Tips, tools, and best practices for B2B marketers.

Don’t Analyze, Optimize.

May 9, 2008 | Posted by: Neil

Metrics, analytics and reporting are hot topics in the B2B marketing world these days. But as 1/2 of the EB Optimization team, I must confess even we have fallen into the trap of touting the benefits of analytics and metrics along with much of the B2B community. And if we were to follow the old "people don't buy drills, they buy holes" adage that I pass along to clients on a regular basis, we would have been talking about optimization, not analytics from the get-go.

Now that Google's Website Optimizer is a stand-alone tool (free), there is no reason NOT to optimize your site. Jumping in head first can be intimidating and deciding what to optimize can be tough. So start small, for instance with your "download now" button on an important case study or white paper. Try a few variations of colors and calls to action. Google will seamlessly test numerous variables by dividing traffic amongst the combinations. GWO will then give you a tallied report of which combination is performing best, and you can sit back and watch conversion rate go up.

While in our world there isn't much work to be done around shopping cart abandonment and the like, it shouldn't stop B2B marketers from testing the conversion rates of their pages. Used in concert, Google Analytics and Website Optimizer can be one of the most powerful tools for improving your marketing (not just your site) in this webcentric world we are living in, so why not give it a shot?  Did I mention it was free?