November/December 2004

Ask the Expert: Your Questions Answered

Question:
What metrics should our organization track for our online campaigns?

Answer:
by David Crooke, Founder and Chief Technology Officer, Convio

The Internet makes it possible for data-driven direct marketers and development professionals to log every step of each constituent's online contacts with their organization. Following are key statistics that any organization should track from this wealth of data.

Email: Opens, Click-throughs and Actions
The most critical online marketing tool is email because it is the primary mode of outreach. Organizations typically gauge an email subject line’s appeal by measuring email open rates. Open rates, however, also can indicate the level of interest in an organization’s e-newsletter and the quality of the organization’s email address file.

Click-through rates — or the percentage of people who click on links within the body of an email to seek more information or take action — help to measure rates of initial response, or whether an email is compelling enough to prompt someone to find out more. While this is a useful measure of the email’s content and presentation, it is important to also track how many people take action and what types of action they take in response to emails, such as making donations, advocating online by signing a petition, or registering for an event such as a walk or race. 

Forward Rates
A measure unique to online marketing is the forward rate, or how many people respond to an email forwarded by a friend. The forward rate is a key metric for determining an email’s effectiveness at reaching new audiences.

Test, Test, Test
A split list test is useful because it allows an organization to measure the impact and effectiveness of varied treatment of the same basic email, such as a different message layout or subject line. The logistics of split list testing are faster and easier with email than paper, since an organization can measure delivery and response within a few days. The new Convio 4.0 email campaigns application makes split list testing easy by automatically generating a list of people who will receive the test, then excluding them from the main message delivery. (For more about split list testing, see Split List Testing in Today’s Wired World.)

Web Usage Reports
While general Web site metrics (including page views, visitors, etc.) help to indicate awareness, they do not always indicate what drives visitors to a site in the first place.  When buying advertising or using other channels to drive people to an organization’s Web site, always use a unique URL, or Web page address, to track visitors responding to that particular campaign.

Conclusion: It's All Relative
The most important thing when interpreting any of the above statistics is to make relative comparisons between similar types of email or content. Comparing one organization’s open rates with a different organization’s, for example, doesn't make sense. Each organization has a different mission; each builds its email files differently and has a different mix of constituents. Similarly, a fundraising solicitation generates a very different response rate than an advocacy alert from the same nonprofit. The key for successful tracking and measurement is for an organization to determine its online goals, then measure the metrics that will determine the level of success for each goal.

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