May 2007
Online Analytics: From click-through to conversion

By evaluating the data from your show Web site and e-mail marketing campaigns, you can understand your customers’ online behavior, measure your return on investment, and increase registrations and revenues.

By Cathy Chatfield-Taylor

Be honest. After your last cheap-and-easy e-mail blast, did you check to see whether your message got through the spam filters? Do you know how many people opened your message, then clicked through to learn more? Have you tracked how many people started to fill out the online registration form, then stopped?

Ideally, an in-house online marketing expert analyzes these statistics and makes the changes needed to convert more clicks to customers. If, like most show organizers, you don’t have someone dedicated to this task, don’t panic. You don’t need to be a math major to use these metrics effectively. But, you do need measurable goals — generate leads, register attendees, sell exhibit space or sponsorships — and a willingness to test, test, test.

It starts with an offer — a value proposition that’s so irresistible, response is inevitable: Open. Click. Submit. Test and tweak the campaign to mazimize conversions. It can be as simple as a word change, and results can be nearly instantaneous. Split the list, test multiple versions, compare response rates, then roll out the top performer.

Using a marketing dashboard, you can quickly evaluate campaign results at any point in time and track activity — everything from whether e-mails are opened to when registrations peak. By evaluating the data from your e-mail marketing service provider and Web site hosting service, you can track each touch point along the way to customer acquisition, measure your return on investment, and capitalize on opportunities to generate new revenue. 

“If you’re ROI-centric and inclined to test and track everything, then you can identify where your greatest opportunities are to create customer relationships,” says Paul Soltoff, Chairman and CEO of SendTec (www.sendtec.com), a direct marketing services company based in St. Petersburg, FL. “You can bring that back to a dashboard and evaluate the scalability of the approach.”

Web analytics measure online behavior by tracking aggregate visits, unique visits, page views, page views per visit, top keywords, top referrers and click streams — the paths of pages visitors click-through. Granted, these statistics can be overwhelming. The key is knowing which numbers to watch.

“Look at trends and anomalies, outliers and frequencies,” says Judah Phillips, Director of Web Analytics for Reed Business Information (www.reedbusiness.com), New York. “For example, if you have a burst of traffic on a given day, you investigate the referrers and find out your content was syndicated. Then you can find opportunities for a partnership or media buy.” Reed has used Web analytics to roll out new template-based sites such as JCK Online (www.jckonline.com), including the JCK Invitational events, with new blogs, e-newsletters and affiliate advertising targeting the community’s highly qualified niche market.

“With the redesign of the user experience, we hope people will stay longer and go deeper,” Phillips says. “As the time spent on our site increases, page views increase, which causes rises in other metrics like impressions served and leads generated.”

By focusing on just the metrics that are the best indicators of success, you can achieve measurable results at very little expense, in time or resources. Here are the numbers online marketing experts tell us to watch.

E-mail campaigns
The most revealing metrics in an e-mail marketing campaign are open rates, click-throughs and conversions. Open rates indicate the level of interest in your value proposition. Watch how they change over time for an indicator of peaked interest in compelling subjects or dwindling interest when e-mail comes too often.

Click-through rates (CTRs) measure response to your call to action. If the offer is not sufficiently enticing, your click-throughs will suffer. Take care when comparing CTRs across campaigns, if the calls to action significantly differ. A save-the-date mailing may not garner much response; whereas a request to forward the message to colleagues will generate measurable results.

The most important measure of a campaign’s success is the conversion rate: Of those who clicked through, how many completed the desired action — entered the contest, signed up for mailings or registered for the event? Web-based actions are easy to track, but conversions frequently occur off-line. If an e-mail recipient calls the 800 number to register, ask for an e-mail address so you can track the registration back to its source.

You can get more return on your campaign investment if you track the conversion rates back to the sources of the e-mail lists. “Track the source of the opt-ins, and look at conversion metrics relative to sources, especially sources you pay for,” says Elaine O’Gorman, Vice President of Strategy for Atlanta-based e-mail service provider Silverpop (www.silverpop.com). “See how well they perform over time, so you can make better decisions in the future about how to spend your list acquisition dollars.” If more than 5 percent of e-mails bounce, list hygiene may be an issue.

You can also use campaign metrics to guide future messaging. By looking at who did and didn’t open the e-mail, and what they read and didn’t read, you can segment the audience and target market based on behavior. “Once you’ve identified the behavior, you can put them on an automated campaign,” O’Gorman says.

While e-mail marketing tracks individual behavior, Web analytics platforms measure aggregate behavior. Integrate the two, and you can track individual activity through to the online conversion point. Then, the action an individual takes can trigger an appropriate e-mail communication for “round-trip” marketing. O’Gorman says, “If you take advantage of it, it’s a sustainable competitive advantage.”

Online advertising
Online advertising is measured in impressions — the number of times an ad is viewed on a Web site. Publishers measure how many times an ad is served, and how many times the ad is clicked on. Their rates are based on cost per thousand impressions, or cost per action. For example, if you have an affiliate program, where a third-party Web site displays your ad, you may pay the affiliate a percentage of each resulting sale.

Impressions and clicks on the publisher’s server side translate into click-throughs and conversions on your landing page — preferably a Web page that mirrors the creative, message and look-and-feel of the online ad. Here, your own Web site analytics kick in to tell you how long people stay on the page and where they go from there. The landing page can funnel traffic to the registration page, where the conversion takes place. As in an e-mail campaign, click-throughs and conversions from the landing page indicate whether your call to action is compelling.

“You can optimize an ad on the fly,” says Rebecca Lieb, Editor-in-Chief of ClickZ Network (www.clickz.com), an interactive marketing resource owned by Incisive Media, New York. “Test different types of creative and messaging, see what’s working and where, and adjust the campaign accordingly. You may start with two or three creative executions, tweak them, kill some and continue with the others.”

To measure campaign effectiveness and improve performance, first define key performance indicators. If the goal is to build a mailing list for an opt-in e-mail campaign, you’ll track the number of e-mails collected vs. the number of impressions served. If you’re tracking registrations, you’ll also want to measure how many click-throughs failed to convert to identify problems with your registration process.

“The final page that delivers ROI is your own Web site because that’s where people are converting,” Lieb says. “The point of advertising and e-mail is to drive people to that Web site.”

Search marketing
Being found on popular search engines — and ranking high on the results page — is an increasingly hot pursuit of e-marketers. Search engine optimization (SEO) is the practice of fine-tuning a Web site so that it turns up in the results for specific keyword searches. To guarantee high rankings, you can pay the search engines to serve up your ads along with those search results.

The more you pay for a keyword, the higher up on the list your ad appears, so it’s more likely to be viewed and clicked. You pay per click (PPC). The objective is to target keywords that convert to action. People may click several links in the search results page before they decide what action to take.

“Part of campaign optimization is to be at the decision point,” says SEO Consultant Bruce Clay of Bruce Clay Inc. (www.bruceclay.com), Moorpark, CA. “For a conference, the decision point will be the first branded site that offers targeted information for the attendees. In my opinion, you have to be No. 1, No. 2 or No. 3, or don’t play.”

By testing your creative — usually a short headline and fewer than 15 words of text — you can discover what gets clicked the most. “We optimize the ads by figuring out what their position should be,” Clay says. “Sometimes we lower the ranking, then we optimize the text in the ad to maximize the targeted click-through. Many times, we can simultaneously reduce the cost of the keyword and increase the clicks.”

Paid search metrics may begin with costs and clicks, but like e-mail marketing and other online advertising, they end with the landing page click-throughs and conversions. You can optimize a PPC campaign by working backward from your Web site analytics, noting what other keywords people search on, then buying those keywords, as well.

Often, there’s a disconnect between when people view a landing page and when they come back to register. “There has to be a different measure of success, or more longevity to your measures, so if people come back later, after getting budget approval, sales will know that it was pay-per-click initiated,” Clay says. One solution is to include a unique toll-free number in the ad, so calls to that number can be counted.

PPC may be best suited for low price-point shows running in different cities, where people search for the event, then click an ad for dates and directions. A free ticket or discount offer can be measured in number of redemptions. Keywords can be geo-targeted within a finite time frame, such as 90 days out, and turn on and off automatically, so costs are contained.

Event Web sites
E-mail and advertising campaigns ultimately drive traffic to the event Web site. Web analytics measure that traffic — how many visitors you get, where they come from, what keywords they use to find you, where they go within the site, how long they stay on each page, which pages are most popular and what page they leave from most often.

By looking at this click-stream data, you’ll learn what information interests people and what problems they have finding it. If people come to your home page, then immediately leave, you’ve failed to meet their expectations. If their movement around the site is illogical or haphazard, your navigation is confusing. If some sections get heavy traffic, and others are no-man’s land, you need to rethink the content.

“I can tell if they’re engaged by what they’re clicking,” says Jim Sterne, Founding President of the Web Analytics Association (www.webanalyticsassociation.org) and Producer of the Emetrics Summit (www.emetrics.org). Something as simple as sorting a list by subject reveals what topics are of most interest. Each “tripwire” triggers an opportunity to learn what users want.

Once you’ve identified the desired outcome — trade an e-mail address for a newsletter subscription, complete a profile or provide a credit card number for a conference registration — you can track and optimize the path it takes to get people there.

“If I know it takes six page views to register, and I can see that I lose people on page three, I can ask: What can I do on page three to keep those people?” Sterne says. “Instead of spending money to get more people to the Web site, I can optimize the process of moving people through my Web site.”

Few people register on their first visit, so you also want to know when you have repeat visitors. A cookie records each visit, date and time, as well as what pages were viewed. You can personalize interactions by using that information to welcome back the visitor by name and dynamically serve content that’s of specific interest to that individual. Such behavioral targeting uses Web analytics in real time to engage visitors and draw them deeper into the site, where there are more opportunities to complete the desired interactions.

Online behavior can also be an indicator of likely offline activity. Will a visitor actually attend the event? Web site analytics can help you fine-tune the events themselves. If people abandon the site when they see the event location, then you can make that location more appealing by focusing on activities and attractions. If they fail to scroll through your conference program, then you might revamp the agenda. And if the exhibitor list is repeatedly searched for a product that’s not found, you can attract companies in that category.

“Web analytics is about what people do, but you don’t know why they do it,” Sterne says. “It’s important to ask them. Pick up the phone and call them. Have a survey on your Web site. Ask, ‘What did you not see on the site that you were looking for?’ Then you can make the Web site better.” As well as your event.