Helping analysts get across the optimization finish line.

Email has been flying furiously in the sales department all year regarding industry articles that sound a great deal like the first three quarters of our sales pitch.

Examples abound, but please find a quote below from an Eric Peterson penned document which is available on his fantastic Web Analytics Demystified website.

“Running tests is the final step in the process of doing web analytics, the point at which you provethat you’ve generated solid analysis against a well-implemented and well-validated data set. The proof is observed improvement as measured by your critical site key performance indicators, improvement that can be translated into incremental revenue or operational savings, a financial benefit that can be directly tied to your investment in web analytics.”

from “The Web Analytics Business Process”

Or how about this one from Shane Atchison (also a great writer) in an article from ClickZ.

“Improvement is continuous. As Japanese car manufacturers have demonstrated over the past several decades, continuous improvement makes products endlessly better. As perfect as you might believe your site to be, you know it can be just a bit better. Do that, and repeat. This is the beauty of optimization and why you should allocate budget for this upfront.” (from Think Your Web Site’s Perfect? Think again )

I could go on ad nauseum, but the moral of the story is that at least twice a week someone sends around a great article about the importance of understanding your traffic, and optimizing conversions accordingly. AND NEVER ONCE HAVE THEY SAID HOW

It’s dumbfounding that no one is offering proper best practices on how to actually make your analytics actionable. As referenced in an earlier post, most marketers don’t feel empowered or supported to make the most out of what analytics tells them. A strong ‘next step’ series of practices would help provide some of that incentive.

Obviously this is a self serving statement, as I happen to sell a tool that allows marketers the agility to be testing and optimizing conversion in an ongoing fashion. But I will fire the first shot in the war of transparency and give every marketer an under-performing traffic segment that you can be speaking to with a little bit of work.

First Time Visitors: They are expensive (read: keyword buys and SEO spend), they convert lower than your overall site average, and they probably make up over half your traffic in a given month. If you came up with a few different calls to action, targeted them specifically to first time visitors, and then tested their impact against the conversion rate of that segment, you will add thousands of dollars to your bottom line.

This week’s Call To Action: I encourage any readers to comment with things that they have done to take what they have learned in their analytics, and then action on it. This ‘open source’ approach to conversion optimization will help marketers and vendors both in maximizing the results of their hard work.

Related Posts

• I guess this is still selling…
• The importance of the ‘from name’
• Macleans and an edgy subject line = oops

Posted in Personalization, Web Analytics, eCommerce