What is it?

Analytics (the process of analyzing something) and Metrics (the baselines you create for analytics) is an incredibly overlooked step in website design, Internet marketing, and beyond.

Without analytics installed and interpreted, you don’t really know how successful you’ve been, and why. It can tell you why traffic to your website is down, or why a great article is not being syndicated, or why people add things to a shopping cart but don’t purchase. Most importantly, it can tell you how to improve things.

Where do you use analytics?

You can use it anywhere you have a need to understand the functionality of a process:

• website tracking, visitor trends, problem pages, and how to fix it
• social media tracking,where your traffic is coming from apart from search engines (though many website analytics programs show this information too, called referrers or sources)
• keyword analysis, the discovery of how people search for your product or service
• competitor analysis, analyzing your customers for successful (and not-so-successful) tactics to employ for your online presence
• shopping cart abandonment, where most e-commerce sites fall down, specifically used for uncovering problems with your checkout
• usability testing, where you have a live human being test subject that you ask questions of about your website (where it is normally used, but usability testing can be performed on any human-machine interface)

Testing testing testing! It’s what makes things work, right?

[insert image of various analytics methods and where they fit into the 7-step process.]

How do you use it? (The Application)

• To detect problems with your current site or campaign, both in design and message
• To allow you to track trends whether big (is our traffic increasing) or small (did that page rank yet?)
• To redirect the development of your website
• To measure milestones (did they reach the shopping cart?)
• To measure success overall, or of a particular channel or campaign

Why it’s so important (The Result)

• Significantly increases the speed at which you can implement successful tactics
• Increases call-to-action on purchases/leads by showing loopholes in navigation
• Slowly rebuilds your site in the image of what your CUSTOMER wants
• Allows you to test various marketing messages for effectiveness.

Example

There are many successful stories out there. Here’s one for Google Analytics (go to about 1:30 into video, if you like)

Pitfalls

There are no pitfalls. Analytics and metrics are incredibly important for online success.

Your call to action

With over 50 metrics campaigns of hard-won experience, we’re creative in our approach on how to increase your revenues and lead streams. Call us for more information.

• Review Google Analytics yourself