Website metrics for New Media marketing

In the world of new media marketing, everything is changing ……fast!
When business managers are breathing down your back and wanting ROI comparisons, it can be very difficult to work out exactly which online marketing activity has been most successful, which has resulted in disappointing figures.

The New Media Marketing Manager has direct control over such factors as merchandising decisions, pricing, online or offline advertising channels and traffic generation partners.

But there are many factors that are outside of your direct control:
Have you ever had an extremely effective campaign that brings in good traffic levels but hasn't resulted in an equivalent level of sales? What went wrong and what can be improved next time?

Whether your eCommerce technology is out-sourced or supplied in-house, the category of web performance is often an area where the New Media Manager is left bereft of useful metrics or information on which to base decisions.

There is likely to be data available - but is data on server uptime, pages/second, SQL query caching ratios, page delivery time for the homepage and so on all that helpful? None of these measures tell what the user's experience was, and why they took a good look around your site but didn't buy. The web analytics data may confirm that the number of users dropping out of the 'add to basket' process was higher than usual, but they won't explain why.

The New Media Manager needs to know how long it takes to complete 'Add-to-Basket' multi-page journeys - and how that compared to earlier campaigns. What was the page error rate during the peak traffic window last month? Were more visitors than normal getting pushed out of their journey by application errors?

The solution is the online version of the good old 'mystery shopper' - user journeys that follow multi-page routes, choose products, fill in forms and check out like real users do. With this level of web monitoring in place, all the other monitor data from the technical team or outsourced hosters can be put to one side - the real facts are in the user journey timings and error rates.
If these numbers show that the web portal was working normally, then the technical team can't be responsible for the poor online sales outcome - time to look elsewhere in the list of factors above.

But if the data does show reduced performance, then it's possible to draw attention to the areas of shortfall, armed with hard facts and figures. The technical team can then focus on the areas within the web engine that under-performed, instead of going away tasked to 'make the web site better across the board' which is often an impossible goal given limited technical delivery resources.

Moreover, user journey monitoring can help to save real money. If you're having to share revenue, or pay PPC to affiliates and partners, then it's important to be 100% certain that the web analytics and logging data that those payments are based on can be trusted, and that includes the 'tracking bug' javascript code inserted into the pages of your web shop, on the instructions of the web analytics or affiliate partner.

With user journey based testing, not only does the test engine ensure that the user is presented with the correct pages at each step of the journey in response to the choices, form fields entered and buttons clicked, but it can also check that the right tracking code is in each page, and that it doesn't disappear, or old templates reappear after site rebuilds and changes.