Today Avinash Kaushik of Google and the author of Web Analytics: An Hour a Day spoke this week at Web 2.0 here in NY and today to a private audience at the kb+p offices.  This was a great experience.  He is a very inteligent and funny person, who really made analytics feel like more than dry numbers.  He definately gave me a lot to think about and put a number of great ideas into my head for how to really let web analytics really produce results and improve the goals of the site.

There were three important things (among others) that I gained from his talk:

  1. Nonline: Online visitors can help you run your offline media. By this you can see what your online customers who have true demographic data and habits like and dislike and relate this to the offline marketing. For example if you have products on your site that visitors in a particular region of the US like more than other regions you can learn that you should possibly try to market in offline ads in that area to help build your brand.  If you have a product configurator and you notice that visitors in Vermont save the configurations for products that are commonly green and you tend to use black products in your ads you may want to try a green product in a magazine ad in the Vermont area.  You can learn about your user demographics with tools like Microsoft adCenter Labs. 
  2. Micro-conversions: Find the imporantance of all conversions on your site, not just the ones that bring in direct cash results.  These micro-conversions can be anything that visitors on your site come there to see: Job Listings, Maps & Directions, Store Locations and Hours.  A visitor may only come to your site and view one or two pages for 2 minutes and leave; because they got what they needed.  So you should analyze the importance of these goals that your visitors want, they may not be what you thought they truly wanted or what you wanted them to want by visiting your site.  But in the end they result in something very important: a possible new employee or even an offline sale.
  3. Let Visitors Tell You What They Like: Use tools such as Google Optimizer to provide different styles or copy for CTAs (Call-To-Actions) and see which ones drive to the goal page.  This will let you realize what your visitors like to see, not what you think they want to see.
Many of these ideas are so beneficial because all of us have an idea of what we want our customer to look for, how they should interact with our sites, and what kind of people we think they should be.  But in the end the most important thing is that customers are buying products from you and they are reaching the goals of your site.  These are the most important customers, so analyze who they are and give them what they want.