When you look at your site wide conversion rate, what does it tell you? What action does it inspire? What would you do differently if your site had a 1% conversion rate versus your site having a 3% conversion rate? The answer to all of those questions is that there is no action to take. […]

Marketing Optimization relates to measuring success by marketing channel – paid search, display, retargeting, affiliate, email, social and then using that information to alter the marketing investment and the marketing tactics. When you see a low conversion rate for certain marketing channels you might decide to decrease your spending in those areas or change the […]

There are certain actions that need to happen before a visitor can purchase—visit a product detail page, add to cart, checkout, make it through checkout and then purchase. To decide on how to optimize an ecommerce website, it’s helpful to narrow down the options of what to work on first by focusing on these required […]

Expectations for web analytics is often misplaced. With so much data available, the answer to the question, “what is causing the site to make/lose money” must be in there somewhere. The truth is that the answer is not in the data to begin with. That’s not the point of the tool. It doesn’t give you […]

Learning from your customers to improve your website can be gathered in multiple ways. Each of the four quadrants in the diagram below provides different kinds of information, each important in it’s own way. In the Attitudinal half, you receive information about what people say they would do or what they say they want. A […]

Heretofore is my Law of Diminishing Marginal Utility Of Web Analytics Reporting: The larger the distribution list of your web analytics report, the less valuable that report is to any individual. Wherever there is web analytics there are big, watered-down reports being generated and sent to lots of people every monday – it doesn’t have […]

Web analytics tools suffer from a lack of constraint. With so many things that can be tracked, all of it is and served up all at once to the unsuspecting user who opens up the reporting interface. The amount of data creates a nagging feeling that will start to follow you around, telling you that […]

With so much data available with web analytics tools, one would think that businesses would become more confident in their understanding of themselves and their customers. But more data leads to just as much uncertainty which is described with a perfect analogy in this New York Times article. Here’s the analogy: “The larger the island […]

It’s said that the successful use of web analytics requires asking the data the right questions. So where do you get the right questions to ask? Some questions start with data and some questions end with data. Recognizing a trend or change in the data can lead to a good question. This requires creating key […]