Digital marketing - Analyse this

Katherine Brandon examines the tools available for tracking digital marketing campaigns

Digital marketing campaigns are becoming more common throughout the business world. Despite marketing budgets traditionally being one of the first costs cut when faced by a recession, research from the Internet Advertising Bureau and PricewaterhouseCoopers reported that internet advertising expenditure in the UK grew to £1.68bn in the first half of 2008, a 21% increase over 2007.

However, Paul Wreford-Brown, director at creative services consultancy Abstract, believes that few small to medium-sized businesses track the results that their digital marketing brings: "Digital marketing is simple and easy to track but many people are daunted by the prospect."

Bart Patrick, head of insurance at business analytics vendor SAS, believes that managers need to be aware of the precise effects that past campaigns have had if they are to implement a successful digital marketing strategy. He said: "Before a broker decides what marketing campaign to use, it needs to understand ones its has done in the past. It needs to see who, what, why and how business is being driven to its website and how visitors use the website once there. Technology can reveal hidden patterns within sets of data that enable a broker to find the hidden gem that they already have and implement a strategy appropriately."

Varied

There are many technology tools available for brokers to drive traffic to their websites, ranging from traditional online banner adverts to more subtle approaches such as social networking (PB December 2008, p.12).

E-marketing is a tool that is both loved and loathed. While many businesses hate the idea of sending out bulk e-mail marketing, others, especially those that sell direct to private individuals, rely a great deal on it to generate businesses leads. The latest Direct Marketing Association National E-mail Benchmarking Report shows that e-mail marketing service providers sent an average of 36 million e-mails a month, compared to 30 million a month in 2007.

Wreford-Brown told PB that, in his experience, not enough is being done to track the success of these e-mails by the businesses that send them: "Too many people send out marketing e-mails and then don't see what is happening with them."

When a business sends out marketing e-mails with links to its website, recent developments in track-and-trace software allow the sender to see the number of recipients that have clicked through to the site and what they have opened. Johnson believes that track-and-trace software will become an important tracking tool for e-marketers and comments that the accessibility of the information provided by track-and-trace software will be crucial to its success: "Software offers real-time recording of data that can follow a customer all the way through the buying chain."

Ubiquitous

Searching the internet has now become such a popular form of buyers' product research that the verb 'to google' can now be found in the dictionary. It is perhaps unsurprising, therefore, that businesses have been placing adverts on websites for years, with insurance and broking being no exception.

The first adverts on the internet were simple banners and it was easy to track their success by counting the number of click-throughs to the website in question. However, according to Wreford-Brown, online adverts are now becoming more sophisticated and therefore more difficult to track: "Advertising online is not just about banners any more. Many companies are now capturing data and using interactive marketing rather than just dragging people to the company website. Technology has evolved and not only can it track the number of views of an advert but also the number of interactions the advert is getting and how many are converted into sales."

Data mining

Web analytics is used widely by businesses to provide advertisers and website owners with the tools to better understand their users' browsing experiences. It tells you how visitors found your site, what they did while there and whether or not they completed any of the site's conversion goals. A geo-location report can also show which countries and cities visitors come from.

One free analytics tool available to brokers is Google Analytics. Neil Johnson, director at Lamb, believes that this application will become a popular marketing management tool: "Google Analytics has taken the analysis of web traffic to a huge level, making it easy to see where web traffic is coming from; it even enables the user to see where most people are clicking on the screen. If you want it, the information is there. All the analytics are self-generating, so you can see quickly the impact of any changes made in campaigns. There will be a bigger movement towards analytics as people are beginning to realise that a website created is not a job done. More people are looking to understand how exactly their website is working for them."

Wreford-Brown is cautious in his approach to Google Analytics, however: "There are some good free analytics tools out there but you need a tool with which you can place a tag between each campaign, making it easy to see how much traffic a specific campaign is sending to a site and following these customers right the way through the buying process. Google Analytics can show traffic and measure impressions but there are better tools at enabling you to isolate the impact of individual campaigns."

Whatever approach a broker chooses, it is important that their measurement tools incorporate all of the digital marketing data available, not just web sales.

In October 2008, Swinton announced that it was to partner with SAS to bring its data from direct mail, e-mail, web and short message service marketing together in order to be able to evaluate the effectiveness of campaigns across the board.

Holistic

Charles Ping, client services director at AI Data Intelligence, believes that such marketing data co-ordination is essential if the effectiveness of campaigns is to be tracked properly. Ping highlighted: "As consumers grow older, they tend to distrust online transactions and, even if an offer is promoted through online or e-mail channels, the actual response can be heavily biased towards inbound calls. Any single-channel approach to customer response measurement tends to underplay performance."

It is easy to download reports from marketing tracking services but the results can often appear confusing.

Mark Manton, managing director at M Consulting, believes that it is still essential for brokers to consult marketing experts where the expertise is not available in-house.

He warned: "Although simple to set up and view, the real skill in using these tools is in the interpretation of the data. Looking at trends and statistical relevance rather than headline figures gives a greater insight into customer behaviour and prevents reactionary marketing moves. For instance, where a pay-per-click campaign delivers five visitors to your website and you have no sales then it's probably not significant."

Warning sign

He continues: "If 500 people visit and there are still no sales, you need to look at your campaign setup, target audience, messages, pricing, the landing page of your website or the sales team on the end of your phones. Tracking wisely can help narrow down which of these areas you should be looking at, saving you time and money."

First Published in Professional Broking Magazine Jan 09 - All RIghts Reserved