Far too many times when we start working with clients on their internet marketing campaign are we asked by the client to send daily/weekly reports and give them our insight about each day. This could be one of the biggest problems we are faced with.

Companies online have become obsessed with data to the point that they stopped looking at longer-term benefits of any given campaign. “What did yesterdays Google campaign yield for me yesterday?” “on Tuesday we got 73 orders, today only 52, should we shut the campaign off?”

The fact is, there are fluctuations online that no one can really point to. I call it the Conversion Chaos Theory. Although there is no evidence of what causes cycles in ecommerce, they are there. Sure, there are the obvious holiday/vacation/weekend cycles that most retailers see, but there is evidence of chaotic cycles that could be attributed to complete randomness.

I would say that although we recommend looking at daily spends to make sure something really crazy is not happening, do not knee jerk your campaigns every day (or week for that matter) as to see the whole picture you really need a longer term sampling size. I typically recommend 3-4 weeks minimum before making huge changes. Always remember, data from failing campaigns will teach you just as much or more than data from winning campaigns. So waiting the extra time even on a failing campaign will surely teach you even more about your online business model.

This entry was posted on Saturday, March 1st, 2008 at 11:59 am and is filed under Online Marketing, Usability. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.