Avinash Kaushik has always been a great evangelist for the Google Analytics solution, with useful tips at the Occam's Razor blog, along with having written two books on the business of web analytics (see the Small Business Trends' book review on his book Web Analytics 2.0). There are great examples of how to extract value from analytics data. This post on customer lifetime value shows the influence of analytics data to determine your most profitable customer segment.
Explained by David Hughes of E-mail Academy , the concept answers three questions regarding the value of an acquired customer base:
This concept, along with inference of the analytics data, can guide businesses to understand which segments of website traffic are worth the marketing effort. Remember, your analytics data is more than just examining keywords. You can examine your online presence, and infer some answers, as well as guidance for others. I love this post from Avinash because it gets into the meat and potatoes of value. This is not entirely new; Annastatia Holdren, a paid search evangelist for Google, gave great comments during her Adwords training about monitoring the value of your keywords so that you are not paying more for traffic.
Key takeaways relevant for business owners looking to review their analytics.
To read the full explanation of the Customer Lifetime Value process, see the post at Occam's Razor.