When it comes to marketing and your website, you need to be able to measure the results. A web content management system can help by providing analytics tools or by linking to another company's tools. What's more, it can help you set up A/B testing to see what attracts the most audience to a given page, and custom landing pages to help you set up specific campaigns quickly.

Aaron Gray, who is director of analytics & optimization at ISITE Design says analytics give you insight to into your website, allowing you to understand how well your website is achieving your business objectives.

"Once you understand how the website is supposed to create value for the organization, analytics can help you see how good you are at it. How efficiently are you converting traffic to the site into value for the organization?" Gray explains.

Lee Dallas, an ECM technology strategist and blogger for the Big Men on Content blog agrees, saying analytics help prove whether your website efforts are working or not.

"The success of any site or campaign is the degree to which it changes the behavior of those visitors," he says.

Analytics rely on a number of metrics to help you determine the success or failure of your site. "That behavior is monitored in a number of ways including the length of time a given user is on a site or viewing a given piece of content, how often they abandon a transaction and, most importantly, how many times they complete a particular action. This last metric, commonly called conversion is a key indicator that the site is achieving your goals," he says.

Dallas says without analytics your site is "little more than a note in a bottle."

Web content management vendors understand this, which could explain why there have been many high-profile analytics purchases. For instance, Adobe (NASDAQ: ADBE) bought Ominture, and recently combined with Day CQ5 to create a WCM/analytics combination.

Gray says that vendors have been keeping their focus on analytics, and this has resulted in tools that make it easier for marketers run their websites. "There are a range of things we've seen, from integrated website analytics (with varying degrees of depth and success) to tools to analyze and improve their content efforts, such as A/B testing, serving up content based on a visitor's profile, and serving content based on behavior tracking," Gray says.

But Gray says WCM vendors have had mixed results as they try to satisfy customers with a system's built-in tools. "Adoption among customers favors the best-of-breed analytics vendors. People like point solutions for analytics and, in most cases, the point solutions are able to do it better than built-in analytics tools. Useful, effective and accurate analytics tools are harder to build than many WCM vendors realize when they set out to build their own," he says.

According to Dallas, however, the 10,000 pound gorilla in the room is the free analytics tool Google (NASDAQ: GOOG) Analytics.

"As Google Analytics absorbs much of the SMB market even those WCM vendors that have their own analytics tools begin to productize and simplify integrations to the free tool set. Ease of integration between various WCM and analytics tools vary but the growth of Google Analytics has in many ways established a baseline that you must support to be viable," he says.

As users become more mobile, you can begin to understand and serve content based on what you know about them--the device they are using and their location in the world. Dallas says the importance of analytics and its relative impact on customization of content is magnified by mobile computing.

"There is a clear need to understand how content is both created and consumed in a mobile form factor. You cannot assume that the techniques and content in a desktop environment will drive the same conversion rate from a mobile device. The action targets are likely to evolve as well. The tools must now collect information on location, mash-up source data and social media interaction in more complex ways and correlate them to user behavior and decision-making," he says.

Regardless of where you display your content--the web or a mobile device--you have to understand the behavior of site visitors to serve them the most relevant content and to understand how well you are achieving the goals and objectives of your various marketing campaigns. Over time, you will be able to use information based on each device to serve content that is most relevant to users, and analytics and the WCM will be an important facilitator.

The above article is excerpted from "Making WCM Work for Marketing and IT Services," a recently published FierceContentManagement eBook. For more information, download the eBook here.