Late last year I traveled to Chicago to attend a well known industry conference called Search Engine Strategies. Having previously attended local Australasian conferences such as Search Engine Room, I was left wanting more. Local online marketing based conferences in New Zealand or Australia had not provided me with the in-depth topical discussion that I was looking for. A Google Rep pitching people on what benefit Adwords could bring to their business was boring to say the least.
Note: Watch out for Search Engine Bootcamp in New Zealand, this sounds like it has potential to rectify our local conference quality.
Topical Depth was really the sole justification for my trip to the USA. I wanted more down and dirty e-commerce geek talk. "I know what Adwords are, lets talk about how to multi-variant test them- here are some examples I have from my own e-commerce site that gets 100K uniques a month selling guitars" - this sort of stuff.
So, when I fronted up to SES Chicago - my expectations were high....
I was not disappointed. One thing that I did realise quickly, however, was that if I had no experience in web analytics my trip would have been almost wasted. Well not totally wasted, but a lot more challenging in terms of being able to partake and gain significant value from the conference. Almost every forum that I attended was fronted by industry experts who almost took it as a given that if you had a commercial website, you would certainly have a decent web analytics package. Meaning you had the ability to at the very least:
- Measure conversions for pre-determined goal actions on your site
- Segment conversions based on the traffic source
- Strong Search Engine Keyword data analysis functionality
- Integration with your sites internal search data (where applicable)
- Easily access ROI data for all traffic driving tactics (PPC, banners, email, SEO)
- Track custom data for each visitor (user names, shopping cart id's)
- Analyse visitor behavior with site overlay click path data
So this got me thinking about web analytics even more than I had been in the past, which was already a lot. The thing is that you need to always consider how you can measure the impact of all the hard work you put into your site. If you expect to improve the performance of your website, no matter the business model, you need a good web analytics package.
In New Zealand, my experience with a number of corporate organisations and their attitude to the priority of web analytics has been astounding. Web Analytics seem to be an afterthought. This is truly astonishing given the volume of potential data they have to work with. They have the ability to be very accurate in their online marketing strategic decisions, but no thanks, "I'm more interested in flash animation." It's plain crazy.
So to the very few number of Kiwis that read my posts - a genuine piece of advice: Whenever you plan to launch a website where you expect to make profit:
- Think carefully about how you can measure the success of your website
- Do this before you make any type of investment in development (especially in bespoke builds)
- Choose the appropriate Web Analytics package
- TEST the accuracy of your analytics regularly once your live
In terms of recommendations for what web analytics solutions are out there the options are endless. I currently have very regular experiences with Google Analytics (free), Clicktracks (a little on the expensive side for New Zealanders) and for my blog level traffic sites I use Clicky (dirt cheap - I love this application).
I am more than happy with all of these programs. It would be fair to say that with the exception of startup Clicky, the other two applications that I use have a widespread global userbase.
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