Last week  the Moscone Center West in San Francisco  was full of marketers and business owners attending Online Market World 2008. Unlike major conferences such as Adtech and SES, Online Market World is smaller and only its second year. Still, there were a number of quality sessions as well as the whole  gamut of exhibitors–from Verisign  to Google, UPS to the San Francisco chapter of the Digital Marketing Association. mobileStorm also attended; we had the honor to meet many business owners and fellow marketers who all are trying to learn more about how to stay relevant in the online marketplace.

Session topics included advice on online payment methods, website optimization, and crafting  effective emails. For a glimpse into the discussions, you can check out the OMW community at: http://community.onlinemarketworld.com/.

I attended a session put on by an organization called Market Motive, a community of Internet marketing experts who have a subscription-only site loaded with information on advanced Internet marketing, site optimization, SEO, and PPC. Kind of like an online school for Internet marketing. Sounds great, but at $299 a month the price is pretty hard to swallow for smaller businesses on a limited budget. At least I was lucky enough to snag a copy of Web Analytics An Hour A Day, by Avinash Kaushik, a Market Motive founder. You should too; for a lot less than Market Motive’s hefty monthly subscription price,  it gives a good deal of information for making your site a success.

The abundance of metrics afforded by Internet marketing at times makes it difficult to put your finger on success. Finding the right Key Performance Indicator, or KPI, to evaluate your online programs can be difficult. Is it the volume of visitors, or the time they spent on your site? A point stressed by John Marshall, ex-founder of ClickTracks, was the idea of \”unintended consequence.”  For instance, if your KPI is conversion rate, then driving too much traffic to your site can actually drive conversion rate down. Therefore, a positive thing like driving more traffic can result in a negative consequence like a lower conversion rate. When thinking about how you measure marketing success, I would encourage you to think about unintended consequence and where it may be manifesting itself in your marketing strategy. I know I will be!

For those who missed it this year, don\’t forget to look out for Online Market World 2009. Not only is San Francisco a great city to visit, but I have no doubt this conference will continue to grow and offer marketers and business owners extremely usable information regarding the online space.

Shaneli Ramratan, Director of Marketing, mobileStorm