Welcome to the Digital Marketing Inner Circle

The good old days in China where advertisers simply accepted click and impression data have past.  Today, Web analytics vendors (like SinoTech Group) are offering tools designed to let marketers do a much more fine-grained analysis of their Web site visitors and even following them even when they move beyond the corporate Web site and out to other locations, both online or off.

Those types of capabilities mean that marketers can look at Web site visitors not simply as someone dropping in but more as what they really are: customers likely to interact with a company in a number of ways and through a variety of channels, including social media.

The SinoAnalytics platform, for instance is drawing data about users from interactions with and within social networking sites. The result of this is providing SinoAnalytics customers with the ability to reconcile their onsite customer data with insights into what these same customers are saying or doing in social media networks such as Twitter, Facebook or LinkedIn (or comprible Chinese sites), providing a richer profile of the customer.

  I consider, Social Media as just another digital channel that we need to consider within the fuller specutum of digital channels. Therefore, it’s not difficult to recognize that we need to tie back all the data points from not simply the primary site but to gain a better knowledge and undertanding of the individual customers through their web site visits and also their engagement with SNS.  I call this Conversational Monitoring in SNS, BBS, Micro-blogging – all areas that we need to be paying more attention to. More so, if you’re a brand trying to leverage Twitter, having some objective, multidimensional measure of success is critical.

More defined metrics can be derived from analyzing user behaviors of visitors referred from these communities. Just as marketers would measure e-mail newsletter or other click data, social media needs to be segmented and measured as to its performance within each company’s Web site.

Another important new trend is keeping track of what users do before and after they interact with a piece of content you create. For instance, SinoAnalytics has a new feature called “impression attribution” that lets marketers better track the paths users take across e-mail, paid search and affiliates networks; including the clicks leading up to and away from an interaction with marketing content. Further, this is graphically outlined to show clearly what the bet performing channels are and where the best ROI can be delivered.

“Marketing now wants to see things that happen off-site, not just impressions,” said Dr Mathew McDougall, Chief Executive Officer. “The goal is to understand what sites and marketing activities bring in the right types of customers and where to place that one more incremental dollar of spending to get the best effect.”