A newly released Datran Media survey of executives at Fortune 500 companies, publishing companies, media agencies and ad agencies finds e-mail and search regarded as the digital channels that worked best last year.

Conducted in December in conjunction with the Direct Marketing Association E-mail Experience Council “and other media partners,” the survey asked respondents to identify the digital channels that “performed the strongest for your company in 2009.” E-mail got the most mentions (cited by 39%), followed by search (24%), offline (9%), affiliate marketing (9%), display (7%), direct mail (6%), social media (5%) and mobile (1%).

Another part of the survey inquired into the objectives these executives have for their online efforts. “Reaching a target audience” topped the list (cited by 84%), followed by “generating high-quality leads” (74%). Smaller majorities said they’re using online efforts for “converting leads into sales” (63%), “measuring and understanding our audience” (60%), “retaining existing customers” (57%) and/or “digitally transacting with customers” (54%). Consistent with the interest in reaching a target audience, respondents put “targeting” atop the list of online “marketing tactics” they’ll be using this year as part of their online strategy.

When it comes to measuring consumer response to their digital efforts, what do the respondents’ companies currently look at? “Clicks” got the most mentions (72%), trailed by “conversions” (59%) and “impressions” (58%). Lagging farther behind were “transactions” and “audience” (43% apiece).

Elsewhere in the survey, 67 percent of respondents said they’ll be “leveraging online video this year.” As for social media, opinion was mixed on the question of whether it will “generate quantifiable results in 2010.” Fifty percent of respondents said they think it will, but 12 percent said it won’t and the rest were unsure.

Charlotte, NC — Screen Pilot, a digital marketing and technology firm, has several simple steps for marketing professionals to realize the benefits of understanding what is occurring in their online marketing world. If you don’t have analysts to decipher your company’s Internet marketing results, there are five easy ways to add clout to your marketing budgets. You might just be surprised at how underutilized your existing web reporting tools are.

1. Uncover Hidden Potential:
Marketing professionals need to customize the way they track their digital marketing campaigns. They should take a look at what kind of measuring tools they currently use. Are the goals that have been set for a web reporting platform meeting the needs of the company? By creating a list of must-haves, it’ll be easier to narrow down what the needs are and how they can be fulfilled and by which products.

2. Add Tracking To Your E-mail Campaigns:
You can add tracking parameters to your e-mail marketing activity that enables marketers to start tracking visitors and their actions once in your web site that are driven by e-mail efforts. Setting up to measure conversions, from shopping carts or other areas of your site that are important to you, will enable you to see which e-mail campaigns have higher returns on investment (ROI) than others. With this tip, you can now test scientifically based on the ROI and not solely on the click-through rates and engagement factors.

3. Are Your PPC Campaigns Set-Up Correctly?
If you have potential customers click on your Pay-Per-Click (PPC) ads and immediately leave your site, your advertising money spent is wasted. You could be missing opportunities if your web statistics aren’t giving you the whole picture about the visitors you get from paid search channels like Google, Yahoo! and Bing. Reporting from search engines only goes halfway in educating you on how effective your PPC actually is. Set up your reporting to measure key performance indicators from paid channels. It can help you increase ROI and make intelligent decisions about how and where to spend your marketing dollars.

4. Don’t Rely on 3rd Party Reporting:
It is very common that the amount of clicks the advertisers say you have is different than what you receive. Countless times we are requested to create audit trails for costly marketing channels that report higher numbers of clicks from their networks than you actually receive. Using your web statistics platform correctly will tell you exactly what traffic you received from a specific campaign and the value of that traffic.

5. Track Calls from Campaigns:
If you sell product offline then you need to track the call volumes that are generated from each specific digital campaign and types. This will easily tell you how effective a campaign’s response is when people go online but don’t convert. Quickly what channels such as PPC, email, banner ads and other create calls and which don’t. By adding this new dimension it might make you adjust some efforts for best returns.

If your current tracking and measurement tools aren’t producing results, you may need to reconsider the platform.

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