Web Site Measurement Hacks

Hacks 37–53: Introduction

One of the most immediate and practical things you can do with web measurement is understand and optimize your online marketing efforts. Assuming you’re doing something to attract visitors to your web site—buying keywords at Google, running banner ads on MSN, sending email, or including your URL in your yellow pages ad—even the most basic web measurement applications provide the necessary tools to quantify the effect of this advertising. More importantly, the best web measurement tools provide you the ability to tie acquired visitors to critical events like a purchase, a lead, or a download, so that you can analyze both the quantity and the quality of visitors you’re attracting.

It’s Only Data

If you’re not an experienced online marketer, this chapter has the potential to be somewhat overwhelming. You’re going to be hit with a number of new and fairly specific terms and ideas and, depending on which application you’re using, be required to jump through some hoops to implement and use these ideas.

Don’t panic.

If you take the time to read each of these hacks, you’ll begin to see the common, underlying framework used to measure marketing on the Internet. You’ll see terms like “click-through rate” and “cost-per-acquisition” come up again and again, each in the context of the particular medium being measured. Try and see this pattern, and you’ll be “hacking the hacks.”

ROI

ROI is a complicated and often abused concept. If you follow the Internet software market at ...