Hi Dave,

I just noticed your posting and wanted to followup to let you know how HitBox Enterprise can help you out! The HitBox Enterprise product is able to report, in up-to-the-second real-time, the response/cost/conversions etc of any manner of different types of campaign. We've launched a number of new features around different cost models, multiple goals per campaign/provider etc. You can find out more about the product at http://www.websidestory.com/simple

Your point 9, re real-time reporting, is becoming increasingly mission-critical - our tools are all real-time and we see this of paramount importance to anyone contemplating spending on campaigns. As you rightly point out, once the campaign is over the money is spent!

I've summarised some of our Campaign tracking capabilities for you below too:

With the HitBox Campaign Analytics and Optimisation service, you can manage hundreds of e-mail programs and affiliates, thousands of keywords across a whole host of sources, a multitude of banner ad campaigns, and other promotions. It’s a centralised campaign measurement and optimisation tool that gives you unbiased views of the data and lets you easily understand all your marketing programs without spending hours on implementation.

Dynamic Campaigns (Auto Detection) - Measures hundreds of campaigns and thousands of links with no set up. HitBox Campaign Analytics and Optimisation solution automatically detects and measures campaigns already organised under your existing framework.

Correlate Campaign Attributes - Evaluate any campaign across all of its programs by keyword, banner size, position, offer, or any other relevant attribute. Using this capability, you can correlate any combination of attributes quickly and easily.

Lead Campaigns - Go beyond the initial contact stages and understand your campaign’s influence on the full sales cycle. HitBox is the first and only Web analytics tool to track and analyse multiple, dependent conversion steps, such as transforming a visitor to a prospect, to a customer, and then to a repeat customer.

Multiple Cost and Conversion Models - HitBox lets you understand your campaigns’ true performance by matching your online campaigns to an unlimited number of site events. And it lets you measure your campaign ROI based on any cost model, including cost per click, per acquisition, per impression, and more.

This is all available as standard to all HitBox Enterprise clients, please see the site for further details on things like funnels and segmentation, Active View and Report Builder etc. See http://www.websidestory.com/simple

Let me know if you have any queries or would like to see the product in action!

Thanks,

Simon
WebSideStory - Founded in 1996, WebSideStory is the creator of HitBox, the de facto standard for online marketing optimisation.

On 08:17:41 10 October 2003 dchaffey wrote:
>I have been thinking through the must-have characteristics
>of the ideal tracking tool which will provide results
>across a range of online campaigns -
>paid search, free search, online ads, affiliates, e-mail.
>It seems that a lot of e-marketers / agencies are using
>separate tools for each which makes tracking and improving
>performance a nightmare.
>
>If a single tool can cover all of these, it becomes easier
>to target media spend at the best responding media and
>online vehicles.
>
>This is my checklist of the ideal online campaign tracking
>tool -
>
>1. Can it track through to point of online sale?
>Basic tools will only provide click tracking through to a
>microsite. More sophisticated tools will show which
>campaign the online purchases result from.
>
>2. Can it track for a range of online media types?
>Ideally you should be able to access a single report for
>all media including online ads and sponsorship, e-mail
>marketing, search engine marketing and affiliate
>marketing.
>
>3. Can return on investment models can be built in?
>This enables the cost-effectiveness of different campaigns
>and different vehicles to be assessed. Ideally it will be
>possible to view these reports by segment as well as on a
>campaign/product basis. As a minimum cost per site visitor
>acquisition and customer acquisition are required.
>
>4. Reports at both a detailed level and a summary level?
>Some tools will only report overall campaign
>effectiveness. For example, they will only give the total
>for several broadcasts within an e-mail campaign ? not
>individual tracking. For search marketing reports will be
>needed for individual keyword purchases to decide which to
>continue using these.
>
>5. Able to track e-mail click-throughs at an individual
>level?
>This is essential for targeting customers with a follow-up
>message when they have responded to an initial campaign as
>explained in the section on targeting.
>
>6. Post-view responses are tracked for online
>advertising?Research from Doubleclick shows that for
>online advertising the number of people who visit a site
>later after viewing an ad may give as many responses again
>as the original clickthrough. Similarly with affiliate
>marketing, the purchase may occur after several visits. We
>need to work back to the referrer that achieved the first
>site visit. Cookies are typically used for this.
>
>7. Post-click responses are tracked for affiliate
>marketing and online advertising?
>For high involvement products it is less likely that a
>campaign respondent will purchase on their first visit.
>
>8. E-mail campaign summaries give unique clicks as well as
>total clicks?
>What matters most to an e-mail campaign is the number of
>unique respondents to it rather than the total number of
>clicks. By default most systems give total clicks, but
>this can overestimate response to a campaign by 20 to 30%.
>
>9. Real-time reporting?
>This flexibility is essential since it allows us to pull
>poorly performing creative or placements and replace them
>with more effective tools.
>
>10. Cross-campaign reporting? Knowledge needs to be
>acquired and shared across an organisation about which
>campaigns work and which don?t through the year. This is
>only possible if it easy to compare separate campaigns.
>Many tools work at the level of an individual campaign.
>Export functionality to export past campaigns into a
>spreadsheet may be sufficient here.
>
>That?s a long wish list and very few tools seem to deliver
>all of these. Those that come closest are the TradeDoubler
>Media Toolbox (http://www.tradedoubler.com/pan/public/solu-
>tions/advertiser/technology_solutions) and the Doubleclick
>Channel View and DART technology for e-mail marketing and
>online ad tracking (www.doubleclick.com).
>
>There is a nice case on TradeDoubler (better known as an
>affiliate network) about how Dell Europe use TradeDoubler
>for an integrated approach to tracking and managing online
>sales through partnerships and performance-based marketing
>such as search marketing. They use it to track performance
>of long terms strategic partners, affiliate programs,
>direct marketing and campaigns.
>
>Does anyone have any experience of these tools or can they
>recommend other tools that fit the characteristics above -
>have I missed anything?
>
>Dave Chaffey
>Specialist e-marketing trainer, consultant and author.
>Web: www.marketing-insights.co.uk
>eResources and Books: www.marketing-online.co.uk

Dave,

Often this will be the perception, however, in order to fully quantify how successfull your online campaigns are you need to understand how these are affecting the behaviour of people on the site. Getting campaign analytics from one provider and web analysis from another is creating two sources of information for the marketing dept's to try and decifer with no simple way to link to two. It is important to know the lifetime value of a visitor based on their original campaign responses, or simply to know how many 'loyal' visitors to an information site were originally obtained from campaigns etc. To implement a campaign analysis tool that links to process funnels and conversions etc is no more effort than integrating a tool such as HitBox and this kills two birds with one stone!

We are also finding that many clients like the fact that our tool is independent of the 3rd party campaign engines - this means they can firstly 'audit' their figures and also means they can use a number of different providers (who use different methods) with the same common interface. One of our biggest media clients use many different agencies/methods for campaign tracking and are even using our tool to track 'internal' campaigns between their own sites and button placements etc. This is then all reported in the common interface - or you can set-up an XLS to send you updates etc.

We try to gear things around single sources of information. Many web analytics tools don't go into enough detail to warrant use as a campaign tracking tool of the type you describe, we've tried to build ours around the requirements of marketers/customers and not 'bolt-on' campaign analysis features that don't give enough depth or are a separate module.

Web analytics and campaign tracking are becoming one and the same thing, monitoring traffic in an web-analytics tool and reporting campaigns in another doesn't give the wider picture that clients are requiring now.

Our solution is a purely ASP, using a simple 'include' a client can be up and running in a matter of hours. The objections to change are not really an issue for us, we can even take historic data from legacy systems to provide historic analysis too if required!

Regards,

Simon

On 13:40:33 13 October 2003 dchaffey wrote:
>Thanks Simon,
>
>I was thinking of specific campaign tracking tools rather
>than web analytics tools which have this feature.
>
>Most web analytics tools will have a campaigns feature,
>but it is often in the higher-end/priced options - like
>Hitbox Enterprise version. For example, I use the basic
>version of IndexTools (www.indextools.com) for tracking my
>sites, but you have to subscribe to a higher level service
>for campaigns.
>
>Often companies won't want to change their web analytics
>solution since this is a major commitment, but will want
>to use a separate tool for monitoring campaigns which
>gives better reporting in this area.
>
>Another example of a specific campaigns tool is Conversion
>Ruler (www.conversionruler.com). This looks good for
>search and OK for e-mail, but not so good for affiliate.
>It seems to be priced from $20 per month.
>
>Dave Chaffey
>Specialist e-marketing trainer, consultant and author.
>Web: www.marketing-insights.co.uk
>eResources and Books: www.marketing-online.co.uk

Dave,

Another reply from a web analytics company - this time WebAbacus! I agree with both my colleagues at WSS and WebTraffiq - a single source of analysis is becomming increasingly attractive to our customers. However, we recognise that not everybody can afford, or choose to replace, a high-end solution. So, we've also been working with a number of media agency and marketing technology partners to provide the answers to the questions you ask in a modular form, typically as a value-add component from your existing provider. We can work with most common platforms, so drop us a line if you have specific providers you work with.

Finding the media type/mix that works best is our goal. In one instance (for a leading global agency) we will be providing ranked cost per acquisition metrics across a range of campaigns and media types including offline such as TV, Radio and DM. We can of course provide the other metrics and tracking devices you mention to suit the customer's requirement.

Our industry is entering a period of consolidation and there are many, many providers - which is why so many separate tools exist. WebAbacus has built an open platform that is data agnostic so as to meet the needs of our many customers, who in turn use many providers. Aggregating and making sense of this disparate data is a problem we work hard to solve. Look out for some new product and service announcements in the very near future...

regards
Dan Drury, CEO, WebAbacus

On 08:17:41 10 October 2003 dchaffey wrote:
>I have been thinking through the must-have characteristics
>of the ideal tracking tool which will provide results
>across a range of online campaigns -
>paid search, free search, online ads, affiliates, e-mail.
>It seems that a lot of e-marketers / agencies are using
>separate tools for each which makes tracking and improving
>performance a nightmare.
>
>If a single tool can cover all of these, it becomes easier
>to target media spend at the best responding media and
>online vehicles.
>
>This is my checklist of the ideal online campaign tracking
>tool -
>
>1. Can it track through to point of online sale?
>Basic tools will only provide click tracking through to a
>microsite. More sophisticated tools will show which
>campaign the online purchases result from.
>
>2. Can it track for a range of online media types?
>Ideally you should be able to access a single report for
>all media including online ads and sponsorship, e-mail
>marketing, search engine marketing and affiliate
>marketing.
>
>3. Can return on investment models can be built in?
>This enables the cost-effectiveness of different campaigns
>and different vehicles to be assessed. Ideally it will be
>possible to view these reports by segment as well as on a
>campaign/product basis. As a minimum cost per site visitor
>acquisition and customer acquisition are required.
>
>4. Reports at both a detailed level and a summary level?
>Some tools will only report overall campaign
>effectiveness. For example, they will only give the total
>for several broadcasts within an e-mail campaign ? not
>individual tracking. For search marketing reports will be
>needed for individual keyword purchases to decide which to
>continue using these.
>
>5. Able to track e-mail click-throughs at an individual
>level?
>This is essential for targeting customers with a follow-up
>message when they have responded to an initial campaign as
>explained in the section on targeting.
>
>6. Post-view responses are tracked for online
>advertising?Research from Doubleclick shows that for
>online advertising the number of people who visit a site
>later after viewing an ad may give as many responses again
>as the original clickthrough. Similarly with affiliate
>marketing, the purchase may occur after several visits. We
>need to work back to the referrer that achieved the first
>site visit. Cookies are typically used for this.
>
>7. Post-click responses are tracked for affiliate
>marketing and online advertising?
>For high involvement products it is less likely that a
>campaign respondent will purchase on their first visit.
>
>8. E-mail campaign summaries give unique clicks as well as
>total clicks?
>What matters most to an e-mail campaign is the number of
>unique respondents to it rather than the total number of
>clicks. By default most systems give total clicks, but
>this can overestimate response to a campaign by 20 to 30%.
>
>9. Real-time reporting?
>This flexibility is essential since it allows us to pull
>poorly performing creative or placements and replace them
>with more effective tools.
>
>10. Cross-campaign reporting? Knowledge needs to be
>acquired and shared across an organisation about which
>campaigns work and which don?t through the year. This is
>only possible if it easy to compare separate campaigns.
>Many tools work at the level of an individual campaign.
>Export functionality to export past campaigns into a
>spreadsheet may be sufficient here.
>
>That?s a long wish list and very few tools seem to deliver
>all of these. Those that come closest are the TradeDoubler
>Media Toolbox (http://www.tradedoubler.com/pan/public/solu-
>tions/advertiser/technology_solutions) and the Doubleclick
>Channel View and DART technology for e-mail marketing and
>online ad tracking (www.doubleclick.com).
>
>There is a nice case on TradeDoubler (better known as an
>affiliate network) about how Dell Europe use TradeDoubler
>for an integrated approach to tracking and managing online
>sales through partnerships and performance-based marketing
>such as search marketing. They use it to track performance
>of long terms strategic partners, affiliate programs,
>direct marketing and campaigns.
>
>Does anyone have any experience of these tools or can they
>recommend other tools that fit the characteristics above -
>have I missed anything?
>
>Dave Chaffey
>Specialist e-marketing trainer, consultant and author.
>Web: www.marketing-insights.co.uk
>eResources and Books: www.marketing-online.co.uk

Dave, you are 100% correct. A single, central and holistic view of ALL marketing efforts is vital to a marketer's success.

I understand your penchant for keeping Campaign Tracking separate from Website Analytics, but they are inherently linked. What good is a successful campaign if a user drops off your site after 2 page views.

How else to measure the effectiveness of your campaigns, if not to understand how they drive sales, acquisition, registrations, branding, site interaction or navigation on your website?

Site Advance, DoubleClick's Campaign Tracking & Analytics Tool, automatically integrates Free Search (all search engines), Ad Serving Campaigns (DART For Advertisers), Email Campaigns (DARTmail) and tracks Paid and Affiliate Listings as well as Offline marketing efforts.

Geared towards Marketers, Site Advance provides a SINGLE view of ALL campaigns through to the point of sale (or abandonment) - right down to the cart, ROI, Sessions, Conversions, Average Order Value, Cost per Session/Conversion, Post Click, Post View, while providing an apples to apples comparison.

Seeing this information at a high level (campaign summary) as well as a detailed level (ad placement, email) is extremely important.

Site Advance not only provides automatic integration with our DFA product, but also allows for push button Remarketing through email (DARTmail). For example, if you want to send an email to every user from a particular campaign who did not convert, with a lifetime customer value of £250 and has not been back to your site in a week, then you can with the push of 2 buttons.

So not only do you get the analysis on the campaign success, but you are provided with the tools you need to leverage that data quickly and seamlessly.

Additionally, ALL of this information is available by Visitor Segment, so you not only see how effective your campaign was, but how effective was it at acquiring/retaining/re-activating your target audience.

Campaign Tracking requires ease of access to a single tool, which allows the end user to understand and analyse the data.

Site Advance allows the marketer to ACT on this data, not spend time collecting it.

Want to know more?
www.doubleclick.net/siteadvance

Anil Shah
Site Advance Europe

On 08:17:41 10 October 2003 dchaffey wrote:
>I have been thinking through the must-have characteristics
>of the ideal tracking tool which will provide results
>across a range of online campaigns -
>paid search, free search, online ads, affiliates, e-mail.
>It seems that a lot of e-marketers / agencies are using
>separate tools for each which makes tracking and improving
>performance a nightmare.
>
>If a single tool can cover all of these, it becomes easier
>to target media spend at the best responding media and
>online vehicles.
>
>This is my checklist of the ideal online campaign tracking
>tool -
>
>1. Can it track through to point of online sale?
>Basic tools will only provide click tracking through to a
>microsite. More sophisticated tools will show which
>campaign the online purchases result from.
>
>2. Can it track for a range of online media types?
>Ideally you should be able to access a single report for
>all media including online ads and sponsorship, e-mail
>marketing, search engine marketing and affiliate
>marketing.
>
>3. Can return on investment models can be built in?
>This enables the cost-effectiveness of different campaigns
>and different vehicles to be assessed. Ideally it will be
>possible to view these reports by segment as well as on a
>campaign/product basis. As a minimum cost per site visitor
>acquisition and customer acquisition are required.
>
>4. Reports at both a detailed level and a summary level?
>Some tools will only report overall campaign
>effectiveness. For example, they will only give the total
>for several broadcasts within an e-mail campaign ? not
>individual tracking. For search marketing reports will be
>needed for individual keyword purchases to decide which to
>continue using these.
>
>5. Able to track e-mail click-throughs at an individual
>level?
>This is essential for targeting customers with a follow-up
>message when they have responded to an initial campaign as
>explained in the section on targeting.
>
>6. Post-view responses are tracked for online
>advertising?Research from Doubleclick shows that for
>online advertising the number of people who visit a site
>later after viewing an ad may give as many responses again
>as the original clickthrough. Similarly with affiliate
>marketing, the purchase may occur after several visits. We
>need to work back to the referrer that achieved the first
>site visit. Cookies are typically used for this.
>
>7. Post-click responses are tracked for affiliate
>marketing and online advertising?
>For high involvement products it is less likely that a
>campaign respondent will purchase on their first visit.
>
>8. E-mail campaign summaries give unique clicks as well as
>total clicks?
>What matters most to an e-mail campaign is the number of
>unique respondents to it rather than the total number of
>clicks. By default most systems give total clicks, but
>this can overestimate response to a campaign by 20 to 30%.
>
>9. Real-time reporting?
>This flexibility is essential since it allows us to pull
>poorly performing creative or placements and replace them
>with more effective tools.
>
>10. Cross-campaign reporting? Knowledge needs to be
>acquired and shared across an organisation about which
>campaigns work and which don?t through the year. This is
>only possible if it easy to compare separate campaigns.
>Many tools work at the level of an individual campaign.
>Export functionality to export past campaigns into a
>spreadsheet may be sufficient here.
>
>That?s a long wish list and very few tools seem to deliver
>all of these. Those that come closest are the TradeDoubler
>Media Toolbox (http://www.tradedoubler.com/pan/public/solu-
>tions/advertiser/technology_solutions) and the Doubleclick
>Channel View and DART technology for e-mail marketing and
>online ad tracking (www.doubleclick.com).
>
>There is a nice case on TradeDoubler (better known as an
>affiliate network) about how Dell Europe use TradeDoubler
>for an integrated approach to tracking and managing online
>sales through partnerships and performance-based marketing
>such as search marketing. They use it to track performance
>of long terms strategic partners, affiliate programs,
>direct marketing and campaigns.
>
>Does anyone have any experience of these tools or can they
>recommend other tools that fit the characteristics above -
>have I missed anything?
>
>Dave Chaffey
>Specialist e-marketing trainer, consultant and author.
>Web: www.marketing-insights.co.uk
>eResources and Books: www.marketing-online.co.uk

Thanks for all your contributions, guys.

It seems there's more on offer from the web analytics vendors than I was aware of - I think many are missing a trick by not explaining the campaign analytics proposition clearly enough or promoting it via search "tracking / monitoring e-marketing / internet marketing campaigns" doesn't show many solutions on Google for example.

It will be interesting to see how this develops, and whether vendors do go for unbundling of campaign options to give a lower-cost solution as some of you have suggested.

Theoretically having a single analytics solution for campaigns and on-site behaviour has to be best - of course you also need to assess attrition and clickstreams once on site.

However, this doesn't necessarily match the skills / responsibilities of marketers in large organisations. For example, I was doing training for a financial services co recently and the campaign and web site teams are separate - not uncommon. All the campaign team really care about and can control are the different traffic drivers. Across many campaigns the site/microsite pages are relatively fixed. For example, search, online ads and affiliates may all be used to drive visitors to identical pages for an online insurance offer.

Thanks once, again and please let me know of any new product announcements in this area (particularly lower-cost standalone solutions)!

=========================================
Dave Chaffey
Specialist e-marketing trainer, consultant and author.
Web: www.marketing-insights.co.uk
eResources and Books: www.marketing-online.co.uk
Published 2003: Total E-mail Marketing, Internet Marketing 2e