Many of the (small percentage of) website owners who make the wise move of regularly reviewing and using their online marketing statistics — to increase sales and marketing performance — are unfortunately wading in ‘dirty data’.
Their web site statistics that reveal how many people visit their for example includes their own, (and co-workers, investors and other non-customer and non-prospects) web visitor activity.
Which means that reports won’t give a true indication of site activity, and could give skewed results, leading to incorrect decision making.
For large sites with a lot of traffic this is not too much of a problem. But any web site that has a low volume of traffic, this ‘dirty data’ can lead to ineffective decision making due to the skewed results.
To be able to make effective decisions on how to optimise your website and marketing budget you need to clean your data… to eliminate anyone who is administering, designing, editing or testing the site.
With web statistics packages like Google Analytics it’s easy.
It allows you to ‘filter’ web site activity for specific IP Addresses, (which are the unique numbers you and I leave behind every time we browse around any web site.)
Ask everyone who works on your site, including members of staff, design agencies, outsource workers, interns, content writers etc.. — ask them to submit their IP Addresses to you. (They can use a simple online facility like www.WhatsMyIP.org to find out what it is.)
Get them to email you their IP Addresses, and then add that list to the IP Address Filtering facility in your chosen stats package, so that in future, the statistics are cleaner and decisions based on those statistics will be more effective.
And if you don’t chack your statistics and don’t know how small tweaks can improve your sales and marketing results, check out my Stats Faceslap! home-study programme.
-Ed.
