A recent interactive report from Sapient shows that marketers have concerns about multi-channel tracking and most of it is around social networking. I know the article was geared towards interactive, but I want full multi-channel tracking ability to include offline and online. Companies such as Omniture and Web Trends have done amazing things with online trackability, but as a CMO, I would be demanding that I know what offline advertising is doing to increase bottom-line and how it effects online.
Direct response marketers that use TV, print and online need to push harder on the analytics companies to make them begin to look at the big picture. As the word interact was originally used, I see TV and print as an interactive medium when pushing to the web. If a company wants to run a Super Bowl ad, they should be able to track success from several measures. They should use vanity url’s to try and capture the success, but they should also look at search volume, and traffic to a corporate site as well. I am sure we are all guilty of forgetting a vanity url and using the corporate or submitting a query to Google.
I am glad to see people have concerns on multi-channel marketing as this will drive to better reporting, I just don’t want them to sell themselves short and not demand “true” multi-channel trackability.
Tags: Multi-channel marketing, offline tracking, trackability, web analytics
