The measure of success for any online marketing campaign is determined by different metrics and dependent upon the objectives and goals that a business wants to achieve. As the old saying goes “you can’t manage what you can’t measure”. That is why integration of analytics in all online marketing is a must. Analytics provides a way to measure the success of the online performance of all your marketing campaign efforts.
Analysing a business’ online performance is also important before you start building the right campaign, even if you have a strategy in place. If this strategy does not work, analytics can point you in the right direction. Without proper monitoring of analytics and a strong management initiative on your over-all online marketing campaigns, the reliability and credibility of the data generated by your campaigns will be quite useless when you come to fine-tuning your strategies.
Going forward and before delving deeper into analytics, there are two important terms that could provide a greater insight into the analysis of your online marketing campaigns: online performance management and online performance monitoring.
What is Online Performance Management?
Online performance management is a microcosmic representation of the way a business puts a business strategy in place. It also encompasses online performance monitoring.
Online performance management is a set of analytic structures and processes that enables the management of pre-selected goals in determining online-based marketing campaign performances. This includes formulation of goals, setting up of objectives, generating strategies to meet these objectives and monitoring the performance of these strategies.
Parallel thereto, Mike Biere in The New Era of Enterprise Business Intelligence: Using Analytics to Achieve a Global Competitive Advantage looks into the business set-up and how analytics could pave the way in creating a global competitive advantage. This applies not only to offline performance but to online performance as well. He defines business performance management as a well-defined iterative process of providing accurate information for defining, measuring and adjusting key areas of the business to keep all elements of an organisation in sync and provide a clear understanding of the things they are measured upon, responsible for and any changes in the business. All levels within the business with a need to communicate and adjust any part of the plan must be able to do so. Feedback and adjustment capabilities are mandatory and must be adhered to.
In an essence, online performance management is reactive as there is a need to fine-tune various key touch points of your metrics in order to generate a successful online marketing campaign.
What is Online Performance Monitoring?
Online performance monitoring, on the other hand, is merely one area of online performance management. This doesn’t mean though that it is less important. Online performance monitoring actually plays a big role in the success of your online business. It basically points to gathering of online performance data and translating the data into tangible results.
Additionally, online performance monitoring is non-reactive. Simply put, it is the tracking of online performance by means of statistics and using this statistics to generate better strategies for all your marketing campaigns.
It is important to remember that through online performance monitoring, you can see your best and worst performing campaigns online. Essentially, if you have a mix marketing campaign, it’s hard to know what really generates the most traffic, or what converts, or what brings in the most sales. However, with online performance monitoring, you can segregate campaigns. This helps greatly with online performance management particularly with strategy formulation.
Call us if you want to better manage your marketing campaigns online. We have experts who can help you craft the best strategy for your business.
