The Operationalization of Marketing
 arketing
invents and holds its breath. It creates, and then prays for a positive
outcome. Marketing takes a stab in the dark, then watches sales figures
with dreams of illumination dancing in its head. Will this television
spot stick in the public mind? Will this banner ad generate more clicks?
Will the Subservient Chicken sell more poultry? And if fowl sales
take wing, how much credit is due to the viral bird?In the mid to late 1990S, somebody in marketing asked somebody in the IT department if there was any way to find out what was happening on the corporate web site. The IT guy offered up performance management reports indicating that pages were being served and data packets were flowing. But that wasn't enough for the marketing folks. The marketing guy wanted to know how well the web site was working from a business perspective. The IT department |
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responded with "What do you want to
know?"
Marketing asked, "What can you tell me?"
IT replied, "What do you need?"
Marketing asked, "What have you got?"
After exhausting the possibilities of performance reports,
the IT guy offered up the server logs. Every transaction system keeps
a log of every transaction so that, if there’s a fatal error, there’s
a record of the last good transaction. Web servers record every page that
goes out and when, how many bytes it was, and what IP address it was sent
to.
Log file analysis tools were created to look for patterns,
in hopes of finding something interesting, such as which parts of the
site get more traffic than others. Log file analysis can show which banner
ads get the most clicks, which products are the most interesting and which
offer (buy-one-get-one-free vs. two-for-the-price-of-one) is the most
persuasive.
It wasn't until the late '90S, with cookies and page-tagging,
that the marketing department started getting some truly useful reports.
When a surfer visits a web-site for the first time, he's asking for a specific page and he's an unknown. So the server serves the page and sets a cookie on the visitor's hard drive. The cookie is a small text file that might contain some actual information, but usually just holds a unique identifier. That unique identifier can be used to see if that visitor comes back, how often and how recently. Cookies help us count the number of first-time visitors, compared to repeat visitors.
Page-tagging involves serving up pages with a JavaScript tag at the bottom---a little program that runs once the page loads. If you make a hotel reservation and you tell the site that you want this room at that hotel on this day and you have a special promotion code, the JavaScript makes sure that it's all captured.
With page-tagging and cookies, we can analyze the four main stages of online communication: advertising, marketing, sales and customer service.
Advertising is measured by clickthrough. Which ad got the most number of people to the web site? Which search term was responsible for the most traffic? What was the impact of that press release?
Once we have a surfer's attention, it's time to educate him as to why he should buy.
That's marketing, and marketing is measured by page views. How much web site content is the surfer consuming? Sales are easiest to measure: transactions and dollars. Customer service is trickier. Whether or not the web site is properly answering questions and solving problems can only be determined by asking customers for their opinion.
All of the above, with the exception of public opinion surveys, is known as Web Analytics. It is the science and art of using clickthroughs, page views, revenues and click path analysis to determine if the web site is working. Web analytics reports are used to see if small changes to the site have an impact on the number of people who come back to the site and eventually buy.
Just as manufacturing processes or distribution routes need to be optimized, so does Internet communication, and web analytics has become the tool of choice of web site optimization.
Bob Chatham, an industry analyst from Forrester Research, was very well received at the last Emetrics Summit when he told a roomful of web analytics professionals that they would inherit the Earth. Delegates sat up a little taller in their chairs.