Web Analytics 2.0: The Art of Online Accountability and Science of Customer Centricity

The folks who create dashboards live in a silo. They rarely go out and collect enough tribal knowledge to fully grasp the organizational actions behind the trends and patterns observed in the data being reported.

“What do I want Visitors to do on the website?”

you structure your site optimally, then search engines will index it correctly, and people will find you through search engines.

search engines, not you, determine the home page of your website. In Figure 3-23, you see the top 10 home pages of your website. Fix ’em, and you’ll have a colossal impact on your profitability.

This question applies for survey tools (compare commercial tools with free solutions like 4Q), for A/B or multivariate testing solutions (compare these solutions to the free Google Website Optimizer), and for competitive intelligence tools (compare these tools to Compete, Ad Planner, Insights for Search, and so on).

can grab the feed from CNN and get just the types of stories I want or grab the feed from my wireless router manufacturer’s website and know when the latest software patch has been released so I can keep my gear current.

Think of creative ways to engage traffic—what can you do to keep a Visitor for 60 seconds or more? Segment the Visitors who stay more than two minutes, and analyze the content they consume, where they come from, and so forth, so you can learn what you should be doing more.

Competitive Intelligence: Your New Best Friend In Chapter 8, I also covered the wonderful insights you can gain from competitive intelligence analysis—insights that are powered by having access to your data and to data about your competitors.

For many companies, measuring click-through rates (CTRs), cost per click (CPC), and conversion rates supplies enough data about their website. But if you run a sizeable paid search program, then you want to step beyond the limitations of your web analytics tools. You can do more advanced analysis either by pulling data out through your search engin