Our 2011 meeting in St. Louis will focus on reaching Customer 2.0 with Web 2.0. To succeed in this effort, we must know how Web 2.0 is performing and how we can continuously improve performance. Even though all effective marketing efforts are part of an on-going process, typical web analytics focus on providing snapshots and provide little actionable time-based information.
At NWA we use SPC based process analytics to monitor the performance of our website, Adwords, etc. This has given us much more actionable information than simple bar charts or trend lines. SPC charts were designed to separate the signal from the noise in process data and they perform the same task for our marketing response data. If we don’t treat marketing performance as a time based process, we lose incredible amounts of useful information which can help us to be more effective and competitive than our pie chart loving colleagues.
Our Technical Director Dave Shearer wrote a study several years ago that looked at individual web page performance. This appeared in Telesian’s “What’s Working in Marketing and e-Business” and is posted on our website: http://www.nwasoft.com/appnotes/webactivity.htm. Dave’s conclusions are still true and guiding effective decision making as we manage our web-based outreach.
This post was written by Jeff Cawley, VP Industry Leadership at Northwest Analytical. Mr. Cawley founded of Northwest Analytical in 1980. Today, he oversees professional organization relations and collaborates with industry leaders to develop lectures and writings on applied SPC and its integration with large scale information systems. Before founding NWA he was Director of Marketing for Alpkem Corporation, an analytical instrumentation firm. Mr. Cawley holds B.S. degrees in Chemistry and Geology from Juniata College and did graduate work in Geochemistry at Princeton University.
when i stumbled upon this i thought it was going to be filled with obvious advice, but actually it turned out to be quite interesting. good job!