Repost: Using Analytics to Find Out What's Working

I definitely believe in the value of analyzing whatever marketing data you can get your hands on, so here is a post from Digital Street that covers the basics of analytics. 


Posted by Michael Herman

The combination of lightning quick internet speed and analytics means your company can now safely ‘fail fast’. This is another way of saying your business can quickly find out if an idea is good or not rather than shooting down potentially good ideas before giving them a chance to breathe. It also prevents your company from spending a small fortune on an ill-fated marketing campaign that yields nothing but frustration and large bills.

New Data

Previous analytic methods involved data sets with just 10-20 variables and less than 100 cases. So-called ‘static’ data was taken from isolated disks and computers with assumptions made on the small amount of information available. The result was inaccurate data overall with very few software tools available to analyze and store data. In the modern era, millions of variables and billions of cases are used to form a more accurate picture with unstructured data such as tweets and emails analyzed by complex software.

Numerous organizations have used analytics to improve their business. For example, Best Buy found that over 40% of its sales were accounted for by less than 10% of its customers. As a result, Best Buy re-organized their stores to suit the specific needs of these loyal customers. eBay analyzes the auction history, bidding history and overall feedback of millions of users to detect fraud. All of these companies used analytics to discover what was working and what wasn’t.

Patience

You should already know the basics of analytics. Google Analytics is an excellent free resource that allows you to analyze statistics relating to visitors, activity and bounce rates. One major mistake made by businesses is to watch changes taking place in the gross figures only. Knowing that your conversion rate is at 1% means nothing unless you know how it compares over time. If it’s down from 2%, it is bad news but if it has risen from 0.6%, a 1% conversion rate is excellent news. Definitions and parameters must remain constant or else you will never have accurate measurements.

The beauty of analytics is if you find that your conversion rate has dropped, you will have sufficient data at your disposal to rectify the situation if necessary. If your landing page has a high bounce rate, you know that it doesn’t contain information deemed relevant by visitors and needs to be changed. You can look at individual pages to discover statistics relating to specific web copy and products. When it comes to fixing what is wrong, you need to be patient lest you also accidentally remove aspects of your site that were working.