Are You Flying Blind? A Web Analytics Dilemma

Would you take a flight if half the flight crew was not present?  Not me.  I’d walk, drive, swim or find some other transportation before taking a flight like this.  Marketers need to think about this.

According to a recent marketer survey by Unica, 72% of respondents had no full time resource devoted to managing web analytics.  That’s almost 3 out of 4 respondents!  So, what does this mean?  In almost 3 out of 4 companies, there is nobody at the wheel of the website when it comes to watching who is coming and going.  What content is being consumed.  What is working and what is not.  Huh?

Think about it this way.  U.S. advertisers spend about $280B annually.  Ads generally include a call to action directing you to a website.  If not, the consumer goes to a search engine and finds your website.  Thousands of websites have been developed and continue being updated.  Imagine the investments in just web design and development alone.  How can marketers rationalize hundreds of billions of dollars in advertising and web development and not pay attention to an important set of metrics such as what is happening on the website?  How do you optimize content?  What is the basis of your decisions?

While the same survey found challenges with analytics packages and linking data back to business results, I find it troubling that marketers are not reaching out and asking for help in this area.  This is too important of a business function to not devote adequate resources.  Your website is often a first impression.  It might be the last impression but you won’t know if you are not managing analytics.

Marketers need to be intimately familiar with their web analytics and how web data relates back to overall marketing measurement.  This is a critical resource and one where companies need to be investing.  Marketing dollars continue shifting towards digital.  Consumers continue spending vast amounts of time online.  Without a pilot and co-pilot in the cockpit checking the gauges, you are flying blind.  Without the appropriate web analytics resources in place, marketers are going to throw more money at the web and not measure it.  There is so much data available and such a great story to be told with web analytics.

Here’s my advice to get started with web analytics:

1. Get familiar with your options – sign up for a web analytics group on LinkedIn and read the discussions.  Start learning.
2. Subscribe to web analytics blogs such as Occam’s Razor.
3. If you don’t have analytics on your site, install Google Analytics.  If you do have analytics on your site, get familiar with what it offers.
4. Begin monitoring the key performance indicators (KPI’s) on your website.  Choose the metrics that matter most or you’ll get lost in the data forest.
5. Ready to make an investment?  Hire an agency or consultant that has the requisite experience in analytics.  Or, hire an analyst to join your staff.  Another way to go might be to train an existing resource on using web analytics.
6. Start implementing changes to your site based on insights from your analytics.
7. Test, test, and test content.  Make updates based on what you learn.
8. Rinse.  Repeat!