I spend every work day talking about websites and how to make them perform optimally. I am basically happy to talk about any website strategy. As a result of this I get quite a number of calls each month from various people asking for advice on website performance issues.
After quite a few years of doing this there is one thing that just AMAZES me- the disrespect people have for the data that their website generates. It's simply incredible.
Over the years that I sold traditional printed advertising I was constantly confronted with questions about how the advertising I was trying to sell would perform. The answer was always "there is no answer". Now the same people are asking the same question about their online advertising and they seem to assume that the answer is the same.
It's disturbing to think of the money that people are throwing away given their lack of knowledge around why online marketing and website's are so powerfully cost effective. Without this knowledge, websites actually have the potential to be even less cost effective than traditional marketing in the long run.
The knowledge that I am talking about is understanding how valuable analytical data is and how to use it. Do you ever notice articles in your local paper about 'Google privacy' and more recently 'Facebook being owned by the CIA'? Some might read these and think,"what the hell are people complaining about, Google provides a great service so who cares" or "CIA- thats crap, facebook is just a cool social network thats become really popular".
People who make these comments obviously dont value their websites data (if they have a website that is). If they did have a website and they did value their websites analytical data, they would understand that the data that drives Google and Facebook is ours,they value it tremendously and we have given them the right to use it. Alone, your little bit of personal data is useless. Combined with 30 million others people, your personal data is incredibly powerful. Powerful for Google and facebook, that is.
The same principle applies to any website. When you aggregate all your visitors data and pump it through a suitable website analytics tool, you have all the answers you need. Funnily enough a lot of this data should be from google, telling you about your visitors search behavior. This is where the answers are people! Use the data. Value the data- everyone else values yours!
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