VinceZ

Target Marketing's president describes new metrics strategies that can help meet customers' shifting preferences.

Increase revenue by 35 percent. Hire 57 new employees in the sales department. Double your customer base. Every successful business needs objectives and a set of goals to strive toward. The challenge is balancing what is desired for the company with what is realistically attainable, and planning accordingly. The interactive marketing community is constantly shifting as consumers are receiving more and more of their information online. What was effective for reaching your customers in 2007 may be obsolete in 2009. 

Interactive marketers are beginning to realize the importance of using web analytics to better understand their customers' preferences and online behaviors. In online advertising, web analytics help us understand where people are going, where they came from, where they drop out and what might help them to convert. Companies can deliver more targeted and relevant email campaigns by measuring open, clickthrough and unsubscribe rates. Search marketers can monitor and optimize their campaigns in real time, adding and deleting keywords as they go.

These are just a few examples of how web analytics can help marketers improve their online campaigns; however, with so much information at their fingertips, companies would be foolish not to look beyond these day-to-day metrics to see the bigger picture web analytics provides.