What is a ROME score?
The ROME (Real Online Marketing Efficacy) score quickly and comprehensively summarizes your company’s current Internet marketing effectiveness. With a proven track record of automating customer product discovery, support, and sales, online marketing also yields substantial cost savings versus traditional marketing channels. Propelling sales with Internet marketing techniques is a complex undertaking, and to achieve winning results takes a critical examination of several combined factors.
A ROME score is compiled by analyzing a number of diverse elements, including: web presence (website); aggregated page rank (SEO optimization, Google analytics, Alexa traffic scores); overall use and integration of Internet technology for business development / strategy (meeting business marketing goals, use of ad networks); and customer experience (meeting user needs, use of social networking). Each key element is examined and the resulting scores from individual categories are compiled into an overall site rating. The synergy these elements collectively produce is essential to maximizing marketing results; consequently, this approach reveals what areas of your campaign must be improved to achieve greater results.
Factor 1: Website
A website forms the foundation from which all Internet marketing arises — you can’t have a productive online marketing campaign without one. All sites are not equal, though; many are outdated, use outmoded technology, or poorly balance business and marketing goals with user experience. Users’ interaction with online information constantly evolves, and great care must be taken to remain compatible with emerging technologies — for example, a site that is a few years old may work terribly when someone uses a smart phone to view it.
We generate Factor 1 in your ROME score by analyzing how a website integrates current technology, information architecture, design elements, and accessibility. Because it’s so fundamental to success, it forms the bulk of your overall score.
Factor 2: Third-Party Site Analytics
How traffic-ranking institutions such as Google and Alexa score your site is a secondary but significant element in maximizing overall marketing effectiveness. High traffic / search ranking is not the silver bullet many people suggest it to be. Because of diminishing returns, once a respectable level of traffic is being driven to a site, greater returns can be realized by focusing development on other factors.
We generate Factor 2 in your ROME score by analyzing and weighing two very distinct metrics: first, your Google Site Rank, and second, your Alexa Traffic Rank.
Factor 3: Primary Site Analytics
One of the more commonly undervalued elements of online marketing campaigns is how a business uses the data that their website is regularly providing. Every web interaction produces substantial information about the user. In most cases, it silently accumulates on the server and is never properly mined for its valuable content. These data can be analyzed in a number of ways and can deliver great insight into where existing efforts can be improved so as to present new directions for increasing customer conversion / sales. This analysis will reveal where users are finding your site and what they are trying to accomplish while there (as well as how quickly and easily they are able to do so), and thus enable us to address and refine any shortcomings with greater ease and cost efficiency.
We generate Factor 3 in your ROME score by studying your site and its source code to determine if you’re utilizing tools to collect clickstream data which allow for user registration, random surveys, and potentially CRM functionality.
Factor 4: User Experience
What’s the ultimate point of this whole process? Why have you built a website, driven traffic to it, and begun examining how users interact with it? Clearly, the point is to successfully win new business by convincing prospective clients that your company is their best choice for the products and services they seek. Often, company insiders dictate the user experience and many can inadvertently ignore the greater goal of designing with an intent to convert visitors into paying customers. Although employees and owners are very knowledgeable, they are not necessarily representative of the visitors you’re trying to engage. This is why client observation and engagement need to be at the center of decisions regarding site optimization.
Factor 4 summarizes the overall convenience to your customer based on how your website is currently architected to support their needs. One metric we use to generate this part of your ROME score is determining if your site allows users to interact with or track information across a broad number of social technology platforms such as Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, Digg, and Delicious.