The Digital Gateway

Session 5
Monitoring and Measuring Digital
Campaigns

Learning Outcomes
At the end of this session, students should be able to;

Explain the purpose of measurement for digital

campaigns

Demonstrate an understanding of the application of the

procedures used for measuring and monitoring digital
campaigns

The Performance Measurement

Process

Goal setting

What do we want to
achieve?

Performance
Measurement

What is happening?

Performance
Diagnosis

Why is it happening?

Corrective
action

What should we do about

it?

Chaffey and Ellis-Chadwick, 2012

The Purpose of Measuring Digital

Campaigns

To measure marketing productivity

To examine product, promotion, place, price decisions
To examine return on marketing investment (ROMI)
To evaluate customer satisfaction and involvement
To measure market share and forecast demand
To examine visitor trends
To measure digital influence

Collecting Information About Website

Visitors
Web server log files
Every time the website receives a request for a source (a file) it
stores details of that request on server access logs
Server log file will typically contain information on:

IP address of the users PC

Time stamp showing the date and time of the request
Status code showing the result of the request
The URL of the referring page
Browser type, language, operating system

Page-tagging and hosted solutions

Tagging requires placing small piece of code on every page of
the site needing to be tracked
If a visitor requests any page, code sends information to chosen
analytics provider.
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Why Web Analytics?

In order to do business effectively on the Web, an organisation needs
to continually refine and optimize its digital marketing strategy, site
navigation, and page content.
An organisation needs to understand its performance - Web analytics
provides the tools for gathering this information and to benchmark the
effects.
Web analytics are tools - they cannot tell you why visitors behave the
way they do or which improvements should be made.
Organisations will often need to employ multiple tools to gain
additional insight as to why.
Voice-of-customer tools (surveys, customer ratings, and feedback)
Offsite analytics measurement (blog comments, social network mentions,
and sentiment).

Google Analytics
Google Analytics is a tool
which allows you to see
where and how traffic comes
to your website.
An organisation can view
and learn a huge amount of
information about their
website, such as referring
traffic and keywords
searched to land on the site.

Web Analytics Basics: Data Capture

Data on site visitors behaviour is collected click by click as
visitors view pages or interact with forms
The set of pages and events that a visitor experienced on the
site is tied together by the analytics solution into a visit or
session assist marketers with reporting on visitors paths
and conversion funnels.
Cookies are used to identify returning and unique visitors also enables reporting on delayed conversions
Registered user names can assist with the issues around
the use of cookies ensure clicks can be tracked, no matter
what computer is used.

Basic Website KPIs

There are some basic website KPIs, which are useful
staring place for measuring web traffic and digital
campaigns
1. Visits/Unique visits
2. Bounce rate
3. Page views & Page/Visit
4. Average time on site
5. Percentage of new visits

Digital Campaign Measurement

Measures used for assessing success of digital campaigns
Step 6.

Step 4.

Campaign ROI

Step 3.
Step 2.
Step 1.

Step 0.

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Branding metrics

Cost per acquisition (CPA)

Cost = Cost per Click (CPC)
Quality = Conversion rate

Volume = Unique visitors /

Reach (%)

Chaffey and Ellis-Chadwick, 2012

Sophistication

Step 5.

Lifetime value

Measuring Conversions
Communications objectives can be stated and measured in
terms of conversion marketing
Conversions will outline the success of the traffic quality in
terms of whether visitors are within the target audience for the
site and whether visitors convert to onsite outcomes.
Reach of website
Attraction efficiency

Website Visitors
Site conversion efficiency

Lead generated
Lead conversion efficiency

Number of required outcomes

Chaffey and Ellis-Chadwick, 2012
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KPIs in Social Media Measurement

Distribution - what social media

channels are being used, how can
people reach the oraganisation, are
they visible?

Followers

Fans
Number of mentions
Reach
Social bookmarks (SumbleUpon,
Delicious)
Inbound links
Blog subscribers

Interaction - how likely are

followers going to engage, spread
the message and interact with
each other?

Retweets
Forward to a friend
Social media sharing
Comments
Like or rate something
Reviews
Contributors and active contributors
Pageviews
Unique visitors
Traffic from social networking sites
Time spent on site
Response time

KPIs in Social Media Measurement

Influence - how do attitudes change

due to the social media activities?
Share of conversation vs
competitors
Net Promoter
Satisfaction
Sentiment positive, neutral or
negative
Number of brand evangelists

Action and ROI - sales and other real world

results from social media?
Conversions
Sales revenue
Registered users
Issues resolved and resolution rate
Number of leads (per day, week, month)
Cost of lead or sale
Lead conversion rate
Revenue (per follower, lead, customer)
Lifetime value of customers
Support cost (per customer in social
channels)
Share of repeat customers (from social
media vs other channels)
Transaction value per customer
Money in the bank, net profit, etc

Measuring Social Media: Analysing

Sentiment
Sentiment analysis looks at comments and suggestions left on social
media sites such as blogs and social networks.
Instead of analysing just words, it identifies attitude towards a brand by
using variables such as context, tone,
emotion, among others.
Sentiment can be monitored automatically
by software that relies on natural language
processing
It offers organisations the ability to track
products, brands and people for example,
and determine whether they are viewed
positively or negatively on the web.
A business can track: Flame detection (bad rant), New product
perception, Brand perception and Reputation management

Measuring Social Media: Analysing

Share of Voice (SoV)

In social media, share of voice refers to the

number of conversations about a brand vs.
its competitors.
To measure share of voice in social media
amongst several competing brands, an organisation
would compare the number of articles, posts,
tweets, videos or images where its brand and
competitors are mentioned.
Radian6 and Social Mention are social media tools
that can assist an organisation in tracking of all mentions
of conversations about the brand and its competitors
brands over a given time period.
When looking at these mentions, an organisation should track those that have
positive, negative, or neutral sentiment a weight can then be assigned to
categories and calculate the average sentiment and share of voice.

Measuring Email Campaigns

Bounce rates
Bounce e-mail is electronic
mail that is returned to the
sender because it cannot be
delivered
A hard bounce is a
permanent failure so email
address doesnt exist, or has
been closed
A soft bounce is when a
message is returned for
example, the person may be
out of the office or the
mailbox is full
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Open rates - percentage of users

that opened compared to the number
sent
Click through rates - the clicks from
email through to the landing page as
a percentage of those emails sent
(total and number of unique clicks)
Open to click through rate clickthroughs as a percentage of those
that opened
Unsubscribe rate - percentage of
users unsubscribe
Number of actions number of
sales, registrations, sign ups etc.

Conversion Funnels
Conversion funnels
The path a customer takes from entering a site
through the checkout process and finally the end
goal being the purchase or signup confirmation
page.
Conversion funnels can give a lot of valuable
information that can help increase time spent on
site, reduce bounce rates and improve conversions and
sales.
Knowing how customers navigate through a site
can help determine what changes need to be made to
make it easier for a customer to purchase.
A conversion funnel can tell an organisation where
customers exit most frequently.
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A/B Testing
A/B Testing
A technique for testing two or more versions of a page on a
website, and advert or email template
Each version can be visually differentiated from the control
(original)
The goal is to try a few versions and identify which version delivers
the desires outcome (for example, most conversions, clickthroughs etc).
A/B testing are best at testing big changes to the layout or
templates, its relative simple to do and is the cheapest way to
start testing

Multivariate (MVT Testing)

Multivariate (MVT Testing)
A technique for testing changes to many different elements all at
the same time on one page to determine the optimal combination
for increasing conversion.
An organisation identifies the components it sees as critical on a
web page and different versions of these components are
generated and then tested.
The content on the page automatically changes for different
visitors and the effectiveness of each element and the combination
of elements is then measured

Monitoring Social Media: RSS &

Data Feeds

RSS feeds aggregate the content from various sites that a user has subscribed
to into one data feed that can be displayed in an inbox or desk top aggregator,
like Google Reader.
Some RSS readers have social elements too - enabling content to be shared
with other friends as well as suggesting similar feeds that also reading these
sites use.
RSS feeds are useful for monitoring blog activity, especially of key influencers for
the organisations brand or products/services.
Feedburner is also an important social media monitoring tool.
It ensures any RSS Feed will be compatible with most RSS Readers.
It provides daily stats about an organisations subscribers and the interactions they
had with the feed which can be used an indicator of blog popularity.
It tracks tracks subscribers, feed reader applications used to access a feed,
uncommon uses, including re-syndication and finally the reach (unique number of
people who view or click the feed content).

Monitoring Social Media: Sentiment

Analysis
Sentiment analysis can be defined as the process that aims
to determine the attitude of a speaker or a writer with respect
to some topic.
Automated sentiment analysis is the process of training a
computer to identify sentiment within content through Natural
Language Processing (NLP).
Various sentiment measurement platforms employ different
techniques and statistical methodologies to evaluate
sentiment across the web.

Monitoring Social Media: Analysing

Social Media
An organisation can analyse social media content
by considering:
Volume
Share of voice
Location
By author
Theme

Online Research
Differences to Web Analytics:
Web analytics involves mechanic observation and cannot
explain motivations
Online research involves Voice of the Customer (VOC)
draw a distinction between analytics implemented to track
computer use and questions posed to real people.

Defining characteristics:

Live
Connected in real time
Little delay in data transfer
Usually self completion

Bradley, 2010

Purposes of Online Research

Usability Testing.
To discover whether hardware or software is easy to operate. CAWI
can test website usability; CAMI can test the ease of use of handset;
ARS measures attitudes to a group demonstration of software
Test online promotions
To test promotions appearing in the online medium. CAWI tests
awareness of web ads; CAMI tests mobile phone ads and ARS held
at a product launch tests attitudes at that event
Test offline promotions
To test promotions appearing in a different medium. CAWI tests
television adverts; CAMI tests Point of Sale promotions in retail
outlets; ARS tests press adverts

Purposes of Online Research

Recruitment
Recruiting respondents for different mode of research. CAWI used
to recruit focus groups; CAMI recruiting for telephone survey and
ARS recruiting for online survey
Testing other elements of the marketing mix
CAWI/CAMI profiling users by collecting demographics; CAMI to
assess mobile phone satisfaction; ARS to test satisfaction with a
conference

Usability Studies
Usability studies
User research is the science of observing and monitoring how users
interact with everyday things, such as websites, software or hardware and
then drawing conclusions about how to improve those things.
Studies can take place in a lab, using one-way mirrors and cameras (lab
usability) or within the users native environment (home, office etc).
A user is asked to complete a task or set of tasks for a website each of
these tasks will have a specified goal for effectiveness, efficiency and
satisfaction.
Enables organisations to see how users really interact with the content
and navigation systems built, providing a plethora of qualitative data to
back up quantitative information collected through analytics.
Recent growth of rapid usability tests utilising companies that offer quick,
low cost (or even free) usability testing of websites.

Panels
Panels
A set of individuals who are questioned, observed or report over
a period of time. Quantitative data is gathered and tracked over
longer period of time to measure changes.
Often uses monitoring software installed on panel members
computers to measure their web activity - example
organisations: ComScore and Nielsen Netratings

Voice of the Customer

Voice of the customer:
Web analytics is good at the what. It is not good at the why. The
why can only come from the customer (Kaushik, A, 2010)
Allows organisations to marry up findings from other web analytics
solutions and then make changes to improve performance and customer
satisfaction.
VOC can be collected in the form of surveys, such as exit surveys, surveys
whilst on site, post-purchase surveys,
product reviews or polls
VOC is one of the most important
pieces of information for any web
analyst as it provides the customers
opinion.

Benefits of Online Surveys

Reduced costs no interviewer costs or printing costs
Fast delivery questionnaires can be quickly designed,
dispatched and analysed
Easily personalised
Immediate low-cost global reach
Penetrating different target groups such as business people
who can be hard to reach via other means
Can be completed at the respondents convenience
Can ensure all elements of the survey are completed

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Limitations of Online Surveys

Technology may not be supported by all browsers
Problem of emails being junked by ISPs not all surveys will
reach potential participants
Can be hard to validate who has responded to the survey
anyone could be using the computer
People remain suspicious of spam and internet security
which could lead to lower response rates

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What is Netnography?
Netnography (also called Webnography) is a qualitative research
solution and a branch of ethnography that analyses the free
behaviour of individuals on the Internet and uses online marketing
research techniques to provide useful insights
Reasons why it can be helpful for marketers:
Living on the Web - The internet is becoming a place where
people live a part of their lives.
Cyberculture is increasingly a part of and overlaps with
offline culture. TV shows, music groups and entertainers get
audience response about their recent shows through online sites
and social media
Bradley, 2010

What is Netnography?
Netnography can be use to:
To capture real behaviour, not customers reports of their
perceived behaviour
To reveal how customers view, internalise, talk about and shape
organisations products and services by influencing others

It has two main advantages over online focus groups:

Netnography examines real world conversations versus a
researcher-led conversation
Netnography has lower time and monetary cost resulting from
the elimination of recruiting, participation incentives, and use of a
dedicated software platform to conduct the research.

Third Party Research & Offsite

Analytics
Data collection approach undertaken by third parties at regular intervals
with detailed results sold to organisations but headline data often free
to subscribers, e.g. eConsultancy, Hitwise
Off-site analytics includes the measurement of a websites potential or
opportunity audience, its visibility or its wider relevance to the web
community as it currently exists
Panel data (ComScore and Nielsen Netratings) - this technique often
uses monitoring software installed on panel members computers to
measure their web activity.
ISP data (Hitwise) - off-site visitor information is collected by
aggregating anonymous data provided by ISPs.

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Test Your Understanding

For an organisation you know well, identify three goals
that your organisation may have concerning their
website visitors and two tools they could use to measure
this activity.

Bibliography

Chaffey, D and Ellis-Chadwick, F (2012) Digital Marketing: Strategy, Implementation

and Practice, Fifth Edition, Prentice Hall.
Kaushik, A (2007) Web Analytics. An Hour a Day, Sibex, Wiley publishing
Kaushik, A (2010) Web Analytics 2.0, Sibex, Wiley publishing.
Web Analytics Association: http://www.webanalyticsassociation.org/