Web Analytics:
Exploiting Business Metrics

By James Atkinson, LLB

Web Analytics - Exploiting Business Metrics: All online and offline businesses, have similar management issues including: bookkeeping, accounting, taxation compliance, costs control and so on.

I have run both online and offline businesses and I can say without a doubt that an online business has prodigious advantages.

Yes, there is a steep learning curve with online business usiness technology - but after you have discovered and learned the myriad and wondrous things you can accomplish online, it’s difficult to return to a fully offline business.

Technology is an important management component because internet technology offers unique rewards over traditional offline business methods. Over the past decade and a half, internet marketing and business have been the ultimate beneficiary of technology convergence:

Now, you can easily carry out all of these tasks online:

• Find viable markets to sell to,
• Research markets thoroughly,
• Instantaneously test markets,
• Inexpensively conduct prospect and customer surveys,
• Easily create digital products,
• Build strong market-oriented social networks,
• Assemble vast online educative processes,
• Market economically to millions of prospects,
• Construct viable online sales processes,
• Easily manage prospects and customers,
• Administer your whole online Business.

If you operate an offline business, the costs associated of many of the above activities are prodigious. A well-resourced internet entrepreneur can do all of the tasks listed and more - without much help from outside. The productivity and cost advantages are exceptionally good.

Just think about the advantages. Rupert Murdoch, speaking in China in October 2009 says:

“…we find ourselves in the midst of an information revolution that is both exciting and unsettling. It is a digital revolution turning traditional business models upside down … traversing geographic, industrial, and media boundaries … and creating a new source of wealth, material and social, around the world.”

Well, he’s absolutely right. The models have been turned upside down. The advantages are on YOUR side. You just have to take advantage of the opportunity.

Consumers love the convenience of the internet. Big corporations and niche marketers have been quick to realize the benefits. Telcos, media companies, internet access providers, radio and TV broadcasters, electronic media, were once all discrete and separate business operations.

The internet allows these diverse companies to merge their service offerings. Many corporations and internet marketers now strive to become the single point of contact or the Point of Information for large portfolios of services.

You, the small eBusiness entrepreneur, can also benefit from technology convergence and business metrics. And the important thing to realize is that each of the attributes below can easily be measured, tested, and optimized.

The next image shows both technology convergence plus many of the marketing and business and the tasks you can do from your computer:

Web Analytics > Setting Up an Evidence Based Business > Test Track and Optimize > Planning and Process > Exploiting Business Metrics > Creating Business Growth >