From hectic schedules to boardroom justification, many marketers are at risk of using metrics primarily as a report card rather than realizing the tremendous optimization opportunities that can be achieved. As 19th century poet Andrew Lang put it, “He uses statistics as a drunken man uses lamp posts — for support rather than illumination.”

True, many web analytic solutions on the market are just reporting tools. Marketers know which campaigns produced the highest clickthroughs, sales and profit, but aside from running the same top-performing campaigns through the same top-performing demand channels, the high-leverage steps that should be taken next are not always clear.

A new generation of analytics solutions focused on customer-centric insight is shifting the metrics paradigm, enabling marketers to leverage past performance and current customer activity across channels to drive future actions.

Take for example, a situation where marketers see a significant percentage of web site visitors dropping out of a conversion process at step four. In the old metrics world, marketers would move beyond reporting by running tests to reduce abandonment. Perhaps they’d find that a “satisfaction guaranteed” offer on this step most positively affects overall conversion rates. In the new world of customer-centric insight, marketers have much more information to holistically diagnose issues and prescribe remedies at a more personally relevant level. For example, marketers may track what visitors viewed after abandoning the process and on subsequent visits, combined with their past campaign responses and offline purchases, to reach highly defined audience segments with targeted offers and messages that incite the desired action.

At the end of the day, web analytics will continue to provide the numbers by which online marketing ROI is gauged and the prowess of digital marketers is assessed, but the new world of customer-centric analysis is not about numbers, nor is it channel specific. It’s about people. By understanding the behavior and actions prospects take across all channels, marketers can tune-in to the affinities and motivations of different audiences and have the insight necessary to overcome conversion obstacles and grow customer value.

A consumer-centric approach to analytics provides exponentially more opportunities to influence marketing results, where even negative visitor actions such as abandonment can be turned into positives by leveraging a greater understanding to drive customer conversations and build stronger relationships.