Entrepreneur recently referenced Goizueta Business School’s Douglas Bowman, professor of marketing and co-director of the Emory Marketing Analytics Center, in an article on “Tracking Customers Beyond Google Analytics.”
While noting Google Analytics’s excellence at tracking a website’s broad trends over time, Entrepreneur discusses the technology’s shortcomings in revealing individual visitor information. The article explains the need for a tool to complement Google Analytics’s big picture snapshot so employees can manage more campaigns, more effectively. Jason Ephraim, manager at digital marketing firm Novatex Solutions, is featured for wanting “real-time, at-a-glance data on those visitors that would quickly alert him to any site issues, and more important, allow him to tweak his marketing efforts to generate solid leads from the relatively small number of visitors to his clients’ websites.”
The suggested fix: Combining use of Google Analytics with GoSquared, an analytics platform designed to demonstrate how people use a site, tracking key information like where individual visitors are from, what brought them to the site, and how they view the page. For Ephraim, the changes to the lead-generation tool resulted in a profit gain of roughly 20 percent for the client. Its efficiency has allowed him to nearly double his customer base and quadruple the number of advertising campaigns he can manage by himself.
Professor Bowman is cited as a “second opinion” calling Ephraim’s combined solution a smart move. He is quoted saying, “When trying to manage multiple sites that get modest traffic, you want, in some ways, a warning to tweak your attention.” Bowman goes on to warn Ephraim that he will eventually reach capacity by asking, “When does he make the transition from trying to monitor multiple sites at once to deciding, ‘Let’s get a dedicated person for a single site?”
-Meredith Farahmand
