Exercises
2 Measures of Internet marketing effectiveness can be categorised as assessing:
Level 1: Business effectiveness– these measure the impact of the web site on the
whole business, and look at financial measures such as revenue and profit and pro-
motion of corporate awareness.
Level 2: Marketing effectiveness– these measure the number of leads and sales
achieved via the Internet and effect of the Internet on retention rates and other
aspects of the marketing mix such as branding.
Level 3: Internet marketing effectiveness– these measures assess how well the site is
being promoted, and do so by reviewing the popularity of the site and how good it
is at delivering customer needs.
3 The measures of effectiveness referred to above are collected in two main ways –
online and offline – or in combination.
4 Online measures are obtained from a web-server log file or using browser-based tech-
niques. They indicate the number of visitors to a site, which pages they visit, and
where they originated from. These also provide a breakdown of visitors through time
or by country.
5 Offline measures are marketing outcomes such as enquiries or sales that are directly
attributable to the web site. Other measures of the effectiveness are available through
surveying customers using questionnaires, interviews and focus groups.
6 Maintaining a web site requires clear responsibilities to be identified for different
roles. These include the roles of content owners and site developers, and those ensur-
ing that the content conforms with company and legal requirements.
7 To produce a good-quality web site, standards are required to enforce uniformity in
terms of:
site look and feel;
corporate branding;
quality of copy.
Exercises
Self-assessment exercises
1 Why are standards necessary for controlling web site maintenance? What aspects of the site
do standards seek to control?
2 Explain the difference between hits and page impressions. How are these measured?
3 Define and explain the purpose of test and live versions of a web site.
4 Why should content development be distributed through a large organisation?
5 What is the difference between online and offline metrics?
6 How can focus groups and interviews be used to assess web site effectiveness?
7 Explain how a web log file analyser works. What are its limitations?
8 Why is it useful to integrate the collection of online and offline metrics?
