Analytics and Business Intelligence
Analytics and BI provide insight! When it comes to your online presence, the facts are the figures and as the person responsible for your company you need to know what is going on. As the saying goes, ‘what gets measured gets done’ and this is what analytics and BI provide, they provide measurement around what is happening in your business. With all your virtual real estate you need to know the following;
traffic levels
conversion levels
bounce rates
click through rates
cost per click
cost per action
origin of traffic
effective key words
quality score
target markets
average spend
effective areas of your site
what your market is asking for and so on.
These factors plus many more need to be monitored and analysed, it’s the key to your business improving. BI basically eliminates guesswork – it provides empirical data to support future decisions it also provides faster answers to your business questions. I have said this before, but the simplest form of marketing is to ask the market what it wants and then provide exactly what it asks for. Well good BI will give you those exact answers that will then allow you to adapt your business to provide the most value back to your market.
From an internal perspective you will also be able to determine what activities need to be streamlined and what need improving upon, as a direct result you will improve efficiency by tightening up in the necessary areas and perhaps most importantly, BI provides you with the BIG picture, you can see where you have been, where you are and where you are going.
To gather this kind of analytical information there is a whole load of BI software and so forth out there, some excellent and you pay for that. However, I also appreciate that SME’s don’t always have the budget available for essential software and that is where our friend Google comes in. They have a service called Google Analytics that you can install on your virtual real estate and it will provide you with all the information you would need to help you move your online presence in the right direction. Couple this with the Google Webmaster tools and you have a very effective set of tools to tell you what is happening with your online presence. Now you may need someone to help implement and/or interpret the information you are receiving but these two tools, both of which are FREE, should be mandatory within your online marketing strategy.
Give me a call or drop me an email if you’d like to discuss this element of the jigsaw further – 0507198467 or strategy@maximumnetgain.com
