Tina Bean

I completely agree with Avinash Kaushik in his latest blog post, “Online Marketing Still A Faith Based Initiative. Why? What’s The Fix?” when he states: “let us consider the world where marketing is done on faith. Television. Or for that matter magazines or newspapers or radio. All wonderful channels, that are needed and will be around for a long time! But when it comes to measuring success of our marketing efforts all of these channels are largely faith based initiatives…. Yet we accept it.”

Avinash, we both share “minor mental orgasms” (Mom, I didn’t really just say that) when we think how online marketing channels can be measured down to the click and to the all mighty conversion.

And to your point: “Just thinking of all the data you can get is enough to put give you a temporary high. With 90+% accuracy you can measure the number of impressions of your ads. You can measure interactions with the ads. You can measure how many people end up on your websites. You can understand how many of them puke and leave! You can measure every facet of success (micro and macro conversions!!). You can measure revenue and economic value! For every dollar you spend! Oh my!!” How can facts like these be discounted?

But are the days of faith based marketing coming to an end? Well, maybe not for advertisers like Pepsi or Budweiser (with their endless marketing budgets), but for the SMB (small to medium size business) owners, the data suggests that they are.

I’m on the front lines at VisiStat. Our customers demand this data. Their days of blindfold, faith based marketing have come to an end. They are coming to us because they’ve come to the end of their rope. There is no more budget to be thrown to the wind. There’s a better way and they are here to implement it.

The days of wondering how a campaign performed are gone. Now customers are getting savvy enough to talk click-thrus, page views, and conversions.

The more technically savvy ones are passing order values into conversion snippets. They demand real-time results to stop the bleed and turn on a dime.

Marketers need validation to prove their value. Nothing validates more than web analytics products.

To see conversions in action, check out these videos:
VisiStat & AdCam, basic:

VisiStat and AdCam, Conversion Tracking:

Throw your faith based marketing out the window and get accountable with web analytics.

You can read more from Avinash’s Kaushik’s article at: http://www.kaushik.net/avinash/2010/06/online-marketing-faith-based-initiative-fix.html

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