WebTrends Survey Finds Most Retailers Have Not Adopted Accuracy Best Practices for Online Marketing Measurement.

Heavily invested in online marketing, and most affected by third-party cookie blocking, retailers must focus on visitor-centric metrics 

NEW YORK -- As part of this week's retail industry conference Shop.org, WebTrends Inc., the market leader for web analytics and Marketing Performance Management (MPM) solutions, today made available to attendees its Accuracy Best Practices Kit, including the WebTrends 2006 Online Retail Holiday Readiness Report. The kit contains a collection of resources to help retailers ensure accurate metrics to better improve the performance of their online and marketing initiatives.

Highlighting the challenge and need for continued education, WebTrends survey of 300 Internet and multi-channel retailers, on which the holiday report was based, found very little growth in the number of retailers using widely publicized cookie best practices, and a very small minority using visitor-centric conversion metrics Co the direct marketing standard Co to evaluate and compare demand generation activities.

More than a year ago, WebTrends identified Retail as being the industry vertical most affected by third-party cookie rejection, occurring at a rate 21% greater than the average across all verticals. Cookie rejection affects the accuracy of all metrics, becoming a bigger problem for metrics over time such as campaign attribution and visitor retention. First-party cookies are rejected at much lower rates, providing the foundation for advanced optimization techniques like visitor segmentation and lifetime value analysis, as well as accurate campaign attribution.

However, according to WebTrends recent 2006 Online Retail Holiday Readiness Report, the percent of retailers using first-party cookies has only increased by one percent over the past year for a total of 25 percent. During the same span of time, WebTrends has helped an additional 1200 organizations migrate from third-party to first-party cookies, for a total of more than 1700 customers now benefiting from greater metrics accuracy.

Moreover, only 10 percent of retailers use unique visitor-based metrics over time to evaluate demand generation activities with 63 percent relying on response and activity-based metrics Co clickthroughs, page views, visits and orders. Although significant value can be gained from basic activity-based metrics, using them to calculate campaign conversion leads to double-counting and declining conversion rates over time even for successful campaigns. The reason: visitors do not always convert during their initial campaign response, and may in fact visit multiple times before making a purchase. The key to evaluating true campaign performance is to understand how many unique visitors a campaign reached and how many of them converted.

For the 2006 holiday season, retailers ranked email marketing as the most important demand-generation activity, with 80 percent of retailers using regular customer emails to build customer relationships. For future efforts to enhance customer relationships, more retailers said they plan to develop a database of clickstream-based information for campaigns targeted to customers' interests over any other activity. Visitor-centric metrics, and the first-party cookies that make them possible, also provide the visitor-level insight necessary to target customers with highly relevant offers, which can be extremely effective. According to a 2005 JupiterResearch survey, emails targeted based on web site clickstream data offer a three times to nine times revenue improvement over broadcast emails.

"Clearly, retailers have a lot on the line when it comes to the holidays and their return on marketing investment," said Greg Drew, WebTrends CEO and president. "It's important that all marketers understand and embrace accuracy best practices, especially retailers who are the most affected. These aren't just marketing measurement intricacies; these issues can literally be the difference between making the right or wrong decisions."

Resources contained in WebTrends Accuracy Best Practices Kit are available for download individually on the company's site, including:

* 2006 Online Retail Holiday Readiness Report, http://www.webtrends.com/holidayreport06

* Best Practices for Accurate Web Analytics, http://www.webtrends.com/accuracybp

* Customer Success: Designer Linens Outlet, http://www.webtrends.com/designerlinens

* Click to Buy: The Essential Guide to Best Practices in eCommerce, http://www.webtrends.com/ecommercebp

* Marketing Performance Management: The Essential Guide for Web-Smart Marketers, http://www.webtrends.com/mpmbp

About WebTrends Inc.

As the acknowledged global web analytics market leader for more than twelve years, WebTrends is now leading the category into Marketing Performance Management. With an uncompromising focus on delivering the most accurate and actionable metrics, WebTrends enables thousands of web-smart organizations to easily improve campaign performance and web site conversion as well as build stronger relationships with their customers. With WebTrends Marketing Lab, the company stands alone in offering comprehensive, flexible and scalable web analytics as well as sophisticated, on-the-fly data exploration and customer targeting solutions for relationship marketing. Companies such as Microsoft, Ticketmaster, IKEA, Reuters, General Mills, US Bank and more than half of the Fortune and Global 500 rely on WebTrends as their trusted standard, not only for the award-winning technology, but also for a full range of consulting services and unmatched industry expertise across the broadest range of vertical markets. Through software and on demand options and a full range of data collection methods, WebTrends is unique in its ability to meet any analysis objective with leading data integrity, privacy and security best practices. For more information, visit www.webtrends.com.

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