What your web analytics won't tell you

21 September 2011

The web analytics tools that are available today are not yet able to give you clear view of what is happening across all of the online marketing channels you may be making use of, leaving you with an incomplete view of your traffic.

Do you really have an accurate picture of how successful your marketing is in attracting customers to your digital properties? If you are like most marketers, you may not, simply because of the complexities of measuring traffic in a multi-channel world.

Over the past few years, the number of channels you need to manage and measure as you roll out your online marketing strategy has multiplied at a rapid rate.

Today, you'll be managing bought media such as online advertising; media you own such as your website, blog, social networking platforms and microsites; and media you earned, primarily through social media word-of-mouth and press coverage.

The web analytics tools that are available today are not yet able to give you clear view of what is happening across all of these channels, leaving you with an incomplete view of your traffic.

They can tell you how many visitors arrived at your web sites via ads or marketing e-mails, but they cannot yet provide you with much information about what is really happening around the edges of your traditional web properties.

This is becoming increasingly problematic in a world where you might be driving traffic to a Facebook page or a hosted press office rather than directly to your own web site. Your web analytics tool doesn't see many of these interactions, with the result that you may be underestimating your traffic.

Consider, for example, your e-mail campaign to drive traffic to your Facebook page. The number of 'likes' and wall posts you generate may give you a fuzzy idea about how successfully you are engaging with users, but you won't have precise data about how many people visited your Facebook profile or how they got there.

When you throw the mobile internet into the mix, the picture becomes even more complicated. Most web analytics tools track traffic using a simple Javascript tag on your website. As a result, you might not be picking up site visits from people who own older feature phones with web browsers that do not support Javascript.

If you do not see a lot of the traffic that your online marketing efforts generate, how do you start to get a true picture of the success/effectiveness of your campaigns? And if you do not know where the traffic is coming from, how do you even begin to calculate your customer acquisition costs and allocate budget to the right channels?

This picture is likely to become even more complex in the months and years ahead as we begin to rely more and more on 'owned' properties besides the corporate web site. Should the traffic to these properties not also count as legitimate customers and prospects?

Today's marketing environment is truly multi-channel and we are likely to see the number of channels we manage grow rather than shrink in the years ahead. If we do not see the traffic we generate across all of our channels, we do not have a clear picture of our performance.

This is a major weakness in the current web analytics model that software vendors and online service providers need to address in a world where we have all become multi-channel marketers.