For B2B marketing professionals, understanding what’s going on with your Web properties is as important as building your content, engaging in lead nurturing, and social media participation. If you don’t know what content resonates with your prospects, how are you going improve as you iterate?

The first step is getting your Web analytics setup. Once you have that in place, you need to take the data and put it into a readable, actionable format.

Get started with reporting:

• Know the functionality of your analytics package. It doesn’t matter if you want to track all or a very small amount of information, but knowing the ins and outs of the tool is essential.
• Understand your objectives and KPIs. Based on your strategy, you should define objectives and KPIs (Key Performance Indicators).  Each objective should require an actionable metric to look at, such as a particular type of search traffic. Under that objective, you would have your KPIs, which roll to it.
• Create a schedule to gather specific data to report. It’s always a good idea to gather specific data on your objectives the same time each month, week or day, depending on your needs. If you create a report for stakeholders and others to see, creating this schedule around the reporting time is even better.

Remember: Don’t just send out the data you have gathered. Put it into a format that’s understandable and tells what happening with those objectives your team has agreed upon. Not everyone will read the entire document, but getting the most important information up front helps decision makers who don’t have time to read a long report.

• Create actionable goals that are realistic. Now that you have the report creation process down from the data you gather, it’s time to put those reports to good use. This is where you create goals and outline how you are going to carry out those goals.  When doing any type of marketing forecasting, be sure to predict realistic, grounded goals to set proper expectation with your team.

Samples of how KPIs roll to objectives

We’ve talked about objective metrics and KPIs, but let’s go through some quick examples to help you see the difference.  As the first example, let’s take a look at search engine traffic as the objective metric.

A few KPIs to look at that roll to this objective would be:

• Search engine rankings: Personalized search and other trends have made rankings increasingly less valuable and should always be tracked as a KPI, not the end objective.
• Inbound links: How many, and of what quality, are the inbound links to your website?  Are they growing each month as you implement promotions or remaining flat?
• Number of pages indexed by search engines/pages actually receiving search traffic: How many pages are actually getting indexed by search engines each month?  As you add content, is it getting found via organic keywords?

What about social media KPIs?

Do you have a social presence such as a blog? Social objectives will vary. They depend on what you are looking for; however, some social KPIs to track could include:

• Unique visitors: What’s the traffic to your community and linked sites?
• Amount of subscribers: How many subscribers do you have to your blog? Are they subscribing through RSS or through email updates? More subscribers will lead to more shares, ReTweets, and interactions on and off site.
• Visitors converted: Are your visitors leaving without doing anything on your site? Are they just reading and bouncing? Time to check your subscription CTA and move it to different positions around your content.

How are you measuring accountability of your marketing? If you’re not using web analytics to track information on your site, you are losing out on a proven way to help with making key decisions for your business. It’s good to start out simple and as you and your team become experienced, you can always add more depth to your analytics.

Sometimes you meet someone so passionate about something that it’s contagious and if you listen closely you can hear me firing off emails to my team in the background about what I am hearing and learning on this podcast.
I had the opportunity to do a podcast with Avinash to discuss some areas where marketers are doing things right and wrong but all of them are simple but extremely powerful uses of web analytics to make their websites and businesses better on the web. We also took some live Twitter questions as we were doing the podcast. But stop reading this and start listening to Avinash …. its 25 minutes long but positively electric!

Link to Original Audio Source
Signup for this Podcast Series
About Avinash
Avinash Kaushik is the author of the recently published book Web Analytics: An Hour A Day. 100% of Avinash’s proceeds from his book are donated to two charities: Doctors Without Borders, The Smile Train.
Avinash is also the Analytics Evangelist for Google and a co-founder of Market Motive.
As a thought leader Avinash puts a common sense framework around the often frenetic world of web research and analytics, and combines that with this philosophy that investing in talented Analysts is the key to long term success. He is also a staunch advocate of listening to the consumer, and is committed to helping organizations unlock the value of web data.
He is a frequent speaker at industry conferences in the US and Europe, such as eMetrics, Ad-Tech, iCitizen, and SES.
You’ll find Avinash’s web analytics blog, Occam’s Razor
Here are two links to posts about the dashboard (the first one was the one I had promised):

http://www.kaushik.net/avinash/2008/04/the-action-dashboard-an-alternative-to-crappy-dashboards.html

http://www.kaushik.net/avinash/2007/03/five-rules-for-high-impact-web-analytics-dashboards.html

The reality is that we are often thinking about many things at once. It’s not even multitasking – they call it continuous partial attention. That is a state in which most of one’s attention is on a primary task, but where one is also monitoring several background tasks just in case something more important or interesting comes up.
We browse the Web that way, too. You set out to find something, hit the search button, and lo,lots of background information and links that take you to different destinations. How is a marketer to measure your attention, then?
WebMetricsGuru Marshall Sponder takes you to the streets of New York to explain.
Depending on your purpose – and the purpose of your customers – your attention will be broken down differently. Let’s take a look at how a Web analyst looks at the information. He writes:

If my purpose is to transverse – to get from one place to another quickly – then gazing for a micro second might be considered “engagement” and tracked as such. But this would generate any immediate action – nothing happened this day – though I may act on it at some future time, like next week.
If I saw something, like a store front and liked it and came back at a later time, I’d be much more likely to transact, or do something.
This means that engagement for the same individual/ same segment needs to be tracked over time – it’s much harder to make any sense of it from a single session – and that’s often what we’re trying to do in Web Analytics.
It’s actually an “interruption” of my “pace” or gait that really marks that I was engaged – my engagement here is the fact that my attention on the street went from 20% to 40% for a moment – and that marked some interest in my part of what I was looking at.
In other words, attention is marked by an alteration in pace of my gait, of my “click-stream”, movement, etc.

Online behavior is not typically measured that way. As Marshall says, web analysts currently take all of the paid (SEM) and organic (SEO) search data and compile it in a report that tries to make something useful out of it. Some days it probably feels like divining tea leaves – a marketer sees what they wish to see in it.
I was thinking of his story when I searched for the new 3 Series Sedan. Let’s say that your customer searches for “sedan”. This is a general key word and is just like the brisk walk he describes.

The normal behavior for someone putting in these terms is to quickly transverse search listings, the point may not be to stay at any particular site – just to find something relevant.

If I apply Marshall’s logic to that, the way to measure attention in Search Behavior would be to track those people who start at generalized search, like sedan or silver sedan, and end up on a much more detailed keyword phase, for example “reviews of new silver sedans”.
Now you can say, with some authority, if the same searcher came to Cars.com and put in the search “new sedans” then later, came back and put in the query “reviews of new silver sedans” that searcher is engaged, she is definitely paying attention with an action in mind.
If this happens in the same search session, that works. But, continues Marshall, we need to begin tracking those searches across sessions. That presents challenges. His conclusion:

So while thinking about “attention” and if it really is “engagement”, it’s more like breaking browsing behavior and search behavior into basic types of activity – and then, measuring the attention span based on that kind of activity, probably against an average.

The good news is that all of our behavior online is trackable and we are just skimming the surface. As we continue to make strides in interpreting all of the data we collect (see my review of The Numerati for more on that), some of the answers will become indeed clearer.
If as marketers we were able to track and measure attention as outlined in the example, we’d be much closer to understanding when our customers are ready for a purchase. We would also be much better equipped on having the appropriate copy and information on the page when they land there.
Now back to looking at that marvelous feat of engineering that is the new 3 Series from BMW. Are you with me? Who’s buying?