In my last post I mentioned analytics as a good think to do during the crisis. Check where the value is in your webtraffic, content etc. and what is a waste. This way you can make your webpresence more effective with the existing resources.

With ‘effective’ do not only think about sales. If time to conversion is getter longer because people are waiting longer before they buy/invest, or if you website is just not an ecommerce site. It may be wise to track leads.

The thing with leads is that you have always this value issue. How valuable are my leads and if I have valuable leads how did I get them.

When you are using only your webanalytics software the best you can get is a conversion rate for leads. You can check which source of traffic is giving you most leads. But this does not say anything about quality.

To get quality info you can do two things. Either you separate lead paths so that you can measure them separately. Or you add info to the lead.

Adding info to a lead can be done manually by asking people to mention or ask for a particular word/code. This way your sales team receiving the leads will have more info about the traffic source.

But you can also integrate you analytics with you CRM for example using Google analytics.

Still don’t believe in the economic crisis so much. But yes this is a total commercial clean up. Is that bad? I guess not.

Further more I see indeed less spending at the moment. A lot of houses for sale etc. But is this temporary or a real trend? If it is one thing we learned from the whole crisis then it is that we are really bad in predictions. So if they now predict downturn..Maybe it is just a matter of a longer time to conversion after all.

In digital marketing I hear a lot about less investments. There seems to be a big opportunity for affiliate marketing because of the performance based model. Display ads and branding seem to have a hard time, but companies are used to these “reach”model for ages and they learned to never skip too much marketing budget in bad times. So they will think twice and spend a little less I guess.

For cleaning up however it is now time for analytics. While we are all waiting for new investments it is a good time to look at how effective our webpresence is in engaging, converting etc. In my opinion there is a lot to gain here.  Most companies where to busy spending in the past, now it is time to look at costs and ROI.

This is totally in line with the overall commercial clean up.

More and more research shows that display ads and in more general online branding is good for conversion.

If you only measure clicks, or even worse last-click, you miss the point of branding completely. People buy more easily when they know your brand or after seeing your display ads.

Check this article about engagement mapping from Microsoft advertising.

eMarketer recently published an article:  eMarketer seven strategies. In this article (starting from page 15) eMarketer shows even the impact of display advertising on Offline sales.

So people learn about your brand online and finally buy offline.

ps. I have business connections with eMarketer