Here’s an example. Maybe you’ve recently deployed Google Analytics on your website and you’re wondering why you haven’t been able to leverage the great data that’s being gathered such as:

• Total Unique Visitors
• Pageviews
• Bounce Rate
• New Visits
• Traffic Source
• Average Time On Page

Read more…

The main takeaways from this survey are as follows:

Key Web Analytics Challenges Include Talent, Measuring ROI and Multi-Channel Support

Top challenges for online marketers include:

1. Difficulty finding and training top talent
2. Determining what actions to take based on their data
3. Maximizing marketing ROI through full funnel measurement and automatic multi-channel integration.

Do you find yourself or your staff spending large chunks of time developing programs and campaigns, delivering them across an assortment of online marketing platforms and then wondering if they had any impact?  It looks like you’re not alone.  The most telling statistic from this study is glaring proof that, since many of the emerging online marketing platforms are very much in their infancy, businesses are unable to track their success as illustrated below:

Marketers know which metrics are important to measure, however they are not capturing all the metrics they need to achieve their goals.  Eighty-two percent of survey responders believe ROI is somewhat to very important to measure, but only 30 percent of marketers can effectively measure marketing ROI!  Additionally, 86 percent of respondents think conversion rate is somewhat or very important to measure yet 27 percent of marketers cannot effectively measure conversion rates.

We all know measuring the success of offline marketing is difficult to nearly impossible but that’s because there’s no system available to allow for granular collection of metrics.  Conversely, online marketing offers so much data that we become overwhelmed by a never ending stream of seemingly valuable information .  They key, however, is knowing how to interpret that information and turn it into an actionable plan that exploits the repeatable successes you have unearthed.

If you’re going to “try” a mobile marketing campaign, social media campaign or viral video campaign, make sure you develop a system to track and measure success against your business goals.  Work smarter and not harder.

Have a great Memorial Day weekend!

Real time data lets you react to changes in your traffic as they occur. For example, if you had an article that hit the front page of a popular site like digg.com, you would see the traffic spike in Small Biz Insight immediately, along with links back to the sources sending you the traffic. Knowing this, you could make changes to your site or to the article itself to take advantage of the situation.

If instead you relied solely on a service like Google Analytics, it would be up to 24 hours before you even knew about the traffic, and by then it would be too late to do anything about it.

Here is a partial list of the real time information available to you in Small Biz Insight:

• Customizable dashboard
• Filtering and segmentation
• Twitter analytics
• iPhone version
• Goals and conversions
• Campaign tracking
• Support for Google Analytics tags
• Information on each individual visitor

There are two versions of Insight available – Self Serve for $9.95/month and Managed for $19.95 which will include customization and reporting services.  If you’re interested in learning more, please send us an email at info@thesmallbiznest.com or call us at (800)277-1187.

Google Analytics had always lacked the ability to take a more granular look at data and be able to slice an dice information on the fly.  According to the announcement on Google’s blog, GA has now become more powerful, flexible and intelligent:

Engagement Goals – Measure user engagement and and branding success.

Expanded Mobile Reporting - Track mobile websites and mobile apps.  Initial release will support tracking of PHP, Perl, JSP and ASPX sites.

Advanced Analysis Features – Remember when Microsoft introduced pivot tables in Excel?  This type of functionality was added to GA last year and now, you can filter the rows in a table based on different metric conditions.

Multiple Custom Variables – You can now define and track visitors according to visitor attributes, session attributes and page-level attributes.

Sharing Segments and Custom Report Templates - You can share the URL link for a report with anyone who has an Analytics account and a pre-formatted report template will automatically be imported.

Analytics Intelligence (I can’t wait to try this feature) – This feature is based on a new algorithmic driven intelligence engine.  The gathered information will generate alerts when there are significant changes in the data patterns of your site metrics and dimensions.

Custom Alerts – Set your own alert criteria and identify delivery mechanism.

Google continues to enhance the most powerful FREE tool on the internet and business owners should do their best to take advantage.