A framework for internet channel evaluation

The Internet is becoming an increasingly important and pervasive channel to market for many organisations. Despite its importance, and the continued pressure to justify IT expenditure, few organisations undertake comprehensive channel evaluation. Market leading evaluation firms provide technical and operational metrics for their clients such as the number of hits per page and site response times, but more sophisticated concepts such as user value and long-term business benefits remain underexplored in practice. In contrast, there is a growing academic literature on channel evaluation. Many frameworks and metrics have been proposed recently. This paper brings theory and practice together by synthesizing existing frameworks proposed by academics with those used by the market leaders in Internet channel evaluation. The resulting framework has two levels—a business- and a user-level. The framework is validated by Internet consultants, channel managers and channel users in three different sectors: retail, financial services and higher education. The framework is refined following the validation in response to the need for a simpler, more usable set of metrics. The outcome is a framework split into three “sets”. Set A constitutes the foundation stone of an Internet channel evaluation programme and consists of a core set of objective user-level metrics. Set B contains a further set of more sophisticated user-level metrics. Set C addresses business-level metrics, which enable the long-term contribution of the Internet channel to be evaluated.