My Love for Google Analytics

I first got involved with Internet retailing when I took a business development position out of business school with CDNow, who at that time was the second largest consumer retailer on the Internet after Amazon. It had recently gone public and was an iconic player in the early Internet retail scene. Through my biz dev dealings for CDNow, I became friends with other folks at leading eTailers...places like eToys and Reel.com. I became aware over time how bad the web-site analytics were at these major public companies, many of them trying to mine crude log files for information, and most of them doing it badly. Eventually great companies like Coremetrics and Omniture came along to address this problem, and created powerful platforms to track, measure and analyze visitor behavior on websites. But their clients have always been major online companies with lots of money to spend, and the small less-sophisticated online business still didn't have any easy and accessible solution for tracking and analyzing what went on on their websites.

Several years ago Google purchased a small web analytics firm named Urchin, and decided to make it free. Yes, free. But not only did they make it available to everybody, and with a staggeringly easy implementation, but the good folks at Google developed resources to make this free tool even better. Of all of Google's various business solutions, Analytics is the one that I have the most experience using (maybe tied with Adwords) and have used for the longest. It is simple and clean-enough for the smallest business owner with a website to use easily, as well as powerful and complex enough for a sophisticated Internet business to use. It is a fantastic tool that can really give you insight into your online business, particularly marketing, search engine optimization, and merchandising.

I'm planning on writing three specific blog pieces on Analytics coming up.
1) How Analytics Helps Your Search Engine Optimization
2) How Analytics Helps Your Marketing Efficiency
3) How Analytics Helps Your Merchandising Optimization (this is related to site design)

And did I mention that this tool is free?

My Original Purpose Here

The seed idea for this blog stems from the thought that a small but savvy team (OK…me and my friend) could leverage the various web tools, services and solutions offered by Google to quickly launch and aggressively grow our web business in a streamlined cost-effective fashion. That's the business-speak of what we're doing - the simple truth is that Google now has a staggering array of online tools and services designed to help online businesses. Many of these tools and services are free of charge, and many of them enterprise-class in terms of their features and ability to give you real actionable insight into your business. We think that using and integrating these tools will give us a software and business platform that rivals those of much larger competitors, and in most cases considerably better in terms of features and cost-efficiency.

We think that Google helps the little guy both flatten out the competitive terrain and become more nimble navigating his way through it. And as the "little guy" ourselves, we plan to take full advantage of their assistance.

The format of this blog is going to be simple – it will be effectively a running diary as we integrate different Google platforms and solutions to get our site ready for launch (mid October...fingers crossed!), and then as we go through several optimization exercises once we get a significant amount of site and user behavior to analyze.

For instance, most of us are familiar with Google's powerful AdWords advertising platform that lets you get in front of staggering numbers of people looking into subjects related to your products and services. Pretty much everybody selling something on the Internet uses AdWords to reach their target customers. But does everybody know about how through using the amazing Google Analytics web traffic analysis platform, they can connect their behavior of visitors on their website to their AdWords campaigns and get further insight into what keyphrases are the most lucrative for them?

Anyway, I won't ramble here too long on how useful the different Google platforms can be…that's the point of the whole blog after all…so I'll just start off by telling you my intention is to explore them thoroughly on behalf on our own jewelry websites and to provide you with some digested thoughts on the implementation and utilization of these different tools to make for a more profitable business. Because, as we learned in that seminal Operations Management manual The Goal by Eliyahu Goldratt (which I read in an Operational Management class at Wharton), the sole and final measure of operational success is profit. As such, I will constantly be trying to figure out how these different Google tools can help make you money. That is, after all, probably why you're here in the first place!