Online Marketers Listen Up. There’s Gold In That Data!

Note: This is a cross-post originally from Matt Lillig’s personal blog, Matt is the Senior Analytics Lead at Yahoo!

It happens way too often and it’s painful to watch.  Extra revenue being flushed down the toilet because online marketers aren’t taking a close enough look at what their web analytics reports are telling them.  They’ve spent the time to properly implement their tracking solutions but they aren’t spending enough time in their solution looking for insights.

For online marketers, there could be a whole slew of reasons as to why they’re not paying closer attention to their web analytics data:

• Perhaps a new rep was hired and he/she didn’t realize they had the data available
• Perhaps they have a 3rd party agency managing their data for them
• Perhaps they don’t know how to analyze the data and need a consultant
• Perhaps they’re just lazy and don’t care

While there’s always reasons why one hasn’t looked closely enough, the bottom line is that you have to pay close attention to what your data is telling you so that you can capitalize on it!  Web analytics data isn’t just a bunch of numbers on a page (though it may look like it to some).  Web analytics data provides you with insights such as: who your target audience is, where your roadblocks are, whether or not you’re turning a profit, and who you should be spending your online budget with.

With that said, I want to introduce you to a good example of an online marketer who hasn’t been paying close enough attention to their search engine referral report data.  And because of this, they’re missing out BIG TIME on driving additional revenue to their bottom line.

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Secret To Winning With Web Analytics? Starting Right!

The following is a guest post from Avinash Kaushik.  Avinash is a leading voice in the field of Web Analytics through his blog Occam’s Razor, speaking engagements and best selling books.  He is also the Analytics Evangelist for Google and the Co-Founder and Chief Education Officer at Market Motive.

There are world class analytics tools, available for free, from Yahoo! and Google that will get you more data than God ever intended you to have. Yet, perhaps shockingly, a vast majority of decisions website owners make are based on faith and not data.

Breaks my heart.

After wiping off my tears, and meeting with many leaders of businesses large and small, I have come to the realization that the problem is not that we don’t have enough data, or even enough of the right type of data. All that exists.

The problem is we are obsessed with data and not about the business.

And that has to change. Now. Especially if you want to take advantage of this the most glorious channel on the face of the planet, the Internet.

Here’s the secret to creating truly data driven organizations. Forget about the data!

At least at the beginning, and focus on the business and answering existential questions about your business.

There are five things you need to identify to start your journey right. In this post I’ll explain what these magical five things are, and share a concrete example with you. It is too easy to use a ecommerce website example so I’ll set myself a hard task and use as my example the website of the National Council of La Raza (NCLR). It is a non-profit website. If I can apply the framework to them, you can apply it in a jiffy to any other type of website!

Let’s rock and roll. . .  here are the first five steps. . .

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