Running a website is probably the most common occupation of people who work from home. One of the main basic principles for ongoing success and growth is constant improvement by effectiveness measurements and tracking the sites data.
A recent study conducted by the B2B marketing company Demandbase among 100 marketing and IT professionals has been examining corporate websites and demand generation. I will discuss here its most relevant and important issues that been surveyed.
Most Important Areas Of Improvement
84% of the respondents felt that at least a moderate improvement needed while generating (or trying to generate) new sales leads. 77% answered that at least a moderate improvement needed when tracking and reporting unregistered users, where 68% thought moderate improvement is necessary to track registered users (customers).
Most Important Indicators To Measure Website Effectiveness
Surprising or not, according to the participants, quality is better than quantity- 34% answered that the quality of the leads is the most important indicator while 22% answered its the number of visitors. Sales has also counted as a relatively strong indicator with 21% of the votes.
Most Common Metrics Of Websites Tracking
The most common metric tracked is the number of visits a visitor has made to the site (65%), Pretty waste of time if you ask me- There is a much bigger audience that should and needed to be tracked and analyzed. Only half of the respondents (49%) answered they track all activity of the users across their sites.
Conclusions
While most of participants that have been sampled in this research thought that the website’s tracking and reporting are important issues to improve, and answered that quality of the leads is an important indicator, only half of them (at most) are doing it efficiently.
From my experience, i can say that this research is pretty representative and most online business owners are failing in the crucial point of tracking, monitoring and analyzing their site’s traffic even though there are great free tools to do it like Google Analytics (there is also a paid premium service of it for high traffic sites).