Developing a marketing campaign for a business may begin with crafting a message, but using Web Analytics programs requires some additional ingredients.

Web analytics software programs used in marketing campaigns have provided valuable information to identify online marketing efforts and to target a segment of consumers. For instance, they can allow marketers to improve a cross channel campaign through follow-up emails once a shopping cart is abandoned, or they may allow for the delivery of ad impressions on other Websites to be calculated, surveyed and examined.

Virgin Atlantic understood the importance of its website in its marketing campaigns, according to IT Week. In 2006, The airline concluded to improve performance of the site it would attempt to track each marketing campaign to find out how they affected business. It had upgraded its WebTrends version, a web analytics software program, from 7 to 8 to get a better gauge of performance.

Today, web analytics and marketing campaigns are more associated. The plan of action for your marketing campaign needs to consider your web analytics software’s abilities.

Distinguish the parameters of the information from the web environment.

By this you need to identify exactly what it is you intend to track and what will indicate a success. Will you be watching for pageviews? Subscribers? How about the bounce rate? This rate, by the way, is the percentage of entrances on any individual page that caused a visitor to quickly leave the site.

Gather additional customer information.

Web analytics shouldn’t be your only tool. Merge other reporting systems with the web analysis. For instance, information from Customer Relationship Management systems or CRMs have been merged with web analytic data. Customer Relationship Management systems group information related to interactions a business has with prospects or customers. It may include surveys, sales history and forecasting, mostly information gathered offline.

Ultimately, stay cognizant of what your Web analytics software can do, how much of the technology will benefit your campaign and how the combination of the data with other resources can increase success.

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