Reports Aren’t Analytics
A pretty graph isn’t analytics. It’s a report. What you do with that report is ‘analytics’.
It’s an important distinction. Look at this graph:
It’s a Google Analytics report showing me which pages get more or less traffic on the Portent Interactive web site.
The subtler and most important point, though, is how important our Portfolio page is. It’s 7.5% of all page views on our site. That doesn’t seem like much. But drilling down a bit deeper shows that 30% of the people who visit our portfolio go to our ‘Contact Us’ page, and 4% sign up for our newsletter. It’s the best-converting page on our site:
A few more clicks show that people visiting this page after searching for ‘internet marketing agency’ and ‘online marketing agency’ are our best prospects, at least as far as taking the next step to contact us.
That led us to optimize our site for those phrases.
The charts and the graphs are the reports. The changes made to your strategy are the result of analytics. It’s a big difference.
Portent's Founder & CEO
Ian Lurie is founder and CEO of Portent Inc., an internet marketing agency that has provided internet marketing, including PPC, SEO, social and analytics services, since 1995. more >
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Put in short: analytics is a process (dynamic), whereas a report is a still picture of a single moment (static).
Nice post.
One more note is that the number of people visiting our email signup or contact page after getting to our portfolio page through a keyword search for ‘internet marketing agency’ and ‘online marketing agency’ are very few.
And it doesn’t matter. Much.
Because we only want a very few people, ready to hire us, to contact us. For our situation (high-priced, low volume services) it is better to be contacted by a very few high quality leads (in comparison to how many people visit the site overall) then to have everyone calling us.
It is not always about a high conversion rate.