Web Analytics: Priorities, Training and Dashboards
Manoj Jasra - Tuesday, April 22, 2008
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Having frequently been involved with the web analytics process I have noticed some consistent issues with web analytics both from an agency and in house perspective. I am not talking about data quality or even vendor selection, I am talking about how web analytics strategically fits in within an organization.
- Analytics is not a priority: In many cases web analytics is often an afterthought and is not implemented during a site launch or during a sponsored/email campaign. Web Analytics needs to be given more priority and should be thought of before any marketing campaigns are implemented so that you can actually quantify the amount of dollars you budgeted and spent for the marketing.
- The right stakeholders are not getting the right data: If the same dashboard is given to every person involved with your online strategy then you're not allowing them to make informed business decisions which affect their part of the overall plan. Customized reporting is an absolute must - show the Marketing Manager leads (SEO vs. PPC), show the online marketing team keyword referrals/ROI by source, show the CEO/CFO sales and revenue numbers, show the IT Team Site Errors/Traffic Spikes and show the usability team barriers within conversion funnels.
- Too much data and not enough resources: In both the In-House and Agency worlds there becomes a time where analysts are simply bombarded with so many requests that they simply can't keep up. Web Analytics is an extremely important tool used to show the performance of a business and how to best tweak your business's performance, so WHY NOT add some more resources to it.
- Tough to find good analysts: It is difficult to find analysts who have the technical ability to implement a training solution but also have the marketing savvy to know what recommendations to offer once the data has been collected. However, there are a few good ways to train a new analytics analyst: Get them involved with the SEO/PPC teams so they better understand the business, Give them a mix between reading and scenario based training, give them some work to do which is out of their comfort zone, work with them through an analysis or deliverable, send them to SEMPhonic for some analytics training, and finally see if they're still passionate after all of this.
Labels: SEM Training, Web Analytics
1 Responses to “Web Analytics: Priorities, Training and Dashboards”
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I agree. In most cases site owners don't use analytics. Instead they consider sales online (if they are e-commerce) as a benchmark of success or failure of their online campaign.
The other issue is sometimes analytics are implemented without consideration for the non-visitor issues. For example, I had one client whose site content was being copied but it wasn't until we examined the logfiles that we found the culprit because they weren't executing the javascript associated with most analytics packages.
It's also important to note that most search engine crawlers won't execute the script therefore won't be considered visitors, but this makes analyzing crawler activity (sometimes helpful in determining why a site isn't being indexed for example) next to impossible.
Another thing I've noticed is that the stakeholders in many cases don't know what they should be looking at. You have the CEO who "wants it all" but then never looks at it because there's too much or he doesn't understand what he's looking at.
More often than not, stakeholders don't know what they should be looking at, therefore base their decisions regarding their websites on incomplete information.