Sat, Jul 27, 2013 — Many clients find themselves making critical marketing decisions without having enough data. Even very smart people make bad decisions when they look at a small data set and extend the conclusion across the entire website, or the entire marketing strategy. One client’s marketing team was frustrated by an investor’s insistence that he knew the important keywords for the site optimization…despite detailed research which showed that there wasn’t any search on his search phrases. A CEO promptly lost 17% of his search traffic when he decided what language would go on the U.S. home page. Neither of these men’s decisions could be questioned by their teams, but they certainly got talked about internally. As the person responsible for the company’s performance, whether in sales, operations or finance, there are ways for your marketing team to contribute significantly to your goals. Web analytics helps us understand how prospects are finding you, how they evaluate a purchase decision, how many times they visit before conversion, and where they get confused and abandon the site. But unless you are asking your marketers the important questions, the ones that uncover patterns and smooth the way to purchase, much of this intelligence is not brought to the top. We recently showed a CFO that the month’s sales from paid search exactly matched the cost…a simple coincidence, but it spurred some rethinking which allowed the company to move that investment where it could be profitable in the long term. To his great credit, he is ignoring the need for immediate sales in favor of greater market share. How Can You Inspire Top Performance?