Officially titled ‘Site Analytics: How to get the most out of your site without increasing your budget’ the session includes 3 analytics experts: Eric T. Peterson, Ian Lurie and Bob Garcia.

Eric T. Peterson resides in Portland, OR and is the author of book and blog, Web Analytics Demystified, https://www.webanalyticsdemystified.com/. He is also known for several other resources on web analytics including The Big Book of KPI’s and Website Measurement Hacks.

Ian Laurie is the president of Portent Interactive, a full-service Internet marketing agency. Laurie also acts as the firms chief Internet marketing strategist and tactician. He publishes a blog entitled, Conversation Marketing where you can see his latest articles, https://www.conversationmarketing.com/.

Bob Garcia acts as VP of Business Development at Widemile. He brings over 15 years of experience to the panel specializing in “deep analytics and search marketing insight as well as experience in developing and executing new solution and partner go-to-market strategies, and building and managing cross-functional teams.”

Eric Peterson kicked things off with a “Top Down Perspective” , taking a look at how the web has changed over the last few years. Web 2.0, mobile content and syndicated content (RSS) has made measuring the web very difficult. He laid out the top 3 things that companies need to focus on to maneuver the shifting landscape:

• Understand and use your data
• People – Need the talent to analyze the data
• Process – Need a plan to implement changes based on actionable data

Peterson suggested companies employ the 50/50 rule when hiring talent and implementing technology. Spend half of your resources on technology and half of your resources on people. This a shift away from the prior ratio of 90/10, 90% on talent and only 10% on technology. He argued this rule wasn’t realistic and so favored a more balanced ratio.

Ian Laurie got down to some specifics with his equation for generating a positive ROI. He advised companies focus on Value, Growth and Pipeline when contemplating website ROI. These principles apply not just to ecommerce websites but lead generation sites and even non-profits. “This equation works for everybody unless you want to build a website and lose lots of money”. He followed with a precise metric that companies MUST use to determine how to build the value of their website:

Value of a website click = lifetime value of a customer x lead to conversion rate x click conversion rate

By determining the value of a click to your website you can then make smart decisions surrounding marketing tactics to ensure they are returning a positive ROI.

The session was concluded with Bob Garcia who focused on optimizing your website and conversion funnel using testing. He outlined the different types of testing used including A/B testing and multi-variate testing. He explained “testing can help eliminate the guesswork and allow you to make data-driven decisions.” There are many tools available to help marketers perform these types of tests including Website Optimizer by Google and Widemile.

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