Marketing Optimization relates to measuring success by marketing channel – paid search, display, retargeting, affiliate, email, social and then using that information to alter the marketing investment and the marketing tactics. When you see a low conversion rate for certain marketing channels you might decide to decrease your spending in those areas or change the marketing message, placement or frequency. Or you might discover that the landing page you’re using is driving visitors to your site’s internal search and you can use that data to choose a better landing page. All of these changes happen off of the site.

The other side of using web analytics tools is to analyze data with the intent to alter the user experience. This is where you treat each site section with a purpose and rate each site section against how well it is performing against the site’s goal of getting visitors to product detail pages > to add to cart > to checkout > to click the order submit button.

Recognizing these two sides of web analytics tools is beneficial because they answer two very different questions to two very different departments: how do I improve return on investment for the marketing team and how do I improve site conversion rate for the site stakeholders. It’s easy to get them mixed up and to misalign the data you’re providing to the one’s who will benefit the most from it.