The fact that we have access to so much website data is great. In fact, much of the data we can get is very close to real-time. How cool is that?
Well, sometimes it isn’t so cool at all, because web marketing isn’t won by looking at the day-to-day data so much as it’s won by looking at overall trends. Over the course of any marketing campaign, there will be mountain tops and valleys. Rankings fluctuate, traffic is volatile, and sales bound around on a day-to-day basis.
A daily understanding of what is going on is important to pinpoint problems, but not everything that you see day-to-day can show you the truth of the campaign. Sometimes, change is just temporary.
Let’s say that you see a sharp decline in traffic to your website all of a sudden. You go into full panic mode and start screaming at your web marketing team. Your site got penalized! The optimization sucks! Google banned you! And from there you start taking drastic actions for recovery.
The problem is, it could just be a problem with the tracking code that got corrupted in an update. That’s an easy fix.
This may be an extreme exaggeration, but things like this happen all the time. Conversions rate drops, we panic, then we see we just had a really well-shared blog post that threw off the visitor-to-conversion ratio. Rankings drop, we panic, but a couple of days later they all come back. Just a Google hiccup is all.
Every web marketer has to make decisions based on the data before them. But making decisions based on short-term data can lead to the wrong decisions at the wrong time.
A temporary crash in web presence might be due to an anomaly rather than a problem with the web marketing campaign itself. This can lead to improper actions being taken. Any change you make to your website or marketing campaign that hasn’t been verified can ultimately make the situation worse.
If you see something, say something, but whatever you do, don’t panic. Dig in, figure it out and you may find out that it was just a glitch after all.