| Online marketers have always enjoyed an advantage | | | | helps with search engine user variations and an |
| over their offline counterparts in that it is simple and | | | | example would be someone a user in a high income |
| easy to track visitors and their behavior on the target | | | | location performing a search using "vacation" |
| website from a simple mouse click of a visitor. | | | | compared to the same search term being used by a |
| Traditional online brand metric tools have utilized the | | | | user in a low income neighborhood. Providing budget |
| "click-to-sale" philosophy of how a website should be | | | | trips to someone with more money to spend is not an |
| positioned and Search Engine Optimization (SEO) has | | | | effective use of the online marketing budget nor is |
| grown up as an online industry to make websites rank | | | | getting a high search engine ranking for a high dollar |
| higher for the search engines. In recent years this has | | | | vacation that a user cannot afford to pay for. |
| slowly been changed as brand advertisers have also | | | | Brand metrics have developed a long way from |
| latched onto the power of social networking sites that | | | | simple click counting but then they have needed to in |
| look to engage and provide a fusing of the traditional | | | | order to track and measure performance with todays |
| television/radio style media in an online context. | | | | increasingly internet savvy consumers. Bill Gates |
| No longer is it enough to simply saturate a website | | | | addressed the Microsoft Strategic Partners Summit in |
| with keywords in order to increase search engine | | | | May, and in the keynote address he outlined his vision |
| ranking and by that, increase traffic. The emphasis is | | | | of where internet users are taking us. Microsoft has |
| increasingly on delivering not only traffic with the | | | | picked up on the increasing use of "locality |
| money to spend on your product but also on delivering | | | | parameters" by search engine users and the need for |
| information to search engine users that is directly | | | | search engines to deliver information that is relevant |
| relevant to them. This requires a more sophisticated | | | | not only to the product or service that is being |
| approach to web marketing that takes us away from | | | | researched but also the location of the user (or |
| the click-to-sale model and weakens the use of brand | | | | potential customer). |
| metrics as a performance measure. | | | | Brand metrics now need to measure not only the |
| Yahoo, Google and MSN, the so called Big 3 of the | | | | traditional measures of clicks, email addresses |
| search engines have all been developing and releasing | | | | gathered, or referral sources but also need to |
| brand metric tools to focus on matching keywords to | | | | manipulate the data to render usable information. Online |
| demographic data as a response to this trend. Yahoo | | | | marketers still have a definite edge in measuring |
| introduced Buzz Index to help with related keyword | | | | performance but that information needs to be married |
| searches from a human panel of volunteers selected | | | | with demographic data for managers to make decision |
| from a very broad range of demographic groups. This | | | | on how well their online brand is really performing. |