Fall 2010 Release Send Feedback Acquisition Metrics Nearly every web site shares three fundamental web analytics objectives: acquire more qualified visitors for the lowest cost, convert these visitors into customers, and retain these customers for repeat business. • Acquire more qualified visitors From online marketing to offline marketing, the first step in winning new customers today is driving new traffic to your web site. But all traffic is not equal. You need to drive the most qualified visitors for the lowest cost. With WebTrends you can get a complete picture of campaign response, campaign conversion and overall return on investment (ROI). As a result, you can pinpoint exactly which campaigns are working and which aren’t. This chapter discusses acquisition in more detail. • Convert more visitors by analyzing click-by-click behavior Whether your web site goal is for visitors to register, make a purchase, or get technical support, conversion rate is a critical measure of your site’s success. WebTrends provides the most comprehensive navigation analysis in the industry, allowing you to track visitors click-by-click, identify confusing navigation and minimize abandonment. Isolating problem areas in your site and experimenting with improvements can have a big payoff. For more information about conversion, see . • Retain more visitors by segmenting those most likely to return Once you have persuaded visitors to become customers, you need to retain them as loyal, returning customers. It typically costs 5-10 times more to acquire a new customer than to keep an existing one. WebTrends allows you to evaluate the effectiveness of your loyalty campaigns such as customer newsletters by how recently and how frequently visitors are coming back and engaging in repeat business. Now you can measure whether or not you are increasing the average lifetime value of your visitors. For more information about retention, see . What the Business Person Wants to See Business people need to optimize the effectiveness of their marketing expenditures. They need to run campaigns that drive qualified traffic to their web sites. They make decisions regarding spending more money on tactics that work and reducing the amount on less-efficient areas. The decisions regarding the acquisition of visitors are some of the most important decisions that business people make because the process of acquiring visitors (such as creating ad campaigns, using marketing resources, outsourcing some areas) is expensive.