I’m a big proponent of “Measuring Your Outcomes” for any campaign you start, even offline campaigns like in TV, Radio & Print. Prior to such tools as Ominture, WebTrends, CoreMetrics & Google Analytics (formerly Urchin.. if you remember back that far) it was pretty tough understanding what TRULY worked and what didn’t. A lot of measurement was guesswork and summation and that was the problem – nothing really concrete. Now we have a tremendous amount of data on our hands, but again a problem of too much data and not understanding what the valuable insights are can be misleading and even damaging to a marketing campaign.
There’s a lot more than to understanding if a marketing strategy is working, let alone understanding if you’ve got an “o.k.” strategy or one that’s really hitting the mark, than looking at how many people are visiting your site each day. The true measure is are you visitors finding value and are you optimizing for all your possible outcomes.
Goals Aren’t Always Monetary in Nature
Goals don’t always have to be monetary at the end of the day. A goal could be someone as easy as a use clicking on the “Like” button, or adding something to their wishlist that later gets shared with their social network. They may not necessarily convert in a monetary form today, but in a week or two they very well could. That’s why looking at just visitors or even click through rates as “lone” metric can be very misleading. Read the rest of this entry »
The goal of this methodology is to obtain “actionable insights” through analytics. Minimally, there are three elements you should apply to your Small Business analytics strategy according to 
