In my last post I mentioned analytics as a good think to do during the crisis. Check where the value is in your webtraffic, content etc. and what is a waste. This way you can make your webpresence more effective with the existing resources.

With ‘effective’ do not only think about sales. If time to conversion is getter longer because people are waiting longer before they buy/invest, or if you website is just not an ecommerce site. It may be wise to track leads.

The thing with leads is that you have always this value issue. How valuable are my leads and if I have valuable leads how did I get them.

When you are using only your webanalytics software the best you can get is a conversion rate for leads. You can check which source of traffic is giving you most leads. But this does not say anything about quality.

To get quality info you can do two things. Either you separate lead paths so that you can measure them separately. Or you add info to the lead.

Adding info to a lead can be done manually by asking people to mention or ask for a particular word/code. This way your sales team receiving the leads will have more info about the traffic source.

But you can also integrate you analytics with you CRM for example using Google analytics.

Still don’t believe in the economic crisis so much. But yes this is a total commercial clean up. Is that bad? I guess not.

Further more I see indeed less spending at the moment. A lot of houses for sale etc. But is this temporary or a real trend? If it is one thing we learned from the whole crisis then it is that we are really bad in predictions. So if they now predict downturn..Maybe it is just a matter of a longer time to conversion after all.

In digital marketing I hear a lot about less investments. There seems to be a big opportunity for affiliate marketing because of the performance based model. Display ads and branding seem to have a hard time, but companies are used to these “reach”model for ages and they learned to never skip too much marketing budget in bad times. So they will think twice and spend a little less I guess.

For cleaning up however it is now time for analytics. While we are all waiting for new investments it is a good time to look at how effective our webpresence is in engaging, converting etc. In my opinion there is a lot to gain here.  Most companies where to busy spending in the past, now it is time to look at costs and ROI.

This is totally in line with the overall commercial clean up.

I am not the first to mention it, but it is just to important. So I just have to mention it on this blog.

Competitive intelligence is now for everybody. And again it’s free.

Avinash Kaushik, webanalytics expert and author of the book Webanalytics an hour a day, is explaining competitive intelligence on his analytics weblog. This week he is explaining the use of Google Ad Planner to get information about your competitors audience. You get demographics and psychographics about their website visitors and you can easily compare it with your own.

He is even giving a Procter & Gamble example. So read this article.

Lately I meet more companies doing online advertising, like Google Adwords, without a good analytics in place. When you don’t measure the results of any campaign, you waste your money.

You see your traffic is growing and you think you are doing a good job. But is this traffic interested in what you offer? Do they ask for more information? Do they buy your product? If you don’t measure that, you don’t know .

In stead of using your own analytics tool you should start with implementing Google analytics. It is free, and in stead of focusing on the amount of traffic you will move forward to a ‘relevant traffic’ focus.

With analytics you get insights in all visitors but you are especially interested in the visitors who buy, subscribe on your site etc. When you follow their behaviour you know what they search for and where they came from.

With this information you don’t need to buy expensive advertisements on crowded websites anymore. You buy ads on relevant places which pay off directly.