Heart Attacks and Web Analytics / OMS

Imagine that you are in for your annual physical.

Your doctor tells you that you are a heart attack waiting to happen. You are overweight, your cholesterol is high, you eat bad foods (i.e. nachos), you don't exercise.

You can choose to heed the advice of your doctor. You openly welcome Crestor into your life, you begin eating turkey breasts instead of bacon cheeseburgers, you walk three miles a day, you do the things necessary to minimize the risk of a heart attack.

Or you can keep going down the path you're on ... hoping that 0 or 00 won't come up on the roulette wheel.

Which brings us to Web Analytics and the Online Marketing Simulation, better known as "OMS".

Web Analytics is great, in that you are potentially given all of the information necessary to understand the health of your business today. You've got metrics (cholesterol) and multivariate testing (ekg). Maybe the health of your business isn't so great.

Here's why you need consider the Online Marketing Simulation (OMS) environment. If you decide to keep eating nachos (discounts and promotions), you increase your personal happiness (conversion rate), but you edge yourself closer to a heart attack (bankruptcy). The OMS environment allows you to play "what if" games --- what if I switch from nachos to boiled chicken, what is the probability of living a longer, healthier life --- or in the case of your business, what if you switch from free shipping in your e-mail campaigns and paid search activities to acquiring customers without discounts/promos, what impact will that have on your business, long-term?

With traditional Web Analytics, you're the doctor telling the patient about the potential for a heart attack.

With the OMS, we get to see all of the likely outcomes of our dietary and lifestyle changes.

Find a techie who can program the OMS environment for you, if you cannot create it yourself. If you don't have the resources and are interested in an Online Marketing Simulation (OMS) project, contact me here. Or the best solution of all ... encourage your favorite Web Analytics vendor (Omniture, Coremetrics, WebTrends, Unica) to partner with me on migrating this algorithm to their platform!