SmallBusinessNewz

Web analytics are already important to online businesses, but that importance is on pace to grow significantly as search engines evolve, making it harder for traditional search engine optimization tactics to drive traffic to your site.

Google is talking about getting more personalized, and Yahoo is already doing all kinds of experimental things with search results, by opening them up to third parties. The coming year is going to be a lot different in terms of how we obtain search engine traffic, which is why you're going to have to look at some other things, and that is means a lot of analysis on your (or your marketer's) part.

Bryan Eisenberg posted an interesting article the other day at the Microsoft AdCenter Blog, which looks at the seven biggest mistakes of web analytics.  They are as follows:

1. Improper Implementation
2. No Goals Setup
3. No Segmentation
4. Paying Too Much Attention to Irrelevant Data
5. Not Setting up Milestone Events Documentation
6. Not Combining Quantitative Data with Qualitative Data
7.  Not Taking Action On the Data

First of all, if you are not implementing your web analytics tools correctly, than you're probably accomplishing nothing but wasting time. "Common mistakes include: untagged pages, untagged or wrongly tagged transactions (i.e. transaction page is tagged like a regular page) and passing wrong values (especially for advanced tools like SiteCatalyst). In fact, several web analytics vendors websites also have these common errors," says Eisenberg.

With regards to number two, you have to have goals to achieve them. "Approximately 80%, of implementations have no goals setup," says Eisenberg. "If you can’t define what is valuable to you, then how do expect to increase your results?"

Indeed. Anyone can set up their analytics tools, but how is it going to help if you don't know what you're going for? Once you have a goal, you can figure out what you can do better to help you reach it.

I'm not going to retread the entire article, but I do recommend reading it if you operate an online business or just have an online presence for your business at all. I will skip down to number seven though - Not taking action on the data. This is the key mistake. What's it all for if you don't do anything about it?

The whole point of using analytics tools is to determine your strong points and weak points. You can then look at your weak ones and figure out what you need to do to improve them. The valuable data obtained from analytics tools is all too often ignored though. Maybe a lack of time is the issue, but you'd better make time for it if you hope to continue succeeding online.

Competition is all over the world, when you're online, and getting people to your site is not going get any easier. It's time to do some testing, some researching, and some analyzing. Then of course take some action.