Performance Marketing with Google™ Analytics: Practical Strategies for Maximizing Online ROI

Chapter 3. Putting Google Analytics to Work in Your Organization

IN THIS CHAPTER

• Leading the Charge for Analytics

• Assembling a Google Analytics Dream Team

• GETUP and Go: Defining Your Measurement Strategy

When you peer under the hood of most Web sites, you'll find Web analytics tags everywhere. It's also common knowledge that most organizations do little to apply the data to everyday decisions. Why is this the case?

This chapter outlines the key ingredients of a data-driven culture, not just for marketers but for all business functions. It also outlines how to assemble a strong team that can translate the data from Google Analytics into actionable insights that reach the right decision-makers at the right time. We also show you how three organizations are using Web analytics to drive marketing strategy today. We hope all this will provide inspiration for you to start applying the techniques we present in later chapters.

Leading the Charge for Analytics

In 1964 IBM released the System 360, a large mainframe that looks a bit like the robot from Lost in Space ("Danger, Will Robinson!"). Geeks loved the new system because it gave them a full 8MB of RAM to power their applications. It wasn't long before geeks and analysts teamed up to attack business problems, and within three years a researcher from MIT, John D.C. Little, launched MEDIAC, the first media planning application and one of the first programs in a branch of computer science called decision support systems (now called business intelligence ...