CogBlog

Yesterday, I attended one of the MarketingExperiments.com online seminars. If you are not familiar MarketingExperiments (ME) is a group headed by Dr. Flint McGlaughlin that performs large scale online marketing experiments.

ME makes their money from subscriptions from online marketers interested in hearing the results of their studies. They also do twice monthly webinars which tackle a particular subject. Yesterday's was on the subject of marketing subscription websites via PPC (pay-per-click).

You'll have to subscribe yourself to get the details, but they did have some interesting conclusions. One important conclusion applies to all marketing, online and off -- an understanding of your customer's lifetime value is critical to determining what you can profitably spend.

One attendee asked how they manage all the data, analysis and management required when you have thousands of keywords. Their answer surprised me. They use a combination of some third party tools like GoToast for bid management, but for ROI tracking they prefer their in-house proprietary system.

This is exactly our own experience. There is just no substitute for hosting your own data. Most third party tools have to make compromises in the interests of serving many users, that are not necessary when you manage your own system. And, the ability to run your own custom queries or address specific client requests just can't be beat.

Here is a link to Marketing Experiments.