What You Measure You Can Improve
Analytics is the core discipline of successful online marketing. Without it, we have no rudder to steer the ship (campaign) and are beholden to the winds of fancy, guesswork and whim. Analytics allow us to do what nothing else has done in the past – instantly optimize and tweak our efforts to reap the most benefit from any promotion or marketing campaign.
Google has provided their free tool, Google Analytics, for many years now. It is extremely powerful and effective, and is sufficient for most businesses.
Forget about waiting for months to effectively evaluate variations in sales or leads – we can make real-time improvements within days, hours, even minutes in some cases. With the analytics tool of choice, you can have instant visibility into everything that is happening with your website: where your traffic is coming from, how well your site is performing, what percentage of traffic is converting to leads, and how much revenue is generated – just for starters. Today, all analytics systems collect data from web users in the same manner – through Javascript tracking code snippets attached to the web browser, a.k.a. “cookies”. In the past, this tracking was accomplished through server logs, which proved to be tedious to manage and unreliable.
Web Analytics – What You Measure You Can Improve