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
Features
- Automakers Need to Become Better Conversationalists July 2nd 2009
- Affiliates can win in the media buy game July 2nd 2009
- Crowd-Sourced Ads: A Measured Response June 28th 2009
- Is the government coming for you? June 28th 2009
- Customer Loyalty: How to Earn It June 25th 2009
-
Loading ...
Latest News
- Readers weigh in on ATT, ad networks and the iPhone July 2nd 2009 ADOTAS — In our weekly poll, readers overwhelmingly said that [...] more »
- Hiring, promotions, location, partnerships and product news July 2nd 2009 ADOTAS — Internet Oldtimers Foundation, Jumptap, eXelate, Kampyle, The Digital [...] more »
- OPA large ad units unfurl across the web July 1st 2009 ADOTAS — The Online Publishers Association said a group of [...] more »
- Email spam in June worst since 2007 July 1st 2009 ADOTAS — MessageLabs Intelligence released its numbers for June, and [...] more »
- Joost becomes YouTube roadkill, starts layoffs July 1st 2009 ADOTAS — Despite reworking its technology to work in a [...] more »
- Ad networks, not websites, choked on Michael Jackson news July 1st 2009 ADOTAS — The news of the pop star’s death saw [...] more »
- StrongMail doubling down on social media, buys PopularMedia July 1st 2009 ADOTAS — StrongMail has announced that it acquired PopularMedia, a [...] more »
Spotlight
Trust Me – I’m a Professional … SEOADOTAS — At WebMetro we typically provide SEO Action Plans as part of campaigns. As the name implies, an SEO [...] more...
Reader Favorites
Layoff Tracker
- AOL - 700
- Apple - 50
- Clear Channel - 2,800 total (1,000 currently)
- Google - 340
- IBM - more than 7,800
- Joost - about 90
- MySpace - in June, about 720
- World Avenue - 30 percent of workforce
- Yahoo - 2,220 total, about 700 currently
- Zango - closes, about 90, in addition to earlier layoffs
Classifieds
Recent Comments
- Josette Davids: Great article and an amazing time was had by all at this event. I'm an
- Mike Poserina: There is also a tragic flaw rumored in Bing's ad placement engine. When resolved,
- Andy: Erin, Never mind the commenters who can only see the negative side of things. I thank you
- pkohler: We've also noticed that ads frequently adversely affects the performance of a Web page. As
