Marketing cowboys prefer to ignore it and just shoot from the hip Dirty Harry style. (We'd like to do the same – if it were only that simple). Clients love it and can’t get enough of it. Start-ups and small businesses are curious, but just aren’t sure how to manage it. In the end, Caine-like pansophical answers would be ideal, but aren't practical. It’s measurement - and it's vital to your growth.

In order to grab and keep your excitement, we're going to highlight the best bits, so you can learn to love measurement as much as we do. Even though we're going to touch on web analytics and statistics, don't be lulled into thinking that you can leave these tasks for the resident geek on your team. Measurement is for marketing managers – and it will save your neck in the end. But, it's also for business strategists. In the end, measurement will help you develop your market position and anticipate trends.

We'll be sure to comment on the basic purpose of online marketing measurement - optimizing site behaviors, conversion and ROI (they're not the same things). But we'll also cover the major challenges facing marketers such as offline-online integration: is it even practical to try to correlate the eCommerce transaction and the POS transaction (Hint: yes, and you'll end up with a better understanding of the interaction between the online and offline worlds).

And what about PR? Can you measure the impact if there's no sale attached? How abut SEO programming - how do you measure its worth? How about Viral Marketing – can Social Networking or Word-Of-Mouth success be quantified?

Don't forget about user satisfaction, retention and loyalty.

One last thing Grasshopper. We'll also talk to the geeks. We’ll discover the challenges with integrating the raw data captured through web analytics. We’ll understand how web server performance impacts marketing performance, and we’ll even learn the standards that have become protocol for cookie expiration, as well as the impact of various survival rules. (Insert meditative bamboo flute sound here.)

Posted by: Jon Cooper - 02/02/07

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