Sean Doyle
Sean is a principal at FitzMartin, and our leading mind and voice on sales and marketing strategy. Sean is particularly adept at applying the science of behavior change to the art of sales and marketing. It’s an approach that he and FitzMartin have developed over thousands of client engagements since 1992.
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Does your agency give you full access to your web site analytics? Many only offer screen grabs dropped into Word doc reports. We believe that is an antiquated practice built on fear. In fact we find it very peculiar that all agencies do not have an open door policy to the raw data. We do. Know why?
The e-mail exchange below is why FitzMartin is a huge fan of opening up web analytics to our clients. Far to often when we begin working with a new client they show us a web report that feature screen grabs of analytics screens. Seriously?
Subject: FW: Ad Words Inquiry
I counted 29 keywords that had “Eligible” listed as their status. When I hover my mouse over the status, the majority of the keywords have “No” listed under the “Showing ads right now?” question regardless of their quality score.
Should we be alarmed by this? Or will the amount of “Low Search Volume” keywords decrease in a short period of time since changes were recently made to the account?
Thanks,
Sent: Tuesday, June 16, 2015 10:14 AM
To: Client
Subject: Re: Ad Words Inquiry
We believe, first of all, that the client owns the data and they should have full rights and access to it. Agencies used to use a model of hosting and then holding hostage the analytics reports by not giving user credentials to the clients. It was a way to “keep” business in the shop. Sounds a bit like keeping a hostage and calling them a “guest” to me.
As or more importantly, we believe the more time a client spends poking around in analytics, the smarter they get about what is happening on a site, the more it elevates our counsel and the efficacy of our joint reporting/analysis calls. With data the client has such a better understanding of how the web platform works and what we are doing for our fees. Best of all, the client will also obtain a better appreciation of some of the ambiguity involved.
All told, just as the above email exchange demonstrates, the client becomes a better marketer! Insist on open book analytics. It’s in your best interest.
Reasonable people can disagree, of course. Thoughts?
Sean