4 Ways To Gain Value From Your Analytics Application

One of the most frequent questions that I am asked at trade shows, interviews, etc. regarding web analytics is "What advice would you give to someone who is just getting started with web analytics to help them get value out of the their web analytics efforts?" Due to the significant growth of web analytics and increasing number of organizations launching new web analytics programs, I thought this would be an appropriate time to document 4 specific tactics that will help an organization get jump started on their path to gaining great value from their web analytics initiatives.
 

1. Define goals for your site and the key performance indicators that measure them.

I cannot understate the importance of having a clearly defined set of key performance indicators that accurately correlate to an organization's business goals for their site. Unfortunately, this is also one of the most commonly overlooked steps in the process that acts as a stumbling block for many companies trying to gain actionable insights from the web analytics data they collect. For additional information on how to define key performance indictors you can checkout Eric Peterson's book The Big Book of KPIs.
 

2. Ensure you have valid data to analyze.

Another critical component to gaining value from web analytics is to ensure the accuracy of the data that your web analytics tools are capturing. This can be achieved by conducting a through review/audit of the configuration of your tool and the resulting data that populates your reports. Below is a list of the most important issues to validate:
  • It is critical to make sure you are leveraging the latest best practices in sessionization in terms of how repeat visitors are identified. I would highly recommend the use of either an authenticated username (if practical for your site) or the use of first party cookie to identify visitors.
  • Leverage an appropriate data collection methodology for your organization's needs. In most cases this can be accomplished with a combination of the following:
        • Page tag
        • Log files
        • Network data collection 
  • Filter internal traffic
  • Filter robots (if using logs)
  • Ensure that campaign and commerce data are populating reports correctly. Within most tools there are some particular variables and formats for data that will need to be leveraged to ensure the specific type of data is being reported accurately. Due to the importance of campaign and commerce data and the potential to take action on this type of data this cannot be stressed enough since having inaccurate information can sometimes be much more detrimental than having no data at all.

3. Create dashboards.

Now that you have valid data to report on it is critical to create a systematic process for disseminating that data to the various stakeholders within your organization on a periodic basis. My experience has been that it is often most effective when these dashboards can be combined with other high-value offline data to illustrate a more complete picture of what is happening to the business. Common examples of this include online advertising expenses, in-store sales data, and call center data. Additionally, it is often most effective when these types of dashboards can be distributed outside of the web analytics tools your organization uses and can be incorporated with the other reporting processes your organization uses or even just exported to excel and emailed to the various stakeholders.
 

4. Act on the data.

This is the most important point on this list given that without taking action on the data you will never gain the type of exceptional return that is continually published in case studies by the various vendors.
 
Acting on the data can take many forms, ranging from the simple optimization of online marketing programs to conducting advanced multi-variable experiments based on the analysis that is being conducted. Armed with the items above, your organization should be well prepared to start down the road of deriving value from its web analytics initiatives.
 
Josh Manion
Josh Manion
Chief Executive Officer
Stratigent, LLC

For more information please call 877-427-2900 or email info@stratigent.com