We’ve all heard about the many cost-cutting measures companies are taking to survive in what I call “The Post-Bush Economy”.

One measure we haven’t heard enough about is analytics tuning.

We hear about budgets being re-allocated or slashed. Traditional is moving online, viral and buzz are being questioned, RFP’s are going out in hopes of finding less expensive vendors, and so on.

But can an organization truly optimize its channels if it hasn’t made the most of its web analytics data?

As our analytics guru Micah Fisher-Kirshner said in a recent newsletter, “Ironically, most of the large companies we have worked with have such nascent analytics practices that their requirements barely scratch the surface of even GA’s capabilities.”

This leads to the question: how can a company know what to cut, and by how much, unless they have a highly optimized analytics practice?

The first step in budget re-allocationis investing in the enhancement of your analytics practice.

If you are reading this and thinking that your analytics practice is probably not what it should be, contact us, we’ll give you an “analytics check-up” that will ensure your organization can make wise budget decisions to survive in the Post-Bush economy.

This post is meant to give you a high level view of how to best use GA.  Subsequent posts will tell you how to implement.

What I love about GA are the profiles.  Unlike other analytics packages, you can create a profile and use filters - this removes the needless exercise of “drilling down” to a particular channel to explore KPI’s- which, far too often (with other analytics packages) have a dead end.

I recommend setting up profiles for:

• All of your website (”all in”, as I call it)
• Organic
• PPC
• Mobile (my next post will be SOOOOO cool for you analytics geeks.  Get prepared for some advanced regular expressions stuff)
• Brand terms - most SEM campaigns report on performance without recognizing that brand terms are a “given”.  Create a filter to see how brand terms perform - this profile will also give you insight into the performance of channels like display, radio, television (awareness) perform - if you see a spike in brand terms, this is likely due to another channel that is otherwise difficult to track.
• Non-brand - create a profile that filters out brand terms so you can track the performance of your marketing efforts without the noise from other channels.
• Affiliate / partner - did you sign a partnership and want to see its performance?  Set up a filter.  Easy to report on.
• International - does your company report by region or by country? Align your marketing reporting with your company’s financial ones.  You can do this by country, region, or language.

That list is just a sample.  Come back for more details on HOW to set these up (particulary mobile!)