Myquestions

 

Since its rapid growth the internet has been the best form of direct response marketing this is due to the fact that it is more measurable than any other form of advertising and the advantage of its measurability. This has brought about concerns about the tools that we use to measure the success of these direct response marketing campaigns. There are some strengths and weaknesses of these campaign measuring tools.

Which analytics tool is most accurate?

There is a real problem in choosing the correct web analytics tool for your business due to the fact that out of the countless analytics tools that are available, there are countless forms of measuring impressions or hits online and with this comes countless forms of errors in measuring.

Traffickers failing to adequately manage their inventory.

The fact that web analytics reporting is not uniform over different measuring platforms can put most online traffickers in a bind when it comes to managing inventory. A trafficker can be using a online measuring tool for example Nielsen’s, which is the standard for online measuring in South Africa this web analytics tool can give him an inventory (projected inventory based on web trends) of 1 000 000 impressions but when the trafficker loads the campaign but his availability forecast on DFP (DART) Could be showing that he only has 400 000 impressions. This problem arises from the fact that DART counts the impressions of each ad on a page whilst some analytics tools may count the impression of the page as a whole. So if you load three creatives on a page DART would count that as three impressions when the page is loaded whilst another analytics tool can count it as one impression. This could lead to problems in managing inventory.

Standardized reporting tools.

To counter this problem, some people have requested that there be a standard in the online web analysis tools which could help keep the business. This has been done in some countries for example in South Africa where all the large online publishing companies subscribe to one company for their online web analytics. The only problem with this some small companies cannot afford to pay the yearly fees that you need to pay to be eligible to receive these online statistics.

Web analytics is it just an estimation.

Web analytics tools seem to give the campaign manager an idea of where their traffic is coming from and what parts of the sites its users are interested in. Because this is not extremely accurate a marketer should only use the online reporting tool to figure out what his visitors are doing on his site and he must channel the visitor’s movement in his site to result into something that will benefit him in the long run.

Conclusion.

In conclusion web analytics or measuring tools can only give you a rough idea of how well your campaign is performing. These tools should not be used to approximate the success of the online campaign they have been tasked to measure.