The web is not static, and neither are your competitors. Your web analytics team should always be looking to create hypothesis to optimize your website. Optimization is about finding areas of your site that can be improved on a systematic basis, and testing the validity of those hypothesis.

Web Analytics Hypothesis
Web analytics management needs to provide your team with the necessary software and tools to conduct proper analysis and create hypothesis. This can be mouse tracking software, deeper dive software such as Omniture Discover, survey software such as Forsee, and social measuring tools. These tools need to be used in conjunction with your web analytics platform. Providing your team with many tools to analyze pages will help them validate their hypothesis and create use cases.

Web Analytics Validation
This one is very important, as your web analytics manager should validate if the hypothesis are correct statistically and organizationally. Web managers need to validate the quality of the hypothesis by statistical means, making sure that significant data was collected. Web analytics managers also need to validate that the hypothesis aligns with organizational goals.

For example, analyst came up with the hypothesis that the Green Widget page needs to have a form on right rather than a form on left. This was done by analyzing the mouse tracking software. Web analytics manager needs to review that the eye tracking software had significant visits to create this hypothesis. More importantly, the manager needs to ask product managers if the organization is pushing to sell more Green Widgets. Any misalignment in the validation phase causes further testing, optimization and measurement for a possibly discontinued product.

Website Testing, Optimization, Measurement
Validated hypothesis need to be tested. Proper A/B or Multivariate testing techniques need to be conducted to make sure that the hypothesis will provide significant lift for your organization. Once tests are conclusive, most optimization software allows you to leave the winning version on your site until your website team has updated the code with the changes. During this process, your web analytics team should be measuring the results of the update and documenting the data for sharing.

Sharing Results With Executives, and Product Managers
Once your team has been through the optimization cycle several times, you are ready to share results. This is a very important step in driving a data driven organizational culture. Product managers and executives who see successful improvement in website performance become advocates of the structure and process. New hypothesis for tests are developed and validated. Your web analytics is now driving significant value to your organization.

Conclusion
With everything in data there are caveats. The most important caveat to the above process is your web analytics tags have to be deployed correctly and data has to be validated. Incorrect sourcing of data leads to distrust and breaking of the web optimization process.

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

All clients, internal or external, are looking for quality insights. Definition of quality is how actionable the insights are and the positive impact the insights will produce. An analyst has to be confident in the data that is being delivered to business stakeholders. Analytical insight confidence comes from the Reliability and Validity of the insights.

Reliability
Reliability of the data comes from understanding the sources of data. It is mostly about the consistency of your data sample. Data that has a very large and diverse distribution may not be reliable for what you are looking to accomplish. Large variances in data are not consistent and will throw off the reliability of your insights. [Read more…]

Web Analytics Platform Limitations
Every system has it’s limitations. Sometimes you do not arrive at these limitations until you inquire about a specific metric that you need and it is not possible with your current system. It is possible that being on version 8 of a software does not provide you with the ability to capture the metrics that you need but version 9 does.

Cost Benefit Analysis
Next, your team analyses the costs of the software upgrade. The complexity, IT time commitment is sometimes beyond budgets. After consideration, estimation of costs and schedule your team concludes that this project is not feasib

Plan B
For the reasons stated above, it is vital to use multiple web analytics platforms to capture metrics. Many organizations use a WebTrends, Adobe Omniture, or Coremetrics in conjunction with Google Analytics. This provides organizations with multiple benefits: [Read more…]

Web Analytics platforms today have many features that allow your organization to gain insights. However, none of these features come with the out of the box implementation. Customization steps  must be employed to answer your business goals. These include customization of code, and customization of your reports and dashboards.

Web Analytics: Think Big
In today’s competitive environment we must think beyond Visits, Page Views, Time on Site and Pages Per Visit. Deployment of KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) that closely mimic sales is the goal. I fully agree that a visit, page view, is somewhat correlated to a sale. However, just because you visit widgets.com, does not mean you are going to buy a widget. [Read more…]