With the holidays upon us, and the results being less than expected, there are a lot of scared people out there in digital commerce world.  Consumers aren’t sure if they should spend, retailers aren’t sure if they will spend, and vendors aren’t sure if their services will be required.  Place vicious cycle here.

Online retail is still growing, just not at the breakneck speed of the last few years.  Internet Retailer reported that in October, online sales grew by only 1 percent.  Newsflash:  it still grew.  Every other type of retail shrank.  This doesn’t mean that times will not get leaner, it just means that digital sales are better positioned to ride out (and potentially thrive) in a time of uncertainly.

So here is my recession proof marketing tip, and it only really applies to websites that have deployed an analytics tool on their website.  To be honest, if you haven’t deployed analytics on your website by now, you might have missed the window of opportunity to be successful online.

TIP: Put some effort into taking advantage of what your analytics are trying to tell you, and not only will you be able to do more with less, you will be able to grow your business while others fail.

Using and profiting from your web analytics data involves a little bit of elbow grease, not an MBA.  (Note:  I have a degree in Comparative Politics and am no math whiz)  Many of the people we talk to feel that analytics is a purely bookish discipline that they will not be able to get into because they think of themselves as designers/catalogers/developers etc.

Not an excuse.

The tools you have deployed to monitor your web visitors are easy enough to use, they are just hard to take advantage of without some work and a good plan.  Without wanting to get into the ‘web analytics is easy or hard’ debate, I am of the opinion that getting web analytics to work is pretty easy, and getting web analytics to work for you is hard.

I try to write these blogs in such a way that there are always a few tactical takeaways.  So without further ado, here are a few steps that anyone with analytics and a website can take to better weather this economic storm.  I have also embedded a ton of links to relevant info to make following

1) Make sure your analytics is set up properly:  Validate your data to make sure it is accurate.  Run WASP against your deployment to make sure your tagging is done properly.  Compare your revenue results in analytics against your shopping cart.  This exercise will not only increase your confidence in your analytics, it will make it much easier and intuitive to use the tool.

2) Make a ‘top 5 list’ of the questions that keep you up at night.  Every online marketer has these questions.  How is my paid search strategy really doing.  Do visitors from outside the United States ever buy anything?  Do our blogs and forums help visitors convert?  What is the return on investment for my website technology spends? ( I could go on at length).

3) Open up your analytics and try to answer the questions.  I would guess that with a little bit of work you will at least see roughly how to get your answers.  Reading a few blogs and books will put you well on the way to getting the definitive answers you want.

4) Action on what your have learned to either streamline or grow your business.  Did you find out that you generate a bunch of European traffic but no conversions?  Try building a European shipping page.  Do you have areas of your search marketing spend that don’t make you much money?  Stop paying for it.

5) Repeat.  Questioning, answering and optimizing is a continuous process.  Plan on spending even one day a month on this process and you will learn a ton about your business as you are strengthening it.

This whole process is going to be a lot easier than you think it is.  The analytics community is very open and helpful, there are a ton of great free resources, and YOU ALREADY HAVE ALL THE DATA.

Have fun, happy optimizing, and feel free to drop me a line if you have any questions.  With a little hard work and the right questions about your business, we’ll see you on the other side of the recession.

Cheers (and happy holidays),

Jim