One thing to note is that many, perhaps even most, of our clients are not new to online optimization efforts in search or conversion, and have either already hired another company in the past or tried some best-practice implementation DIY style. Unfortunately, many of them claim they’ve been “burned” in the past, and we hate to hear that.

Time and time again when I ask, “What are you currently using to track your analytics?” the response I hear is, “Google Analytics, but I’m not really sure if it’s set up right or what I’m supposed to be looking at.”

Everyone assumes (based on what the industry tells us) that having Analytics is important. Everyone knows that the more data you have, the more information that can be extracted from it. However, what good is a bunch of numbers if you don’t know what it’s tracking or what this data means? It’s no surprise that many have a difficult time understanding their visitors and don’t know how to optimize their site. They’re driving without a map. They aren’t connecting the data to the people!

So, if you find yourself saying, “I’ve got Google Analytics, but I’m not sure what it’s telling me” here’s what to do:

1. Take the time to make sure that it’s properly installed and tracking. If you’re using Google Analytics, try the free SiteScan tool from EpikOne.  If you need professional troubleshooting, contact an Authorized Consultant.

2. Make sure that it is tracking the metrics that influence your conversion. Setup a goal to track the conversion funnel so that you will be able to look at the performance of your shopping cart or lead generation form.

3. Ask yourself a few basic questions and look for the answers to these questions in your Analytics such as: Where are most of my visitors coming from and what landing pages are they being sent to from these sources? What’s the bounce rate on my top landing pages? What keywords are they using to get to these pages from search? The answers to these questions will help you understand what is happening at the front end of the visitor’s experience on your site and where some of your highest impact opportunities for improvement may reside.

If you’re not currently using your Analytics data to influence your optimization efforts, you’re ignoring a wealth of insights into who your visitors are and what they are experiencing when they get to your site. At FutureNow, our analysts weed through data continuously to gain increasingly deeper insights into what is happening on sites and WHY it’s happening. We help clients continuously optimize their web site performance by understanding the way visitors are looking to buy, and helping map the sales process to the customer’s buying process.

Ultimately, seeing our clients get positive results is what gets me out of bed in the morning.  Once in a while, I get to see a conversion rate trend line that takes a sudden turn for the better, and heads up towards the clouds.  This type of “home run” conversion increase usually happens when a major conversion obstacle has been removed, or a test has been run with very profitable results.  It seems like a lot of folks, clients and consultants alike, are fixated on chasing this type of increase.  I can’t really blame them–who wouldn’t want a triple-digit increase in conversion rate?

But I’d like to share the kind of trend line that I really find sexy.  It illustrates that “base hits” do add up, and you don’t need the home runs to win the game.  For my final baseball analogy, I remind you that most home run hitters strike out an awful lot!

This is a screenshot from our OnTarget conversion rate optimization product showing the trend line for a hardworking client.  The time period is about a quarter, and as you can see, the rate of increase of the conversion rate is decidedly un-sexy! This would not make the cover of “Trend Lines Magazine,” were such a silly magazine to exist

But here’s 3 reasons why this un-sexy trend line report turns me on:

1. It represents a 31.55% relative increase in conversion rate
2. It illustrates the hard work of continuous improvement.  It isn’t sexy, but if the client keeps up this pace, they could double their conversion rate in less than a year
3. We estimate this increase is worth $202,907 a month to the client.  That’s almost $2.5 million over the course of a year…assuming they don’t do any further optimization! You can start to see how a continuation of this un-sexy trend could lead to some very sexy year-end numbers

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, as they say.  What may seem like insignificant gains can really add up if you keep up the hard work of continuous improvement.  So make sure you can calculate the value of your achievements, and don’t be fooled by boring-looking trend lines–as long as they’re heading up, they’re gorgeous!

Sarah from Seattle tweeted Bryan the other week, asking for some advice on how to use web analytics, and specifically “goals,” to help her with a nonprofit website supporting the Burke Museum of Natural History and Culture.  We thought it would be good topic to explore a bit, so we’ll start with the basics.

Even the most “nonprofit” website still has goals, and let’s face it, they’re still “business” goals. Keeping that in mind, I’m going to try to label some different types of business goals you could track in web analytics, and how to measure success.

1. Memberships & Donations – We won’t spend much time on this one because it’s pretty obvious.  Most nonprofits’ main business goal is to solicit memberships or donations.  And tracking them using web analytics is no different than ‘for profit’ sites.  The only caveat is that (unfortunately) human nature seems to dictate a longer consideration cycle for donations than, say, buying a fancy new smartphone.  Knowing this, it’s wise to track the content and micro-conversions that might lead to a donation (micro-conversions).  Think about downloading brochures and visiting particular pages about the mission statement, leadership, whether donations are tax-deductible, etc.
2. Logistics – For physical spaces like galleries, museums, and parks, there are goals related to logistics that indicate a strong likelihood of a visit.  These should be tracked as goals, and optimized on an ongoing basis.  Some examples here are downloading a map, visiting a page that lists directions and hours of operation, or even interacting with content related to “events.”  For maps, it would be great to track that a visitor had mapped from their location to the nonprofit’s location, as that indicates strong intent to actually visit.  For events, some sort of “add to calendar” micro-conversion would indicate strong intent.  Another great goal to track regarding events is getting prospects to sign up for time-sensitive “reminders” via email or SMS.
3. Opting In to Content Pushes – That’s an odd phrase, but my way of saying that nonprofits should be tracking goals where prospects allow you into their lives a bit.  Anytime a prospect opts to become more than an anonymous site lurker you achieve a portion of your business goal!  The Burke Museum has lots of great options already, so it would just be a matter of tracking goals related to: subscribing to their blog, signing up for their email newsletter, taking action to follow them on Twitter, and taking action to friend them on Facebook.  If you can’t track with 100% certainty that a conversion has occurred, track the action taken (e.g. clicking a Facebook icon) that shows strong intent.

Note that most web analytics programs won’t necessarily allow you to track all of these things as goals “out of the box,” but with some technical knowledge (especially JavaScript), perseverance, and creativity, they’re all quite achievable.

Calling all NPOs! What else are you tracking (or wishing you could track) as goals in your web analytics?

So the natural thing to do is trim non-performing words and phrases in order to increase the efficiency of your PPC spend.  And that’s exactly what one client did, except rather than increasing his efficiency, he dropped his sales by 30%.

Why?

Because, depending on what you sell, lots of people buy on their second, third, or umpteenth visit to your site, rather than the first visit.  Those visitors are building confidence in you as they move through their buying process.  But most systems don’t (or can’t) track user behavior over multiple visits.   So when those early and middle buying-stage keywords shown up as non-converters, they get cut.

The shame is that not everyone is able to track the following sales drop off, which may not occur for days, weeks, or months, back to the act of cutting those keywords.

Trading away Dennis Rodman as a Non-performing Player?

Would you trade Dennis Rodman for non-performance?  Of course not, right?  Rodman’s defensive stats alone tell the tale.  At his prime, Dennis was pulling down a truly astonishing 18.7 rebounds per game.  For reference, the previous year’s league leader in rebounds (David Robinson) averaged 13 per game.

But if the only stats you looked at involved scoring, you’d get a different picture. Comparing Rodman’s 8-9 points per game against other star players’ 20 or more points per game, you’d likely have been misled into trading Rodman, only to find yourself wondering why you started losing games and everyone else’s scoring stats went up against your team.

Think of your assisting keywords terms as the Dennis Rodman’s of your PPC campaign, except you’ll get all the assists and none of the off-court shenanigan’s.

There’s plenty of other ways myopic analysis can leading you astray

A recent eConsultancy post discusses how Google’s default window for tracking cookies can distort traffic data.  Left in its default cookie window setting, Google Analytics (GA) will classify visitors as “search”-driven traffic for six months following a single search based click through to your site – regardless of how they got to your site previous to that search or how they might arrive at your site following that search. Here’s an example of how this might skew your results:

Let’s say you’re driving traffic to your site via radio ads and that a listener, after hearing your ad, types your url directly into his browser.  Later, he comes back but this time, he types your business name into Google and clicks through on a displayed search result.  Following that, he visits your site three more times via bookmark or directly typing your URL into his site. That’s a total of 5 visits.

Question: How many of those visits would GA classify as search-driven?

Answer: 4 out of 5.

GA would count the first search-based visit and then all of the remaining 3 visits, despite the fact that the following three visits didn’t use search and may have taken place several months after the initial search.  Multiply that by all your visitors/visits, and you can see how your understanding of what drives traffic to your website might be distorted in favor of search. And under the impression that your traffic was mostly generated by search and not, say, your radio ads, you might be tempted to cut them from your ad spend.   Obviously, the same thing could apply with e-mail campaigns, magazine ads, etc.

Bringing Clarity and Orientation to Web Improvement Efforts

Any experienced Web Analyst or Website Optimizer could extend this list of “gotchas” and “classic mistakes” almost indefinitely.  It’s just not that uncommon for an uncareful analysis of data to lead online marketers either to analysis paralysis or sub-optimal optimization strategies.  Is it any wonder that 70% of businesses collecting wed data fail to act on their analytics data?

Obviously this issue has been central to Bryan and Jeffrey Eisenberg’s Web careers since the beginning.  It’s why they helped found the Web Analytics Association; why they published The Marketer’s Common Sense Guide to eMetrics, Call to Action and Always Be Testing; why they created Persuasion Architecture; and ultimately why they’ve built the OnTarget program.

The central theme amongst all of these issues is bringing clarity and actionable insight to Web improvement and online marketing efforts.  They are all answers to the business owner who feels confused or disoriented by the data he’s given and want’s a clear direction toward more sales/conversions and improved website performance.

So, if you find yourself struggling to make sense of your online marketing data, or frustrated by non- or counter-productive optimization efforts, ask yourself: are you giving credit where it’s deserved?  Or do you need help achieving greater clarity and actionable insight from your optimization efforts?

In fact, whenever I work with B2B and complex sales clients it’s a sure bet their website won’t:

1) Adequately address the multiple decision-makers and influencers involved in securing the lead

If a sales manager needs to justify a training expense to his CEO and CFO, wouldn’t it help to provide your inside champion with messaging and tools to help him make his (read “your”) case?

It’s usually good to have sections of your website and messaging designed specifically for those secondary decision-makers and influencers that need to sign-off on the decision of your inside champion.  As an analogy to the consumer world, would you really want to construct a website that sells engagement rings without providing content and messaging for the prospective fiancee?

2) Have planned (and tracked) conversion points for visitors who are early in the buying process

To keep with the consumer analogy, let’s say you’re considering having a pool put into your back yard.  Assuming that one of your local pool suppliers/installers had a website with valuable early and middle stage content, how many times might you visit their website before actually contacting them and becoming a lead?

• You might come to them early on when doing preliminary research regarding what type of pool you wanted, what size, shape, depth, etc you should look at, what kind of associated expenses and purchases are involved, etc.  Reading this stuff might take 3-5 or even 15 different visits.  How would you know if any of these visits are successful?  How could you measure or get a handle on your Website’s influence on such a buyer?I’d normally suggest having a goal for these types of visitors.  Maybe it’s downloading a pool planning or pools for dummies report/PDF.  Maybe it’s playing with an interactive pool builder or pool cost calculator.  Whatever it is, having a trackable (and helpful) event for these early stage buyers helps to track your Website’s success in attracting and engaging

• Moving to the middle stage of the buying process, you might touch the site again when you are closer to buying and constructing a short list of potential contractors/installers.  This time you might drill down into why you should do business with them and not someone else, reading up on their installation timelines, the skill of their install crew, etc.You may or may not feel like filling out a lead form at this point.  But a valuable and well-merchandised free download titled something like, “10 Questions to Ask Any Pool Contractor,” might look far more attractive to you – especially if you only had to provide a name and e-mail (rather than the lead forms more detailed info requests) to get it.

• And then at the late stage of your buying process you might look at the site a third time to fill out the form or get the phone number to actually buy the pool. What a waste if the pool website only had the lead form as a conversion point, without ever providing (let alone tracking) any of the early and middle stage downloads and conversion events.  Questions would go unanswered, and prospective buyers would go unengaged / go somewhere else.

Needless to say, the exact same patterns of behavior occur for B2B sites as well.  And yet most B2B sites don’t have defined content and conversion points for their early and middle stage visitors.  Your prospective leads are going to go somewhere to get their questions answered, shouldn’t it be on your website not your competitors?

3)  Have metrics/analytics capable of tracking visitor behavior over multiple visits.

While early and middle stage conversion points help a Web analyst/website optimizer get a better handle on a sites overall success in engaging early and middle stage buyers, it still leaves them guessing at the big picture, simply because they can’t track a lead generation or sale all the way back to that prospect’s first visit to the Website.  This can be crucial for gauging the real success of a PPC campaign.  Key words that might look unprofitable (because they target earlier stage buyers) might be spectacularly profitable – but only after the 8th (or 20th) visit to the site.  Unfortunately, if you can’t track visitor behavior over multiple visits, it’s difficult to get a handle on real – vs. false- measures of keyword performance.

While I love, love, love Google Analytics / Google Ad Words, this is exactly one of these tools shortcomings.  And it’s one reason that we insist that our OnTarget clients install our software in addition to GA/GWO: OnTarget can bracket visitor behavior through keyword entry and track individual visit behavior over multiple visits.  It’s a wish-list come true for us Future Now Persuasion Architects and can be a positive boon for our On Target clients.

So there you have it: start matching your B2B and complex sale website to the real complexity of your sale.  I’ll be writing follow-up posts with exercises and steps on how to do this, but in the meantime, would it be too forward of me to suggest you sign up for On Target?

- Elaine in the movie Airplane

Does looking at an instrumentation panel like this (picture on the left) create feelings of information overload? It does for most non-pilots I know.

Pilots on the other hand, quickly identify the primary flight gauges and navigation equipment.  They know what’s immediately important for flying the plane, and can scan across multiple gauges (rather than fixating on one or two of them) to develop a “big picture” of what the plane is actually doing.

Even more importantly, when they make a control input (like adding power), they know where to look to verify its intended effect (e.g., altimeter and airspeed).

Web Optimization is a lot like that.

Emotionally, many business owners experience that exact sense of information overload when looking at traditional Web Analytics.  No one has taught them how to assemble a composite picture of visitor behavior – what measurements to look for first, what to look at in combination, and how to verify that website changes worked as expected.

Flying blind becomes the inevitable result.

Yet rather than looking for a pilot or investing in flying lessons, many business owners buy into optimization efforts based on sophisticated data gathering capabilities and overly complex testing methodologies.

Why would they do that when they need more actionable insight and situational awareness, and not more gauges to look at?

Because flight instructors are in short supply.  And because this kind of sense making, as a so-called “soft skill,” has always been a more difficult sell than hard-core data collection and taguchi testing.

But those interesting in learning to fly their web optimization efforts have a viable option:  Follow Bryan Eisenberg’s free Webinars and get free flight lessons each month.

On January 15th, Bryan and Jim Sterne (considered the godfather of web analytics) will cover specific techniques to get a composite picture of visitor flow and the importance of looking at analytics through the lens of visitor intent.  Consider it a first, free flight lesson that can be followed up with Bryan’s recorded Webinars.

And for those that want more, I’d invite you to check out FutureNow’s OnTarget product as an affordable way to hire an “on demand” flight instructor for your web optimization efforts.

Marketers are often measured by the number of leads they generate. Sales people are measured by sales. Marketers don’t want to be held accountable for sales because they aren’t actually selling. Sales people criticize “poorly qualified” web leads. This all leads to a lot of tension.

The Consequences of “Low Quality” Leads

In fact, in a survey conducted by Omniture and InsideSales.com they set up aliases, such as John@xyzcompany.com, and completed the lead or request information form of 700 different companies, several different times. Then kept track of their lead response and nurturing strategies and found:

• Average email response time: 19 hours, 31 minutes
  *Optimum response time should be within the first hour

• Average phone response time: 36 hours, 57 minutes
  *Optimum phone response time should be within the first five minutes

• How many companies even responded?
  *Only 47.3 percent responded via email, and just 7.5 percent responded via phone!

Web-generated leads decrease effectiveness by over 6x in the first hour according to InsideSales.com.

Obviously, there is a huge disaster in the making. Marketers have potential customers who indicated some level of qualification to buy from your company and sales people who practically refuse to respond. In the end everyone loses out.

Five Steps to Solving the “Lead Qualification” Problem

1. Identify which sources of traffic generation are creating improved qualification rates and ideal close rates. You need to have the analytics and a CRM / sales workflow system that helps you close the loop from marketing all the way through the close of the sale.

2. Identify which offer types improved qualification rates and close rates. Understand your personas and what actually matters to them. Spend time testing and refining offers and generating additional content that you can prove matters to your prospects.

3. Improve your method of qualifying and capturing leads. Test your lead forms to find the right balance of questions that keep the quality and lead count up. Use a platform that enables you to capture web activity (pages/content viewed, tool/calculator interactions) and include that information in the customer profile for sales. This usually involves tagging content to identify its value in the sales and buying process. Content tagging is so simple when you use Persuasion Architecture.

4. Improve your method of distributing leads. Often times the delay in getting form submissions responded to is your internal process of routing leads to the appropriate sales person. This should never be a manual process considering you lose a leads effectiveness with in the first few minutes. Think about it, the last time you submitted a form on a site, when did you want the response to your inquiry. Now! So do your prospects. Use a platform that will automatically distribute leads based on the profile of the customer you have collected through their visit(s). Distribution is often based on geographic region, company size, product/service they are interested in, etc. Either you can have the prospect fill this out in a form or most of this information can be collected and gleaned by web activity.

5. Improve your lead response time. When marketing aligns with sales using effective content planning, integrating the customer buying process with the company’s sales process, distributing leads that have not been turned off by your processes (and horrendous forms), providing sales people with details that matter to them about the prospect’s interests and motivations and then distribute those leads effectively, their isn’t a salesperson who wouldn’t want to respond to that kind of “qualified” prospect right away.

Do you need help generating more qualified leads? We are here for you.

• Established his own (very successful) ad agency
• Launched the Dodge and Chrysler brands
• Hired and mentored Leo Burnett, creator of the Marlboro Man, Tony the Tiger, Pillsbury Doughboy, and many other advertising icons that made his clients rich
• Turned positioning into a fine art form half a century before Ries and Trout even coined the term.
• Helped establish Cadillac’s pre-eminence among early automotive marks
• Wrote “The greatest ad of all time,” as voted in 1949 – an ad still listed in the top 50 of Ad Ages Top 100 Advertising Campaigns.

Interesting, but why should you care?  Because MacManus’s – and by extension Burnett’s – approach was the yin to Hopkins’ yang, and because MacManus’s approach still works today.

And what was that approach?

In a word, it was to position the client while dethroning competitors in the minds’ of the audience. He wanted to create, in the mind of the public, a deep-seated prejudice towards his client’s brand.

If, in the words of the legendary Gary Halbert, the biggest key to success is to sell to a starving crowd, then MacManus aimed to persuade the consumer that only his client’s product would fully cure their hunger, and then wait for the more-cheaply-persuaded and much larger mass audience to get hungry as their individual circumstances dictated.  This would be in contrast to targeting only hungry people and then selling to them via direct mail.

And so the two poles of advertising continue on to this day, as is clearly seen in the following comments by an extraordinarily successful brand builder, Chris Maddock.  Chris was responding to my request for his opinion on Google’s recent attempt to track the effect of offline advertising upon online sales/conversions.   Here’s what he had to say:

Jeff,

I think Google’s traditional ad analytics are interesting, sexy, and certainly useful on some level.  But I think the program could also be dangerous, in that it could give some folks faulty impressions of what is actually happening – or what is right – because it assumes advertisers know things they probably don’t.

Let’s say a local hardware store runs some print ads, and compares the online response to another time they’ve run radio ads.  If the print ads were for a short term offer, and the radio ad of a more institutional bent, the print ad could drive more traffic to the website and have the hardware store owner thinking that print’s the ticket.  The reality in such a situation is that the print advertising is impressing and motivating a tiny, albeit palpable, percentage of the market to respond and go the the website, while the time-sensitive nature of the offer makes the advertising all but invisible to the bulk of the market.  On the other hand the radio advertising is likely creating greater long-term top of mind awareness, yet probably not motivating as many to go the website.  Mr. Hardware likely thinks that the radio campaign was less effective, when in fact most category dominant businesses are those that eschew short-term sales, offers, promotions and the advertising tools that make them work, while leaning on intrusive media such as radio and television to push long-term awareness.  Over time, radio could likely drive many more visitors to the website – visitors who will likely buy.

So my worry is admittedly Hamiltonian.  Years of interaction with average business owners and traditional ad people has revealed a startling blindness to things like buying cycles, differences in long and short-term strategy, and proper media selection.

So these new Google analytics are cool.  I just hope the good people using them understand what they’re trying to make happen, and what the numbers returned really mean.

-    Chris

Do you see how Chris picks up the standard of Theodore McManus, Leo Burnett, and Roy Williams?  Although I think it is possible to intelligently and rigorously compare media, I can’t help but agree with Chris’s larger point.  Creating a prejudice in the mind of the customer before they’re hungry is often a more effective strategy than trying to only target hungry customers.*   But it requires a longer time horizon.  So if you are only measuring on the short term, you’ll likely come to the opposite conclusion and then deem your position to be “scientific.”  It’s a perfect example of one of the deadly sins of Web Analytics.

So what’s your time horizon?  And have you implemented a measuring/analytics system that will enable you to measure accordingly?

* To be fair, there are certainly also times when it pays to directly target hungry customers, rather than engage in a lengthier branding campaign.  I’m not necessarily advocating one over the other; I’m arguing that you shouldn’t base your decision on skewed metrics.

I was responsible for the performance of those sites, and I was the de facto “web analytics guy” within my company.  But I wasn’t a full-time Web Analyst, and I had lots of other strategic and operational things to do.

Sound familiar?

When I did look at my web analytics, I often skimmed the information contained in my default “dashboard,” and rarely dove into the real data unless someone came to me with a specific question, or I had to produce a report.

There’s an obvious downside to that approach: The data in the dashboard is very “averaged out” and may lead us to miss more specific data points that we can leverage to do a better job.  But how do we get at the juicy money making data, while not spending too much time getting buried in minutia?

The solution? Scheduling in regular, recurring “data dives” to make sure you are not getting addicted to the dashboard view of your website.  Maybe start with once a week, and put it in your calendar. (If you don’t you’ll likely never find the time ☺)

Note: I am using Google Analytics in these examples because of its ubiquity, but they should all be applicable to any modern web analytics system:

Here are 5 tips to get you started:

1. Instead of the default “last 30 days” view of your analytics, try exploring different extended date ranges.  For example, I used to keep a rolling, 90-day dashboard.  Using the “timeline” function in the date selector tool is good for this.  So is selecting “date range” in the comparison dropdown menu; that way you can compare the same date range in the prior year, for example.
2. Make sure you assign goals and dollar amounts to every conversion on your site.  Most sites have a primary conversion like becoming a lead, subscribing, or purchasing, but micro-conversions are important, too.  Tag your primary conversion goal with your average order value, your lead conversions with a value per lead, etc.  For micro-conversions, figure out what percentage of your visitors that take that action eventually leads to sales.  If 1% of blog subscribers turn into deals, and the average deal is worth $500, then that micro-conversion goal value should be $5.
3. Explore the Traffic Sources reports to get a better understanding of your traffic “mix.”  Segmenting by traffic source can often yield quick, actionable insights.  Try looking at your organic traffic over the last 6 months, or your referral traffic over the last 3 months.  What does the traffic graph look like?  How well or poorly are they converting?  Has that KPI remained consistent?
4. Dive into your Top Content reports, and try sorting by “$Index.”  Note: This value is only calculated if you’ve assigned goal values and e-commerce revenue values across your site.  And believe it or not, there are ways to assign e-commerce values to your site pages even if you’re not running an e-commerce site.  $Index calculates the values of pages according to how often they’re accessed en route to a conversion.  It works kind of like the plus/minus point system used in the NHL.  If a player is on the ice when a goal is scored, they’re “+1,” and if they’re on the ice when a goal is scored against, they’re “-1.”  So if a page is very regularly visited by customers who convert, it will have a high $Index value.  It’s a great way to figure out which high-impact pages you should start testing and optimizing.
5. If you have site search, spend some time hooking your web analytics up to your in-site search, then dive headfirst into the very valuable data the Site Search reports can provide.  Are you able to see which keywords are delivering “zero results”?  What keywords are being used most often in search?  Are visitors who search more likely to convert?  Do they spend more per transaction?  Are there products are services your visitors ask for that you don’t offer?  Should you?

I know there are more handy tips around, but I limited this to 5 because I’m sure our readership has some brilliant ways they can share on how to do healthy and productive “data dives.”

And if this was useful, let us know, and maybe we’ll do a part two.

One final note:  Data diving is healthy and fun, but just remember to come up for air once in a while . Even more important, don’t let the stuff you learn from your analytics just sit there, turn your learnings into action and let’s move our conversion needles together.

No doubt, these are exciting times if you love Web tools. For the many folks who are dizzy trying to sort out conversion optimization tool choices, it might be a little frustrating.

In “The Interactive Marketer 2.0,” I made the case for improved optimization in interactive marketing and to think outside the campaign. I listed several steps to get started, including the first step: Get good at free tools, then pay for them. Tools aren’t the indicator of success, but having a process and the people in place to take action are.

The good news in this barrage of 2.0 goodies is that many believe we’ve finally reached tool parity in the Web analytics space. JupiterResearch states the following:

“Despite some small skirmishes over capabilities like video and audio measurement, the Web analytics feature race is largely over,” explained John Lovett, Senior Analyst and lead author of the report for JupiterResearch. “Leading vendors will forge ahead by making data accessible and actionable while expanding offerings into adjacent marketing technologies.”

I agree.

Several people have accused me and my firm of having a Google bias. (Full disclosure: FutureNow is an authorized Google Optimizer consultant.) This simply isn’t true. A sizable percentage of our clients use other tools like Omniture, WebTrends, and Coremetrics. Our policy has always been to work with the analytics/tool vendors of the client’s choice. For many who are just getting started or are experiencing a marketing budget squeeze, the free and robust Google offerings simply make sense. Others have found a need for features available in other tools, and we’re happy to help them use those tools better.

A tool is just that, a tool.

A tool doesn’t persuade your visitors to take action, nor is it exclusively responsible for a company’s success in optimization. So when a client approaches me requesting a tool suggestion I always answer the same. If you have a tool in place now, use it better. If you don’t, start with something free and get good at using it.

A free tool may be all you need. While certain analytics vendors offer what are considered enterprise-level tools, the free and lower priced solutions are typically labeled for use by small to medium-sized businesses (SMBs). Still, you’d be surprised at the number of large clients who are satisfied with free or cheaper tools. And, we also have several SMB clients that have more sophisticated needs.

Bottom line: don’t get hung up selecting a tool. Any business, no matter the size, that isn’t optimizing today can extract great value from any tool on the market today. The important thing is to get started optimizing and measuring more effectively. There are no more excuses, not even a lower optimizing budget.

Which brings me to my next point. How does one use a tool effectively? You must operationalize it. Your process must lead your team to take an action, e.g., make a change that you can measure. Lastly, you must be able to gain insight about customer behavior from the data. And, you must do this over and over again. Without those three things in place, no tool will usher in the success you seek.

You must always do the work of optimization. A better treadmill won’t, all by itself, trim your love handles. Likewise, a cheap camera in the hands of a skilled photographer will always take better pictures than one used by a clumsy newbie.

A tool is a tool is a tool. Pick one, learn how to use it effectively, and you’ll see optimization success. Then we can talk about what other tools you might need.

Then we can all afford drool worthy gas grills in our backyards.

*Cross-posted on ClickZ.

. .

Editor’s Note: If you’re buried in data and looking for a better process to keep your campaigns customer-focused, accountable and metrics-driven, contact us today for a confidential and free consultation.

A recent Advertising Age article, What All That Chatter Is Really Saying, talks about how text analytics can turn customer feedback into more meaningful insight.

Today it is marketers who are increasingly turning to text analytics to mine information from the mountains of customer data they’ve accrued from customer-service surveys, e-mails, online forums, hosted feedback sites and user-generated blogs.

“You can have someone read through 100 comments, and they will likely overstate the importance of some concepts, understate the importance of some concepts and totally miss other things,” said Tom H.C. Anderson, managing partner, Anderson Analytics. “For instance, if one person in 100 mentioned something, it would be missed. But if in 100,000 responses, 1% of people say the same thing, it could be noticed as important, like a new trend that’s developing or something wrong with a product that’s just starting to surface.”

So what are these companies learning? Unilever’s Dove brand is using text analytics to gain insight into who their customers are and what really matters to them.

In recent work for Unilever’s Dove brand and its Pro-Age marketing campaign, Anderson went digging for consumer insight on Dove’s own message boards, coding the text content against 43 different psychological attributes. Anderson found the vast majority of women who posted comments appreciated the realness of using older nude models. But they also discovered other common sentiments. For instance, most women over 50 strongly dislike the concept of “perfection” in beauty images. They also often talked about their mothers, grandmothers and daughters with concern about their portrayal in media. In fact, two in 10 women expressed real anger at how other advertisers portray women.

“Text analytics is a new methodology for us, and we were very pleased with the results and the depth of insight,” said Catherine Cardoso, associate insights manager at Unilever, in a statement. “The results were helpful beyond understanding reactions to our campaign. We also gained an understanding of what motivates people on discussion boards, which issues are most important to women in our target group, and how to create better products and messaging for them.”

Interesting stuff. At FutureNow, an important part of our persona development work is assigning value words to each persona – these are words personas may be typing into search engines, may use to describe their problems or the solution they are seeking, or may be words that appeal to their buying modality.

How do we determine these value words? One of our secrets is mining the text of customer correspondence, blogs, and live chat logs.

What are you doing to use your customers’ words to better understand who they truly are and what they truly want?

Gone are the rose-colored-glasses days of “Gee Whiz.” Return on investment is the imperative. Your bottom line depends on your ability to market intelligently. And your ability to market intelligently depends on the accountability you design into your online efforts. As Jim Sterne of Target Marketing wrote for us, “There is no such thing as a perfect website, there is only … change. Do not expect to ever reach the final version of your site. You want people to buy? Keep trying things and measuring the results.”The underlying beauty of a conversion system based on the principles of Persuasion Architecture lies in its accountability. For Call to Action, Jason Burby, Director of Web Analytics for Zaaz, offered these “number tactics” to help you shape the accountability of your conversion system.

Jason writes:

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