MarketingVOX: Many retailers have poorly designed web metrics processes and aren’t willing to make an effort to improve their results.
The use of third-party cookies (which are often rejected) and the misuse of activity-based metrics such as pageviews, or response-based metrics like click-throughs, to measure demand-generation activities threaten the accuracy of most retailers metrics, ClickZ writes, citing WebTrends survey that tracked the metrics of 300 multi-channel marketers.
Jason Palmer, WebTrends VP of marketing, suggests that retailers should instead focus on visitor-based metrics, such as unique visitors and deferred conversions, and track them over time. The study found, however, that only 10 percent of retailers do so, and 27 percent do not consistently measure demand-generation activities at all.
More than 63 percent said they rely on response- and activity-based metrics, such as click-throughs, pageviews, visits and orders, whereas using those to calculate conversion can lead to double-counting and declining conversion rates, according to Palmer.
A key takeaway is to instead use unique-visitor metrics – over time, because just as a customer needs several exposures to an offline ad, visitors to a website may need several visits before they convert.
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