April 17, 2007 | Tuesday
Online marketing still on top for growth
By Jackie Danicki - Blogger in Marketing |News |Online Sales
Need more evidence that the web offers the most value for your marketing budget? Just ask other marketing directors. Here’s the latest proof that online marketing is still outpacing growth in all other areas of marketing:
[A]ccording to the latest Bellweather report for the first quarter of 2007...[t]he sector now accounts for around £2bn of marketing spend each year. Advertisers boosted online marketing budgets more than other channels in the first quarter, with 19% of companies reporting an increase.
On a related note, Adweek has an interesting piece on how online retailers are, by and large, wasting opportunities to increase conversion on their sites. The problem? Not enough emphasis on what customers like and want from an online shop.
Online marketers “treat Web metrics like religion,” [Jeffrey Grau, eMarketer senior analyst] said. “They don’t look at what’s behind the numbers.”
“Market research tells retailers why customers are doing things, which is different than only measuring what consumers are clicking on,” said Grau. “Online retailers can use focus groups, e-mail and consumer conversations with customer service agents to find out what people care about.” But Web analytics follow user behavior, and that kind of data doesn’t explain why people do things, he said.
Not ignoring the fact that metrics for search are vastly more revealing and powerful than the data collected for display advertising, Grau does have a point. It does seem rather silly, though, in this day of unprecedented customer participation on the web (think about all those blogs where people are writing very freely and openly about what they dislike and like on any given online shop), that the best suggestions Grau can come up with are for companies to use proxies as an alternative for conversing with customers one-on-one. For online retailers, there is a goldmine of information about customers out there - information nobody had to offer them a free biro or supermarket voucher to volunteer - and to ignore it would be hugely wasteful.
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