Remove the emotion from decision making. Typically decisions are made on a site regarding design, layout, marketing, promotion etc etc is based on “What someone thinks”.

Usually this “someone” is paying for the site or it’s development. In this scenario how do you REALLY quantify if a decision was a good decision or bad. Or even more specifically, how do you know if a site change was good for some visitors, in certain areas, on certain days or bad altogether?   Without Web Analytics - You really don’t.

Web analytics allow business & site owners to use DATA not EMOTIONS.

Every enhancement I show you you will be able to se what it affect it had to sales, to page abandonment to top paths, to conversions, and SPECIFICALLY to who these tactics worked best with and when. Think about how helpful this would be for newsletters, banner ads, and all marketing & promotion efforts!

Apply for a free Google Analytics account at GA Sign Up Page Once you get the code implement Google Analytics on your website in parallel with your favorite expensive analytics tool Get a comfort level for delta between the two sets of key numbers (you know visitors, conversions, page views etc etc) and create a multiplier (my tool shows visitors 10% higher and page views 10% lower than Google). You will use this multiplier in future to compare year over year trends if you want to. Cancel the contract with your favorite expensive analytics vendor and take that $50k or $100k or $200k and: 1) Hire a smart analyst for between $50k to whatever maybe your areas great salary 2) Put the rest of the money in your pocket.

Makes a lot of sense when put that way, doesn’t it? You can save a lot of money, just by switching to a free utility like Google Analytics. A smart analyst will be able to extract just as much value from GA than your old tool, in fact it should be much more.

Click Here to read my article on Increasing Conversions

This entry was posted on Sunday, July 2nd, 2006 at 5:42 pm and is filed under Optimize Your Site. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.