How Web Analytics Can Make or Break Your Online Marketing

It’s almost impossible to over-stress importance of using a good web analytics software. Launching a marketing campaign, making changes to a website, really making any marketing decisions at all without first finding analytics data that backs it up, is just taking shots in the dark.

Web Analytics as a way to justify marketing decisions

Operating without analytics may work sometimes. You may generate returns on capital invested. But in the long-run, it’s unreliable, and not very smart—especially when there is a much more reliable and inexpensive way to do it.

Smart companies–like this one we recently worked with from Glen Burnie, MD–not only use rich analytics software, they MINE the data too!

When they first got it, they logged in feverishly. They quickly became familiar with the program, started finding trends, tendencies among their users, and they then began using that information to make their online (and sometimes their offline) marketing decisions.

Surprisingly, more than half of small to mid-size companies do not use any type of analytics. (source: eMarketer.com)

So naturally, the first thing we end up doing for many clients is to install, configure, and/or fix their current analytics tracking. It takes about a month to collect any statistically significant, actionable data from analytics, so we spend that month doing two other very important things, keyword research & behavioral analysis

These two activities are more than important questions like,

• How do users find content like mine?
• What information specifically are they looking for?
• Is it possible for me to show up on the first page of Google when somebody searches for that?”, and if so,
• What do I have to do to show up there?

It’s pretty easy to argue that mastering these early, foundational stages of a project can be the biggest success-driver of a good campaign.

Happy Marketing,

The WebMechanix

Learn how the WebMechanix can help your firm prosper online