Analyze, Strategize, Commoditize: A Case Study on How Analytics Spawned Successful Strategies
All decisions are not created equal. Specifically, strategic decisions serve as the foundation for all subsequent decisions related to a particular initiative. You wouldn’t build a house foundation on an unknown composition of ground materials. Similarly, you should not build a new web site strategy without fully understanding the composition of past efforts. Analyzing those efforts allows you to identify past mistakes and invoke future successes.
Websites without analytics suffer from blindness. Lacking clarity in your strategy can be detrimental to your plan and can lead you to costly and avoidable mistakes. The use of analytics to define business objectives and goals will aide in early identification of strengths and weaknesses to curb unnecessary work. Analysis is also needed to effectively monetize your site’s content. You can also identify and eliminate underperforming advertisements. Eliminating wasteful outlets taking up valuable real estate on your site allows you to usher in the construction of more profitable tenants.
The ever-evolving world of website participation has ushered in a wave of new industry challenges. These are the factors that drive the need to understand who the consumers are and to entice them to your site. Chances are one or more of these challenges have touched your organization:
• More and more consumer dollars are exchanging hands online. Does your company know how many potential hands there are in your market and how many of those hands have opened their wallets on your site?
• Online marketing spending often accounts for the largest line item in today’s budgets. Do your executives have the data they need to justify the money they spend?
• Who is visiting your site? Inquiring minds (otherwise known as potential advertisers) want to know.
The age old questions of Who, What, Why, Where, When and How must be asked about your website. Leverage the answers to these questions to make informed and effective strategic decisions. Save yourself and your organization time and hassle by asking questions and finding comprehensive solutions.
Web analytics help eliminate your question marks. Through analytics you gain peace of mind and increase your odds for success by making strategic decisions without uncertainty:
• Use analytics as a guide to measure the effectiveness of your marketing efforts such as Search Engine Optimization and Pay-Per-Click. Both are pricey and often ineffective because the targets are not fully understood.
• Reach out and shake the hand of your visitors through your site. Analytics adds individual characteristics to a faceless numbers and define specific genres of recurring visitors.
• One-dimensional understanding is replaced with a 360 degree perspective of online users. You can walk in your user’s footsteps and follow their paths.
• Prioritization is simplified when you use metrics data to identify areas of critical need. Don’t waste precious time squashing minor problems when a fire storm of problems is burning out of control.
• Engaging your online community increases customer retention and promotes customer loyalty. User generated content and polling strategies make your site interactive and encourage return visits.
• Monitor your user traffic to see if the volume of eyes is what you anticipated. If you then reorganize your content to accommodate those eyes, you will simultaneously succeed in increasing brand awareness.
• Track downloads then analyze the data to weed out content that is past its prime. User behavior is further understood through analysis of download patterns.
The range of possible data available can be overwhelming to someone unfamiliar with analytics. Another challenge many organizations struggle with is the ineffectiveness of untrained self-analysis of data. Once the data is obtained, it should be analyzed thoroughly by an expert to gain the highest level of feedback from the results. It is often difficult to find a one stop shop that offers all of the required analytic functions. However, there is infinite value in finding an agency you trust that can offer analytic software implementation, administration of the software and the ability to decipher the data to offer pragmatic solutions to the subject organization.
You want your decisions to generate value for your organization. Without employing analytics to supplement your strategic decisions, you are embracing unnecessary risk and uncertainty. Having more of your questions answered opens the door for more progressive innovation. By providing clear metrics, you will be able to gain valuable support for your decisions within your organization.
Stop the guesswork by applying analytics to assess effectiveness of existing strategies and test the potential of concept strategies. The use of analytics should not be limited to a one time fix for a specific problem. Broaden your vision to see the benefit of continually monitoring such key web site features as content and user paths. Trends are always changing and it is important that you stay on the forefront of change. Maintaining a reliable system of metrics allows you to avoid conflicting and overly risky strategies.
Implementing analytics deepens and expands your understanding of not only your website’s functionality, but of its potential as well. You are only limited by the knowledge you have and within the scope of your imagination. Extend the reach of your imagination with the increased knowledge and insight gained with thorough analytics.
Digitaria Engages In The Analytics Space With A Broad Range Of Clients
Most recently, Boot Barn sought our help in defining and executing their site-wide analytics strategy. We implemented a well known analytics software package and helped them use this tool to identify and harness key data. Specifically, we collected and analyzed the following:
• General and commerce site usage statistics
• Each query and parameter used in the advanced search feature
• Content categories and page names
• Link tracking
With this data, we were able to help Boot Barn define their KPIs, which in turn formed the cornerstone of their baseline analytics report. This led to further customization of the analytics implementation to ensure the proper areas were under scrutiny. The recommendations that followed the initial implementation included:
• Improvements to page names
• Improvements to content organization
• Enhanced link tracking
• Website redesign
Our analysis showed us that visitors were searching for brand names and navigating through deeply nested site categories to get to product pages. We also noticed visitors exiting the site before arriving at a product page. An analytics fueled redesign followed — we highlighted categories and brands on the homepage, and showed clearer category hierarchies in the global navigation. By identifying paths taken by our most committed visitors we were able to drive all site visitors to product pages faster improving Boot Barn’s overall rate of conversion.
Article Sponsor
More Features
Latest News
- Moskovitz, Rosenstein Leave Facebook To Form Venture October 6th 2008
- BlackArrow Raises $20 Million October 6th 2008
- Hakia Launches “Quality” Focused Interface October 6th 2008
- Context Optional Introduces Social Marketing Platform October 6th 2008
- eBay Fires 10% of Workforce, Makes $1.3B Worth of Acquisitions October 6th 2008
- Click Forensic Unmasks Weapon in Trademark Infringement Battle October 6th 2008
- Video Advertisers May Cash in on Fiscal Crisis October 3rd 2008
- Obama Issues iPhone App October 3rd 2008
Spotlight
HipCricket: SMS Is Still the Wave of the FutureADOTAS EXCLUSIVE — HipCricket, a mobile marketing company, has been changing the way advertisers think about reaching their audiences since [...] more...
Features
- Self-Serve Ad Exchange: This Century’s Strowger Switch? October 6th 2008
- Banners: Back from the Dead October 3rd 2008
- How To Earn Top Network Admittance October 2nd 2008
- Marketing Secrets of an Online “Lurker” October 1st 2008
- How To Produce a Social Ad That Doesn’t Suck September 30th 2008
Reader Favorites
Classifieds
Most Commented
- Can 314 Ad Networks Really Thrive? (8)
- Obama’s VP Pick Inauspicious for Net Neutrality (7)
- In The Time Of Recession, Is Branding Really Enough? (2)
- Study: Ad Network Use Soars (2)
- The Ad Revenue Waterfall (2)
- Facebook’s $100 Million Virtual Economy (2)
- Boomers Are Slutty Shoppers (2)
- Ralph Lauren Launches Mobile Shopping Site (2)
