Post Author: Matthew Saunders
It truly is an exciting time to be a part of the online marketing field in Northeast Ohio. There is an abundance of local professionals developing industry-wide best practices and The Web Association provides a fantastic medium to convey their knowledge to the masses. The topics generally cater to attendees from different departments within their respective organizations, all with various levels of familiarity to web marketing. Those in the audience typically range from SEM newbie’s to seasoned veterans, and just about everything in between.

I recently attended my second Web Association luncheon. This time the topic of the day was Understanding Web Analytics. From my perspective, web analytics is one of the less glamorous, yet more important aspects to finding success online. In fact, when discussing analytics I find that people generally fall into one of two categories: 1) those that go to sleep with visions of ClickTracks reports dancing in their head; or 2) those that would rather belly flop into Lake Erie mid-January than calculate percentage changes in site referrals from month to month. Realizing useful information from an analytics stand point probably lies somewhere in the middle. Kudos to the handful of gentlemen from the panel that communicated a plethora of important points while providing some entertainment.

The most important message that I took away from the presentation was an idea so simple that most of us would be surprised to find how often it’s overlooked. Simply put, before you can ever expect to turn your web analytics into a useful resource, you need to really understand what you’re trying to accomplish with your site. Whether you’re looking to sell kangaroo lunch boxes or generate leads for future business endeavors, developing benchmarks and appreciating the numbers becomes a lot easier once you have defined the goal of your site. I have seen a number of sites where companies were concerned with establishing their web presence, yet never knew what they wanted to accomplish once they got there. Unfortunately, this often leaves customers pondering the very same question.

Don’t expect to understand analytics overnight. At the risk of sounding cliché, you need to crawl before you can sprint. Before you find yourself standing on the snow covered banks of Lake Erie, realize you first need to figure out how to make your site work for you. Only after you have done this can you begin to fully take advantage of the marvelous features offered by your analytics program.

I would recommend attending a Web Association event to anyone who thinks they could stand to learn more about online marketing. My only complaint – how about an alternative dish for those of us who don’t eat fish!