I have written and discussed how important it is to capture all the diagnostic metrics around your particular Key Performance Indicator (KPI). As analysts, we have a tendency to reveal too much information. We try to explain how much we know to the business and show our value. In the midst of these discussions, we forget the audience that to whom we are disseminating information. We overload our audience with knowledge, and they get overwhelmed with the information.

In the situation described above, nobody wins. The analyst is left without the satisfaction of providing the audience with data. The audience feels like they got information, but it is not what they were looking for. This is a fundamental communication problem that arises many times in the industry and we need to start from Strategy, move to Data and then create KPIs.

Strategy
Your website, landing page, microsite, and mobile page was built for a reason. There are marketing initiatives that are driving users to view the technical property. Strong analysts find out those reasons and understand the user experience of the page and it’s relationship to the data. Collecting this information is a vital step to finding your KPI.
[Read more…]

In my past life I used WebTrends 8, then some time has passed and I have moved into customizing WebTrends Analytics 10. I have seen some drastic improvements since the older version. I want to highlight four new features and how they can be beneficial to you or your organization.

Dashboards
The new WebTrends A10 has two dashboards that are provided. The system has an overall site dashboard that you can customize with important high level reports. There are also page dashboards that provide the visits, bounce rates, traffic sources, next page flow, social buzz, geography, search engines and search phrases reports. Both of these dashboards are really nice if you have an organization that looks at their site in specific sections or product categories. Your team can look at the high level pages of your products and determine where the traffic is coming from, bouncing, and where they are going. The design is easy to use and very simple to garner basic analytical insight. [Read more…]

You worked hard to write blogs that provide your audience with content they care about. Then, you took the necessary steps to promote your content via social channels (linkedin, Twitter, G+, Facebook, etc). After a few days, you start looking in your web analytics platform such as Google Analytics and understand if your content reached the right audience.

The pages report lets you know how many people viewed your blog post. Furthermore, you see visits, page exits, and bounce rates. But this doesn’t tell you if your blog is a hit with your audience. A blog pages report, is just page view by a unanimous person somewhere out there on the interwebs, and there is no way of telling if they will ever come back and read your blog or do business with your company. Keeping this in mind, here are a few creative ways to judge your blog content using Google Tools.

Location, Location, Location
Our company is located in Chicago, and most of our business is U.S. based at this time. For this reason, it is important to judge our blog content by how many users in the U.S. read the blog article. When you look at the pages report in Google Analytics, use a secondary dimension to pull up the Region for each blog post. Then, look at the Metro area and City reports to see how many people viewed the post in your local, metro area or city. [Read more…]

1. Educate their teams – analytics is complicated, make sure everyone understands the data they are looking at and where it is coming from.
2. Be approachable – it’s important to be knowledgeable, but it’s more important to be approachable. Your team needs to be able to ask you questions and get understandable answers.
3. Don’t fear the system that is collecting data – with so many software choices and options, it can be overwhelming to learn a new system. You should never fear learning a new web analytics platform, CRM System, Social Media Hub, or Mobile Platform. They all collect various data which is key to your success as an analyst.
4. Seek one version of the truth – data can be manipulated in different ways and achieve various results. Good analysts look for causal relationships in data that allows them to have high confidence in the analysis.
5. Be curious – listen to your team for key information that is going on in your organization. These can lead to interesting data findings.
6. Seek 90/10 – 90% of an analysts time should be analyzing data, 10% should be pulling data. This is a very big goal in the industry.
7. Suggest A/B Tests – sites always need improvement. A/B tests are a great way to move the needle in a positive direction. Good analysts should always be on the lookout for something to test and improve.
8. Segment – groups of people may behave a certain way with your product, mobile device, or website. Finding these segments and providing them with what they want will create revenue for your organization.
9. Document caveats – everything has a condition or something important to keep in mind while interpreting the data.
10. Work with raw data – many systems simplify the analysis for your, but that isn’t always enough to obtain statistical significance. Exporting raw data into an SPSS, SAS or R allows you to obtain insights with statistical significance.

Related Posts:
3 ways to find something to A/B Test
How to become a great web analyst
When to switch your web analytics platform

Website redesign’s happen quite frequently these days. Unfortunately, for a web analyst this isn’t a time to go on vacation. Many changes in the organizational direction, copy, site functionality happen during a website redesign. These changes greatly impact your analytics approach and tagging of your current web properties. Here are 4 tips for a web analyst to survive a website redesign.

Tip #1: Get Wireframes and Functionality Early
When you know how the new site templates are going to be laid out, it will alert you to possible changes in the way users browse the website. The changes in user path, user experience, and functionality will greatly affect your website analytics data. Depending on how sites are laid out, your engagement with time on site and pages per visit will vastly change with a redesign. The sooner you get your hands on the wireframes, the more prepared you will be to create tags that capture all the new interesting aspects of your redesigned website. [Read more…]