Beat the Recession With Web Analytics
May 20th 2009 12:32 PM
Categories: 
The global recession has created a massive transfer of wealth, probably faster than ever before. You must adapt to the rapidly changing conditions better than your competition to survive. As more people use the web, survival increasingly depends on establishing an internet presence that understands, adapts to, and meets the needs of your visitors.
It does not surprise me that Cabela’s and Amazon, two of the most successful e-retailers during this recession, understand their visitors and deliver to their needs better than anyone else.
It also does not surprise me that Web Analytics is at the core of their internet strategy. The same thing applies for the most successful internet blogs. Why? Web Analytics lets you understand your online visitor behavior and needs, to adapt to their changing needs during the recession.
Here are five ways Web Analytics helps you beat the recession:
Spend Your Marketing Dollars More Effectively
Web Analytics measures which marketing campaigns are working, and which ones are not. This lets you determine the performance of each one of your online initiatives.
Transfer your marketing dollars and efforts into the programs that are working, and stop wasting money on those that do not. This effectively cuts out unnecessary costs, and improves your revenue.
Discover Your Most Valuable Visitors and Customers
A small proportion of your visitors perform the actions you desire, and contribute the majority of revenues.
Web Analytics tells you who these people are, how they behave, and what their needs and preferences are. In a recession, this is important as the number of visitors who spend a lot dwindle.
This is done through visitor segmentation, which allows you to isolate segments of visitors based on their behavior.
React to Rapidly Changing Visitor Behavior
During a recession, visitor and customer behavior drastically changes. Strategies and pitches that worked during better times are no longer feasible. With less money to spend, people are more frugal with their spending.
You must understand what they desire during today’s recession, which is far different than before, and deliver to them in a compelling manner. Web Analytics lets you understand what visitors in a recession are looking for and what they want.
Conversion Funnels and A/B Testing
It is much more cost effective to retain a current visitor/customer than acquire a new one, and a recession is all about being cost effective.
Web Analytics Conversion Funnels and A/B Testing lets you squeeze the orange to the last drop, extracting the most value out of your internet marketing budget.
Web funnels find the bottlenecks in your online conversion processes, allowing you to eliminate them and drive higher conversion rates.
A/B testing measures the impact of every single improvement you make to your website, so you can ensure your actions are moving you in the right direction.
Do you agree web analytics are essential, even more so during tightened marketing budgets? I would love to hear your views on the subject:
Can not agree more with you!
I advise to any Web Analyst feeling “endangered” in these troubled times to focus on the first point first: improving online media efficiency because it is where you can easily demonstrate major ROI’s and quickly make a difference.
So many companies still spend an awful amount of money in online campaigns and programs without really looking at the “real” performances (no, looking at CTR and CPC is NOT enough).
With the crisis, advertising budgets get chopped down. Still the Web gets more share of media budgets because it is a common idea to see it as a “cheap” medium (and more and more popular). “Cheap” should not mean that it should not be measured. On the contrary.
The other points are also essentials but in many companies it is in the online ad / media that lot of money is spent…and therefore where there is a lot to save.
Michaël
Hi Michael thanks for your reply, I’m happy you found the post useful. I think a key part of success for any Web Analyst is their ability to ’sell’ its importance.
In the end, a web analyst needs to be able to first ’sell’, and then prove the importance of web analytics.
Instead of going out and telling management ‘you need this,’ take a better approach, guide them through a path of thinking, with the ultimate goal to have THEM realize and state how important web analytics is to their business / bottom line, it’s the only way to have web analytics adopted throughout the organization, buy in from the leaders!
Ask some questions, what is important to the business, what are its current problems? Then, ask how would X help you (being able to measure online performance…) get them to say it. Only at the end of this process should you mention how web analytics solves the problems, not before!
The key is to have corporate buy-in, and I believe this is the most difficult part of a web analyst’s job. It’s almost as if the most important aspects of a web analyst have nothing to do with analytics, although being an exceptional web analyst is obviously a requirement.
Any thoughts?