Measuring Online Success Gary Mincieli, President Patrick Sosalski, Senior Online Business Analyst Internet marketers are projected to allocate billions of dollars this year to reach the healthcare consumer. These dollars will be divided among banner campaigns, search networks such as Google and Yahoo!, e-mail programs, and so on — all designed to drive visitors to brand.com. While each one of these Web-based promotional initiatives has experienced double-digit growth in the last decade, far too many companies fail to consider a proper strategy for measuring the success of these campaigns in relation to their brands. The following five steps should be performed by every brand to ensure measurable, successful Internet campaigns. 1. Cleary Define Campaign Goals The most important step to ensuring promotional campaign effectiveness is to clearly define the campaign’s purpose. Simply put, what is the objective of the advertising? Most often, the goal of an Internet marketing campaign is to attract potential patients or healthcare professionals to a newly launched brand site or perhaps to educate an audience on a brand’s new indication. Regardless of the objective, defining this up front is vital in the pursuit of designing a measurable online campaign. 2. Determine Performance Indicators The next step is to identify the Website’s components or tools that will best illustrate campaign performance. These key performance indicators, or KPIs, could be the completion of an assessment quiz, the download of a particular document, or registration for a program. Each of the promotional campaign’s tactics should be designed to drive the visitor to this indicator. 3. Design Trackable Promotional Initiatives After KPIs have been identified, the next step is to ensure that the Website has the ability to measure the performance of each advertising channel whether it is as far reaching as a banner or search campaign or as exclusive as an in-house e-mail program. To accomplish this, each initiative must be given a unique landing page. The landing page is the first page a visitor accesses on the site. Oftentimes, this landing page is a duplicate or mirrored version of another page within the Website. 4. Isolate Visitors by Promotional Channel The next step involves accessing the Website’s log files. Log files contain detailed information about each visitor session, such as where the visitor was before reaching the Website or which pages he or she accessed on the site. These files should be captured and archived on a monthly basis. To accurately measure a multichannel online campaign, the analysis should begin with the first page the visitor accessed on the site. 5. Measure True Performance Hits or visits are no longer an accurate gauge of Website success. Much more reliable metrics are currently available to evaluate true Website user engagement. Metrics such as task completion rates (TCRs) and exit-rate analysis are extremely useful when determining the quality and value of advertising initiatives and can give marketers important insights into not only the campaign itself but the effectiveness of the site’s design. The TCR is the rate at which a visitor accesses and subsequently follows through to completion of a particular Website task, such as condition assessments or registration forms. For example, the task completion rate analysis may reveal that a higher percentage of visitors completed a program registration form from an e-mail blast than another promotional initiative. Exit rates show how many visitors left the Website from the page they entered without accessing any other content on the site. This rate is an excellent way to determine whether the promotional message is on target. For example, through exit-rate analysis it is possible to identify which particular banner is most effective at driving actionable visitors to the Website. Even general user behaviors, such as page views and time on the site, help to provide insights about an advertising campaign’s performance and the quality of the visitor that is sent from the advertisement. Online Success There are countless bits of information that need to be considered when developing an effective Internet strategy. Gaining intimate knowledge about the audience, such as their needs and objectives and their online behaviors, can be invaluable to a brand’s online success. MProven LLC Web-based promotional initiatives have experienced double-digit growth in the last decade, but far too many companies fail to consider a proper strategy for measuring the success of these campaigns in relation to their brands. MProven LLC, Richboro, Pa., uses data and analytics to help organizations both large and small more effectively reach their target audiences online. For more information, visit mproven.com. March 2006 VIEW on Advertising

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