Over the past decade, I’ve bought and sold many millions worth of online ads. When I ran ISPcheck, I had no real answer for prospective advertisers who wanted to know what results my customers were able to achieve. And when I became responsible for RackShack/EV1′s ad buys, I found that there was no easy way to measure ROI.
All I wanted to know at the time was how many visitors from TopHosts versus TheWHIR signed up. But as I’ve subsequently learned from Ted Smith at Peer 1, I should have been tracking customers throughout their lifecycle. If my cost per sale from Site A is 20% less than Site B, but the average account gets canceled 50% sooner, B would be a better long term investment.
A couple of weeks ago I convinced Ben Gabler at HostNine to install StatCounter, the better to look up new customers and find out where they came from, and which parts of HostNine’s website they visited before deciding to sign up. (I’ve also used Clicktracks and Google Analytics, which provide aggregated data on visitor behavior, but don’t allow you to drill down to each visitor’s click path.) It just occur to me that it’d be very cool if this functionality were built into ModernBill.
Imagine being able to generate sales reports that tabulate order amounts against referring sources? Or pinpoint content on your site that’s most-viewed by your most profitable new customers? Better yet, what if you could instantly compute the lifetime ROI from those $20 Google Adwords bids? Wouldn’t you like to know if customers who clicked on your “cPanel hosting” ad stick around 3x longer than those who came through “cheap hosting”?
HostNine already gives all of its resellers free ModernBill licenses, and being able to automate signup/provisioning is awesome. But what if every $19.95 hosting plan came with a business intelligence system that delivers up-to-the-minute knowledge on what website copy and ad venues work? Wouldn’t that be something?
AND, what if ModernBill could collect and publish aggregate, industry-wide data on how profitable TopHost-referred customers are, relative to those who came through TheWHIR? Having been on both sides of the table, I think that would really help both ad salespeople and media buyers.
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