10 Most Common Web Analytics Mistakes

Paul Lima     

So you want to know the most frequent questions I get about web analytics and online marketing? I’ve tried to present them here and answer a few of them so maybe I can save you, my clients and future prospects some time so we can get onto executing profitable campaigns.

1) Free analytics are good for my business and are just as good as paid ones

Coremetrics Platform offers more than Google Analytics

First, let me say, I like Google Analytics and Yahoo’s Analytics solutions. But Google Analytics was built for Google. It serves their interest, not yours.

This might be the most common myth out there, and possibly one of the most dangerous. First and foremost, to directly dispel this rumor, the truth is that enterprise analytics solutions offer levels of detail and capabilities that free solutions such as Google Analytics don’t. Although free solutions can be hacked to a certain extent to extend their capabilities, at the end of the day they fall far short of the paid solutions in providing meaningful reports to a diversified group of stakeholders. If for example you had any interest in tracking the video drop off rates, or immediately integrating custom analytics events, records or values with a recommendations engines, you can’t.

The Omniture Online Marketing Suite offers a platform to manage the online marketing discipline for sophisticated digital marketers.

Beyond capabilities alone, you also get a lot of important side benefits as well. First amongst them is accountability and support. With free solutions you’re not paying for anything, so you get a community of blogs and consultants, which we belong to actually. If you’re paying for a solution, and if for any reason it has a problem, we’ve got help from the analytics provider to get the job done.

With paid solutions you own your data and can integrate it seamlessly with PPC bid management platforms, multi-variate testing platforms, and a host of other add-ons and integrations like Salesforce, NetSuite, SugarCRM, email marketing solutions, ad-server networks and more.

The future of analytics is in an analytics suite approach, not in point solutions. Of course, if you want to own your own data from Google Analytics, they offer a license to purchase Urchin for approximately $3,400 (the company that Google acquired in 2004 that is today known as Google Analytics). The future of analytics isn’t more data, but instead the ability to act upon that data in an a fast, efficient, and measurable way. Free solutions will never offer the level of integrated optimization that paid solutions do, and due to the great competitive advantage that such features offer, a business should be wary of the risk that going “free” might entail. Bottom line: If your business relies on the internet, you should investigate using a paid analytics platform. I have seen cases where the answer is to stay on a free solution, but more often than not, it’s time to increase conversions and there’s too much at stake to penny pinch.

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Should I build an iPad application?

Paul Lima      Building an iPad app, Flurry, iPad, Magazines, University Alumni

Look at the analytics.  If you’re users are visiting your existing website via mobile devices you can make a better decision.

If you’re using Google Analytics, go to Visitors > Mobile > Mobile Devices.

Media companies, Magazine, Subscription based websites and advertisers should consider building iPad applications.  I’ve tried to list out the following benefits.

Visitors by Mobile Device in Google Analytics

- Instant distribution of content

- Gain insights about the content published (for example, see how many users read each article)

- registered user option (paying or free access to both the app and/or each edition)

- applications built on XML are easy to keep the updated with continuous streams of content with each new edition read more