Fast food for the brain
Business Intelligence, that’s what I am all about. I like thinking up new ways to empower companies, customers and partnerships to function and perform more efficiently. I guess being brainwashed as a former long term McDonald’s employees has made me dream in terms of business processes and standardization optimization.

Although not being the most attractive place to work in terms of wages it sure has one of the most precise value chains and business models around. Their concept of product standardization to fit equal customer experiences around the globe is a staggering information warehouse, shared with each individual employee when starting a career in the burger industry.

Knowing that it takes exactly 1 ounce of lettuce on a BigMac or that the bottom half of a clamshell grill must be 350 degrees Fahrenheit might seem as superfluous information, but indeed it embodies the “best in class performance” that McDonald’s strive to achieve. Their value chain is fine tuned to deliver just the right quality pr $ fast food your demand dictates.

Online marketing standards
When thinking of what I can do as a new employee around here, I stumbled upon our cool product Headlight™ and started browsing. It certainly seems that value chain management in online marketing is what we live for in TraceWorks. Headlight™ supports just that, enabling you to connect your activities and measure your succes.

Knowing what Banners, e-mail campaigns, Google ads and natural referrers are creating revenue is important but knowing if you are still underperforming is even more important. Specific areas in goal setting, planning, execution and performance measurement can be off setting the whole value chain and result in catastrophic if not just worse performance overall. Headlight™ helps you avoid such disaster by delivering the ability to plan and quantify these essential activities. In a succesful company that reaches their goals and actually has a solid value chain, it is not always easy to asses which part of your organization surrounding online marketing is dragging the others down and in successful online marketing divisions it can be even harder to identify which areas of the value chain that could contribute to an even better performance.

Wondering about competition
I have always been wondering how they did it in Burger King. I was convinced that they must be worse at least in some aspects or that their value chain optimization would not be a valid parameter to benchmark against. I was sure that they pre-grilled their beef patties, served food that was too old or even picked up dropped food from the ground and served it; the holy grail of any McDonald’s. If you want to lose your job, pick something up and put it on a tray.

I was convinced we were the best, but I was at best making a qualified guess. Wondering about all these things is helpful, but does not present you with any motivation to improve your own operation. My point is that even though you have the most effecient overall value chain in your industry, you could still be outperformed by your competition when it comes to specific areas.

What if we could actually know what areas we were, albeit successful, then lagging behind compared to the competition, the regional market or in the general industry. What if online marketing could actually be compared to each other and one could motivate online marketing divisions to improve performance and precisely demonstrate which areas they were market leaders and which they were not. It leaves you with the same wonder that I once had flipping burgers while studying to for my bachelors in business management and information technology.

Help us help you!
What are you wondering about? I am sure that many of you in online marketing divisions around the globe wonder if you are actually the best at creating conversions off banners, if your ROI on PCC marketing is the highest, if you have the highest Click Through Rates or simply if you are most efficient at converting visitors to sales. My question is simple. If you could pick 5 to 10 questions about your industry or competitions online marketing ability, what would they be? What parameters would you like to benchmark yourself against in online marketing?