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Archive for December, 2010

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Privacy Dilemmas: To Track or Not to Track

Friday, December 10th, 2010

That is not even a question! As far as online advertising is concerned, tracking is essential. However, the limits of tracking are yet to be defined. As much as advertisers would love to know anything and everything about their targeted audience, the end users’ concern of privacy stands legitimate. FTC endorses the do-not-track option for internet users – not to completely terminate the idea of tracking, but to the extent of having some regulations.

Online Privacy

Online privacy - does it exist? Should it exist? (Source: ars technica)

“There are no limits to what types of information can be collected, how long it can be retained, with whom it can be shared and how it can be used,” said Susan Grant, director of consumer protection for the Consumer Federation of America. “Consumers simply have no legal control over being spied on when they go online.”

Online tracking is legal and companies currently aren’t bound by government rules to show people what they know about them. Advertisers argue in their favor that if a broad number of people sign up for “Do Not Track” option, it will undercut the effectiveness of the Internet model and online advertising.

84% of consumers prefer not to be tracked

84% of consumers prefer not to be tracked (Source: BestTechie)

A poll done this summer for Consumer Watchdog, a California public interest group, found that 84% of respondents wanted to prevent online companies from tracking personal information without a person’s explicit, written approval. Media experts argue that consumers don’t realize that tracking improves their Internet experience by offering the stories they like or keeping track of their saved information so they don’t have to re-enter it every time they shop online. They claim that these benefits are taken for granted.

Responding to the consumers’ desire for privacy, Microsoft is adding Tracking Protection to Explorer 9. Previously, a handful of Internet and tracking firms, including Google, Yahoo, BlueKai, Lotame and eXelate, made such information available on their own sites. However, few consumers were aware.

Microsoft claims its coming tool is potentially more powerful than a do-not-track system that relies on companies to comply with the user’s request. Users will be able to subscribe to lists of the web addresses used by tracking companies. Internet Explorer would then automatically block those companies from the user’s computer. Tracking Protection will block the tracking completely and instantly.

Randall Rothenberg, Chief Executive of the Interactive Advertising Bureau, is concerned that the new blocking features in browsers will also block the advertising that supports free content on the Internet and as a side effect may also block news, entertainment, and social media as well.

Posted in News | 1 Comment »

Are you missing critical data about your sales? You should be tracking phone calls

Wednesday, December 8th, 2010

If you run a business or a website that does any kind of marketing (even offline — gasp!), phone call tracking can help you focus your advertising dollars and give you another tool to measure campaign performance. Let’s talk about all the ways you can use call tracking to better your business.

Correlate sales with your efforts online even if they come in over the phone

In the past, we’ve had clients who didn’t see the value in making special landing pages or websites. Most of their sales came in over the phone, not from the Internet. They would go to the trouble of creating an online campaign but there wouldn’t be any visible connection between those efforts and actual sales. When we built our call tracking tool, suddenly we could prove that specific sales made over the phone were the result of an online ad campaign or a particular landing page.

How does it work? Well, it’s easy, really. When you want to track a campaign, you just use a new phone number and include it with your message. When someone calls, you can tell that they called in response to a specific message, ad campaign, or anything you want to track. It’s painless and powerful.

A/B Testing with Phone Numbers

Beyond proving that a message creates a response and measuring its degree, you can go a step further and use phone tracking to compare performance between variable elements in a campaign or between two or more different campaigns. For example, you might run a split test comparing two different messages (one highlighting a specific feature, the other describing a benefit) and measure which phone line receives more calls. If you have a sufficient sample size, the line that gets more calls is the one tied to the better message. You can use split testing to incrementally improve any campaign. Even modest improvements, discovered by this kind of testing, end up creating significant savings.

Read more about call tracking:  “What Can Call Tracking Allow You to Do?” 

Call Tracking in Lytiks

Lytiks Pro offers the easiest tool available for call tracking. Quickly buy numbers and they’ll be automatically correlated to ads and/or websites.

Posted in Analytics Strategy, Digital Marketing, Lytiks Features, Marketing, Phone Call Tracking, Web Analytics | No Comments »

Listening – The Missing Link of Marketing

Tuesday, December 7th, 2010

Gone are the days when people used to think about marketing as a one-way channel, where businesses would invest in various avenues, hoping to see returns by gaining more customers without any way to measure actual performance. The web has had a huge impact on the way marketing has evolved. Consumer interests are tracked in a constant (silent) two-way communication.

Tracking
Web tracking is getting more and more intrusive as tracking gets smarter. It is not a coincidence when mortgage rate comparisons show up on the ad bar of the screen as one is trying to refinance. The information gained as a result of tracking is considered as marketing gold because it allows businesses to invest their marketing money where it is most profitable.

Web Tracking Ecosystem

Web Tracking Ecosystem (source: WSJ)

Listening
Businesses show increasing interest in web tracking to learn about their customers. However, David Jackson, Founder of Clicktools, thinks that the listening aspect of business is often ignored in an effort to push marketing on the customers. He writes,

“Marketing is a dialogue but the listening part is often the poor relation to the desire to get ‘the message’ out. Just look at budgets and what is spent on listening vs. other marketing communications.”

In a world where marketing managers are eager to get their perspective across, the idea of hearing the consumer is often more foreign than it should be. Listening has always been considered part of effective communication. Now marketing is turning its listening ear to the consumers to make marketing an art of effective sales. Companies like Kodak and Dell are hiring ‘Chief Listening Officers’. These dedicated listeners keep a tap on their company’s products’ reviews, blogs, and consumer response to their competitors’ products. Consumer posts and videos are considered valuable data to shape their product’s image and bring business strategy in line with the market needs.

Posted in Digital Marketing, Marketing | No Comments »