Reach Customers Online

Building an Online Optimization Culture

“At first blush, one could conclude that site owners suffer from either arrogance or ignorance. Marketers either believe they don’t need analytics because they are smart enough to trust their gut (arrogance), or they don’t know what to do with them (ignorance). The Web analytics community has been split on this issue. Eric T. Peterson, Web analytics consultant, argues Web analytics is hard, while Google’s analytics evangelist Avinash Kaushik argues Web analytics isn’t hard. This still doesn’t sufficiently explain why more than 50 percent of marketing professionals fail to integrate analytics into their marketing efforts.”

From GrokDotCom. This is a really excellent discussion about the possible reasons businesses rely on instinct rather than hard data to make business decisions.

I believe it is culture: people start and run businesses based upon interacting directly with customers, in person and on the phone and by email. The quantitative skills required for optimization and testing typically are found in the accounting department and possibly a marketing research department. Most staffers don’t have an analytic background and so don’t necessarily think in terms of data and testing for marketing materials. They get that through customer contacts. The quantitative research function, if it exists at all, is part of business planning, not necessarily day to day marketing, which is what this article argues is needed.

From my client experience, aside from the cultural issues, the big problem is what to measure. I tell clients to start first with what they want to accomplish. It can be a small goal, for example, to get a site visitor to click on a button or signup for email. Or retweet their tweets. That tells you what to measure. And also to limit what you measure to one or two things to start. And to keep some sort of log file so you can measure results, recheck your assumptions and goals, and all the good stuff that comes from tracking your online marketing.

But this process does not have to be terribly complex. Indeed, complexity in measuring online marketing is the kiss of death. The best results come from incremental changes and optimization based on testing different ways to incent and motivate people to interact with your marketing.

Photo courtesy of Jon Clark’s Flickr stream.

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