Measuring the Success of your Online Campaign

I recently had lunch with a good friend who works for a FMCG Company. He’s a product manager and I can really describe him as a hardcore technical marketer. We had a discussion about building micro sites to push brands online and he was explaining to me how happy he was with the success of one of the projects that he spearheaded. He said that the agency sent them back metrics saying that the micro site was a success because of the hits and unique visits it got over the 3 months of the campaign. When I asked him for the actual numbers, I was really dumbfounded. I could not believe what I just heard. The number was just… insane.

Insanely low, that is.

They spent a significant amount of money on a micro site that generated around 30,000 unique visitors in 3 months. 70% of which came from the Philippines (which is their main market). I think I burst the bubble of my friend when I told him that my blog, Waukster Online, gets more than 90,000 unique visitors monthly, 50% of which came from the Philippines. When he asked me how much money I spent in developing Waukster, I told him that I spent less than 5k for the domain registration and the hosting.

Building the Website is just the Start
I can’t imagine how much millions of pesos have been thrown away at building micro sites for product launches. I know for a fact that a lot of agencies overcharge for website design and development. What’s even more insane is that they sites being made are not optimized at all for the Philippines. Instead of going the route of having basic sites that are easy to load and SEO-friendly, a lot of companies decide to go the fancy flash and heavy website type, which takes just forever to load and is not indexed properly in Google.

The work does not end with building and launching a website. Don’t expect people to go there just because you made it. You have to invest in properly promoting it so that you can drive significant and quality traffic. The internet is not like a billboard along EDSA wherein you just post a site and you just hope for the best that the people on the road will see you.

Promote it offline and ONLINE
This is one of the biggest mistakes of a lot of agencies and marketers. They JUST use offline media to promote their online properties. While it’s okay to have your URL on banners, billboards, and posters, don’t forget that the most effective way to drive traffic is to go online and reach out to Filipino internet users. Let me explain it this way:

For Offline Media Promoting Websites: Person sees the URL on the poster. He needs to find a computer first, remember the URL, and then type the URL on the browser. There are so many steps and factors for failure in this chain.

For Online Media Promoting Websites: Person sees the banner. Clicks banner. Viola. He’s in your web page.

Painfully obvious but almost everyone keeps on making the same mistake over and over again.

SEO Matters
When I asked him if he knew what SEO was, he said no. I explained what it was and he was really surprised how much traffic one site can get from referral engines. I told him that bulk of the traffic that my site gets came from SEM. The question now is if the site they made was SEO-Friendly?

I think the bottom line is that if you’re a marketer and you hire agencies, don’t just take in everything they say about internet marketing. The best thing to do is know the very basics and pegs about the internet marketing scene in the Philippines.