Got web stats?
I check my website statistics every day and have assumed (foolishly) that every other site owner/operator/manager does the same.
Not so.
When I first conducted my web-writing workshops, I asked participants what their statistics revealed about the relative popularity of various pages/elements on their sites. I got a lot of blank stares in return. "What statistics?" they asked.
Subsequent events repeated this scenario. Turns out my perspective, as a solo practitioner in charge of his own site, is quite different from marketers in most businesses, who apparently DO NOT have regular access to the stats.
If this is standard industry practice, it is madness. How on earth can a company's marketers, PR people and communicators make sound decisions about the website without this data? How can they understand what works, what doesn't, what's popular, without the numbers?
They can't. Which means they're obligated to make guesses instead. Which means disaster.
What's the deal in your organization? Do you have access to the stats? Or are you at the mercy of IT?
Not so.
When I first conducted my web-writing workshops, I asked participants what their statistics revealed about the relative popularity of various pages/elements on their sites. I got a lot of blank stares in return. "What statistics?" they asked.
Subsequent events repeated this scenario. Turns out my perspective, as a solo practitioner in charge of his own site, is quite different from marketers in most businesses, who apparently DO NOT have regular access to the stats.
If this is standard industry practice, it is madness. How on earth can a company's marketers, PR people and communicators make sound decisions about the website without this data? How can they understand what works, what doesn't, what's popular, without the numbers?
They can't. Which means they're obligated to make guesses instead. Which means disaster.
What's the deal in your organization? Do you have access to the stats? Or are you at the mercy of IT?
1 Comments:
The Marketing Department I work for at a small Christian college has direct access to all information we log about our public website. It's been helpful to us to note user patterns and see how much traffic certain elements. This has helped us several times decide if it is worth our time and energy to put into different elements on the site.
With the ease of different website reporting tools to install and use (Mint, Google Analytics, etc.) I just don't know why any major (or minor) company wouldn't be tracking their site.
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