Engage-Digital

IMPLEMENT AND CONFIGURE YOUR ANALYTICS TOOL PROPERLY

Bad data is worse than no data at all. Decisions made using bad data can have a negative impact on performance and revenue and that can often be worse than sticking with the status quo.

Thanks to Google and Microsoft a wealth of potentially valuable data about how visitors interact with your site is now available for free. Implementing Google Analytics or Microsoft Gatineau takes little more than ½ an hour and from the moment they are implemented they will start collecting data about traffic to your site including a range of useful metrics to help guide the decision making process.

However, to get the best from these web analytics tools they should be correctly configured post implementation. This involves filtering out unwanted traffic such as your own visits which can skew the data; setting up campaign tracking to understand which elements of acquisition strategy are the most cost efficient; setting up funnels which will identify which levels in the visitor journey through your website have the highest attrition points – knowing this helps focus attention on the most critical points and reduces the chances of wasting precious budget on design updates made on the wrong areas. Additionally setting up internal search tracking is a key part of understanding what visitors are specifically looking for when they arrive on your site, it cam also help inform you pay per click marketing strategy again reducing wastage.

Web analytics data is often the starting point from which wider analysis stems so making sure configuration of your web analytics tool is as good as it can be is critical.

This is an article I wrote for issue 176 of .net magazine in the UK.

I used to be Head of Online Planning and Buying at a London based media buying agency. I was there for 3 years between 1999 and 2002. In my first year our nascent online media planning and buying department experienced a 1000% growth in billings and some growing pains. Of course overall spend was much lower then than it is now as online media was also in its infancy relatively speaking.

Then in 2001 things slowed dramatically. At the time, growth in online media had been fed by new internet start ups with lots of VC capital looking to advertise to help grow their businesses and drive inexorably towards IPO! Additionally it was driven by a growth in interest from mainstream advertisers looking to dip a toe in and check the temperature.

Advertising is often considered a bellwether of economic decline as it’s one of the first things to be cut from budgets as belts tighten and when the slow down came in 2001 billings pretty much flat lined in our corner of the online media world, but other channels fared worse.

Part of the reason why online advertising may have fared better is due to much greater levels of accountability compared with other forms of advertising. Now consider the level of accountability we have with web analytics.

Back then in the early “naughties” web analytics was barely a twinkle in a webmaster’s eye, now it is proudly sitting at the boardroom table.

Not only can web analytics bring even greater accountability to on and offline advertising (if set up correctly) but it also completely opens up the level of business accountability for the website itself. It can be used to drive growth and cut costs through improved efficiencies across the whole spectrum of online communication.

If we are truly staring down the barrel of worsening economic conditions, especially looking forward into 2009 then arguably the worst thing any organisation could do would be to cut its web analytics budget.

Back in January I was working with a client that operates in an industry that is itself suffering but the saving grace for this particular client was their new website which had proved a great success in the face of a generally poorer trading climate.

If economic conditions deteriorate web analytics and the insight that it provides should be safeguarded and pored over with even greater intensity in the same way that normal business reporting and results are.