may enable search engines to reach a great deal of their content. However, this usually requires that the developer really knows what they are doing and may require special coding just for the search engines – even that is not a guarantee that search engines can reach everything (or anything depending on the content).

Today, Adobe (the makers of Flash and many other RIA products) announced that they are working with search engines to make the content in Flash and RIAs more visible to searches (or indexing). Yippie! Let’s code all our websites in beautiful Flash, right?

Well, hold on. The problem is much more complex than just working to get the content searchable (which in itself is quite complex). As Hank Williams discusses, the way RIAs are created inherently makes the information in them very difficult to display to a search engine. He uses the example of Microsoft Word where the type of information that is available to search engines is the menus and what is in the menus, which is not particularly useful. Much of the information that is available in RIAs requires a person to make some type of interaction (choosing to see all the red shoes for example), which then displays a specific set of information – very difficult to reproduce for a search engine and even more difficult to make meaningful to a search.

This is certainly the first step in having information in RIAs available to search engines, but there is much work yet to be done. Flash and RIAs can be used to provide great customer experiences, just don’t bet on them to provide search engine traffic to your website (yet).

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