Omniture Articles

The Site Is Dead: Long Live The Campaign

Here's what we believe: the website is dying. It may, in fact, already be dead.

And that's a good thing, because in order to be truly successful online, websites and site usability, as they exist today, must become subservient to marketing programs. When that happens, marketers will cease to see the site as a destination or entity unto itself and begin to see it simply as a collection of web content -- the process through which product messaging and selling is executed.

Think that's a radical approach to a system that has been working pretty well so far? Consider this:

-- The "media guys" and the "site guys" have separate budgets and separate fiefdoms, and each thinks in different terms, particularly when it comes to satisfying the customer.

-- Costs per acquisition are rising, yet there exists no single message driving customers from first click all the way through to acquisition.

-- Deep-linking from product or category specific keywords is becoming increasingly common, but conversions haven't significantly improved; we contend that's because the marketing program driving a visitor ends at the landing page (or doorway into the site) rather than at the exit (after a customer has purchased and is ready to leave).

-- Even the best IT departments cannot operate at the speed of marketing, so even if marketing departments wanted to manage the site as a series of campaigns in and of themselves, they may find it impossible.

So as obstacles mount and IT departments are unable to keep pace with marketers, something's got to give. We think that something will be the site itself.

A company that conducts a campaign for acquiring mortgage customers through Google, for example, will eventually have visitors from that campaign follow a "landing session" -- an entire campaign strategy from the minute a user sees the original link until the user fills out the mortgage application.

A financial services company offering credit cards through an ad on NYTimes.com won't send visitors to a landing page that then funnels them through the site's usual path. Rather, it will offer a sequence of landing pages -- again, a landing page session -- designed with that particular campaign, and that particular visitor, in mind.

Will some of the sessions have common denominators -- the shopping cart, perhaps, or the privacy statement? Absolutely. What will change is that marketers will become ever more deliberate in choosing the pieces that they assemble for visitors to see.

When the site stops being a "store," where everyone sees the same thing once they walk in the front door, we believe marketers will feel empowered, able to move forward again, without being stymied by technical obstacles. We'll stop having one group of people buying the keywords and another group filling a desire. CPA will be measured from first click all the way through to a converted customer.

Gone will be the days of the quarterly site release. The investment in a site will be driven on a campaign basis. And ROI will reflect these changes and once again be on the rise.

In future issues of our email Newsletter, Selling by Design, we'll debate this idea in more detail and offer concrete examples of what we mean.