It was Socrates who said, “The unexamined life is not worth living.” The very same truth applies to your internet marketing efforts.
If you fail to analyze and respond to your web analytics and usability – what actions people are taking or not taking when they get to your website – then your online strategy will suffer.
You’d be better off investing your money in a billboard.
By interpreting your online analytics, you can gain a level of understanding of your customers’ behaviors that traditional brick-and-mortars could only dream of.
So to that end, the real opportunity behind our web consulting lies in the potential to inform, track, and measure everything visitors do on your website.
Flagstone has more than 10 years experience analyzing data in software such as Google Analytics and Omniture, as well as parsing and interpreting that data at an executive level.
Once Google Analytics tracking scripts are installed on your site, I can help you to make sense of it all by looking at standard web metrics.
You can’t really start using web analytics until you’ve determined business objectives. Otherwise you are just shooting in the dark.
Good question. Web analytics is the process of understanding your online presence better so that you can optimize and improve your customers’ online experience (assuming you want that). This optimization can include increasing the number of visitors buying products, lead generations, registrations, phone calls, or anything you deem a success-related event.
Website analytics can seem complicated and intimidating, but Flagstone can help you see the forest for the trees. Because what it all boils down to is this: Driving more of the right audience to your website (by various offline and online marketing strategies), and making it easy for them to complete your website’s end goal (which is not coincidentally, aligned with the goals of your business).
In other words, get people to do the stuff that you want them to do.
This should be the aim of any company’s website — whether it’s a locksmith service or a political candidate, the goals are the same: getting the user to complete an action. The differences are in which actions a website deems a success.
KPIs, or “Key Performance Indicators” are a fancy way of saying, “the things you want people to do when they get to the website.” They should be defined differently for every website. For a blog, a KPI would be the number of people who came and read the post, and how much time they spent reading, if the users shared the post on a social network, or a white paper download. For an online clothing retailer, KPI’s are hard and fast: how many people completed their shopping-cart purchases in the men’s shoe sale campaign. For a bank, the KPI or success event might be an online application. For this website, it’s a simple request for more information.
All to often I hear about internet marketing consultants trying to snow their clients with KPI’s that don’t really matter.
Great. But only if those metrics were the ultimate goal. If not, it seems almost anecdotal, and of questionable value to the business.
Web analytics measure things a webmaster cares about, like page load times, page views per visit, and time on site. Marketing analytics, on the other hand, measure business metrics like traffic, leads, and sales, and which events (both on and off your website) influence whether leads become customers. Marketing analytics includes data not only from your website, but also from other sources like email, social media, and even offline events. Marketing analytics are also usually people-centric, featuring the prospect, lead, or customer as the unit of focus, whereas web analytics usually regard the page view as the unit of focus in its reports.
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Flagstone Search Marketing is a Google-certified partner agency based in Mountain Brook, Alabama. Flagstone’s focus is on well-crafted SEO & PPC campaigns, engaging social media marketing, cost-effective Wordpress website design, and Hubspot-certified services.
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