Tracking the Effectiveness of On-Site Promotions

The hard work has been done and you've got the visitor to your site, now's the time to sell to them. Google Analytics, Omniture, WebTrends, Unica and other tools can tell you a lot about how the visitor reached the site and whether they became a lead or a customer. But what about the effective are the messages displayed within your website?

eMetrics Sydney - Day 2

How could you predict that different coloured buttons provided different results at different times of the year? This is what Paul Robinson, Marketing and Communications Manager, from the ABC shop found when he conducted multivariate tests to optimise the purchase process on the ABC shop website. Paul is a skilled user of WebTrends and always provides wonderful insights on how to get the most from web analytics in a retail environment. I was definitely looking forward to this presentation and I wasn't disappointed. His insights into the lack of return on investment for Facebook commerce were interesting as was his insights into the decisions that he makes based on the data from WebTrends.

Mark Allison from WebTrends shared the stage with Paul and provided a sneek preview of some of the features of WebTrends Analytics 10 and its ability to merge data from many different sources (more on this to come in my post on WebTrends Engage 2011).

Frank Grasso from e-Channel Online presented an interesting argument in using AdWords more as a distribution system than a pure advertising platform. In essence his argument was based on the efficiencies that can be created by effectively bidding on long tail keywords to close the sale once a user has made a decision on their purchase. His examples of how poorly companies use AdWords were a real wake up call for the industry.

Alan Long has moved away from Hitwise/Experian to set up his own venture Online 1984 which provides reputation management services in the area of social media. His presentation on the difficulties of analysing social media sentiment across a large scale highlighted some of the key issues that the sentiment analysis market needs to solve before they can provide meaningful tools to the industry.

Other speakers included Aiden Beanland, Regional SEO Manager for Yahoo on engagement analytics for publishers, Christian Bartens from Datalicious on cross channel attribution models, Gregan McMahon on integrating mobile advertising data with other campaign tools and David Brigham on the use of web analytics to optimise marketing spend.

Finally I also spoke at the conference on the topic of Measuring the Environment which covered some of the key factors that should be considered when using web analytics tools. I hope to make this presentation available online shortly.

If you are interested in web analytics and optimising marketing, once again, I can't recommend the eMetrics conference highly enough. It will be coming to Melbourne later this year and hopefully back to Sydney in 2012.