I would consider that question analogous to “Why is a ruler so important to a carpenter?” You might be able to eyeball four chair legs to within a centimeter without measuring them, and the chair will function. It may even temporarily hold you while it wobbles a little. However, after repeated use one of the legs is sure to come loose (Don’t you wish you took the extra time to measure what you were doing in the first place?).

The same concept applies to internet marketing without web analytics. There is no certainty in success, and failure is inevitable in the long run. Just to clarify: failure in marketing occurs when a marketing initiative costs more money than it brings in. According to Mark Stevens, CEO of MSCO, this type of failure is extremely common because many marketing plans don’t have the proper measurements in place. Stevens calls this lazy marketing, and it is just that.

Companies “know” that they need a website, and so they have one, but how many actually know how effective their site is? How many thousands of dollars are spent on flashy graphics and layouts that display countless products and enumerable services without knowing if they are influencing the customer in a positive way? Which online ads are actually bringing people to the site? Is your website keeping the visitors engaged long enough to make a purchase? Is Google sending people to my site? Web analytics can help answer all those questions and more.

With basic web analytics you can monitor:

- How many visitors you had over a specified period of time

- How long the customers are staying on the site

- How many pages the customer saw within the website

- Where the customer came from (did they enter your URL directly into the browser or did your banner ad work?)

- How many times customers clicked the links on your pages

- If you made a conversion and how (sell a product, get the user to sign-up for your newsletter, etc)

The best part about these metrics is that they will help you determine trends and adjust your marketing accordingly. If no one is coming to your site from the online article about your latest breakthrough from one PR firm’s media connections, then you know to spend your PR dollars elsewhere next time. If you are spending hundreds of dollars on 5 banner ads placed on 5 different sites, but only 2 of them are regularly driving traffic to your website, you can now cancel the 3 useless ones (60% of your current banner ad budget) and spend more on the sites that are effective.

Before implementing web analytics into an internet marketing strategy, the marketing department is dependent on guesswork and assumptions. With web analytics a marketing department can confidently explore multiple facets of online marketing including email marketing, search engine marketing, blogs and social networking sites (like Facebook and Twitter), ads on other websites, and more because they know they can determine how useful each facet is after trying it for a relatively short time period. Combining multiple internet marketing outlets is extremely important because without an integrated marketing strategy that leverages multiple customer contact points you may be missing out on easy business. If a customer sees an ad on a page they regularly visit, reads an article about your company that you strategically placed online, and also sees that you’re offering a deal on your Facebook group you are much more likely to get the desired conversion out of the potential customer compared to if you only used one of the three tools.

Let’s summarize that into the 4 main reasons why web analytics is essential to any internet marketing campaign:

1. There is too much uncertainty without it. Marketing without metrics is lazy and probably ineffective.

2. It saves you from wasteful and unnecessary spending in the long run.

3. It enables you to explore multiple facets of internet marketing with confidence.

4. It helps you understand how you are making conversions and helps you reach marketing goals faster.

Further Reading:

- I recommend reading Avinash Kaushik’s blog for a great introduction to web analytics

- Your Marketing Sucks by Mark Stevens – Reading this will make you wonder why you even asked this question in the first place. Stevens provides a common sense breakdown of why most marketing strategies fail, and how to do it the right way.

Tags: Web Analytics

This entry was posted on Thursday, December 10th, 2009 at 7:35 pm and is filed under Rise Interactive, Web Analytics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.