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An eMarketer report on online coupons provides various stats that indicate growing usage among retailers and marketers as a marketing strategy to drive website traffic and sales. The usage, which became more mainstream with consumers beginning with the 2008 holiday season, is expected to increase in the coming years.
The surging usage should also be a boon to analytics practitioners.
Why? With capability to track campaigns in an analytics solution, practitioners now have a new medium to convince managers the value that analytics can play in investigating the response to an online buzz. With the explosive growth in social media, along with consumer interest in value, coupon campaigns are becoming a great value for marketers. Furthermore, smartphones have made sharing online coupons a benefit for potentially engaging customers with new offers and events. While analytics still has a long way to go for covering the entire tagging activity from a coupon to a site, analytics solutions can still help to correlate site interest to coupon campaigns.
The online coupon growth may also be a benefit for small businesses. Many business owners are leery of PPC, having been burned by overspending on keywords that lead to little actual conversion. Yet these businesses need another driver to their e-commerce site. Coupon creation sites such as twtQpon can help ensure that small businesses can announce tantalizing offers as tempting as those from large corporations.
And a li'l web analytics can help ensure the best results.
