Conventional wisdom says online marketing spending has suffered less in the recession because the Internet is more measurable than other channels. But even marketers looking to justify each dollar in a world of tightened budgets are not confident in their ability to evaluate their online performance.
When interactive agency ISITE Design queried companies about their online execution, almost all of them said they used strategic planning, including about 40% that planned Web efforts six to 12 months in advance. But only a minority felt that strategy was effective.
One reason for a lack of confidence in strategic planning could be ineffective approaches to performance measurement—reported by a strong majority of respondents. ISITE also reported that nearly one-half of respondents failed to take action even when they did have information.
BusinessWeek and Coremetrics found that a similar minority of marketers in the US and UK were fully confident in the online metrics they tracked, though one-half of respondents to the survey were “somewhat confident”—more optimistic than the results found by ISITE Design.
BusinessWeek’s report indicated the watchwords for online marketers going into 2010 were “effectiveness” and “optimization,” but most found it difficult to judge their performance by industry standards or against their competition.
“The immediacy of real-time information is creating a new urgency and speed that has many marketers scrambling, particularly those who lack the technology to capture and make sense of this information,” the report said. “But for the leaders who understand its potential, the result is direct improvement of the bottom line and creation of a self-fulfilling cycle of effectiveness.”
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Check out today’s other article, “Leads for Less with Social Media.”