Your Website Data isn't Telling the Whole Story - And That's a Good Thing
Website data is one of the most powerful tools you have at your disposal.
It tells you how many people visited your webpage, how long they stayed, what they clicked on, and more. This information can tell you how to manage your resources online. Mainly, what is working, and what is not.
That means when you understand your website data, you can make more informed decisions going forward and decide what to cut out of your roadmap.
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However, your website data isn’t telling the whole story. There are many key points that your website data simply cannot track.
This post will go over some of the intangibles that your website data will not be able to track, and how you can use this to your advantage.
Your Website Data Cannot Track Everything
In a perfect world, our website data would tell us everything we need to know about our marketing efforts.
Unfortunately, our world is far from perfect, and there are many holes that our website data cannot address.
Let’s look at some of the intangibles your website data cannot track, and why this might be a good thing for your brand.
Word of Mouth
The staple of good business for centuries before the internet and Yelp, word of mouth is still perhaps the most powerful tool today when it comes to attracting customers and making sales.
We all know that good business comes down to trust. The fact is that it is far easier to trust the endorsement of your friend, colleague, or neighbor than it is to trust a thousand five-star reviews or a stellar webpage (although both are hugely beneficial).
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A high-quality website can bring in a lot of sales by producing positive word-of-mouth endorsements. But your website data won't be able to tell you that!
External Sharing
When you produce media to market your brand, you send advertisements for your business all over the internet. Your web data does well to capture the number of views and shares your media gets on social media, but it cannot always tell when that media has been shared externally.
For example, let’s say you made a video showcasing your new service. This video gets 50 shares on Facebook and 6,000 views. That’s all well and good, but it doesn’t tell you where your video ad was seen outside of Facebook.
An employee may have shared a link to the video in their company Slack channel, or they may have emailed a link to their boss. Both these methods can make your business a sale, or produce a new client, but your website data won’t be able to pick up on it.
Your Followers’ Followers
The last way your website data misses out on key information is that it cannot track real-world interactions.
Let’s say you post an article on LinkedIn and one of your followers reads it and enjoys the content. They may share this article with their colleagues or boss in several ways that website data cannot track.
Whether this is over their personal social media page, via email, or in person, your content is getting shared without contributing to your website data.
How Can I Use This to My Advantage?
The good news is that website data always captures what takes place on your webpage, or social media page. That means it will never tell you that something is working when it isn’t.
However, since it cannot track everything, it may tell you that some piece of content you have isn’t working when it is.
For example, you may have an article or video that has produced a low number of views or shares, but you find that the views it does have stayed on the page for several minutes. This means that while the website data might be less than ideal, the content may be getting shares that you cannot track.
So, how can you use this knowledge to your advantage?
Many of your competitors will only focus on website data. This can be effective as it gives us a good idea of what is working, but if you only focus on website data, you may be missing part of the bigger picture.
Instead of blindly following the website data, focus on creating engaging content, that addresses a problem or pain point, and is easily consumable. Useful content will always do well and so long as your SEO is up to snuff, it will give you results.
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Get Content that Takes Your Brand Further in Ohio and Kentucky
Making content yourself is no picnic. Tracking your web data and trying to manage the intangibles can be even harder.
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