Create Measurable Impact

Call him a nerd, but David Rivers readily admits that each week, he waits with anticipation for a web analytics report to arrive from his marketing department. And as president of KegWorks, a beer equipment company that relies heavily on the web to generate customers, Rivers knows better than to take those reports lightly. For he has learned that analytics often prove revelatory--and beneficial to the bottom line.

"It's all fun and games, doing different things with a site, figuring out what works best," says Rivers, who founded the Kenmore, N.Y., company in 1998. "You can debate that stuff all day. But it comes down to data. The analytics show what you're doing right and where you need to make changes. They help you make more informed decisions."

The time and money spent generating and digesting web analytics--indicators such as site traffic, conversion and page bounce rates, search term effectiveness and countless other metrics--can pay significant and immediate dividends, as Rivers discovered not long ago. While KegWorks had for years been tracking the performance of its pay-per-click advertising on Google at an aggregate level, across multiple campaigns, it hadn't until recently drilled deeper to calculate how each individual campaign had performed in terms of cost per click.

The company handles web analytics mostly in-house, using tools such as Google Analytics and Yahoo's IndexTools, but this time it hired an outside firm to look at its Google ad campaigns more granularly. "Now we're reallocating resources to focus on our most successful campaigns," says Rivers. "I expect our net profit is going to increase because we're more effectively spending our money. We've already seen a difference."

The key is knowing which analytics are most relevant to your business and which warrant merely passive monitoring. "It's a little scary how much data you can access. There's a potential to overkill this," cautions Schnurman. "But really, it's a lot of fun having this kind of information."

Spoken like a true analytics geek.

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