Interview – Miles Bennett gets interviewed by Marketing Guru Dave Chaffey

Interviews
September 16, 2009

Dave Chaffey is a well known marketing guru. He is a regular at event like eMetrics and Search Engine Strategies. I met him quite a few years ago at an email marketing seminar held by Redeye. His blog is known as a fountain of information for all things internet marketing related.

interview Recently, Dave and I were talking about the difficulties in getting web analytics recognised by senior managers as more that and add-on responsibility (which could mean anything between 10 to 40 minutes per month of dedicated resource).

It is something that has echoed for a number of years now and I am still amazed that businesses think paying lip-service to understanding web behaviour and traffic is going to deliver return on investment or justify budgets for future web development.

Avinash Kaushik has promoted the 80/20 rule at conferences ever since I met him. Spend 20% of the budget on the tool and 80% on resource.

A little while ago I worked on a training project with Danny Meadows-Klue and the local government people we were training and even those these web managers were on a web analytics training course and responsible for local government sites – I still had to drill the basics into them. Few had heard of page tagging let alone advanced page tagging – all were using different tools (which isn’t too much of a problem) but could provide government cost savings by having one shared contract / tool.

Maybe it is because web corporate communications / local government sites don’t deliver actual value. What I mean is that they don’t sell anything. They are there for information and the idea of monetisation hasn’t cropped up on their radar yet.

Anyway back to the interview these are the questions that were asked and I tried to answer them as thoroughly and as honestly as possible (I do believe that Dave had to edit some of my language) hehe.

Q1. Looking at the big picture of digital marketing reporting and performance improvement, what would you say are the most common problems that are most detrimental to a business that companies should guard against?

Q2. For me, developing custom metrics, custom dashboards and emailed reports that are actionable to improve business results are crucial. Could you give some tips on the general approaches you use to identify appropriate KPIs and how they should be structured?

Q3. The latest Econsultancy research shows that 77% of surveyed companies use Google Analytics, but with many (57%) using both Google Analytics and a paid service. How should companies decide whether a paid solution is worthwhile?

Q4. It’s one thing to have an analytics system configured correctly, it’s quite another to get value from it through staff using it sufficiently and appropriately. Which approaches have you seen which work help encourage productive usage of web analytics system.

Q5. When more than one web analytics system is used for reporting, then there will often be substantial differences in visitor volumes and page views. How should web specialist explain the significance of these differences to their less savvy colleagues?

Q6. Looking to the future, what excites you most about where we are now with web analytics against where we could be.

For the full interview click here.

Have a great weekend

Miles