Paralytics: The Art and Science of Web-based Analysis Paralysis

One of the greatest ironies of my eMarketing career is that I’m able to create and accurately measure search engine marketing (SEM) campaigns for clients, yet the amount of data generated in the process can be completely overwhelming. I call this data analysis conundrum “Web paralytics” as it combines Web analytics with complete paralysis. By definition, paralytics is “a characteristic of or resembling paralysis“, which accurately reflects the challenges we and many companies face when analyzing their Web site traffic or SEM activities. From my experience, the best way to cope with or entirely avoid the data paralytics issue is to tightly define objectives, metrics and benchmarks for key performance indicators (KPIs) and create reports that accurately and easily communicate progress towards the benchmarks. There is certainly more to it than that, but I’ve been surprised nobody in the SEM industry has jumped on the term “paralytics” yet, like I did with SEM PR.

[tags]paralytics, web, analytics, search engine marketing, SEM, definition, emarketing, Internet, data, analysis paralysis[/tags]