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Tracking and reporting
One of the undoubted benefits of online marketing is its measurability. It is true that you can measure pretty much anything that goes on online. It is certainly true that it easy to generate huge volumes of data. The harder part, as with any other form of statistical analysis, is generating meaningful information at a price that offers fair value.
In terms of value, at least, the situation is easier for a large organisation. Although they have more data to look at, when you are looking at trends in particular, there are significant economies of scale; the benefits are also correspondingly scaled up. For smaller organisations, where budgets are tighter, the cost benefit equation is less clearly obvious, so it is important that you have a clear understanding of the benefits that you are looking to generate from your tracking activity.
What's involved?
Tracking breaks down into 3 basic elements.
Data generation
As we have said, generating the data is easy.
Every action that occurs on your website is (usually) automatically "logged" on your web server in the form of log files. Each action is time stamped, so you know when it occurred. Your log files are one source of data, but extracting meaningful information from them can be a challenge.
An alternative is to generate tracking data. As this data is generated for purpose, it produces better information more easily. This requires a tracking system.
Reporting (data processing)
Once you have generated the data, you need to turn it into useful information. To do this you need to process your data.
There are 2 things to consider when considering your report. First it takes computer power. The more data you have and the more complex the query you are making, the more power you need. Second, you need some software to run it. There are innumerable options for generating reports, quality and price varies considerably, with solutions to fit every budget. Unusually, however, there is an excellent free solution available, Google Analytics.
Analysis
Your data processing will generate a report, which will tell you what is happening on your site. But what does it really tell you? Is it good or is it bad? What changes do you need to make and what benefit will they have?
In order to draw meaningful conclusions from your reports, you need to have effective analysis. You need to understand how your websites fits into your business, before you can work out if it is doing what it needs to do and how it can do it better.
Why bother?
"Half of my advertising is wasted, and the trouble is, I don't know which half." This rather over used adage makes a simple point. That if you can work out which bits of your marketing are working and which aren't, you can make things better. Or, to use the words of Sir Winston Churchill, "However beautiful the strategy, you should occasionally look at the results".
Too much marketing activity is undertaken without sufficient scrutiny. You run a campaign and its results are judged by the level of sales at some unspecified point of time in the future. Little or no effort is put into working out which bits of the campaign were actually responsible for the change, or even whether the campaign was responsible at all.
Understanding what does and doesn't work will give your marketing a much clearer direction, as well as improving the return on investment.
Tracking is useless unless ...
Data and / or reports on their own are useless. The bit that's useful is the analysis. The analysis should make concrete recommendations on how to improve your marketing activity, whether they are related to the campaign, to your product or to your website.
Recommendations are useless unless they are acted on. Test-learn-test - run a campaign, work out what it achieved, revise your plans and do it again. It is only by a process of iteration that you will learn what really works for your product.
