Maintaining and monitoring the online presence

Learning objective
After reading this chapter, the reader should be able to:
 Identify the task necessary when managing an out line presence
 Understand terms used to measure and improve site effectiveness
 Develop an appropriate process to collect measures for internet marketing
effectiveness

Questions for marketers

Key questions for marketing managers related to this chapter are:
 How much resource do I need to put into maintaining and monitpring the
sites ?
 What process should I use to maintain the web site ?
 How do I measure the effectiveness of web marketing?

Links to other chapter

The chapter should be read in conjunction with these chapters:
 Chapter 4 describes the development of an internet marketing strategy
have been achieved.
 Chapter 7 describes how to set up a website. And should be read before
this chapter to introduce the reader to concepts of website development
 Chapter 8 describes the method of promoting a web site. It should be
read before this chapter since one aspect of measuring the effectiveness
of internet marketing is aimed at assessing the different promotional
methods

Introduction

Companies that have a successful approach to online marketing often seem

to share a common characteristics, they attach great importance and devote
resources to monitoring the success of there online marketing and putting
in place to process to continuously improve the performance of their digital
channels. This culture of measurement is visible in the UK bank alliance
and Leicester, which in 2004 reported that they spent 20% of their £80
million marketing communications budget on outline marketing Stephen
Leonard, head of e-commerce, described their process as “test, learn,
refine’{revolution, 2004). Graeme findlay, senior manager, customer
acquision of e-commerce at A&L explains further:

Our online approach is integrated with our offline brand and creative
strategy, with a locus on direct, straightforward presentation of strong
value-led messages. Everything we do online, includes creativity, is driven
by an extensive and dynamic testing process.

Seth romanow, director of customer knowledge at Hewlett-packard,

speaking at 2004 e-metrics summit, described their process as ‘Measures,
Report. Analyse, Optimize’. Amazon refers to their approach as ‘The
culture of merits’ (see case study 9). Jim Sterne, who convenes an annual
event devoted to improving online performance (www.emetrics.org), has
summarised his view on the required approach in his book web metrics
(sterne, 2002) as ‘TIMITI’ which stands for try it! Measure it! Tweak it!,
i.e. online content should be reviewed and improved continuously rather
than as periodic or ad-hoc process, The importance of defining an
appropriate approach to measurement and improvement is such that the
term ‘web analytics association (www.waa.org) has been developed by
vendors, consultants and researchers in this area. Eric Petersen, an analyst
specialising in web analyst specialising in web analytics, defines it follows:

Web analytics is the assessment of a variety of data, including web traffic,

web-based transactions, web server performance, usability studies, user
submitted information [i.e. surveys], and related sources to help create a
generalised understanding of the visitor experience online.
Petersen(2004)

You can see that in addition to what are commonly referred to as ‘site
statistics’ about web traffic, sales transactions, usability and researching
customers’ views through surveys are also included, We believe, though,
that the definition can be improved further – it suggests analysis for the
sake of it – whereas the business purpose of analytics should be
emphasised, The definition could also refer to comparison of site visitor
volumes and demographics relative to competitors using panels ans ISP
collected data. Our definition is:

Web analytics is the customer- centred evaluation of the effectiveness of

internet – based marketing in order to improve the business contribution of
online channels to an organisation.

A more recent definition from the web analytics association (WAA,

www.webanalyticosassociation.org) in 2005 is:

Web analytics is the objective tracing, collection, measurement, reporting

and analysis of quantitative internet data to optimise website and web
marketing initiatives

To succeed in a measured approach to improving result from internet

marketing we suggest that there are four main prerequisites, which are
broken down as shown in figure 9.1 into the quality of the web analytics
process including defining the right improvement measures and purchasing
the right tools and the management process such as putting in place a
process where staff review result and then modify their marketing activities
accordingly, in this chapter, we will review both approaches.
This chapter is in two Part, the first is about performance management,
where we review the approach to improving performance through assessing
appropriate measures, tools and the right process to apply them as
suggested by fig 9.1. in the second part, we review some of the issues
involving in maintaining an online presence, which against involves
looking at the measures, tools and process for keeping a website up-to-
date.

Performance management for internet marketing

To improve result for any aspect of any business, performance management
is vital. As bob Napier, chief information office, Hewlett-packard was
reported to have said back in 1960s
You cant manage what you cant measure
The process ans systems intended to monitor and improve the performance
of an organisation and specific management activities such as internet
marketing are widely known as ‘performance management systems’ and
are based on the sstudy of performance measurement syatem.
Many organisation now has establish online presence, but there are many
unanswered questions about the process by which the marketing
performance of this presence is evaluated and how it is modified with a
view to improving its performance . Adamset at. (2000), for example, asked
managers to name their priorities for improvements to e-business
performance measurement system. Result diffred for different types of
organisation, reflecting the stage of evolution in there measurement. For
bricks-and-mortar companies, developing or introducing a more
comprehensive measurement system and enhancing analysis capabilities to
establish what really drives business performance was most important.
Finally, dot-coms, as start-ups, were concerned with improving clickstream
analysis and coustomer traking and profiling and improving the entire
company’s performance measurement system.
Although we have stated the measurement is an important part of
maintaining a web site,it is worth nothing that the reality is the
measurement is often neglected when a web site is first created,
measurement is often highlighted as a issue once the first version of a site
has been ‘up and running’ for a few months and employes starts to ask
questions such as ‘how many customers are visiting our site,how many
sales are we achiving as a result oof our site and how can we improve a site
to achive a return on insventment/’the consequences of this is that
performance measurement is something that is often built into an online
presence retrospectively, of course, it is preferable if measurement is built
into site management from the start since then a more accurate approach
can be developed and it is more readily possible to appaly a technique
known as ‘design for analysis’ [DFA]. Here,the site is design so companies
can better understand the type of audience and their decision points. For
examole, for dell (www.dell.com), the primary navigation on the home page
is by business type. This is a simple example of DFA since it enables dell to
establish the propotion of different audiences to their site and, at the same
time, connect them with revelent content. Other examples of DFA includes:
 Breaking up a long page or form into different parts, sp ypu can see
which part people are interested in.
 A URL policy (see chapter 8) used to recommend entries pages for
printed material
 Group contend by audience type or buying decisions and setting up
content groups of related content within web analytics systems.
 Measure attrition at different points in a consumer journey, e.g. exit
points on a fivepage buying circle.
 A single exit page to linked sites.

In this section, we will review approaches to performanve management

by examing three key elements of an internet marketing management
system. These are, first, the process of improvement, secondly, the
measurement framework which specifies groups of revelent internet
marketing merits and, finally, an assessment of the suitability of the
tools and techniques for collecting, analysing, disseminating and
actioning results. We will review four stages of creating and
implementing a performance management system.

Stage:1 creating a performance management system

The essence of performance management is suggested by the definition

for performance measurement used by andy neely and co-workers of
cranfield school of management’s centre for business performance.
They define performance measurement as
The process of qualifing the efficiency and effictiveness of the past
actions through acquisition, collation, sorting, analysis, interpretation
and dissemination of appropriate data.
(neey et
al..,2002)
Performance management extends this definition to the process of
analysis and actioning change in order to drive business performance
and returns. Online marketers can apply many of the approaches of
business performance management to internet marketing. As you can
see from the definition, performance is measured primarily through
information on process effectiveness and efficiency as introduced in
chapter 4 in the section on objective setting where we noted that it is
important to include both effectiveness and efficency measures.
The need for a structured performance management process is clear if
we examine the repercussions if an organisation does not have one.
These include: poor linkage of measures with strategic objectives or
even absence of objective; key data not collected; data inaccuracies;
data not disseminated or analysed; or no corrective action. Many of the
berries to improvement of measurement system reported by respondents
in adams et al. (2000) also indicate the lack of an effective process. The
barriers can be grouped as follows:
 Senior management myopia – performance measurement not
seen as priority, not understood or targeted at the wrong targets-
reducing cost rather than improving performance;
 Unclear responsibilities for deleviring and improving the
measurement system;
 Resourcing issues – lack of time (perhaps suggested lack of staff
motivation), the necessary technology and integrated system;
 Data problems- data overload or of poor quality, limited data for
benchmarking.
These barriers are reinforced by the survey by cutler and sterne
(2000) which describes the main obstacles to metrics development as
lack or qualified personnel (31%), data overloaded (19%) and lack
of technical resources (software) (19%).
To avoid these pitfalls, a coordinated, structured measurement
process such as that shown in figure 9.2 is required figure 9.2
indicates four key stages in a measuremnent process. These were
defined as key aspects of annual plan control by kotler (1997), stage
1 is a goal – setting stages were the aims of measurement system are
defined – this will usually take the strategic internet marketing
objectives as an inputto the measurement system. The the aim of
measurement system will be to assess whether target and actual key
performance indicators. Stage 2, performance measurement,
involves collecting data to determine the different metrics that are
part of measurement frame work as discussed in the next section.
Stage 3, performance diagnosis, is the analysis of result to
understand the reason for variance from objectives (the’perfomance
gap’ of friedman and furey, 1999
) and selection of marketing solutions to reduce variance. The
purpose of stage 4, corrective action, according to wisner and
Fawcett (1991), is

To identify competitive position, locate problem areas, assist the firm

in updating strategic objectives and making tactical decisions to
achieve these objectives and supply feedback after the decisions are
implemented.