What!?! Less Than Half of Marketers Use Analytics?

So I was perusing through marketingcharts.com and came across a stat that just astounds me. Alterian released a survey in January that reported less than half (47%) of marketers use analytics to measure their campaigns. Less than half of marketers surveyed know how their campaigns are performing! I’m still baffled. In fact, I would love to learn more from those who do not measure their campaigns and why. If they’re not measuring the effectiveness of their campaigns or their website then I wonder how they decide what works and what doesn’t. The survey also revealed that 25% of the marketers stated that analyzing the results of the campaigns were the hardest part. If this is the case and you find that analyzing your campaign results to be difficult, here are a few steps that may help:

·         Define your goal. What are you trying to accomplish other than increasing traffic to your website? Once you have defined this goal, make sure that you are able to attribute your goal or conversion to your campaigns.

·         Be sure to tag your URLs with the proper campaign parameters that are available with your web analytics solution. Refer to your vendor’s manual for a detailed description of what this may entail. (Vendor’s URL parameters may differ)

·         Drive traffic to specific landing pages. Preferably landing pages that have content that is pertinent to your campaign and target audience.

·         Metrics that you will want to evaluate for performance include click through rate (CTR), conversion rate (CVR), cost per acquisition (CPA), return on investment (ROI), and landing page bounce rates

·         If you want to gather more insight about your campaigns, segment visitors based on the campaign that they respond to and analyze their behavior with your website. You may learn something new about your visitors or you may not, but until you analyze your site visitors, you will never know

Analyzing your campaigns does not have to be hard if you have the available resources. If you don’t, then the problem should not be that it is hard, but that you need to hire someone who can make sense of the data for you.