by Sheri Fink

Created on: May 25, 2007

Online resources can be incredible sources of data to help businesses understand their audiences, measure campaign performance, and track system performance. We must measure the effectiveness of our website before we can improve it. First, we must determine what our goals are and how the particular marketing effort will benefit the company.

Once we've established what we're trying to accomplish, we can begin conducting market research using both primary and secondary data. Our website is an ideal source of primary research data including information about our visitors, customers, online community members, etc. We can access this and much more data using a variety of sources including web server logs (with web analysis software), landing pages, questionnaires and surveys, personalization profiles, community resources, e-commerce files, and third-party analysis services.

Secondary research data is information that comes from a third-party that pertains to our business, industry, and/or target audience. It can be obtained through research companies, industry/trade organizations, companies with whom we advertise, government websites, and our competitors' websites.

Finally, using the primary and secondary research data, we can combine the metrics with our company's internal system metrics to determine how well we're doing. By striving for synergy between our various online and offline marketing campaigns, we can work to improve our conversion rate, uncover trends, track buying patterns, and measure the "soft" results of our marketing efforts. Strategically using this data will help improve customer satisfaction and retention over time.

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