Measuring ROI for website marketing

Achieving the best ROI from your marketing spend is vital to business success - so what's the best way for marketing staff to measure the effectiveness of their website and online marketing campaigns? Can Web Analytics figures ever give a complete picture?

Web analytics and log statistics tell you about user behaviour; at what stage users drop out and perhaps how many, but they are less able to describe what caused them to leave nor their frustrations as they journeyed through to complete your desired action.

Web analytics

Web statistics offer a number of useful marketing indicators. Penetration describes the percentage of visitors that go beyond the first page that they encounter and conversion the percentage that carry out a desired action. Connection statistics tell you where the user has come from - is it a direct result of your banner advertising, or referrals from another site? Similarly, migration figures indicate which content areas of your website are least effective in holding onto a user.

Web analytics tell you what website visitors do and where they go - but don't help explain the reasons why. Was it due to some marketing action which could be improved such as a misleading banner advertisement, or was it down to usability issues or website errors and slowdowns?

Could your marketing be 'too successful' resulting in levels of activity with which the site cannot cope? The last thing a marketing manager wants is to spend more on advertising only to make matters worse because the site becomes overloaded, slow and error prone. If a campaign results in a lower conversion rate than expected, how can you find out what went wrong or better still how can you prevent it happening in the first place?

Online User Journey Testing

User Journey (UJ) metrics provide valuable data about the user's end-to-end experiences. The data can identify factors which could cause visitors to dropout - slow delivery, errors and inconsistencies at a particular step on the way to completing your desired action. Such data isn't merely retrospective - it can be obtained before a campaign to assist your planning decisions and potentially save damage to your brand.

A website is made up of many different technical blocks behind the scenes for different user tasks. All pages do not behave equally - it's not uncommon for a site with a problem-free homepage to have customer numbingly high error rates on purchase or login user journeys.

To help measure effectiveness, marketers can test UJs for desired actions from beginning to end. For example for the best ROI from your online advertising, it's vital to test UJs which follow clickstreams from landing page to desired action.

Before or after a campaign

Both before and after a campaign, valuable metrics can be obtained for journeys made to complete a desired action. For example:

• What percentage of visitors will encounter an error at some step along the way?
• What percentage of pages will be delivered slower than acceptable user speeds?
• How slow is each step of the UJ and which is the slowest step?
• How bad does the slowest page delivery become and when did it last occur?

Before a campaign, marketers can employ UJ load testing, running many hundreds of journeys in parallel to mimic a large number of concurrent users, to determine the effects of heavy traffic on user experience - was the peak site performance worse than expected and how quickly did it return to normal?

During a campaign, 24/7 UJ monitoring will show what performance users experience before, during and immediately after peak periods. And if call-centre colleagues report increased website complaints, you will have the exact performance data on whether technical slowdowns or errors frustrated visitors.

User Journey testing highlights exactly what impact site performance could have on the dropout or conversion rate. The technical team can use this data to fine-tune website performance and the marketer to safeguard the next campaign from disappointing results, ensuring that your visitors have the best possible chance of completing your desired actions.