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Posted on 28 Mar 02
No Im not referencing to a football or basketball game, but a web site or portal. As the web continues to proliferate, uses previously unlikely like on-line bill payment, auto insurance, auto purchase, credit profiles or movie tickets are becoming the norm. Nevertheless, are these new applications easier and more convenient?
While new functionality is great, often times the "usability" of the site or new function is difficult at best and impossible at worst. This is an important issue when choosing where your organization will invest available marketing dollars into Internet space. For example if the site, portal or web developer can not help you answer the following questions back off from making a decision. -
The effectiveness of a site or on-line purpose? In other words, can the customer/browser accomplish their goal using the site/portal? Two ways this is achieved are customer end users surveys of the site or portal. If the site or portal has a 75% customer retention rate or greater thats considered excellent. Anything below that you may want to reconsider your model, marketing or shut the site down altogether for lack of need. If your dubious about the answer you get call the paying customer yourself. -
Efficiency determines how long it should take the customer/browser to accomplish their goal? A good example depending the sites purpose would be our very own programbusiness.com site, the average time per unique visitor is 3 minutes and 10 seconds. Considering the site is a specific industry search engine for property/casualty insurance coverage and programs thats pretty good staying power. Any longer and we may want to increase monitoring our user sessions time frame and location hits in the site to make sure the navigation is functioning properly. -
Satisfaction defines how pleased the customer/browser is with their experience. The tell tale here is the number of times a unique visitor has returned to a site or portal. Much like a trade publication web sites and portals have subscribers, who are called registrants. Its a whole lot easier to measure the satisfaction of a browser/customer in a site by the number of times and length of there visits reviewing an automated report such as Web Trends. Imagine having to make an outbound call to magazine subscribers to ask how they are enjoying a publication or if they even noticed your ad. Dont mis understand me I think you need to advertise at all levels depending on your budget. -
A thorough successful series of questions will prevent your agency, MGA or carrier from advertising in the wrong place at the wrong time. Asking these questions and putting the advertising sales person to the test will help you determine if they are driving the right traffic to their site/portal that you need. The bottom line score is number of unique visitors versus home page visits and hits. Hence the title 23,389 unique visitors (retail agencies) in 50-day period is an incredible statistic for a property/casualty specific site. Jeff Neilson is President of National Marketing Services and Programbusiness.com. Jeff can be reached at 800-736-9741 ext. 3003 or Email jeffneilson@programbusiness.com to have any questions answered. The National Marketing Services storefront can be reached at http://www.programbusiness.com/tracking/sftracker.asp?SFid=128
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