Business-to-business marketers have unique challenges when it comes to measuring the success of their Web site. Because it’s not as obvious as number of product sales, b-to-b marketers must look deeper into Web analytics data to derive conclusions about brand building, advertising effectiveness and prospect interest.
The first step, as with all successful optimization strategies, is to define your goals. Are you trying to drive Web site visitors to ask for a quote? Register for membership? Complete a request form? Pick up the phone? This event is the “desired action,” and you will want to measure traffic to this action and all of the components of your site that lead visitors to take this action.
The next steps are testing and optimizing. Do more visitors click through to the desired action when the link is in the top-right corner of the site or in the left-side bar? Which is more effective—text links, buttons or clickable pictures? This process is vital to the success of your Web site.
It’s also important to combine online ad data with Web analytics data to get a sense of how and why visitors are coming to your site. Pulling in information from search marketing campaigns allows b-to-b marketers to better understand what visitors searched for to find their site and what text-based ads elicited the highest click-through and conversion (action) rates. In turn, these data can help marketers optimize their sites with language that resonates with their target audiences and customize their home pages with links that are most important to their visitors.
The same is true for banner ads and e-mail. Monitoring the effectiveness of banner ads, e-mail and search campaigns to drive visitors to the desired action can help marketers more effectively allocate advertising budgets.
Finally, brand exposure and customer activity can be measured by number of page views and length of time spent on the Web site. ( source : target media )