Continuing the 2012 trend conversation, last week was about overall design and development trends. This week a more practical thought concerning how you manage your website with analytics and data mining.
We believe understanding your site stats will become ever more crucial this year. As the web continues to fan out over so many different devices, and content is consumed via so many different services, it becomes more important than ever to know which devices and services are bringing benefit to your business, and how you can eek even more out of them.
Sometimes referred to as Web Analytics
"Web analytics is the measurement, collection, analysis and reporting of internet data for purposes of understanding and optimizing web usage."
-Wikipedia
There are tools out there to help collect this data: its performance, and other cool information such as traffic sources, medium, and campaign information. Remember to stay as consistent as you can collecting it. The more information you have over time, will show you patterns of behavior that will help you when you need to reach out, remodel or revisit your online goals.
So overall, keep a keen eye on your site statistics in google analytics or webtrends (or whichever tool you use). The more you understand your audience, the more your audience will return to you. Remember that these aren’t the end all in terms of your data, but by combining this information with other business metrics you will have a better idea of what and where your online marketing is heading (or needs to head).
Other resources:
http://bx.businessweek.com/data-mining/blogs/
http://analytics.blogspot.com/
http://www.freakonomics.com/blog/