Where You Should Invest Your Web Marketing Budget

...the bottom line for magnificent success is the people...invest multiple times more in her or him, or more of them, if you truly want to take action on your data. Otherwise, you are simply data rich and information poor...a great tool in the hands of your reporting squirrel is useless.  A free/inexpensive/underpowered tool in the hands of your analysis ninja will yield massive results that impact your bottom line...

-Avinash Kaushik (@avinash), Web Analytics 2.0

Web data is easy to get at; and it can even be free.  Yes! That is awesomeness.  But, you know what's not easy to get and is not free?  The insights you can get from the data that will result in wise decisions and actions for business growth.  Since this is the case, it just makes sense that you would spend way more on what will get you insights than you do on what gets you the data.  The bottom line is that you have to invest in talented people.  Without them, your data is useless (except you may FEEL good if the blue line goes up and to the right).

That is what you want, right?  To build your business?  Well then, you have to know what to do next to make it better.  Your opinion, although well-intentioned, may not be well-informed.  Well-intentioned decisions tend to cost more in time and money than you'll ever invest in people that can give you well-informed insights.

If your goal is to grow your site's effectiveness, then you need analysis ninjas that know what to do with all that data you've been gathering in your analytics tool.  Without them, you're relying on faith alone.  Faith is good, but faith without data is dead.