By Matt Buchenau
Learning Spanish would have been a lot easier if I hadn’t had to understand what the words meant. To me, Spanish was a string of easy-to-pronounce, phonetically obvious words. Aside from an accent, a tilde or an extra alphabetical character or two, saying or reading the words on the page was cake. But much to the detriment of my high-school grade point average, understanding those words and interpreting the nuances of the language was where things got a tad murky…pea soup murky, in fact!
I see a strong parallel between my misadventures with learning Spanish and how many companies use their Internet marketing analytics. Assuming they pay attention to the available data at all (many don’t) most can only say or read the words on the page. Sure, most can look at traffic and know when it’s rising or falling. Most can tie a traffic peak or valley to an outside event: a new advertising campaign, a press release, an e-blast or something like that, but when it comes to a more granular understanding of the abundant data, what it truly says about your web marketing initiative, how your company stacks up against your competition and, above all, what it can reveal about your audience, a gaping chasm exists between website key performance indicator (KPI) data and making meaningful, actionable sense of it all. At the bottom of this chasm lies a gnarled heap of wasted dollars, missed opportunities and failed marketing plans, that, with a commitment to experienced data evaluation, interpretation and Internet marketing guidance, didn’t need to wind up there.
The Importance of an Interpreter
Taking the analogy a step further; if you plan to visit a foreign country and don’t know or plan to learn the language, it is ideal to have an interpreter at your side. You would expect such an interpreter to be fluent in both your language and that of the host country. He or she would be able to discern the subtle differences in linguistics, inflection and body language and would often need to adapt what you want to say and mean to how the receiver needs to hear and understand it and vice versa. Without one, a visit to a foreign land is marked by confusion, meaningless babble, blank stares and lots of wrong turns. Continue Reading
