One of the reasons I love putting ads on websites and in e-newsletters is the accurate feedback I get on click-through rates and opens. My organization doesn’t do a lot of intricate marketing analysis, pretty much because I am the entire department in one person and I don’t have the know-how to do it quickly or the time to do it well. But click through rates, opens… those are things I can track and use.
I can’t understand for the life of me why these numbers need to be requested from sites where I advertise. Wouldn’t you want to provide these numbers to your advertisers as proof that your site draws in business and reason for them to spend more money with you? And yet I find at the end of every quarter (or two quarters if you are as behind as I am) I have to send emails to everyone asking for these reports. They almost always respond quickly, but this year I had someone tell me that they can only provide general reports for emails up until now because they purge their detailed numbers every 30 days. Really? You didn’t want to maybe share those numbers or at least write them down? This isn’t my social security number, it’s the response to my ad.
Is there an industry standard that I just don’t know about? Is this how the world works and I’m the wackadoodle for wanting regular reports? Or is there a better way to approach this?