Bottom-line analytics…without the numbers?

Just as the key to any marketing plan or campaign is to “know your audience,” from their external behavior to their inner needs, wants, and motivations, so is the need to know your audience when it comes to reporting relevant website data and metrics to different organizational levels and client bases. In evaluating the level of commitment by every involved party in the website’s success, it is probably safe to say that the bottom-line sales or revenue figures are most important to top level managers. Their success and the directives that they pass down to the tactical front-line people are likely to stem from these figures.

As the bottom-line is important, so is web analytics to ensure that every site rollout or online campaign brings in the amount of revenue that will provide a strong ROI. BUT, as per a recent discussion in the Yahoo!Web Analytics Forum, web analytics is not a sales forecasting tool.

Web analytics is a tool for benchmarking, tracking trends, peaks, and troughs over time and across campaigns. Due to various inconsistencies and error margins, web analytics doesn’t always correctly measure hard data, the so-called bottom-line figures. But growing trends or declining measures against goals or benchmarks should definitely be effective in driving appropriate action by managers or clients.