Lecture 12: Lesson 5: Web metrics

Advertising.com(SM) Study Reveals Optimal Online Ad Frequency and Additional Interactive Advertising Performance Metrics

BALTIMORE, MD--(MARKET WIRE)--May 28, 2003 -- Advertising.com, Inc. today released its research study of online consumer behavior and interactive marketing. The study highlights online ad performance by frequency of impression, creative size and format, daypart and industry category, as measured across Advertising.com's network of over 1,900 websites. Click here to read the rest of the article

Notes from The Lesson Plan

The learning objectives of lesson 5 include:

• Identify metrics used on the web.
• Understand server log data
• Understand the various tools for measuring web activity;
• Understand trends in web metrics.

E-Metrics is certainly a hot buzzword! And there is certainly more than just a few companies that are trying to take advantage of the trends in this extremely important sector of e-business. of Take for instance these excerpts from the website at NetIQ:

Case Studies

Read case studies from customers who have improved their conversion with WebTrends.

"With a few simple changes that we conceived and verified with WebTrends Reporting Service, we helped increase our site visitor-to-tax-client conversion rate by more than 3 percent from 2001 to 2002."

"We used WebTrends to analyze, step-by-step, customer checkout behavior before and after a change. We were able to document that it resulted in more completed checkouts, and a $1.2 million annual increase in revenue."

"By analyzing the reports, we discovered the best location for the button and, as a result, increased registrations by 40%"

This company gives several demos. Click here and then browse the various sample reports. Click the first link. When you get to the interactive demo, click the Template Drop Down box in the upper right hand corner. Select eh LAS Small Business View menu selection. You will then be able to browse the demo. This is an excellent interactive tool. I will ask the following questions on the next popquiz

For March 5th, 2002 what was the percent number of international visits:__________

For March 5th, 2002 what was the number of unique visitors:_______________

For March 5th, 2002 what was the number 5 authenticated user name:________________

For March 14, 2002 what was the top organization that visited the users site:____________

For March 15, 2002 what was the number of referrals by the Googlel search engine________

You will have to search around for this, but I want you to get a feel for what types of information this type of tool can give you. Now, considering that I am giving you the questions in advance, I feel that 4 minutes is not an unreasonable amount of time to allow for the next popquiz!

Speaking of questions, on the midterm, I will be asking the following question:

Assume that you are the marketing manager for the firm Very Vera. What would be the five most important questions that you would want to know the answer to that you could derive from your web data analysis. Why would this be important? How could you derive the data to help answer them?

To help you answer them, let's look at the following summary of the first article:

The first article (Actionable E-Metrics) examines three categories of metrics:

Here is a quiz Question: What are some examples of Quality e-metrics? What questions might these metrics help answer?

These metrics are generally gleaned from the basic types of log files that are available from the various types of webservers. These reports are generally classified as:

• NCSA Combined Log Format
• NCSA Separate Log Format (3-log format)
• NCSA Common Log Format (access log)
• W3C Extended Log Format

Be sure that you are able to define each of these. Click the link to get a quick definition. These terms are covered in the third article and will be the basis for several quiz questions.

Here is another quiz question: What are some examples of Project Centric Metrics? What questions might these metrics help answer?

the article is quoted as:

Waterfall reports are invaluable for analyzing the effectiveness of the sales funnel, or the ratio of the number of customers in one stage of the sales process, to the number of customers at another stage in the sales process. Say, for example, that the project manager wants to move more customers online in order to reduce phone calls to the customer service center. The Web analytics consultant would create a metrics package that the project manager could run through the course of the implementation to see if more customers used the new and improved Web application as a percentage of all customers (Web and phone) who interact with the company.

What other questions could you think of? What information could you glean from the sample report that you viewed above could be considered a project centric metric? The first person who e-mails me a correct answer will be exempted from popquiz number 6 with a score of 100!

Here is another quiz question: What are some examples of Deep dive metrics? What questions might these metrics help answer?

The article is quoted as:

These metrics are known for their short-term/high integration effort. They are 100-percent customized and thus among the most time-consuming metrics to develop, mainly because they're designed to answer any of a large range of questions. These questions may include root-cause analysis, hypothesis testing, developing confidence intervals, online customer cluster analysis, shopping cart (market basket) analysis, sequence and association analysis, and other data mining applications.

What other questions could you think of? What information could you glean from the sample report that you viewed above could be considered a deep dive metric? Or at least the beginning of a deep dive metric. Again, the first person who e-mails me an answer is exempted from the popquiz of their choice with a score of 100! Here is a chance for some of you who might have missed a popquiz to make up some lost ground!

Interactives

Vocabulary Review