SmallBusinessNewz

Today, I want to share with you some wisdom from SiteLogic Marketing Founder Matt Bailey that he shared with those in attendance at the Small Business Marketing Unleashed conference.

Bailey spoke at the web analytics session, and he also did a video interview with our reporter Abby Prince for our sister site WebProNews in which he further discusses web analytics from a non-technical perspective that those unfamiliar may find helpful.

Matt believes that people are worth far more than any analytics program.

"The human brain is the best analytics program there is," he says.

For one, you can't rely on analytics to be accurate, which is why you need a living person to analyze the analytics with so many variables going into them.

"There is no such thing as accuracy. Accuracy and analytics never mix," says Bailey.

You have to understand where your data is coming from, and Bailey highlighted six initial reports by segment:

1. Conversion rate
2. Top keyword "groups" from search engines
3. Top referring URLs
4. Content popularity
5. Click Density/Overlay
6. Bounce Rate

He also highlighted the "3 C's of Analytics": Context, Comparison, and Contrast.

"Numbers without context are just numbers," said Bailey.

He says that you should pick one analytics program to do both your reporting and analysis. This will keep "data integrity".

When it comes down to it though, every program is missing the human element.

"It doesn't matter what the program, but you have to rely on yourself...You know what the goals are for your website," said Bailey.

A couple things that you humans should keep in mind however are:

- Unique visitors can only be tracked by 2 methods - cookies and client-side tagging (javascript).

- And total visitor sessions are made from 2 groups - visitors who visited once, and visitors who visited more than once.

Another piece of useful advice Matt gave was to analyze how many steps your customers have to take on your site. Then find out where they stop and test it to improve it.

Stay tuned to SmallBusinessNewz for further coverage on what you missed out on by not attending the Small Business Marketing Unleashed conference.

Video anchor Abby Prince contributed to this report.