The single biggest mistake web analysts make is working without purpose. We work very hard. We torture SiteCatalyst. We send out a lot of data. Then we resend it again and again. And yet our work results in very little impact on the business in terms of action taken by company leaders. Why this sad state? Almost always we dive into the ocean of data first. Sadder still, we don't ask questions later. We never ask questions.
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.
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.
It is astonishingly common that we are asked to analyze the impossible. In perhaps a career limiting move I'm going to try and do that today (and for a controversial topic to boot!). In this post, about an important Google change, I want you to focus less on the data but focus more on the methodology. And. So important. I want you to help me with your ideas of how we can do this impossible analysis better, in the complete absence of data :). So please share your ideas via comments and let's
I am going to break one of my unspoken cardinal rules: Only write about real problems and measurement that is actually possible in the real world. I am going to break the second part of the rule. I am going to define a way for you to think about measuring social media, and you can't actually easily measure what I am going to recommend. So why break the rule?
Recently the Google Analytics team changed the way sessionization algorithm. In lay terms… how the start, duration and end of a Visit is computed. A minor version of the butterfly effect occurred, one small change in a part of the system caused a few other smaller changes in other parts of the system. Some people freaked out. Others wondered what the fuss was all about. Still others wondered what they were going to eat for lunch. :)
99.9996253% of Web Analytics reports produced are utterly useless. Partly because of a lack of any tie to business strategy (ensure you have a Digital Marketing & Measurement Model!), partly because they are out of the box standard reports that web analytics vendors create for “average” people (and we both know that you are not average!), and partly because all they do is present data in the aggregate (a punishable criminal offence if there ever was one!).
With all the sexiness oozing out of social media it might seem insane to write about email. It’s been relegated to the “OMG that cesspool of spam that no one cares about because everyone is using Google Wave and Facebook!”
Web Analysts are blessed with an immense amount of data, and an amazing amount of valuable, even sexy, metrics to understand business performance. Yet our heroic efforts to report the aforementioned sexy metrics leads to little business action. Why?
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:
