Profitting from a Web Measurement Strategy

Measuring your site's effectiveness seems logical, but how do you determine if your site is a candidate for a web analytics?

As a marketer, I would suggest that if you are in the business of maintaining a web site, then you'll need the proper management tools to be successful. Regardless of the web analytics application, improving your site's ROI is often a combination of web site visitor tracking, strong performance management tools, consistent web reporting and timely site changes.

But don't take my word for it. Just to be sure, I've provided a proper staging ground for making that final determination: So, to Measure or not to Measure?

Your site is a likely candidate for web analytics tracking and process measurement:

• When visitors on your site complete a process and your business makes money as a result of that success.
  
• If your site metrics decreased by more than 15-20%, would your business loose money? Would you loose your job?
• When understanding customer intent or online behavior might help you improve your business or help you better budget your resources.
  
• If you'd like to better understand if customers are experiencing problems with a process you have created or a message you have delivered.
  
• When you have spent money to enable a process and now you need some sort of return on your investment.
  
• When your customers can complete similar processes on your competitor's web site.
  
• When you typically make changes to your site based on hunches, the HIPPO or because your web designer suggested that you do?

If you've answered yes, to one or more of these questions, then perhaps its time you began to measure your site for success. You say you have analytics in place, but are you still managing your site blindly?

Web analytics can be an astounding listening post for online marketers. A solid analytics implementation, should enable you to consistently leverage the experience and knowledge that is being captured from your site daily.

The framework for web site measurement is easy, but it's the execution that is most often problematic. If you need help with this execution, hire an agency that specializes in analytics or seek to hire top notch analytic talent. Caution, the last may be the most difficult of all.

The Problem with Web Reporting

We've all certainly run reports about online activities. For a select few, we've spent time running reports about offline activities. But of all of the hours spent in generating these mission critical reports, how many were used to drive organizational change?

The web analyst really does have an embarrassment of riches when it comes to web reporting. It was my friend and mentor Matt Berk that said this in 2002.

Let's take a look at the standard reporting palette:

• Page Views
• Visitors
• Referrer Traffic
• Commerce (cart views, cart abandonment, checkouts, orders)
• Organic Searches (branded, categorical, local, etc)
• Internal Site Search (failed searches, null searches)
  

Now to complicate things, if you are fortunate enough or unfortunate, depending on your heartache, you have an application that allows the cross referencing of one reporting metric against another. Under this scenario, you may have access to thousands of reports.

How do you manage that??!

With so many reports and so much literature surrounding Web Analytics, there is one thing that still persists!

Read on.

I suspect that many analyst struggle with helping organizations define business success. This simple but necessary exercise is the reason the field is so disproportionately split and why conversion laggards, if lucky, ineptly drive success just 2% of the time.

One of my favorite analysts, "Ashish Braganza' astutely said, "Ross, most organizations do a great job at spending money, but a horrible job at conversion".

Why do conversion funnels consistently look like Martini glasses and yet, we keep on reporting and we keep on spending!

There are two camps:

We have organizations that report (99.5%) and the compelling few that seek change (.5%).

The fact that few organizations seek change means that most online managed channels simply lack strategy! Now just imagine that! Here's an industry that generates billions in spending, but lacks any fundamental strategic principles?

To frame it all up, how do you define metrics and KPIs without understanding what your business goals are? If you aren't aligning your projects towards these goals, what are you really doing besides wasting resources and maligning talent?

Reporting is not analytics and analytics is not a substitute for strategy.

I want to leave you with this and hopefully you will learn from the mistakes of the many.

• Draft a business objective (even one puts you well ahead of your competition).
• Establish the metrics to support the measurement of those objectives.
• Define your KPIs.
• Generate expected values (Run forecasting models with a few years of data).
• Define your business goals (10% increase in Q3 subscriptions, 15% increase in online bill pay adoption, or a 40% increase in yearly online sales).
• Seek change (A/B split, multivariate testing, behavioral segmentation)
• Monetize your efforts (not every task put before you deserves your full attention. You need prioritization)