Marketers are very concerned with the volume of traffic reaching their websites. However concerns and opinions of measuring conversion rates are all over the map. On many a webinar I have heard someone say a high bounce-rate is bad. I don’t think that is ALWAYS the case. To get straight to the point, conversions are likely the most important analytic because “conversion” usually somehow equates to making money or tightening a relationship. But if you have only a basic analytics system at hand, then you have a very limited view or understanding of what people are doing on your website. You might be able to track how many new customers you have versus returning customers, average pageviews per visitor, which pages have the most traffic, which CTAs are clicked thru, etc. But usually you have very little insight into the on-going activities of any particular people on your website…even those that unbeknownst to you are in the buying-cycle.
And that is exactly why I occasionally bang my fists on my desk and shout…er…actually in my case it means I tap vigorously on my keyboard “I want Sitecore!” More specifically I want Sitecore OMS which stands for Online Marketing System…though I think I'm going to start referring to the OMS as Online Marketing Saviour (but then SEO could get all messed up with the American spelling "savior" v. UK/Canadian/Australian/NewZealand spelling “saviour”. LOL)