I don’t often have the need to read about — let alone want to celebrate — an Office of Management and Budget (OMB) regulation change. Thank goodness there are more interesting things in life.  But last month was an exception.

In case you missed it, federal agencies conducting social marketing and public education campaigns with a web component now have an improved opportunity to analyze how their campaigns are working.  Thanks to the OMB, Federal websites can deploy “persistent cookies.”

Not to be confused with the insatiable Cookie Monster within us all, “persistent cookies” are actually pieces of text that are stored by a web browser on your computer’s hard-drive.  Software can synthesize this information about your computer’s web activity and that of other computers.  By tracking cookies, collectively, across all computers, we can assess how a marketing campaign is working digitally and determine how to improve our marketing efforts.

Web analytics is a term used to describe just that: the measurement and analysis of digital channels (websites, social media and email) for the purpose of understanding and improving an organization’s online user experience.  It is, nowadays, an online marketing best practice, compulsory for commercial marketers. It should be equally important for federal and social marketing campaigns.

While commercial marketers worry about how they fill their online shopping carts, Federal agencies and social marketing campaigns have an even bigger worry.  They need to worry about their progress in moving people towards behavior change: a long and complicated journey. Relative to the shopping cart, there may be many more “clicks” along the path of building awareness, changing attitudes and generating action.  It’s good to know what’s happening along the way, address what works and doesn’t work and make sure that every visitor is at least a little closer to your behavior goal, not frustrated by a failed website visit or disappointing experience.

More specifically, if you are a Federal agency using web components as part of a social marketing and public service campaign, what exactly might you learn with web analytics?   Here’s a just a short sampling:

· You can track the trend in overall penetration of a social marketing campaign.  Top-line web analytics metrics like website visits are a proxy for the reach of a campaign (especially one that consistently mentions web addresses in the creative).

· You can learn what parts of the website are getting used, how they work to further engage people or result in them leaving the site.  Web analytic reports show common entry and exit pages (where people start and end their visits) and the navigation paths in between.

· You can figure out which media or outreach channels are working for you by driving traffic to the website and ranking their effectiveness. Web analytics helps you to compare visits and conversions from, say, social media versus email, and within the social media channel Facebook versus Twitter. (You can even track offline efforts that use vanity URLs to drive viewers to the website.)

· You can find out how to improve visitors’ experiences and drive them beyond the home page into key areas of the site.  For example, the web analytics technique “split testing” (where different visitors are shown slightly different content) can compare the impact of specific messages and improve landing pages.

As a case in point, Noral used our public health client’s web analytics data to measure the number of monthly visits before the campaign, then compared subsequent efforts against that baseline.  The software’s reports also helped us choose — based on metrics like bounce rate, time per visit, and pages per visit — the best landing pages for web surfers who encountered the campaign online via its syndication feed (RSS), social media profiles, and search engine marketing (SEM).  To validate the campaign’s investment in pay-per-click (PPC) advertising, we performed custom analysis of web analytics data to confirm that visitors enticed by search engine ads were engaging with website content as hoped.

If you’re not using web analytics, the OMB has given the green light.   A good first place to start is by checking out your options for web analytics software, such as Google Analytics, WebTrends Analytics OnDemand, and Omniture SiteCatalyst.  But after you‘ve read all you can about cookies (and had a few  to digest), check out Noral’s web capabilities and our GSA contract to deliver web-based marketing services to Federal clients.