Find out more about behavioral targeting and download the free Behavioral Analytics For Dummies book from Quantivo.

Now let’s put this into perspective.  My website has only been around for a few months (since Sep 10th, 2009 for the historians).  Should I think that I have arrived and stop all pursuit of website improvement until I am back to the level of the rest of my industry vertical?  Suppose I only pay attention to where I stand against my industry.  What if my metrics are declining along with the rest of the industry?  Am I still doing well?

Regardless of your website’s standings compared to Google Analytics benchmarking, this is the line of thinking you should have.  The bottom line is this – did you outperform yourself?  Another way of putting it is that you should compete against yourself and try to become better than you are.  If you push yourself to be better and focus inward, then you know you’re moving in the right direction.  Your plans will be based on what your KPIs dictate needs help, not where you stand against competitors.

Stop obsessing over benchmarks and outperform yourself!

“A Fun Game: Guess The Outcome Of 15 Tests” by Lars Johansson is an effective display of how little we know about how our customers behave and what makes them tick.  My opinion is that the closer you are to your business, the less you know about how your customer reacts to your marketing.  When working with the Sun Developer Network eCampaigns team, I had a colleague present a similar case study depicting which banner ads performed better.  It was an enlightening experience for all.

You owe it to your business to ensure that marketing dollars are being used on the most effective campaigns.  You also owe it to your business to optimize those that aren’t.  Don’t just throw them out the window.  Test different ideas before assuming it’s just a bad idea.  For example, you may have tried utilizing an email list to generate new sales leads.  It may have generated a less than stellar conversion rate.  Before you toss it, have you considered trying different subject lines or different content?  In fact, when you start a campaign, you should ask, “How can I test a few ideas instead of going with my instincts?”  With this method, you would have taken a small portion of your email list and tested a few subject lines.  Then you would have used the best performing one on the remainder of the list.

So how did you do on the Outcomes Test by Lars?  I am not embarrassed to tell you that I was only correct 53.3% of the time.  I should not be surprised.  After all, my point is that you should be testing, testing, testing.  I’m not an exceptional web analyst because I make the best guesses, it’s because I test.