An essential element to optimising you site content is having the right measurement tools. Google Analytics seems to get better and better and the rational of using its free service instead of a licence product is becoming more compelling, especially in these hard times. Recently Google has announced 7 new improvements to Google Analytics that will see it become more like an enterprise solution. If you are current Google Analytics user then you should see these enhancements rolled out over the next few weeks. The new enterpise features are

• Improvements to the user interface
• Improvements to the management interface
• Integration with adsense
• Custom reporting
• Advanced segmentation
• Motion charts
• New API

Google has created a few videos in its YouTube channel to help explain these changes in more detail. We particluarly like the video on the new motion charts.

Now we have online marketing, content marketing, digital marketing and mobile marketing. But it would seem that advertisers know less about their online audience than they do of their offline audience.

It is not uncommon for example for media buying agencies to place online ads in Print Media newspaper websites based on the offline audience readership metrics – the assumption being that the online and offline audience must be similar.

Well, what do you know; it looks like it pays to research your online audience.

It turns out The Telegraph and Guardian Unlimited websites do indeed attract the same readers online and offline, however The Sun, The Times and the Daily Mail attract a much broader online audience. Heather Hopkins of Hitwise brought this to our attention in 2007 – yes, I know, it’s old news, but I rediscovered it yesterday whilst I was doing some research for one of our clients. We often talk about the value of providing access to your archive of “old news”, its one of the principles of content marketing, if it’s online someone will find it and find it useful.

If you are interested in researching you audience you may end up using the services of companies such as Hitwise, Nielsen Online comScore and quantcast. If you have a significant audience based in the United States, you might be interested in checking out the audience profile for your site on quantcast. Also you might want to have a look at their new service the media planner allowing advertisers to target audience by age, gender, income, ethnicity and education. The service is free and is focused on US Internet audiences, however ‘Quantified Publishers’ can get access to breakdowns of their audience from around the world.

Now, getting back to researching the audience for that social marketing campaign, what is the difference between the US and UK population browsing habits for a particular demographic? I was tempted to assume there would be significant similarities but what do you know…..

You can have too much of a good thing. It has often been commented that online wins over offline because it offers real time feedback of people’s behaviour. This is true, but what is provided is something like this

Page views 10,000; Unique visitors 3000; click through rates 10%; bounce rates 3%; 55% of search engine traffic from Google; Top ten search terms are…

What does that actually tell us? The answer is very little – it gives no real understanding of who is visiting a site and what they are doing.

The reason so many businesses accept this quality of reporting (and so many agencies provide it to clients) is simple. With the sophistication of analytics software now available in the market place (Google Analytics, HBX, Omniture, etc) production of data is cheap but intelligence is expensive.

For this reason businesses and agencies are often greedy for data and do not invest the time and effort to turn data into intelligence. Without this investment they try to substitute volumes of data for insight – the intelligence must be in there somewhere so no-one can complain they never saw it.

Data will not help when you evolve your online strategy. Instead any changes you make will be a gamble that will be based on a hunch or the HIPPO effect (HIghest Paid Person’s Opinion) described by Avinash Kaushik.

In order for the cycle of measure and evolve to work effectively your digital marketing strategy should be driven not by the greed for more data but by intelligent analysis making clear recommendations. In. Plain. English.

Remember the film The Field of Dreams ? In it, Kevin Costner was told that if he turned a field into a baseball pitch dead players would turn up to play on it. He was told: “Build it and they will come.”

In the online world, baby, they don’t. They really really don’t. You have to go and get them with the content you have to market, no matter how much good work you’ve done.

The Information architecture may have been well designed; the creatives and navigation structure may have been user tested and the stakeholders may have all signed it off. No doubt, the content management system is industry standard and you bet it’s flexible enough to cater for future developments. It goes without saying the site is 3A, XHTML and W3C compliant to boot. Your analytics package will be in place ready to measure the large number of customers who will come to admire your work. You are all so very very proud as your new site launches. Look upon our works, ye mighty, and despair. You have built it and they will come.

But they don’t and after a short peak of modest initial interest the traffic begins to die off. It dies because you haven’t attracted anyone to your site with interesting stuff .

The reality is you live and die by your content . No matter what your business, when you are online you are in the content publishing business. The content your beieve in and want to market is the only long term determinant of the success of your site.

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