Research on the Internet is probably one of the easiest platforms to work on. With a bit of creative thinking it is possible to find ways of measuring online and offline campaigns through your website.

The simplicity comes in that almost everything is measurable online. Every-time something is clicked on a website it can be measured. This long list of ones and zeros can turn your website into a research machine.

Think of it like this. If you know how many people visit your site you know that X amount of people have been drawn to your website. Most of the people are probably on you site because of some marketing campaign you are running. However, most of the time you are running more than one campaign. How can we distinguish which campaigns are working?

One way is to separate the campaigns on to different pages of the website. Send a campaign to a page specifically designed for that campaign. This then saves the consumer time and entrenches your marketing message even further into their heads. They dont have to spend time on your website finding the campaign that sent them to your website.

Now that each campaign has been posted on different pages, you can measure the campaign response by simply measuring the page visits during the time of the campaign. This should give you a good idea of which campaigns are developing good responses from your consumers.

Another measurement tool on the internet allows you to view where the web user came from. Using this measurement tool will save you a lot of time in the future.

An example of time saved; we sponsored a client a website in return for our logo presentation at the bottom of each page. We also added a products page onto the sponsored website that advertised a variety of customised products for that target market.

Immediately after the sponsorship we noticed an increase of users on our company website. The increase in users was due to direct referrals from the sponsored website. Our customised campaign was working; so we thought. However, after further research we discovered that all the users referred to our website came off the most popular page on the sponsored website. Therefore the users were clicking on the company logo and not visiting the customised product page.

We learnt a valuable lesson; sponsorship campaigns online should revolve more around visibility on the more popular website pages rather than trying to drive traffic to particular pages on a website. Seems like a simple theory - Go where the people are - but it was made all the more evident through the online research conducted on the campaign. Now we wont spend days working on customised campaigns to maximise on our sponsorship campaigns.

At the end of the day, measuring the success of a campaign can only be achieved through research. Fortunately we can now access these valuable research reports online. Only after measuring a campaign can we learn from those experiences. Learning always leads to developing strong marketing campaigns which leads to more effective campaigns in the future.


For more information on the topics discussed in this series of articles please visit www.sesalos.com/web/presentations to request a full presentation on:

Exceeding Client Expectation Through Their Website: They'll Love You For It!