Measuring Online Marketing Campaigns

Fortunately for SMEs the Internet makes this process very easy. We can know who view the ad, when and how many times, who clicks on it, furthermore we can know where are they from even in which city do they live, what language do they speak and what computer system do they use, all the above information can be obtained in real time bases, which makes online marketing communication much better approach than offline marketing communication.

Not only it is faster and easier to track any marketing campaign online than offline, it is also much less expensive to make any adjustments to the advertising message if there is need to do so. (Rafi Mohammed et al 2003)

Using site visitor activity data

The best way to understand user’s behaviour is watching them using the website, and analyse their movements and behaviour, all this information needed to do the above, can be obtained from the traffic log file where visitor activity data is stored.

Log files can reveal to SMEs the user’s background such as the exact time they visit, from which country and city they are from, what language they use and if they were referred by search engine what keyword or phrase did they use to come to the webpage, also information such as where do users click? Can they find important features easily? Are visitors spending time on the site, and if so, where? (Chaffey 2004)

Nevertheless server logs are difficult to read therefore web analytics program is needed.

Web Analytics According to Traction Search (2007) web analytics is “a tool that collects data on web site users behaviour”

Bruce Clay the leading provider of search engine marketing services (2007) stated that Web Analytics is essential for improving the performance of web sites and marketing campaigns. It also identifies the areas within the site that can be improved for better performance, and measure and track the results of any marketing campaigns.

However traffic analysis presents more questions than it answers. For instance, the log file may reveal that 90% of the users leave the site after the first page, but it doesn’t explain the reasons for that. Is the site very slow? Or is the design confusing? Or maybe the marketing message was targeting the wrong people?

Therefore for SMEs to be able to use this method effectively and read in-between the charts and graphs the web analytics program provides, they have to have some knowledge of their target market, web design, and Human–computer interaction.