Here at KPM we believe that it is strategy not tools that bring success online.  Such is the complexity of building an online business nowadays it is tempting to just collect a pile of recommended tools together and begin using them without any underlying strategy to get any of it to work or make sense.  Having a website without a solid and repeatable marketing and sales process behind it is less than ideal, however as business owners get better educated they do start to branch out into other areas to improve their online activities and analytics and in particular Google Analytics is a further example of putting the cart before the horse. 

As I write this I am pondering the enormity of how wrong this can all get.  In many ways how successful businesses are with their websites, their blogs, their social media strategies, their google analytics efforts are all symptomatic of one thing.  Have they defined exactly what their online presence culminating in their website is supposed to achieve.  Without solid answers to that question you do not see well defined websites with strong calls to action that can be measured.  It is important to realise that just capturing keywords, page hits, visitor browser identities will not give you the essential facts you need.  You don't want to know what a visitor did you want to know why they did it.  If you know that then you can begin to provide the right offer on the right page and engage with the visitor. 

So the bad news right now is that collecting lots of data and analyising it will not give you the answer you want.  Google Analytics is not a tools that gives you the magic answer just be installing it.  You need to build a layer of "qualitative data" onto of the "quantitative data" that you get out of the box from GA. 

We will update this post shortly but for your home work think about how you can find out why people come to your site and what actual business goals you can measure on your site that can provide "qualitative data" on your business.

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