The digital breadcrumb dilemma.

Our last blog post about the digital breadcrumb that gets left behind when people visit your website garnered quite of bit of buzz on the social networks. Our friend Sonny Cohen at Duo Design addressed it in a recent blog post. In his piece, he alludes to a point that warrants discussion:

Web analytic tools don’t offer much insight without coupling it with compelling content.

When we built our law firm website content management system, the Rainmaker CMS, we included a one-of-its-kind analytics dashboard that made it extremely easy for the marketing department to see, among other things, who is visiting and where the traffic goes to on their website.

But we didn’t stop there. The attorney-microsites solution (providing each attorney and practice area with their own small website within the firm’s website) allows marketing departments to see the same information for each and every attorney.

Seeing who is visiting a particular attorney’s bio is powerful stuff that offers concrete actionable data for attorneys, and the marketing department. And it’s not something that other programs like Google Analytics can provide.

But here’s the dilemma – if an attorney or practice area offers little worthwhile content, the data that these tools provide will not reveal much.

But one benefit of keeping tabs on your digital breadcrumbs is that it can help marketers determine what content should be created. Good content will result in more traffic, and thus more revealing data.

We’re big fans of employing enhanced analytics tools to boost your marketing efforts. But we’re even bigger fans of well-conceived content marketing strategies. Coupling the two is a winning approach.