First, apart from direct-action metrics like cost per click or action, much of the effect of online marketing isn t accounted for. Few measure, for example, how a site that extols a product s benefits actually influences a customer to purchase that product. Second, if data is gathered, it is proprietary. And since the web is so young, no company has enough experience to have consistent, reliable, information that can be truly called a benchmark. Sure, most of us know what an average click-through rate is.
Necessity is the mother of invention.
If you can survey customers, or simply measure site traffic before a marketing campaign begins, you will be able to quantify the effects of your efforts. The result helps measure the success of disparate marketing efforts that might not be, in and of themselves, trackable. In them, we ask respondents to rate and rank concepts, competitor web sites, and our client s current efforts. We then are able to use these number rankings as benchmarks in subsequent groups. This will help your online marketing organization to leverage past experience and mature.