Have you ever noticed how much guys talk about numbers?
A lot of us often talk about on-base percentage, seeding in the NCAA tournament, games out of first place, scores in relation to par, the over/under, ROI, stock quotes, market cap and on and on. Our obsession with sports and finances has made a lot of us predisposed to a love of stats. Don’t believe me? Just check out how much fantasy sports content is out there.
I am as bad as the next guy. I love stats. That’s why I truly enjoy website analytics. For those of you who don’t know about website analytics, it’s how user behavior on websites is measured.
For example, analytics will help you determine the following about your website:
- number of visitors, borken down by hour, day, month, year
- number of pages those visitors are viewing
- where traffic is coming from
- what pages users are visiting on a site
- how much time users spend on a site
- how frequently they visit
- and so much more.
Get the point?
Analytics is all numbers, charts, graphs-updating all day long. In other words, it’s a dream for a lot of guys who already enjoy stats.
I was reminded of man’s natural affinity for analytics when one of our clients called the other day. This client is great (as are all of the companies and people Brand5 is lucky enough to work with). He is a huge sports fan and a baseball junkie in particular.
At the end of last year, we installed an analytics program for his website. Since then he has been obsessed with logging in to check out the latest numbers on his site’s traffic. He really enjoys picking apart the different categories and interpreting user bahavior.
Beyond the numbers, this client understands the true value of analytics and how it makes his business better.
He told me a story about how just last week he closed a huge deal thanks to his Brand5 analytics program. He was tracking which potential clients-out of all the ones he had recently pitched-had been on his website (something easily trackable through analytics).
My client saw that one company in particular had recently spent a lot of time on his site. He interpreted this as interest in his services. He correctly followed-up with them and won the business.
Instead of sitting in his office wondering if his sales pitch had had any effect, analytics had given our client clear evidence that this company had taken his call-to-action to heart and visited his site. Instead, the company is swithcing more and more of their bsuiness to my client.
That’s just another example of the power of analytics. It’s a must for all companies, and all guys who love stats.
We got a really nice letter from Rudy Castruita, President of the San Diego Bowl Game Association, thanking us for our work developing new websites for the Holiday Bowl and Poinsettia Bowl.