Website analytics: most marketers still clueless ?

01/26/10 05:54 AM

To most marketers website analytics are the abyss and who can blame them. Too often website metric reports are a jumble of data that could mean most anything. In order to truly leverage website metrics the website dashboard should tell a story and clearly identify areas of opportunity.

A lot of companies have invested a lot of money in web analytic software yet few companies have people who can interrupt the reports and provide recommendations. If IT is reading the report it's hard to make recommendation without having a marketing person analyze the data and compare it to brand/business objectives. A marketing person needs to understand the data and then apply the data against quantitative marketing objectives to determine if your online strategy is working.

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Marketing professionals need, more than ever, to showcase the value of their expenditures. Even though we are seeing hints of a fragile economic recovery accountability will still be a driving factor in decision making. With ROI often the ultimate metric determining what stays and goes in the marketing department, marketers need to be sure that their ROI methodology is sound not only in its ability to evaluate the past, but also in its power to predict the future.

Let's look at why some metrics don't tell a complete story:

1. Time on site: Sure you want people to spend a lot of time on your site but in an age of multitasking and time stressed consumers too much time on your site could indicate that they had trouble finding the information they needed and had to "dig" into your site to find it.

2. Click-through rate: means nothing today especially when you compare your CTR to your bounce rate.

3. Unique page views: Again means nothing because it is estimated that as many as 40% of consumers clear cookies from their computers on a regular basis.

What you should be looking for?

1. Cost per targeted action: What was the cost to get people on our site and do what we wanted them to do? (i.e. request more information or view pages that lead to conversion)

2. Did my site fulfill your needs? You're not going to get this from your web analytics. You need to have an additional service like CRM Metrix that can quantify site satisfaction of your audience.

3. Keyword ROI: Is the money I'm spending on keywords providing a good ROI or is it just sending people to my site who spend little time?

4. Bounce Rate: Is my bounce rate high and if so why?

If you're a marketing person you should be asking for a digital dashboard that tells a story, you shouldn't have to spend a lot of time analyzing it yourself. A good digital dashboard tells a story that can be understood by everyone in the organization. The key is to take that dashboard and consistently look for new areas of opportunity that can increase conversion. Sure engagement is important but engagement that doesn't meat business needs is farting in the wind.