March 2006 Winning the war

We all realise that the internet has made huge inroads into traditional marketing. It is now the responsibility of the website owner not only to deliver their content in a search engine friendly and compliant manner but also to track how visitors utilise individual pages.

While online is making huge strides, there is still much to be done to improve its effectiveness as an advertising medium writes, Conrad Bennett, technical services director, WebTrends.

If there is a war going on between the high street and the internet, then the net is winning. Christmas, the most recent battle-ground, saw a number of casualties from traditional retail. Senior executives from big brands resigned admitting defeat in the face of the internet’s armoury of affordable prices and convenience, while the national press has continued to run reports suggesting that the internet’s position is becoming unassailable.

There is no doubt therefore, that e-commerce is now a force to be reckoned with and this has been matched by the continued growth of internet advertising. Strong growth in broadband subscriptions helped online advertising expenditure beat commercial radio’s UK total in 2004 (£653.3m versus £637.4m – according to research by the Interactive Advertising Bureau). Online advertising’s next victim was the outdoor market. According to further IAB research, internet ad spend in the first half of 2005 rose by 62.4 per cent on the same period last year to £490.8m. Its share of the overall ad market rose to 5.8% per cent, pushing it ahead of outdoor, which accounted for 5.1 per cent of the market.

After the initial promise of internet advertising during the dotcom boom, there was not only the subsequent bust that dramatically affected spend, but also a consumer revolt against pop-up ads that left the medium with a tarnished image. Today, however, the industry is worth over £1 billion; thanks again to record broadband uptake in UK households, improvements in the creativity of internet advertising, and better targeting by advertisers.

Although a fantastic boost for the industry, this news means that web-hosts have an increased obligation to advertisers, who have a right to demand more in return for the huge amounts of money invested. This requires the provision of more information, more detail and more accountability.

Any visitor has an objective when they come to a website and if the experience doesn’t match the expectation, they will leave regardless of how many great offers they encounter along the way. Time and thought must be invested into why the visitor is there, as well as what messages are most likely to reach and affect them, if advertisers are going to get a return on the vast sums the IAB suggests they are investing.

Analysis of the advertising itself is also key. The web is an incredibly versatile and flexible medium in this respect, providing the opportunity to make rapid changes. Is how often visitors click out on the advertising carried being measured? Technically this is reasonably simple to achieve, but many sites are not evaluating in this way. A/B and multi-variant testing will allow you to optimise the advertising as well as the site itself. Ideally this would be integrated into a web analytics application in order to provide seamless reports.

Segmentation is vital when it comes to analysing website effectiveness to advertisers. Visitors from different media may respond and behave differently within the site and these differences can be more pronounced for returning visitors from email campaigns for example, as opposed to those from traditional acquisition sources such as search engines or banners. Constantly asking questions will help. If a large number of customers are leaving your site during the purchase process, figure out at what stage they are leaving and why. Are there too many steps for them to go through? If so, consider combining a couple of them. Are they becoming distracted? Then experiment with eliminating some content. Are they getting lost in your navigation? Try to figure out how to redirect them.

Making the process as seamless as possible is fundamental for advertisers, who may have a banner ad that appears at a point after visitors have dropped off or “abandoned their shopping carts”. This could simply be as a result of a poorly designed page but unless web-hosts are analysing the paths that visitors take, there is no way of reassuring advertisers that their banners will be seen let alone proving it beyond doubt with reports and hard data.

Analysis of the site itself with key metrics overlaid on individual pages can give a much better idea of how visitors use particular pages on a website. This can be a powerful tool to help refine messages to the customers that are most profitable to advertisers. A common mistake in site layout is to use a screen resolution higher than that of the average visitor’s. The only way to spot this is to look at a page overlay and see that no-one clicks on the right-hand side of the screen (visitors expect to have to scroll down, but not to the right).

Websites that carry advertising need to measure the success of content. This is not always as simple as it might be for commerce sites (since they typically do not host external advertising). Scoring systems for content and brand messages will allow site owners to measure the effectiveness of content and advertising, and will also help with visitor segmentation.
The online industry must now repay the vast sums invested by advertisers by tracking site popularity and optimising content effectiveness. By improving a website’s ability to persuade visitors to take a desired action, online can truly begin to turn what is still considered a developing medium into an established and consistent revenue generator. After all, online may have won the battle but it should also seek to push home the myriad of advantages it has over the high street to eventually win the war.