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Greetings dear reader. I'm proudly to present my very first post on my blog called "The Frenetic Thinker". I'll intend to write weekly about web analytics, ecommerce, digital marketing, gamification and customer online behavior.
Lots of subjective and objective information is constantly thrown at us, and most of it we don't have a spare time to think deeply on it. So this blog's posts is my bird-eyes view on those subjects wherever they appear critical for my businesses and it's likely to help others.
I'll start with one of my favorite subjects: Web Analytics!
Prior to post about anything technical, those are the 4 key issues that most companies suffer when initiating or sustaining an web analytics initiative.
Consider to create an action plan for each of these key issues and keep updating, revising and acting - like any continuous improvement process - because this issues will not just disappear suddenly, it needs to be incorporated in the 'everyday habits' of our web analytics teams.
1. 'WHY over WHAT' (or Analysis over Reports)
For every bunch of numbers that is trying to explain 'WHAT' is going on, there 'must have' a little box on the top with a explanation to 'WHY' this happened. This is what I've been calling a 'WOW Report' (WHY over WHAT).
To report, is the act of presenting data and it's powerful to understand what is and what is not in a quantitative way, for example, which page has more visits, the number of hits of a button on a landing page, number of conversion rates, load page times, percentage of website abandon and others.
But data alone is not good at all to present us with why these events happened in that way in our website.
To achieve this conclusion you need to sit back, relax, and merge all those data to forge, in a meaningful and categorized way, a qualitative information about, for example, why those customer are abandoning the cart, why they hit the home and leave the website, why my revenue per click is low at certain periods and for certain customers.
With the 'sea of data' that we had upon us, meetings, e-mails everyday and every hour, we need to embody a culture of analysis in every level of our company. Think just now: how many reports you read and write today was a 'WOW Report'?
Even if it leads to a simple and rather superficial analysis for some reports, it will help us all on reinforce the culture of analysis over just send away numbers, it'll improve the ones search for data relevance and relation, it'll leverage an earlier data categorization and broaden understanding, fastening upcoming wider and/or deeper data analysis.
Quoting Avinash Kaushik (Google co-founder and Digital Marketing Evangelist):
Quoting Avinash Kaushik (Google co-founder and Digital Marketing Evangelist):
No company will succeed by having a army of report writers, they will succeed by having a small group of "Analysis Ninja's " who transform data into information. If you get just data, reject it and reject the person who gave it to you.
2. 'PEOPLE over TOOLS'
"Whosoever holds this hammer, if he be worthy, shall possess the power of Thor", using a Marvel's comic book quote (written in the side of Mjolnir, the hammer of character Thor), it brings us a simple rather good though: Neither the most powerful tool in the world will produce results when is not handled by the best people.
For people and tools, we need to establish, on a budget basis, a 10/90 rule of thumb.For every $10 spent in tools, reserve $90 to spend in people analyzing the data resulting from those tools.
There's a huge amount of data in our websites today and the tools has power to provided much more data, putting pressure and how fast and accurate we'll deliver the information behind all of that and for this ultimate task we will only survive with the best people.
All of the paid and free tools available offer 80% of the same data, so what will make the difference here is if we have the best people for it, remembering that with the 'worthy' people, tools will never be a limit.
Remember that in a Web Analitycs team you'll need to have 3 distinct functions to be executed by on or more professionals (depending on the size and budget of your company). These 3 functions are well described by Michael Fassnatch in the Marketing Geek blog:
Remember that in a Web Analitycs team you'll need to have 3 distinct functions to be executed by on or more professionals (depending on the size and budget of your company). These 3 functions are well described by Michael Fassnatch in the Marketing Geek blog:
- Data Strategist. This is someone who doesn’t need to be a statistician but someone with strong marketing strategy capabilities and high data affinity. This person is the bridge between the analytical hard core geek and the rest of the world
- Techie. Someone needs to own the build out and implementation of the necessary underlying data infrastructure and applications. This techie needs constant communication with the data strategist to ensure that he is not developing anything off strategy. It’s all about rapid development with instant feedback loops. No development should take more than a couple of days before immediate review by the rest of the team.
- Data Designer. Here we need someone with strong creative background who is able to transform data insights into innovative visuals with meaning. This person is the most difficult to find and challenging to train. There are not too many role models out there, it’s a totally new discipline that we have to define over the next years.
3. FAIL FAST
When we're kids, learning to walk, the high is low, so the pain is bearable and the losses are minimum. So fail fast, right in the earlier stages of any experimentation.Needles to add that the failure in the web world is cheap. So experimentation is (almost) free of charge and need none to little boldness to do it.
We have a lot of strategies to change and learn a lot in our websites with no harm to our numbers.
But prepare yourself far ahead to do that experiences, because we need to not only fail fast but we need to learn fast too.
But prepare yourself far ahead to do that experiences, because we need to not only fail fast but we need to learn fast too.
Attention to which data you're looking at each new idea will you try to now be failing with no lessons to be learned - this is a mistake that is not allowed here - preparation, preparation, preparation.
I would rather die a meaningful death than to live a meaningless life.
- Corazon Aquino
4. NEITHER HARD NOR EASY
Don't take web analytics by some tweaks here and there in your website's home page or in the checkout process, but also not let you believe that gather information from a mass of data is rocket science.
For anything to present a valuable result we need effort, dedication, inspiration and preparation, but don't expect that you need months for your first results in your website.
Jump start in this posting from Avinash Kaushik and see for yourself... you'll probably will get some results in less than a day!
FINAL WORDS
I wish you all the best in your web analytics journey, keep tune for more postings and to summarize in a phrase all this post, it will be something like:Hire the best and fittest people to the job, assure that everyone is information oriented, start in your trials today to fail as fast as you can and make sure that all is been recorded for further learning and improvement.
...and thanks for being here!
