Failure to Measure Traffic Every so often when I speak with someone who is dismayed at their web site’s ability to generate revenue I am surprised when they tell me they don’t know how many people visit their site each month, day, hour, etc. Measuring traffic to and through your web site is critical for understanding marketing prowess of your web design and effectiveness of your advertising efforts.

If your web site enjoys lots of traffic, say over 1000 visitors a day, but generates one or two sales a month you can be pretty sure there is a deficiency in your web design. If you are not measuring traffic to your site you do not provide yourself an opportunity to identify and correct problem. Your web design should lend itself to helping you get your visitors to take action you want, buy something or provide you their valuable contact information.

On other hand, if your web site generates a small amount of sales and you don’t know that only fifty people are visiting your site each month you deny yourself ability to realize that you have a fantastic web site and that marketing it better will lead to a significant increase in revenue.

If you are not measuring your web site’s traffic you are missing opportunities to increase your ability to generate sales and be more successful. Two providers of web metrics are webtrends.com and webstat.com.

Poor marketing message Another reason web sites fail to sell is that they do not do a good job of delivering a compelling marketing message. Without an excellent marketing message you risk your visitors hopping off to another web site because they do not know that you have what they want or need.

One sign that you may have a less than stellar marketing message is that it does not speak directly to consumers who become your clients. Your marketing message should identify exactly whom you help. If you help more than one population you can easily cater your marketing message by changing just a word or two. Be sure your marketing message clearly indicates whom you help and you will notice an improvement in you sales success.

Another sign that your marketing message is not hitting a homerun is that it does not clearly demonstrate that you provide what your customers seek. If you sell handbags and your marketing message is “glamour can be yours” then you are missing boat as this marketing message fails to indicate at all that you sell handbags.

By Venkatesh P (Lecturer in Marketing)

One of greatest challenges being a marketer is to predict consumer behavior. Lets look at our own buying patterns. Don’t we find so many factors affecting what we buy? Recollect latest shopping you did, and see for yourselves how many off-the-list products you have bought. Why did you buy them? Recently I went to a near by shop to buy some butter. While shopkeeper was weighing butter, I just stretched my neck (strained from daily scooter ride) and my eyes spotted ‘Cup-O-Noodles’. I was feeling hungry and I bought it. I think that was first time ever I bought that product. The product was never in visible region, still something told me to buy. Of course you could say it was my ‘hunger’, but why choose that particular brand. Well something told me to buy. What’s that something? Well when consumer himself is unsure as to what was that something, how can a marketer know that ‘something’?

There are literally a million reasons to why we buy a particular product (or Brand to be specific). That’s exactly reason why market is cluttered with a million variations of same product. (variations could be tangible or intangible)

Gone are days when you thought of toothpaste, you thought of only one brand. Now market is more cluttered and you can think of other toothpastes too for whatever (!) reason. So how do we, as marketers direct a consumer only to brand that we want them to be attracted to? How do we get our brand in contact with consumers?

Look at all marketing tools that we as marketers use. Sometimes marketers waste precious dollars on ineffective tools. Sometimes an accidental campaign might click and might have huge response from consumers. How do we analyze (or gauge) well before implementation of a marketing exercise, effectiveness of it?