Mr. Tarasofsky

Website / Online Mechandising / SEO

Maximizing Online Promotional Web Sites

By Jerry Tarasofsky, CEO, iPerceptions Inc.

Let's look at the kind of real time information you need to be able to capture and measure once you've created a promotional web site.

First and foremost is "the buzz factor" - how did people learned about the promotional web site and how and what are they telling other people about it. Imagine the Internet as one very large and all encompassing online water cooler. What kind of buzz, if any, is your promotional web site generating around the water cooler? If you don't have solutions in place to measure that buzz, you will never know whether the promotional site is having a positive or negative impact on your brand. Put the tools in place to make sure you can catch the buzz wherever it's coming from including your web site, blogs, message boards, forums, and other online communities. By monitoring buzz in real time you'll get a better understanding of whether the site copy is hitting the right hot buttons and what features of the site are generating the most/least buzz?

Once you've established the buzz factor, it is important to remember that you also must be able to place some meaningful value on your customer's overall experience at the site. You need to be able to clearly understand the strengths and weakness of the site as well as your customer's likes and dislikes. The promotional web site might draw a lot of attention and traffic, but once there, if users were disappointed with the experience or had serious issues with content or navigation for example, you must be able to track their satisfaction if you want to ensure your next promotion does not create the same problems.

Evaluating the impact of the promotional web site on brand appreciation and preferences and on your visitor's propensity to make a reservation is also another metric that you must be able to tap into. It goes without saying that your investment in the promotional web site and its overall success will eventually be measured by these two key components.

If this information is going to be meaningful, you also need the capacity to benchmark and prepare day-to-day trending charts for most if not all the above-mentioned variables. With trending data in hand, you can judge at what point the promotional web site reaches maximum effectiveness and at what point it becomes obvious that the site should be discontinued.

Let's look at a hypothetical example of how a marketing team in the hospitality sector would execute all of the above. You have decided to launch a promotional web site initiative linked to a contest aimed at raising the awareness of your various properties across North America and driving traffic to those sites. You promoted the contest and the web site at your main web site, on other sites using banners and buttons, as well as with newspaper ads and television commercials.

To successfully evaluate this program you put in place an analytics solution that is able to capture and quantify feedback and comments from actual visitors in the context of their actual visit to the promotional web site.

To do this, you utilize an attitudinal analytics solution that takes the form of an online questionnaire that captures the detailed demographics of visitors to the promotional site. In addition to demographics you also capture psychographic information - what is going on inside the hearts and minds of those visitors.

Once in hand, you can start the analysis by comparing and contrasting the similarities and differences, if there are any, between visitors to the promotional site and visitors to your main web site. Using data from the study, you will be able to ascertain if visitors are familiar with your brand and discover if they've viewed it more positively because of the initiative. Based on the many studies that we have conducted, we know that it is also possible to determine if site visitors are more or less likely to make reservations because of the promotional web site initiative.

You can also use the information you are collecting to obtain a complete ranking of the effectiveness of the various media and non-traditional marketing channels deployed for your program. This will prove invaluable when it comes time to planning your next major promotional web site initiative.

Most importantly, you can use the data you've collected to confirm the buzz related to the promotion and, if the solution you've selected to measure user feedback is offered in real-time, you should be able to watch word of mouth grow as the campaign expands virally across the net and via other media.

The demographic and psychographic data that you've collected is also extremely helpful in providing valuable insights that allow you to better target your online and offline ad dollars.

To summarize, if you have decided to move forward with the development of a promotional web site there are several key areas of focus that you must be able to track and monitor.

If you can put metrics to these key areas, you are well on your way to developing a successful promotional web site strategy.

Jerry Tarasofsky is CEO of iPerceptions Inc. Its webValidator® "captures the voice" of the online customer, helping companies learn more about their customers. Using a comprehensive perceptual framework to evaluate key elements of the visitor experience and, algorithms and modeling to identify attributes that drive satisfaction. The webValidator solution turns data points into easy-to-understand strategic and tactical decision support. iPerceptions’ clients in the hospitality sector include Crowne Plaza, Omni, Savoy, Wellesley, Homestead, Radisson and Holiday Inn. Mr. Tarasofsky can be contacted at jerryt@iperceptions.com Extended Bio...

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