Marketing in the Age of Google: Your Online Strategy IS Your Business Strategy, Revised and Updated

THE VALUE OF AN EXPERIENCED IN-HOUSE WEB ANALYTICS EXPERT

Accurate, actionable data are critical in today’s online environment. And with so much information available—much of it confusing and not actionable—the best way to cut through to what really matters is to ensure you have a skilled Web analytics expert on staff who can cull through the hundreds of data points and give you the top five metrics that show you how the business is going and help you make business decisions.

Avinash Kaushik wrote on his blog about the top things to look for in a Web analytics manager. The person should:

• Have passion. “You have to love the Web, you have to love its life changing power, you have to believe that at some level you, yes you, have the power to change people’s lives by killing reports that show, in 8 font, conversion and visitors stats and replacing them with analysis that will fundamentally improve the experiences of your customers and ease their stress.”
• Love change. “The Web changes and grows and morphs like an alien being. You just got used to prefetching and here is Google trying to guess searcher intent (and now ‘personalized search’ where even your awesome organic listing might not result in your being number one) and then come RIAs and Ajax and then will come something else and, like a tidal wave, it keeps coming. Ask for one thing they know of that will mess up the analytics world in the next 180 days. If they have an answer, you have a winner.”
• Question data. “The core problem ...