Recession Proof Web Analytics
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Recession is upon you (and the rest of us) whether you like it (most chances you don’t) or not and there is nothing you can do to prevent that. As soon as you acknowledge the fact that your business could be affected by the recession the better.
Why? Because you can prepare yourself better for the upcoming events. Online economy is no different from offline in that respect, all you need to keep in mind is this: While many companies are losing during recession there are a lot of businesses out there that actually perform better in recession and yes, I am mean business in the same industry.
How to prepare for the recession?
1. Don’t Panic!
Do not cut your marketing budget drastically, smart marketers will be more than happy that your company wont be around!
2. Have a plan in place.
You need to sit down with stake holders in the company and understand the implications of a recession on your online activity. Learn how it is going to affect your monetisation model.
3. Take the road less traveled
Why? Because everyone else is going to search exactly there! You HAVE TO BE CREATIVE.
Do not do what everyone else is doing. (Of course you can always benchmark data to understand what your main competitors are doing but that is not what I am referring to. Mind you, you still need to keep track with what your competitors are doing.) The company has (if not it SHOULD HAVE) a unique selling point, do whatever you can to pop it out to your online operation.
Web Analytics in the time of recession. How?
1. Check your KPI’s.
Do you need to revise them? How would you know if your business is in the right direction if you do not have quantifiable goals?
2. Make sure all your pages are tagged!
Seem obvious does not it? You would be surprise how many companies tag only 60% of their pages just because the owner of that process never conducted a site scan to check that all pages send data to the web analytics software that they just renewed for a lot of money. Cannot tag all pages? Fine, you will have no data for these pages but do yourself a big favor, make sure you tag all landing pages for all your offsite marketing collateral. If you do not do at least that, recession would not have any impact on you since your marketing activity will crash your business anyway.
3. Go beyond the monthly dashboards.
Monthly dashboards are not enough. Your dashboards would have to be weekly (and sometimes even daily) as well. In order for you to get more insight you have to pay attention to the little details since you might need to react immediately for changes occurring in your domain since every little helps.
4. Create Dashboards.
It is much easier to identify if your online activity is healthy by looking at a graphs, it is a good currency. There are a lot of people out there that are too afraid to look at the numbers (for the same reason they can not look their own current account in the eyes without blinking) therefore if are busy doing other important tasks share it with someone else to get a feedback most chances are he won’t have any problem understand the graphs.
5. Show some love to your existing customer base.
It is a good idea to run onsite discount campaigns or email campaign to target your existing customer base. If you do not have loyalty program in place it is a good time to have one now. Pay attention to Average Order Value (AOV) and Browse to buy ratio.
6. SEO, OnSite Search
What ever you do, keep your efforts to provide a better indexed website. SERP’s are recession proof and will not be affected by recession, your website might. Identify what your visitors are looking for and make it easy for them to find.
7. Paid Search
Look closely at the performing keywords and Ad copies resulting in conversion and cross reference them with SEO and offsite search. As examples you might find that you are spending money on traffic you could be getting for free and you might want to create optimised landing pages for custom keywords. Look at the keywords that result in error pages and/or main URL instead of deep linking.
8. Affiliates
If you are not using them by now, you should (it depends what is your business really). You can identify quite easily who are your best performing affiliates and think of a good incentive for them to keep performing. It is a good time to understand why some of them, even though they have a good website, send traffic that does not convert.
9. Monetisation model
Instead of hiding your head in the sand, think about more way to contribute to the business (brand, profit etc.) When it rains it pours! You might be able to get better deals from your suppliers, use it for your own advantage.
10. Good luck!
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