I was listening to a WebEx on a fairly broad subject, how to drive quality traffic to a web site.  During a Q&A period, someone asked about a specific site they were talking about and what was their metrics and analytics strategy?  One of the people on the panel responded with something like, “Our goal was to drive traffic to the site first and then we were going to worry about measuring the traffic later.”  At first, this statement made me cringe in my chair.  I thought, how do you quantify whether the traffic you are receiving is delivering you the ROI you are looking for?  Moreover, how do you disseminate where your traffic is coming from to allow you to see what is working and what is not?

Though then I began to think that maybe this goes back to that age old question of what came first, the chicken or the egg?  It seems like a similar quandary as without traffic there is really nothing to measure, but without measuring, you really do not have any idea about the who, what and when’s of your traffic.

I think that a couple of years ago, the argument of focusing on traffic first and metrics later was a much more valid argument than it is today.  For the simple reason, technology has advanced so far that enabling metrics is very cheap, if not free, and very easy to integrate within a web site.  It seems to me that launching any kind of an online marketing initiative without enabling the most basic of analytics systems is unwise and foolish.

If you want to know more about analytics and just how that among many other factors can translate into real strategy, I recommend checking out JP Sherman’s Blog.

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