“This year will be an inflection point in the history of digital marketing, where a lot of the older-school more powerful effective customer segmentation will be brought into the digital realm.”
It seems like the topic of good customers versus bad customers wouldn’t be a very deep topic, but actually it is. The problem in online marketing has always been defined in terms of conversions, but the goal should be to find the best customers and cultivate a long-term relationship with them. Marketers are generally focused on bringing in as many customers as possible, and getting them to buy the product. As an example, imagine if you sell your product for 75% off, you can immediately vastly increase both pageviews and conversions, but the ROI will be poor.
It’s easy to drive sales spikes, but the goal of a business should be marriages, not one-night-stands. Especially with B-to-B, repeat customers are often a company’s main source of profit.
It’s important to integrate SEO, SEM, and SMO in order to bring more people to the creative – the site content. Another issue missed particularly by larger companies is that not every search term should lead to the same creative. Often, it’s important to segment the landing pages. When all of this is integrated, and non-Internet interactions are added in, the system becomes quite complex. Google Analytics is looking to help online marketers solve these problems in new ways, so marketers should expect new analytics tools that will help them find valuable customers in their customer pool.
Phil Mui – Chief Product & Engineering Officer at Acxiom
Dr. Phil Mui is the Chief Product & Engineering Officer at Acxiom, where he leads the strategic direction, development and management of Acxiom’s global product management and engineering functions.
Before joining Acxiom, he was the Google Analytics Group Product Manager since the first year of Google Analytics. He has a Ph.D. (EECS) from MIT and a Masters (Management) from Oxford University where he was a Marshall Scholar. Prior to Google, Phil was a bioinformatics researcher in Stanford University. You can follow him on Twitter @philmui
Justin Cutroni – Analytics Advocate at Google
Justin Cutroni is the Analytics Advocate at Google. He is the author of Google Analytics (published by O’Reilly) and co-author of Performance Marketing with Google Analytics (published by Wiley). You can connect with Justin through his blog, Analytics Talk or follow Justin on Twitter or Google +. Justin has worked as a Google Analytics Certified Partner for the last 5 years and now he works for Google.