Home > Reference > Articles

Protecting marketing campaign investment

You need to talk more - 75% of internet marketing campaigns hit by website failures

Nearly three quarters of organisations have experienced website failures following 'successful' marketing campaigns. Yet, despite customer complaints and aborted transactions, 26% of marketing departments fail to alert IT departments about impending campaigns.

This is the key finding from our Internet Campaign Effectiveness Study, which surveyed marketing professionals from 100 UK retail, financial, travel and online gaming organisations during July 2005.

As many as 14% of marketing departments fell short of their objectives due to struggling websites. However, only 22% of marketing departments in the companies surveyed always involve the IT department in new campaigns. 52% sometimes do. 26%, as mentioned, just don't bother. Nearly two thirds of marketing personnel admitted that they have no idea how many user transactions their website can support. 73% of companies have experienced failures.

SciVisum CEO, Deri Jones recommends that "the two camps - IT and Marketing - should always work together to map out the typical User Journeys that customers will take through the website in response to a campaign. The IT department needs to be able to plot this against the website design to ensure that there are no hidden barriers to performance. "
Abandoned transactions

The study found that 47% of marketing executives have no idea how many users abandon their sites before completing the transaction. 18% estimated that it was at least half; a further 16% estimated up to a quarter. Average transactions are £50 to £100.

Although 49% had looked into why users were abandoning transactions, almost half of them were unable to discover the cause from their IT departments, being informed that it was too complicated or that the investigation was inconclusive.
Deri Jones comments, "In fairness, tech teams come up with metrics and graphs but these are ones that the software generally easily delivers. They can't always be translated into visitors, journey satisfaction, and why a particular campaign drop-out was higher or lower than expected. "

"There is often a language gap between commercial and technical teams.
This is exactly where the User Journey approach to web portal monitoring can make a big difference. It gets both sides focused on the same metrics and keeps discussions centred on the evidence of measured journeys, not perceptions. The result is that things can quickly move towards a better web delivery".

First Steps on your User Journeys

So what's the best way to approach a User Journey monitoring programme?
SciVisum recommend that you measure the agreed journeys 24/7, and give both teams access to the real-time summary graphs.
After the first month, review together the performance issues it highlights, and aim for the tech team to address any specific bottlenecks early on.
For a good site the metrics after a campaign will show that the web performance is within acceptable bounds - so if there's any disappointment in conversion rates from a campaign, then the root causes must be sought elsewhere than in the web technology systems.