During one of the huddles at xChange, a good question came up.  What does Analytics look like?  Is it a report, a graph or even a conversation?

At first blush, this seams like a simple question.  It looks like Omniture or Google Analytics, right? Or does it look like Webtrends / Visual Sciences?  Wait a minute, I hired a web analyst and he gives me a report weekly with text on it.  Sometimes we even have a conversation about analytics.

During xChange, analytics looked a lot like conversations to me.  We all sat around tables and talked a lot about it.  The problem is, there is no answer for this.  I know what accounting looks like.  I know what my doctor’s office looks like.  I know what most other professions look like but there doesn’t seam to be a standard way to communicate analytics.

Just printing out a dashboard or special report doesn’t seem to cut it for me.  Neither does a dry report.  When I used to receive weekly reports from our web analyst, I used to insist that he sit with me and go over the report.  I wanted to hear a story about our traffic.  I wanted to speculate as to reasons why things were up or down. 

Data itself is not very interesting.  I think Analytics must tell a story.  It must tell us something we didn’t know before we started.  I want to know how analytics can help our user experience or how it can help us avoid problems.  Those are the stories that interest me.

What does analytics look like at your organization?

Mature Process Reporting Should Become Seedbed for Discoveries, Patents, and Broad Practice Foundations

With constant data streams passing over the minds of analysts everyday, it seems higher than likely that, over time, the team which deals with this data should start to construct ideas and applications built on consistent experiences. The amount of information which is aggregated about visitor and customer information over time gives a specific picture about who needs what with regard to navigation, structure, and assistance within the website. That information, paired with analysis, should produce a list of items for IT and stakeholders to brainstorm on solutions and short-cuts to help users achieve navigational nirvana.

The idea of the web analytics process is the continued production, analysis, and decision support for the business in which it has been installed; as well as the obligatory feedback from the action which takes root within the agency. Therefore the establishment of process is, at least in my eyes, a goal for online businesses with more recent adoption. In the case of mature and refined analytics process practitioners, this should be a means to success of a single entity, and feed into the larger sphere of markets, industries, and eventually, universally adapted technologies which could feed macro-improvement of the user experience globally.

Look Past Process: Visitors Deserve Your Attention and Devotion

We are all users who are visitors. As a collective group, we can attest to the number of half-baked ideas which are thrown on the net for one reason or another. Many of us who matured working with computers have a few we hide away from the world. Hell, I have ten of my own. We all find sites which we thought were going to meet our expectations and fail miserably. Our arrival on pages often misses the original intent of the search or slightly misdirects the concept. We blame the search results, but, broadly, this is the output from lousy understanding of SEO taxonomy (i.e. Silos) and/or usability issues.

With usability testing, search marketing and SEO information as widely available as they are, the only explanations for a lack of progress in these subjects are:

1. Finances: Marketing budgets fail to consider the possible positive primary outcomes of efforts to improve these aspects of a site, much less the periphery value of the research contributions and application value abroad
2. Hesitation: Generally, businesses in practice tend to be ‘bearish’ when it comes to expenditure on technology which discusses returns. Intent might be pure, but the risk clearly does not merit the restraint.
3. Ego: In contrast to the previous item, trendy businesses based on whimsy and willingness to engage in risk view using data as somehow ‘cheating’ on creativity or lacking in true inspiration. Therefore, they overlook or suppress buy-in through a flurry of logical fallacies.
4. Perceived Complexity: To some, creating an in-house usability program, building a lab, standardizing reporting and inciting discussions on stats and quantified experience data is an ENORMOUS undertaking. It becomes a sociological hurdle for the company and eventually, with enough steam, a self-fulfilling prophecy.

With little or no participation in gathering an understanding of how YOUR site visitors respond to content, you, in essence, neglect their voice. By neglecting them, you inhibit your growth and deprive a community of people dedicated to evolving our world wide web experience of data which can contribute to greater understanding. Gaining this perspective is the key to unlocking the true potential of a process-driven analytics practice and a wildly valuable means to building the new architecture of the world wide web.

A Lofty Prediction with Exponential Considerations

If I had to place a bet on the future of web analytics, it would be on services and solutions. Commercial vendors like Omniture and Coremetrics (and Google Analytics when/if that time comes) will provide a series of broad tools, which, at least Omniture, has started doing. As the analysis and application of insight suggested actions cascades down from those platforms, industries, and markets will eventually respond with vertical groups and practices zones. Some will split specifically into advertising, others into expertise on eCommerce, still others into Social Media or Branding or what have you.

Over time, probably a couple years before enough talented analysts can blossom and contribute, markets and geographies will develop their own identities where conversations and comparing notes will likely drive highly-predictive analytics and scaled systems for buy-in by the most frugal small/medium business ventures. Shared resources will again be the natural progression (outsourcing is a natural evolution of industry). Small but incredibly effective micro-solutions based on research compiled by ambitious teams driven by numbers will dominate each niche feeding more information back into the collective process.

The idea of preparedness for unexpected events or peril is nothing new. The anxiety which mounts upon each published story seem to falsely disseminate that the corrections in commerce markets are a) unprecedented and b) inextricably linked to a slippery slope of economics which will plunge our company’s infrastructure and personal lifestyles into the pits of a depression.

The ‘Perfect Storm’ which COULD create widespread economic issues is not the natural and cyclical corrections taking place in the global or capital economies, but the poor approach to reacting to this new by forcing bad decisions. In order to avoid bad decisions as an ‘economy’ we, as analysts and gilded protectorate of the data, need to empower our companies with good information. We need to understand the business as well as the business we are in. Having a grasp on this will help us navigate the choppy water of volatility.

BACK TO BUSINESS WEB ANALYTICS

If there is a time to put being an evangelist aside, it is now. This is about business. Business is, essentially, a series of decisions being made by different people and teams to produce optimal return on finances invested. Continuously improving business means becoming more efficient in action and more adept at making decisions. Making better decisions means having good, current data which can be correlated to the way in which a business makes decisions. Good data comes from a diligent analyst plucking the groupings out of raw web analytics output:

• Filtering out domains, IPs, internal users, bots, script-executing robots and anything else that will give a skewed picture of who comprises your audience.
  • Both Google Analytics and Omniture SiteCatalyst (and I’m sure the same is true of Coremetrics, ClickTracks etc.) provide a means to do this. While SiteCatalyst only boxes 5 filters, you can add many more with a Vista Rule ($)
  • Jot this down as a task that requires regular management. Simply doing this once is equivalent to taking inventory once.

When an analyst goes to a meeting to provide information to the people who need it, it should be without reservation. Confidence in the data which you are presenting or using to support avenues for business should have all the questioning done in the locker room and not on the field. Paying close attention to your data and watching out for invasive issues is key to building good decisions.

• Correlating trends in the marketplace which impact your business model as they relates to your web analytics data
  • Learn about your customers, your vendors, and your financiers and see how they are impacted by market forces.
  • Get competitive intelligence on the checklist to see how the news is impacting the market and where opportunities exist. Big economic consequences tend to create consolidation at the top, and liquidation at the bottom.
  • Get to know your Geo-locations. Big cities produce a great deal of information about topics, but their volatility depends on their ‘perceived’ collective investment in the actions creating market fluctuation
    • example: Cities where housing markets are suffering might be more aware of the local impact of the lull. The result might be that individuals whom have been exposed to larger concentrations of for sale signs might not be as willing to buy the ‘handy-dandy three speed deluxe vacuum’ of the week.
  • Build presence in areas where its necessary, and expand presence in areas which have economically insulated populations. By the time the numbers stabilize, the brand identity value should be starting to trickle down.

• Draft Momentum from Strong Brand Manufacturers or Business Affiliates
  • Whenever possible, spelunk the data on the websites of companies who provide your products, inventory, services or solutions.
  • Speak to your partners and affiliates and try to gauge when big media events are coming up.
  • Cross-pollinate their PR with your own to help feed each other energy around a product or idea.
  • Trade some venues with them. Inevitably people who are landing on your site might be trying to communicate with the manufacturer in circumstances, and vice versa. In all likelihood, you should be able to give each other ideas without cannibalizing the market. If anything, you both might benefit from knowing the mindset of the user.

• Understand Web Analytics as a Function of Marketing; As a Function of Business
  • Take the time to understand how your analytics solution measures all marketing venues (referring domains, campaigns, SEM etc.) and know how the solution is attributing the success.
    • These methods might include tricky subjects like First, Recent, Linear, or Participation attributions, or, worse: acscription which essentially provides little or no scientific basis for the explained success
  • Every dollar which is spent through a marketing budget, either directly or indirectly, should have a highly scrutinized figure of return attached to it.
  • Know where your money is going and how much is coming back.
  • Help managers and executives make good decisions on where and how to spend money to:
    • Increase likelihood of success
    • Trim costs on resources
    • Quantify return on investment

• Measure and understand the “other” web and business analytics - take the time to think through ways to get more data. Sometimes you have to get creative.
  • If you plan on using print media and have not yet done so, discuss test markets with publishers. You can spend 10% of the costs of a broad publication to test reactions in small markets. This requires benchmarking areas prior to injecting media and measuring the blip and tail in that market.
  • Independently measure personalization applications. Taking the word of the provider should never be enough. The fact that you do this might even win you points with the solution vendor. Ever since we really pressed SiteBrand, they’ve been extremely active and interested in the developments which we have with CableOrganizer.
  • Get more information about your customers through what happens when they pick up the phone. Our research company has developed a way to measure phone call web metrics using something we call Session ForeSite™. We liked it so much we filed a patent application and developed a brand around it.

While the graphic at the top of this post is a joke, on some level, I’m seriously considering putting together some sort of pamphlet or compendium on this topic for upcoming events. If anyone is interested in contributing, I’d be interested in hearing and discussing some of what experienced professionals have found is working, or has worked in the past, with regard to offsetting damaged markets.

Please feel free to comment or discuss any point here and continue to check back for updates to this particular post in case revisions are made to provide more useful information. I personally view this as a ‘living post’ instead of a regular article. Also, no information will ever be provided in any work from me on how to land a plane…just so you know…;)