A large number of marketing professionals still seem to be somewhat reluctant in using monitoring tools to measure the performance of their marketing actions. They will find any excuse to explain why they refuse to pay attention to data. Below is a list of the 5 most common excuses that marketers use, and the reasons why they shouldn’t be used.
Monitoring my product’s performance is more important than my website’s performance.
OK, so focusing on your product to continually improve its quality is very important. If you have an outstanding product, people will come onto your site and purchase it. However, is this a valid reason not to focus also on your website and its performance? If visitors to your site experience problems on the site, is this actually good for your brand image?
You must be aware of the halo effect. As prospects are unable to see your product and test it, they use what is available to them to get an idea of it. In addition, what they see and experience on your site will also be applied to your products. If your site is slow, if your prospects have a poor user-experience on your site, or if they find it poorly organised then they will associate all of these defaults with your product.
Web analytics does not allow me to act upon critical items.
Traffic data will provide a small proportion of information which has a weak impact on your company’s business. However, you should not think of web analytics as just revealing usability and browsing issues.
Data coming from a company’s online platforms provides the company with an essential source of information on its activity, performance and customers. Furthermore, the increasing contribution of online actions in a company’s results and the impact of digital platforms on the performance of physical stores means that today companies have to integrate online data into their strategic decisions.
Traffic data also makes it possible to perform Business Analytics as shown in the 3 examples below:
- an e-Commerce site which manages its stocks according to the number times a product fact-sheet has been viewed,
- a temporary employment agency which decides the future location of its offices according to searches made via the store locator option by visitors to the site,
- professional buyers of an e-Commerce site who adapt their budget according to the online traffic of their range of products.
Web analytics does not explain “why”.
Yes, in effect, the causes of a web site’s problems are not always apparent in the traffic data. For example, the data might reveal that a page has a catastrophic bounce rate but does not explain why the bounce rate is so high. It is necessary to evaluate the page according to a set of best practices which have been laid out or to use an online survey or even to set up a test.
But we still need to find out the problems encountered by visitors to your site before thinking about what the causes are. Web analytics is far from being unhelpful in this area. Coupled with online surveys or tests, it lets us understand the reasoning behind Internet user behaviour.
I know what Internet users want.
Your experience in your domain will undoubtedly give you excellent knowledge of your market and targets, but why miss out on additional information about your customers and prospects? Data on visitor behaviour will provide information such as how visitors to your site behave, what their needs are and what their fears are.
There is always a need to know more about our customers: customer knowledge is never complete and needs continual updating. Using web analytics will allow you to confirm or disprove opinions you may have about your prospects or customers.
I don’t have the time.
You surely have a thousand and one other things to be doing at the same time as monitoring your site’s performance. However, having feedback on your marketing operations allows you to abandon inefficient and ineffective operations, or to select and focus on marketing operations that attain a minimum level of performance. This will also save you time.
Web analytics will also allow you to improve productivity whilst focusing on actions that have the most impact. If you have any other reasons not to use web analytics please feel free to get in touch and share them with us. We will try and convince you otherwise
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