Marketing Evaluation

You must measure your Internet activity the same way you measure any other communications activity: find consensus on objectives, establish specific criteria, measure those criteria, look at the results, take action, then measure again.

No matter what your benchmarks, your success depends on the following six basic rules:

1. Establish objectives. Reach an agreement among all the parties involved about what you are trying to achieve.
   
2. Determine criteria. Define measures of success specifically, whatever they may be - number of hits, percentage of people more likely to purchase tickets, rave reviews in Interactive Age or an Arts publication.
   
3. Select a benchmark. There is no shortage of criteria against which you can benchmark your progress. The key to valuable benchmarking is your choice of the right criteria. Are you going to compare your progress to yourself over time, compare yourself to the competition, or compare the Web to other communication forms?
   
4. Compare your results to objectives. Once you’ve conducted your benchmark, don’t get carried away by numbers. Instead, examine them in relation to your original objectives to decide if your online marketing has succeeded.
   
5. Draw actionable conclusions. You’ve received 100 hits a day, but what do you do with this information? You need to interpret the numbers to know what actions will help your site become better, more efficient, or more cost-effective.
   
6. Measure again. The cycle is not complete until you have collected all the data from the previous activities, analyzed them, and begun the planning process anew.