\”Focus on what\’s meaningful, not what\’s measurable.\”
I wish I\’d said that. It wasn\’t me though. It was Warren Buffet, a man much smarter — and a great deal wealthier — than me.
And not surprisingly, it\’s great advice and it\’s especially important for online marketers.
The Web gives us access to all sorts of figures. Our AdSense stats tell us our clickthrough rates, our eCPMs, how our channels are doing and of course, our earnings.
Log files can tell us where our users are coming from, how long they\’re staying on which Web pages and what they searched for to reach our site.
Marketing reports let us know which of our ads won the most clicks and help us to calculate what those users were worth when they reached our pages.
For people with a head for figures, the Web is a wonderful place. If you want, you can spend all day doing nothing but checking your stats and playing with math.
But I don\’t advise it.
Data is important. More than that, if you want to succeed as an online marketer you have to know the figures flowing through your site.
But however valuable that will be to you, it\’s even more important to know what you need to know.
Not all of the information you can learn about your site is useful. Understanding that a free link on someone site is giving you no money, for example, isn\’t very helpful. You might be earning nothing from it, but you\’re not paying for it either so there\’s no point in wasting time thinking about it.
When you look at your stats, you should know which general figures are the most important and which channels you want to focus on right now. You want to keep your efforts where they\’ll bring the biggest rewards.
And that principle works outside the world of data too.
I recommend a lot of very valuable marketing products, items that I know can help people build their business fast. I don\’t expect anyone to buy them all. I do expect that people will understand which items contain the information they need to know and buy those.
You don\’t have to take every measurement you can on your site or learn everything there is to know about Internet marketing.
You just need to gather enough information to be a success.