It is painfully heartbreaking to realize that a very small tiny number of people who have access to web analytics tools actually use them. I mean really use the tool. Ravage all the features. Exploit every possible button. Produce built-in visualization magic. Poke into the hidden crevices and discover exotic delights. Nourish yourself with the info snacks that the tool's Engineers and Product Managers cooked up.
It is the season to be predicting the future, but that is almost always a career-limiting move. So I'm not going to do that. It is a lot easier to predict the present. So I'm not going to do that either. Rather, I'm going to share a clump of realities/rules garnered from the present to help ready you for the predictable near future . Now here is the great part… if you follow these rules and act on these insights I believe you'll be significantly better prepared for the
We have access to more data than God wants anyone to have. Thus it is not surprising that we feel overwhelmed, and rather than being data driven we just get paralyzed. Life does not have to be that scary. In fact a data driven life is sexiest digital life you can imagine. In this blog post we are going to bring the sexyback. I am going to attempt to significantly simply your life by recommending the critical few metrics you should use to analyze performance of your digital marketing campaigns and website.
Data analysis is not easy. It takes years to get good at it, and once you get good at it you realize how much more there is to learn. That is part of the joy. You are always learning. You are always growing. This blogpost is a collection of tips I share with my friends who are just starting out. Each tip is a "simple" mistake that is easily avoided. My hope is that you'll skip them if you are aware of them, and move on to making more important valuable mistakes. :)
Make love? Direct Traffic? Really? I am not kidding. Direct traffic contains visitors that proactively seek you out, everyone else you have to "beg" to show up on your site! Yet this question seems to bedevil a lot of people:
We lovingly craft reports every day. We try to make sense of what they are saying. When we hear nothing we try to bludgeon them, hoping for the best. My hope in this post is to share some simple tips with you that might make your reports and analysis speak to you a bit more. Suggestions that might increase the probability that you'll bump into things that might be insightful, and communicate data more effectively.
We have more web metrics and data than there are stars in the universe (slight exaggeration!). Yet we stink at informing decisions. Our reports are ignored. Sites & online marketing continue to suck. A large part of the reason is that a large part of our job seems to consist of glorified data puking, hoping someone will be impressed. After all there is so much data in those reports!
Most of the time spent by Marketers & Analysts tends to be spend looking for "known knowns". Things we know and expect to see in the data, we look to see if they are there. "Oh look Google is still our Number 1 referrer and we are selling lots of product x as we always do. Yea!". Some of our time is spent reacting to the "known unknowns". Looking for things we know might be happening but don't know when they happen. "I would like to know when conversion rate dips below q%, let me go see if that happened last week."
The hardest kind of "analysis" to provide is in response to open ended questions. That is why I love asking open ended questions!
They expose a person's critical thinking ability (something I highly recommend you test when you hire web analysts: Interviewing Tip: Stress Test Critical Thinking. Please).
They also help you understand if someone really grasps key concepts.
Competitive intelligence, the "what else", is one of the core tenets of Web Analytics 2.0.The reason is simple: The ecosystem within which you function on the web contains mind blowing data you can use to become better.Your traffic grew by 6% last year, what was your competitor's growth rate? 15%. Feel better?
