Web marketing metrics are revenue metrics, analytics related to them lead directly to increasing sales. And they're dynamic, even small changes you make, for example, in your website's homepage text or in the AdWords that you purchase for sponsored links on search results, can lead to rapid and significant changes in these metrics. To provide a context for web metrics, we begin with a quick overview of web marketing in general. For our purposes, marketing is defined as the deliberate, measurable process of first creating and then continually increasing positive awareness and interest for a specific brand, product or service offering within a target demographic. By a target demographic, we mean a group of people with common characteristics, such as all being between 18 and 35 years of age, being from the same country or geographic region, etc. Because marketing requires effective use of limited resources, marketers seek to focus their efforts on groups whose members are much more likely than the average person to be willing to learn about the product or service offering, to buy it, and ultimately, to become high value, recurring revenue customers. If you open a pizza restaurant in Trotters, North Dakota, and hang a sign in a window, you can be pretty sure that any Trotters resident who wants pizza, will buy it from you. Your nearest competitors will be over in Sydney, Montana, 51 miles away. Here, your target demographic is people who live in Trotters. Trotters only has 770 residents, and it's a good bet that in a town that small, everyone will find out about a new place to eat within a few days. Your new customers' switching costs, the time and trouble of going somewhere else for pizza, in this case driving two hours to Sydney and back, will be so high that if your pizza's even half decent you are likely to develop a loyal following of repeat customers. Now imagine that you open your new pizza restaurant in a town with a population of 6 billion. That sounds good. Lots of potential customers. The bad news is that when you open, there are 70,000 other pizza restaurants already open on your block. As well as many other restaurants and stores competing for attention. Welcome to web marketing. You should try to identify a much smaller group within that 6 billion, your target demographic that are likely to want pizza, and more importantly, are likely to want your pizza. A group of people much more likely than average to respond favorably to your unique message, communicating how you are different than the other 70,000 pizza places out there. Your message of difference is your market differentiation. The idea is to match your market differentiation to a target demographic. Imagine your points of differentiation are that you offer strictly vegetarian pizza and you've developed a special freezing process shipping box, and international franchise network that allow you to ship your frozen pizzas anywhere on earth and have them arrive within two days. Okay, so maybe your ideal target market would be people known to love pizza and who have a strong preference or need for strictly vegetarian food for health, cultural, or religious reasons. And who do not currently have vegetarian pizza available locally to them where they live. And who can afford a luxury product that will include shipping costs. And who are planning special meals for the future, rather than just being hungry for a pizza right now. Of course, people are not already neatly sorted out by all of your ideal target characteristics. You often need to work with categories that have been predefined by others. These are the so called, demographic categories, using available categories, you find target demographics as close as possible to your ideal target customers. In this case you can define a target demographic of people who have incomes high enough to afford luxury goods and who live in remote geographic areas far from pizza restaurants. Sometimes more specific demographic filters are available. For instance, you could certainly advertise to the 724 thousand people who like the vegetarian community on Facebook. And from other sources you may be able to buy names and email addresses of people who, as part of their job description, often purchase luxury meals for others, such as office managers, enterprise sales representatives, party planners, etc. What do you think would be some other job titles that might be associated with ordering luxury pizzas for delivery in two days? What are other creative ways you might be able to use to identify members of your ideal target market using demographic data?
