Don't hire me to do your web analytics!
As much as I love wrapping my mind around the results of a well-executed, carefully measured marketing plan, analytics are only a means to an end. The point is to make smart decisions, period. Better decisions than your competitors, one would hope. You ask questions of your markets (prospects, loyal customers, even listeners) and they answer honestly, unfailingly, in the form of statistics. That is, if you do it right and if you know how to listen.
If you're not making decisions with the metrics you track, you need to have a hard talk with yourself. Because if your metrics aren't actionable, there are a thousand other more important things you could be doing with your time, liked understanding your competition better, understanding your customers better, or better yet, understanding your competition's customers better! Here's one approach to help you get focused. Before looking at your web analytics reports, try coming up with business rules for the decisions you will make about each one. 1) Open up a spreadsheet2) Down the left hand side, list each metric you track for your digital marketing activities (PPC campaigns, email campaigns, social media sites, etc.)
3) Across the top, list columns: Business Goal, Result, Tolerance 1, Action 1, Tolerance 2, Action 2, Tolerance 3, Action 3.
4) For each metric, list the business goal that metric addresses and how you will know when you have achieved it.
5) For each metric, select appropriate tolerances and define the actions you will take if your results fall within these tolerances. If you think this takes too long, maybe you have too many metrics. If you are focusing on the critical few, this will be a quick and simple exercise that will help you focus your thinking and will make your report review go very quickly. If you have metrics that don't fit neatly within this template, this process should at least get you started thinking about how to make your metrics more actionable. You can take the same approach with each of your target segments. It may sound a bit mechanical, but it beats swimming in a sea of data and not knowing where to start. Start out with a stand-out product or service, add a genius marketing plan, execute and manage that plan with discipline. Every step along the way can be improved with great analytics.
