Internet Marketing - Matt Bailey [247]
Ultimately, this needs to be measured in terms of profitability. Although conversions are a great measurement, the total spend of your business needs to be included in the calculations of the marketing and delivery of your business. The true calculation of profit is the ultimate measurement of a successful campaign.
Chapter 20
Week 17: Measure, Measure, Measure
Although you’ll spend these final two weeks focusing on analytics, I’ve touched on analytics throughout—and for good reason. The importance of analytics needs to be ingrained from the beginning of a project. Many marketers have a negative impression about analytics because they have developed opinions based on bad information. They have no idea of the gold mine of information that is available to them through their website analytics or marketing analytics software, and as a result, most view analytics as an expensive and time-consuming way to develop a report with unique website visitors, time on site, and pages viewed. When marketers understand how to use analytics properly, it changes everything.
Chapter Contents
Monday: Understand the Terms
Tuesday: Establish Goals
Wednesday: Evolve from Data to Analysis
Thursday and Friday: Develop Segments
Monday: Understand the Terms
In many cases of online marketing analytics, there is misunderstanding of the terms that are used and what they really mean in measurement practices. For any organization to communicate properly, there needs to be a consensus on what the words mean and the information they carry.
Page Tagging
Page tagging is how most analytics data are collected. Simply put, in order to get analytics for a website, a piece of code needs to be added to every page of the website. This is both the easiest and hardest thing to accomplish for many websites. Depending upon how your website is built and what type of management system is creating your pages, it may be easy to add the code to part of the programming that will naturally reproduce the code on every page of the website. Some websites use multiple templates, and the code needs to be added to each template in order to ensure proper data collection.
The first step to gaining the best information that you can get from your analytics is verifying the code throughout every page of your website. If you do not have the code on every page, your analytics will be incomplete. Unfortunately, analytics programs do not inform you if they are installed incorrectly or missing information. It is usually a physical process of verifying the code by hand or by software that will check every page of your website for the code. All the code does is send visitor information to a server, which collects that data and reprocesses the raw data into understandable information. I like to call those the pretty charts and graphs. The code interacts with the visitor’s browser and acquires information such as IP address, operating system, browser type, screen resolution, pages, and files requested and other data. All of this information is sent to the web analytics server, cataloged, and then repurposed to show the activity in some kind of relevant report.
Accuracy
In the world of analytics, there is no such thing as accuracy. John Marshall is one of my good friends in the industry and was the founder of ClickTracks, one of my favorite analytics programs for many years. I asked him once if his creation was more accurate than other analytics software, and he stopped me with his answer. He said, “We don’t sell ourselves as being more accurate than our competitors; we like to say that we provide less inaccurate analytics than our competitors.” That explained the dirty little secret of the world of analytics in only a few brief moments.
You see, the collection methods utilized by analytics programs are a very inaccurate science and actually full of many holes. Visitor activity can be reported different ways by different programs, simply based on the rules of interpreting the data. All analytics programs interpret the raw data differently, which is why no two analytics