Challenge
A top parenting website sought to build on its audience lead by bolstering community features on the site and emphasizing its advertising offerings. Its new CEO realized that managers would need a different set of site performance metrics to supplement the e-commerce reporting that traditionally drove decision-making. But these metrics were provided by disparate, unconnected systems and often existed in a vacuum, with no budgets, forecasts, or historical comparisons available.
Approach
An Empirical Path consultant worked closely with senior managers to understand the drivers of business success and craft a number of Key Performance Indicators. KPIs were prioritized and divided into four sets based on how frequently managers needed to review and respond to each.
Empirical Path drafted daily, weekly, monthly, and quarterly reports – including both data tables and charts to show results and variance from plans and prior periods – that synthesized multiple data sources so that managers could review KPIs as a group during standing meetings.
Next, Empirical Path created the company’s first-ever detailed forecast of site usage and advertising sales in order to establish a baseline for performance to be compared against. Empirical Path also configured reporting systems, including Omniture SiteCatalyst, DART for Publishers, and Salesforce.com, to automatically generate outputs to feed into the synthesized reports. Finally, Empirical Path trained client finance staff to quickly create and distribute synthesized reports for decision-makers.
Results
The client successfully completed its transition from a website dominated by e-commerce to one with substantial social participation and the majority of its revenue from advertising sales.
Decision-makers use the reports designed by Empirical Path to understand which sections of the site warranted efforts to increase visitation and engagement in order to provide the most valuable advertising inventory. They also monitor which advertising products needed adjustments in pricing and sales emphasis in order to maximize revenue per pageview.
The company was able to fund acquisitions of competing vertical community websites to cement its leadership in the category. It has now transitioned to a business model relying entirely on advertising.
See capsules of other Web Analytics or Media Industry projects.
| < Prev |
|---|
