Using analytics to create a digital strategy comes standard. But the reality is most companies hire digital vendors without a strategist.

At the very least it’s critical website and digital marketing vendors to understand these metrics before making recommendations on how to spend your budget. Surprisingly, not everyone does this.

Here are a few ways you can do your analytics homework before opening your wallet.

Internal data: Consider the data in your CRM tools. When used correctly, your CRM can be ripe with consumer data. Quantify that data: What’s the average age, location, and/or gender of your consumer? What’s the average cost-per-transaction? What are your peak seasons?

Website analytics: This is standard. Know your traffic stats and trends. Know your top referring traffic sources and, if you can, why they are are at the top. Know which products do best and which under-sell. Know your conversion rate. Know your average transaction value.

Market data: Check out Google Trends for keywords relevant to your industry or product types. Gauge how the rest of the online world world is moving and note any areas of opportunity you’d like to seize.

Social media: See what people are talking about. Social mention is a fast, free way to get the down and dirty information on this.

Webmaster tools: Check out your webmaster tools for crawl errors (have any?), keyword relevancy (what’s good and what’s missing?), and popularity (incoming links).

Web rankings: Check your website popularity on Alexa. And understand where your website ranks on major search engines (as it compares to competitors).

Armed with this information, you’ll be able to identify where you stand and start drafting expectations before picking up the phone. With this information on board you can now realistically and clearly communicate goals and expectations. It is then on the vendor to identify where he or she can make an impact.

Or, if all else fails, hire someone to do your homework for you.

Original article here.

This is my third month using Google Wave for project correspondence. Wave, in addition to Google docs, is working great for project management. I've added a second project for February.

Taking your Site from One to One Million Users by Kevin Rose from Carsonified on Vimeo.

"Happiness is not something you postpone for the future; it is something you design for the present." Jim Rohn

Subway Violinist.m4a

(download)

Click here to download:

Subway Violinist.m4a (7 MB)

On the subway a few weeks ago, there was a pretty incredible violinist. Recorded using the Voice Memos app on the iPhone. The train is the background noise.