Well, I had a fantastic chat with Barry Teppola from the Legend Company today (he is one of the most progressive home builders in the Treasure Valley, IMHO), and I left with a big smile.  Why?  Because he gets it.  He gets web analytics.

We helped Barry get rolling with web analytics a few months ago, and followed up with him today to see how things were going.  As he explained how they were using the data the analytics provided warmed my soul (no kidding).  You see, the decision makers in the company meet once a week to review the data, and use it to shape their forward progress.  While I was sitting with Barry he drilled down and announced that the majority of the out-of-town visitors were coming from an unexpected geographic region.  As a result the management team is shifting their targeting focus.

Anyway, the concept is fairly simple, and admittedly there are not a ton of industries that can use the geographic reports to make actionable decisions.  However, the principle and practice is absolutely fantastic, find the meaningful metrics and use them to make good decisions.

Okay, to boil it down then, there are tons of reports (upwards of 100 in Google Analytics, BTW) and data available; the real challenge is finding the metrics that drive your business and focusing your efforts there.  It will always be interesting to know that we had 15 visits from India today, but in most cases that is meaningless.  Be sure that the time you spend analyzing your web data is focused (usually you only need about 5 reports, plus segmenting capabilities). 

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 20th, 2007 at 6:36 pm and is filed under Website Optimization, Web Analytics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.