Got an email from eMarketer today, with this quote:
"According to a survey of middle managers in the US and the UK, more
than half of the business information they spent time gathering is
worthless to their company."
The other day I was in a meeting about post-click analytics, and
someone wondered out loud what it would take to put up conversion path
tests and analyze the results using traditional web analytics tools.
Wow - that would be so time consuming - you would have to wade through
so much useless information to get to the good stuff. Let's see - if
you are running a simple 6-page conversion path, and are testing 6
versions of it, thats 36 pages. You would need to pull the data, group
the pages together according to path test, and then try to determine
which was performing better, and where (this path has higher
segmentation, this one has lower drop off...what's that all mean?). And
that's just a simple example.
This is a perfect example of why we should use tools designed for
specific purposes. Sure, traditional web analytics are a powerful tool,
for general purposes. But when you have a specific purpose, you need a
specific tool -- it saves tons of time, and gives the ability to make
better decisions based looking at only the relevant data, without
having to wade through useless information.
-Anna Talerico
