blog articles from 2011

We’re confident that the new year will yield more of the same success, partially because there are more and more indications in the online marketing space of a shift towards “pay for performance” marketing, which aligns well with the founding philosophy at Convertro. The title of this blog, a quote by noted statistician and renowned quality guru W.Edwards Deming, is meant to capture the kind of focus we have here at Convertro. We use data to guide our decisions and encourage our clients to do the same. And so that we feel confident doing this, we make it a top priority to have the most granular, complete and correct data across the board in the analytics industry.

To give you an example of the way that data is starting to play a larger part in understanding the actual effectiveness of various kinds of marketing, many of our clients eventually get into a cycle of continuous optimization that looks like this:

Getting to this stage requires really immersing oneself in the data. Recently, I chanced upon a paper by Stephane Hamel, an influential practitioner of web analytics, that formalized this idea. His paper describing the concept of a “Online Analytics Maturity Model (OAMM) instantly resonated with me, partly because it draws inspiration from the Capability Maturity Model (CMM), which I remember from the early days of my career (back then, the CMM was all the rage in the software industry; reaching CMM level 5 was a huge badge of honor for a company), but also because it encapsulates the behavior I see from some of Convertro’s more advanced customers.

As Hamel explains, there are 5 levels in the Web Analytics Maturity Model, and they denote successive progression for a business from being “Analytically impaired” to reaching the level of “Analytically competitive”. The diagram below shows Hamel’s OAMM. Companies at level 5 are essentially in a cycle of continuous optimization where they are able to completely and accurately understand and tweak their marketing to yield the best results.

The growing acceptance of ideas like the OAMM is just one example of how the online marketing industry is starting to use metrics-oriented marketing for competitive advantage. At Convertro, we’re happy to see that the industry is coming around to our way of viewing the world,  and we can’t wait to see how the increasing demand for data-driven marketing analytics impacts the industry in the coming year.