In a recent survey under 250+ marketing executives, WebTrends set out to discover how big an impact the web would have on marketing in the next year and how confident CMOs and other executives were in their ability to measure online marketing performance and create an ROI mind set throughout their organizations.
In this posting I will quote the parts I found most interesting, read the full WebTrends CMO Web-Smart Report (112.79 KB)
The web is the hub: Over 56 percent of marketing executives said that the web was either the hub of their organization’s marketing strategy, or that it would become the hub in the next year.
Organizations aren’t feeling ready:
Marketing executives aren’t grading themselves or their organizations very highly when it comes to their collective knowledge of the latest web marketing trends, strategies and technologies. On average, execs rated themselves 6.3 on a scale of 1-10. And they rated their staffs even lower, at an average of 5.5.
Marketing teams will be even more accountable:
Most marketing executives plan to increase accountability by investing in training and building metrics into employee reviews and compensation.
52 percent of organizations make measuring web marketing performance the part-time responsibility of multiple employees or a single employee. 15.7 percent of marketing executives said that analysis is non-existent on their team. When you consider how significantly online marketing budgets will increase, it’s hard to believe there’s no accountability for it. 26.4 percent said it was the part-time responsibility of multiple employees, which signifies the need for consistency in metrics (and agreed-upon key performance indicators) across departments. And 25.5 percent said it was the part-time responsibility of a single employee. Managers considering hiring a dedicated web marketing analyst shouldn’t wait. A recent JupiterResearch study, “…companies assigning at least one dedicated resource are at least twice as likely as those assigning none to measure conversion rates, integrate external search marketing data, measure marketing spending, as well as use A/B testing strategies and funnel analysis tools to incrementally improve Web sites… which JupiterResearch believes is fundamental to achieving analytics success.” JupiterResearch also went on to note that… “assigning many partial resources is sub-optimal, rarely producing the quality associated with dedicated resources.” Here at Tam Tam I notice the same poblem, customers do feel the importance of measuring their website performance but in most cases stop at the point of measuring number of visits and pageviews. In some cases it’s worse, when they report their management on technical information such as hits and bandwidth usage. With our new E-Marketing Services approach we want to help our customers to report on the information that does matter and all directly related to their KPI’s; scenario analysis, form abandonment, ROI, click paths…. We will introduce an extensite marketing dashboard which will take away the need of extensive web analytics knowledge at the end user side. For more information don’t hesitate to contact me. 
www.omtrends.com
