One of my favourite expressions is this:
“Successful Marketing is the Consistent Application of Common Sense”.

With all the marketing tools at our disposal, it is all too easy to overlook the obvious answers that often lie right before our eyes. A case in point: An organization selling consumable products recently asked me whether there was a way in Google Analytics to determine why customers did not come back to reorder in greater numbers. They had found that many of their purchasers were net new contacts, rather than existing customers reordering.

While Google Analytics is good at many things, it cannot generally answer a ‘Why’ question. It is much better at answering the ‘What’ question. I.e. what happened to my conversion rate last month? How many new visitors did the site attract and where did they come from etc. To find answers to the ‘Why’ question, you have to look elsewhere. And while On-site surveys are often a good way to answer the ‘why’ questions, this situation did not require any tools.

It just required some common sense. After chatting with the client for a bit, it turned out that they usually sent their brand name products (3rd party brands) in non-descript brown shipping boxes. Once the product (e.g. cleaning detergent) arrived at the client site and was stacked on a shelf, there was NO way to identify where the order had come from. As a result, once it came time to reorder, the purchasers would look at the bottle and – more often than not – type the product name into Google. Presto: an easy opportunity for reordering was wasted.

The simple solution: the client is now adding a small sticker to their products – a purchaser now can either visit the website or call to reorder… Result: reorder rates are up significantly, and the average cost of sale has decreased.

Google Analytics wouldn’t have come up with that in a million years.

The morale of the story: don’t forget to look beyond the tools, and the reams of useful data they produce. Look around you – the answer may very well be staring you in the face.

For those of you following Google Analytics developments, the last few days were pretty big.  Google Analytics has rolled out a few new features that anyone in the analytics space should be excited about:

• Up to 20 Goals per profile (the previous limit of 4 was severely limiting)
• New Goal Types: Time on site, pages per visit
  
• Custom Alerts:  Get notified when something important happens on your web site
• Improved filtering on tables and reports (yay)
  

For all the details on this, here are some of the main videos:

• “Expanded and Engagement Goals”
• Analytics Intelligence and Custom Alerts
• “Advanced Table Filters

Congrats to the Analytics team at Google.

As many of you know, I’ve been a major fan of two web analytics tools: Google Analytics, because it’s free and pretty powerful, and Clicktracks, because of the unique insights it presents in easily digestible form.

Today, Google Analytics Version 2.0 was released.  From what I can see so far: Amazing! 

 I’m looking forward to seeing it in action with our clients.  And here are the details: Google Analytics V2

After acquiring Gatineau, Quebec based DeepMetrix Corporation last year, Microsoft is working on its own version of a free analytics offering – aptly code-named “Gatineau”, to be released sometime in 2007.

My take: Bring ‘em on.  Every site owner should use a form of analytics that goes beyond the often pathetic offerings that are provided by the various ISPs as part of a hosting package.  Competition is healthy, but – judging by earlier efforts – Microsoft has their work cut out for them.  AdCenter, for one, despite having the benefit of hindsight, is stil lagging behind Google AdWords in many aspects.

For marketers, this is definitely great news…

Chris