I was recently at a business trade show in Raleigh, NC and was talking to a business owner about his marketing efforts. I inquired if he was utilizing Paid Search to promote his website. His was response was “yes.” He further explained that he felt the campaign was successful. As I asked him how he knew the success of the campaign, he deflected my question and started talking about his direct mail postcard campaign. I asked how that was doing and his response was, “very well.” “How do you know?” I said. “Well, I can see how many people bring them into the store. OK, I get it. I then asked him again if he was using anything to track how his AdWords campaign was doing and he responded “no.” He went on to talk about his billboards and how he thought they were doing well. When asked how he knew, he admitted that he didn’t know. I asked if he had a dedicated phone number and he points to the (919) number on the postcard. I tried to explain that a dedicated toll-free number would be the optimal way to track the billboards.

Web analytics provide numerous ways to capture and analyze important data about your business. A web counter is insufficient in understanding how users engage with your site. You’ve written effective ads or created beautifully informative banners or a well-crafted email. Now you need to determine what potential customers are doing after they reach your site. Are they leaving immediately? Do they spend a lot of time on certain pages? How is the traffic converting? Are there bottle-necks in your checkout process? Do you know whether your email campaign is converting better than your display campaign?

A solid web-analytics tool can provide you with all of this information and allow you to slice and dice the data to make sense of it all. Some applications are free (and somewhat robust) while other, enterprise-level packages come with a cost. Either way, it is vitally important to any online business to track and measure campaign performance. The success of your efforts depends on the information you have access to.