Interview: Tips for online marketing

Jim Sterne: Absolutely not. Every web site has problems. If they didn't I wouldn't be a consultant. But there are no hard and fast rules. There are dozens of issues relating to customer satisfaction but most sites are about the firm and not their customers. Public expectations are high but budgets can be limited. You have to find what will give you your best return on investment.

You specialise in testing the effectiveness of sites through so-called e-metrics. What should firms measure?

That depends on what you are trying to accomplish. Ask yourself what is most important for your firm at that moment, then break those things down into component parts and milestones. I consider myself to be a corporate therapist, but first I have to figure out what it is that each company is trying to accomplish. Many want to increase market share and beat the competition. They should ask themselves how will they know when they are doing that. For many sites the problems are that firms simply realised they needed a site and put one up before they were ready. They thought, "We have enjoyed a wild run of expectation. Let's put up a site before everyone else does."

Do web sites have to be complicated?

Not at all. Putting up a web site is ridiculously simple and cheap and some of the best have nothing more than contact details on them. If all you have is a homepage with these details then that's a lot better than having no site at all. Having said that, there are three golden rules for web sites. One: publish as much information as you possibly can. You cannot publish too much. Two: make everything available in three clicks. And three: do it within your budget.

How did you become an internet marketing and metrics consultant?

I have been in sales and marketing for technology products throughout my whole career. I was doing some consulting work when I tripped over the [web] in 1993. I was interested so I found three webmasters to talk to about it. These people, from Sun Microsystems, HP and IBM, were about the only webmasters around and had no idea what to do about online marketing. Then I went to the Internet World show where I saw the stand for Wylie, the book publishers. I asked them if they had any books on online marketing and they didn't. So by 1995 I'd written my first.

Have systems changed much since then?

Looking back on it, things have changed a lot. For one thing all of the screenshots in my original book have grey backgrounds. But as things changed so fast I released three different versions of that book. After eight years of writing I got to wonder how you could say the internet was such a wonderful thing, and how you could measure its success. So I decided to write a book on e-metrics and created the Emetrics Summit.

ABOUT JIM STERNE

Jim Sterne is the author of Web Metrics: Proven Methods for Measuring Web Site Success and will host the Emetrics Summit in London in May.

He has worked in marketing for 20 years and began his career explaining the VisiCalc spreadsheet system.