Managing Analytics

There is a lovely Sterne newsletter sit in my inbox when I came back to work. In the first item of that issue, he was trying to sell his buddy Bryan Eisenberg’s OnTarget service with a catchy title “Bryan Eisenberg Looks Over Your Shoulder”. He wrote:

[The following is from Sterne Measures newsletter Dec 15 issue, you can subscribe here http://www.targeting.com/

Ever sat down with Bryan Eisenberg and had him review the conversion quotient of your website? It's intimidating. In seconds, he can tell you seven things you know are true. They're obvious once he's said them. Well now they've found a way to downloaded Bryan's brain into a web server. They call it "OnTarget" and are rolling it out as a pay-per-month service.

So what's it do?
In his words it:

- Continually analyzes and uncovers challenges in over 100 different areas of your website, team, marketing
efforts, and visitors.
- Tells you what to do to fix it.
- Tells you what resources are needed and the estimated amount of time it will take them.
- Uncovers the reasons why visitors aren't being persuaded to do what you want them to and delivers approximately 40 hours worth of actionable recommendations and direction to your team per month on how to resolve it.
- Provides online survey & email campaign tools and reporting.
- Provides automatic visitor identification & reporting.
- Uncovers the effectiveness of marketing efforts and content.
- Provides competitive tracking and reporting.
- Provides lead qualification, scoring, and routing.

I call it Bryan Eisenberg on demand.

I call it way cool.

http://www.futurenowinc.com/ontarget_service.htm

[Sterne newsletter over]

All sounds good. Although it is very unlikely for us to subscribe such services, I couldn’t resist the temptation to click on that link. Knowing Bryan in person and reading his blogs all day long, I know when he has something to offer, it got to be great.

The landing page is well designed with similar information as Sterne summarized. I noticed there is a huge green button “Please contact me” screaming at me -good work, Bryan, you did what you are preaching.

Besides that green button, the second paragraph caught my attention:

[With OnTarget you get the benefit of analysis without hiring an analyst. It is better than simply analysis. You tell us what resources you have available to implement change so that you don't get recommendations that waste your time or resources.]

Get the benefit of analysis without hiring an analyst? Hmm, I am wondering if Bryan’s new year resolution is to kill all of us, poor web analysts. In this economy, I am pretty sure a lot of companies are interested in such strategy.

So I wrote Bryan an email with the exact question on the title “Hey Bryan, are you trying to kill all of us? ”

Bryan wrote back in a day and I really appreciate he took time to further elaborate his points as below:

[That is a great question and one I am glad you asked. Of course, I don't want to kill any analysts, I wish I could clone more of you though. Most organizations are having a difficult time dedicating resources, finding people and getting results with their optimization efforts. OnTarget is meant for those hundreds of thousands of organizations that aren't the Dells, Overstocks, or Amazons of the world.

You know Jim's and my passion and mission in starting the WAA was to create and educate analysts and bring them to the marketplace but while we have been successful, we haven't been able to keep up with demand. OnTarget is meant to bring cutting edge Persuasion Architecture trained analysts, leveraging our technology and help companies improve their conversion rates and operationalize optimization within the organization. Could we help companies like yours, the answer is yes, but we would only supplement and provide an outside perspective to your already capable staff. ]

I was half joking when I sent him the note but I am still glad to know that OnTarget is not meant to kill any of us. Without knowing much details about OnTarget, I believe it will be great tool, just because it’s from Bryan and his company. But from the bottom of my heart, I know a super web analyst is priceless.

And that’s you and me, baby!