Web Analytics Wisdom 2006

Marketing Sherpa just released their e-book, “What I learned in online marketing in 2005.” They ask viewers not to cut and paste but since I wrote one of the snippets, I figure that I have the right to copy that one here:

Web analytics rock! We are now seeing customers wake up the fact that measurable is better. We also learned [in 2005] that Alexa data can be useful. We had a potential new customer who had been running an e-commerce site, for a very large company, with no analytics. Despite their lack of numbers, we compared their Alexa data to Alexa numbers from a group of our other customers whose traffic we really do know, and triangulated to create a Unique Visitor count. Using the e-commerce company’s actual sales and average order size, we computed a conversion rate of only .3%. When their new webmaster installed an analytics package, the company found that our guesstimate was within 10% of actual. Not only did we close the sale, but the CEO became a data head. They are now making decisions based on questions like, “If someone touches the “About Us” page, how much more likely are they to convert?

Robbin