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.

Quick Update: Setting up Ruby on Rails

The plan for this evening is to have Ruby on Rails up and running so I can migrate everything from the local test environment over to the hosting company. If all goes well, the plan is to have Marketing for Mavens up and running in the wild next week. I'm really looking forward to fully testing this application in an environment where I can start to collect some real data.

There are still some issues that need to be addressed and some features to be added before the beta is launched. The some of these features are:

• Reporting: We're going to be collecting a lot of data which you'll find valuable to share with your colleagues. Of course, none of this is of any use to you unless there is some way to get it out of the database.
• Additional Tracking: There is almost an endless amount of information that we could track and store but you have other web analytics tools for this. We want to make sure we're only providing you with the data that you need to make quick business decisions and that we can use to distribute your content.
• Recording non-HTML Links: Right now, tracking is only occurring on page load. We need to add the ability to record clicks on PDF's, ZIP's, etc. These are very important assets that need to be tracked since you can gain more information about a person's needs based on data sheet download then you can from most web pages.