http://www.7search.com/newsletters/articles/art37.htm
Set Your "Sites" on Success
with eMarketing Metrics
by Pete Prestipino
One of the most significant pitfalls facing business managers and marketers today is the lack of a universal eBusiness metrics standard to gauge success and justify online investments of their time and money. To successfully measure your Web-based ROI, LTY brings you five basic principles of eBusiness Performance Management (eBPM) to help align your sites' Web performance with your overall business objectives.
1. Start with Strategy
Know the top-level goals of your company inside and out and apply these to your eBusiness strategy. For example, these might include driving the cost of sales down, increasing brand awareness, growing revenues or improving customer satisfaction ratings.
2. See Success
Envision up front how your Web initiatives can support your overall business objectives. Who is the target of your next eBusiness campaign? Who will it serve? Who do you expect to sell to? If your eMarketing program were an offline initiative instead, how would you measure it?
3. Measure Early and Often
Throughout the program, even hours after launch, it is important to assess results, even preliminary, so that execution can be fine-tuned throughout a campaign. Understanding results is not a "post mortem" task.
4. Design and Plan
Plan for how your vast data reserves not only will be mined and stored, but how the company's key decision-makers can readily leverage data from disparate sources - e.g., customer databases used by sales and service, sales transaction records stored in the corporate mainframe, etc. - to complement your Web-based initiatives.
5. Make it Real
Share results - both successes and failures. eBusiness stakeholders - executives, line of business management, and others - must have access to critical information so that timely and accurate decisions can be made. Killing an unsuccessfSet ul Web-based program early can still be considered a "win."
Pete Prestipino is a Marketing Specialist for 7Search.com, the Web's second most trafficked pay per ranking search engine. For more information about this article or 7Search.com's array of services, contact PR@7search.com.