SOMETIMES What You Think Does Matter

A few days ago I wrote a post about how your online business decisions should be made in the light of available data rather than your opinion.  But numbers can’t tell you everything and you just can’t test everything, so today’s post is about the flip-side.  Sometimes, your instincts and the insights that you’ve gained through your years of experience really do matter.  In fact, they are vital.

Basic use of a free analytics package like Google Analytics can easily identify parts of your site that aren’t working as you’d hope.   So we have data.  And maybe it’s telling us that something isn’t working. 

We want to expand on what works and change or discontinue what doesn’t but what do we change? 

Say a page has conversion problems and you want to improve it.  A/B testing is easy to setup and we can measure 2 or more versions of a page against each other to see which works better.  But what do you change?  What do you test?  Testing doesn’t answer that question.  Sometimes what you think does matter and getting your online marketing to perform at its best requires:

• product/service knowledge
• knowledge of your market and your customers
• and knowledge of the Internet.

The Internet allows us to test and base our decisions on data.  So as I pointed out in the last post, we should base our decisions on that data when it’s available. 

BUT data won’t tell you what to test.  Even though you can monitor so much more online than you can offline, there will always be gaps and grey areas.  It’s in these gaps that you have a chance to excel.

• If the Internet is not working for your business right now, you need to change something.  Accepting that can be a difficult but necessary step.
• Understanding that you can test and use data to improve your online marketing, although it’s basic, is crucial. 
• But… harnessing knowledge of your market and experience in web business to make better decisions in those grey areas.  That is competitive advantage.

Related posts:

1. Sometimes What You THINK Just Doesn’t Matter

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 2nd, 2010 at 3:52 pm and is filed under Online Marketing Strategy. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

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