This post is dedicated to all marketers and business owners out there who are involved in online marketing activities, but could recognize themselves in the statement: “Webanalytics? I don’t need that. I base my marketing on gut feeling and experience.”

In the following in am not planning to say that you have to use webanalytics, but I will in short explain why it might be the most important part of your online marketing efforts.

Imagine that NASA sends a rover to Mars to look for water, but they don’t have any way of communicating with it after it has left Cape Canaveral. Instead they just assume that it will do what it was programmed to and that the mission will be a success. I think that everyone can agree that it is not a very good strategy.

The same applies to online marketing. If you send your website, PPC keywords and banners out into the vast space of internet without knowing how they are performing, how can you know that you get the results you want? Or any results at all?

What if you are in a circle of continuously failing marketing, but you don’t know it because you are not analyzing the information available?

Online marketing works and it works for everyone, you just have to do it right. And in order to do it right you have to know what you are doing. Knowledge is everything.

So what can webanalytics do for you?

Webanalytics gives an insight to user behavior and user experience on your website and the relation between online marketing and conversion. Conversions could for example be sales, subscriptions and sign-ups. Some analytics tools also include demographic analysis, which gives you information about who the people arriving to your website are.

In many ways webanalytics supplies the same information as a marketing analysis (questionnaire) would do, but with some key differences. Where as you with the traditional marketing analysis in most cases only get the results of the marketing some time after the campaign has ended, webanalysis is live. You will know right away if the marketing is working, or not. You also get some good indications why, something that will enable you to optimize the marketing to get an even better result.

Webanalytics is also a lot less expensive and time consuming than traditional marketing analysis. In Norway many companies outsource their webanalytics to an analytics agency. This is normally cheaper than having your own analyst and the agencies can often supply additional services like SEM, SEO, adserving and webdesign. They also have experience with a variety of products, websites and campaigns, enabling them to identify problems faster and to give a better analysis of the information.

In a world market that is still suffering from crisis in many sectors, not making sure that the money invested in marketing is giving the best possible result could prove to be fatal.

So the question is: Can you afford not to analyze your online marketing?

Alexander Dahl (Twitter: @alexander_dahl)

Tags: web-analytics

This entry was posted on July 13, 2009 at 12:41 pm and is filed under Digital Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.