Web Analytics is Dead!

Web Analytics is the one thing that all web marketers do and it continues to be the least understood. Every corporate site uses some form of Web Analytics software. Whether it's Google Analytics, WebTrends, WebSideStory, or some other package, companies spend thousands of dollars a year on these applications. The problem is that these packages record too much information with too little time to respond. When we do respond, it's to make small changes designed to appeal to the masses that have already been to your site and that if we've even interpretted the data correctly.

If we've learned anything in the ClueTrain era it's that mass anything no longer works. Just look at mass advertising, mass email, and mass mailings. These marketing techniques require that you hit as many people as you can because you're only going to reach about 3% to 5% of them. Well what about the other 95%. Shouldn't we at least try to appeal to them? Well we can.

To appeal to the other 95% on the web, we need to be able to customize and target our content directly to them. We need to learn about our visitors as they use our sites and we need to respond to their needs in real-time, not weeks and months later when we have time to analyze our reports. We don't have the time. Many people will only visit our sites once to decide if they want to do business with us. These lost opportunities will never come back.

We're now well into the Web 2.0 era but our web analytics software has done little to catch up. It's now time to look for ways to communicate as close to a 1 on 1 basis as possible. I've been formulating these ideas for some time now and have begun integrating them in the Marketing for Mavens web application. It focuses on communicating with each of your visitors and I welcome you to try the free beta and let us know what you think.