I pay close attention to user behavior on our websites. Mainly because opinion is just opinion as far as conversion, funnels, so called “best practices”, etc.

Most people have an immature view on what’s really happening with their website analytics. Most website owners know what their conversion rate is, how many unique visitors they have, etc.

This is all basic information and gives people a warm/fuzzy feeling inside when they can spit these figures out quickly, but at the end of the day, those figures mean nothing.

You have to get to a point where you not only KNOW that data, but you have to take it to the next level and make educated decisions on what to DO with that data. Avinash Kaushik explained it perfectly in his latest book when he said…

“Combining the why (intent, motivation, and so forth) with the what (clicks, visitor counts) has to be the cornerstone of any successful actionable web analytics program”.

Notice Avinash used the word ACTIONABLE when he was speaking about how to have a successful web analytics program. You not only need to know the why and what, but you need to have a plan of action once you get that information.

I’ve been doing some testing with ClickTale for a while now…

This service has been around a little while but I finally decided to use it. In my opinion, this tool is one of the most important tools I’ve ever experienced on the internet for understanding user behavior. If you combine this, with Google Analytics and Google Website Optimizer as a small business person and start taking this stuff seriously you can start making so much more money it’s crazy.

I highly recommend to everyone here that you shift away from the latest and greatest persuasion and marketing techniques that are being pushed on the internet. All of that stuff can be found in books from Amazon and learned very quickly with some daily reading discipline.

Having a product, having good direct response copy, and having traffic are the cornerstone to a successful internet based business, we all know this. But WHAT next? Your next step should be drilling down and figuring out the best way to survey, communicate, build products for, and service your list/customers.

So after saying all that, the big “secret” to making MORE money online is you need to go much deeper within your market. You’ll make so much more money by implementing what I just talked about and learning that than you ever could with a new monthly subscription or marketing product. A new monthly newsletter is NOT what you need to hit the next level.

P.S. If you install ClickTale on your site and actually WATCH what people do on your site, most people reading this post will finally believe at last that copywriting is a DISTANT 4th compared to LIST, PRODUCT, and PRICE!

90% of our readers skim, and FAST! And that’s not just my market.

This entry was posted on Monday, August 11th, 2008 at 5:02 pm and is filed under General Marketing, Making Money. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.