Web analytics – core to any web strategy

The internet offers business –to-business (b2b) and business-to-consumer (b2c) marketers an endless array of applications to target, promote and measure success of prospect and customer engagement. The proliferation of new tools is interesting – and frankly hard to stay on top of.  But in some cases, some of the best products aren’t even being used. In countless conversations with prospects and clients I am amazed at how many of them gather web analytics data (whether from web server log files or page tags) but don’t do anything with the data. If your website is an important part of your business, you owe it to yourself to look at your analytics data.

How is your website traffic trending? Which geographic regions are you getting hits from?  What are your primary traffic sources?  What’s the average time spent on your best and worst pages?

Knowledge is power and even a cursory understanding of your web traffic will let you better target your key markets and create content that (hopefully) will improve your statistics. Other than the (minimal) time to set up the analytics software and logging in to review it every once in a while, what do you have to lose? Maybe... potential business.

How much do you try to control your message?

In a previous life, I worked as the Director of Marketing for a software company. We’d been bought and sold a couple times by multinational corporations. Given our competitors were having a field day spinning our story to their advantage, I kept strict control on the message that we pushed out.  As an engineering company, we had a lot of bright people – admittedly busy, bright people –- that I could have leaned on to contribute to a corporate blog. I opted not to at the time.

My decision today would be very different. While ensuring a corporate policy on blogging would be in place, I would recommend a blog for all technology companies. My reasoning:

• The conversations will happen (either on your blog or somewhere else). Wouldn’t you prefer to be aware of it?
• Your customers are on the web....you should be engaging them in one-on-one conversations where possible. It’s cheaper than flying to a tradeshow.
• Thought leadership content. Blogs will naturally gravitate to topics near and dear to your customers. These key words, and the related links to and from other industry sites will help with your own site's ranking for key search words

There are too many conversations taking place on the internet to limit them to “off corporate site”.  All technology companies, if they haven’t already, need to start blogging to set up a direct dialogue with their customers and prospects.