Part 1: Web Analytics Tools – How Do I Know I’ve Outgrown Mine?
Web analytics tools can be outgrown by companies, just like pants can be outgrown by people. Over time, an analytics tool may no longer fit organizational needs or be well suited to deliver on complex organizational requirements for site optimization and multichannel integration (among other things).
This topic led me Silicon Valley this week thanks to an invitation from Unica I headed over to Webex headquarters to record a preso in their new LiveStream studios. A few other folks also participated in the production. In attendance was Fireclick founder and all around cool guy, Steve O’Brien (also VP Internet Marketing at Unica), my pal and fellow blogger, Avinash Kaushik (of ZQ Insights and MarketMotive), the genial Elana Anderson (founder of NxtERA marketing and former VP Marketing Research at Forrester), the excellent bloke and all around nice guy from across the pond, Dr Alan Hall (Director of Analytics at SCL Analytics), forthcoming author and savvy multichannel marketer, Akin Arikan (Analytics Evangelist at Unica), and the jet-setting smarty Karen Hudgins (marketer at Unica). We all had a blast getting down to business at Webex studios. And eating at places like Burk’s and Parcel 104 - both excellent restaurants.
The title of my preso was “Symptoms you’ve Outgrown your Web Analytics Tool,” such as:
- Inadequate segmentation
- Poor visualization
- No custom reporting
- Limited Integration (covered in Part 2)
- Cost (covered in Part 2)
While I did manuscript the speech (hey I was being recorded!), it’s way too long to post, so I figured you all might enjoy me paraphrasing my own content. So as I sit here on a Jetblue redeye, here it goes:
- Inadequate Segmentation. Segmentation in web analytics describes the activity of categorizing and dividing your online audience and customers by their various attributes. For example, you might choose to segment your audience based on their demographic location information to determine if a visitors from a certain geography have a higher conversion rate or behave differently on your site than visitors from another geography. Or you may choose to use your web analytics tool to define a segment that you want to track such as visitors who clicked on a paid search term and did not convert, but came back to the site within one week. Sounds easy, right?
But not all web analytics tools can segment data. The proprietary tool you run in-house may not be able to segment data. Your expensive vendor solution may not be able to segment data easily. Many tools only provide simple reports. Yet basic reporting is insufficient for web analytics. In order to understand new data relationships and the effectiveness of marketing campaigns to your massive online audience, you need to a web analytics tool that can segment data.
The idea being to do what I describe in this post on web analytics segmentation:
- Define a segment
- Identify expected segment behavior.
- Measure current segment behavior.
- Create “optimization hypotheses.”
- Optimize content, offerings, user experience, and other site elements.
How does your web analytics tool fit into the process of segementation that I described? Does it? Can your tool assist you in this process? If not, you may have a nice IT tool that reports web metrics, not a marketing tool that enables you to optimize your site and landing pages to offer the best possible messages to known online segments.
- Poor Visualization. Pictures are worth a thousand words. Your stakeholders are already overwhelmed with data before ever presenting reports with a whole bunch of numbers. Not everyone is quantitative. Some stakeholders just want to be able to quickly digest data, and they prefer an aesthetically pleasing visualization instead of a spreadsheet.
Data visualization helps stakeholders interpret important data at a glance. Visualization helps reporting comprehension. Good visualizations are important when you want to:
- Highlight key trends in the data
- Compare counts of things
- Identify multidimensional relationships using cube visualizations
If your tool can’t visualize your web analytics data, and you need that visualized data to assist comprehension, act as sales tool in a presentation, or as marketing collateral in a report, you have outgrown your web analytics tool.
- No Custom Reporting. An acute inability to deliver customized reporting that meets the needs a diverse group of stakeholders is one of the signs you’ve outgrown your current web analytics tool. The problem manifests itself in sheer frustration because people can’t get the data they need. Over time this will cause people to lose faith in web analytics because the data isn’t relevant to their jobs. Some of the symptoms include:
- Problems creating KPI’s. To manage online performance, you need to be able to define Key Performance Indicators. For example, you may want to define a view:visit ratio, that is the number of page views generated per visit. You need to define this equation in your web analytics tool. If you can’t define such simple KPI’s, you are limiting your success at web analytics.
- You may not have reporting that identifies conversion rates and allows you to define custom metrics for channels like RSS, Newsletters, and Internal and External Search. A powerful web analytics tool will be able to build custom reporting for conversion rates and other KPI’s by online channel.
- You may have a limited ability to build reports with filtered data, such as viewing reporting of top pages on a particular day or combinations of days, or filtering data by referrer, geography, or time.
- No ability to add core web analytics dimensions to your reports, such as creating and saving a report that shows all referrers, their keywords, conversion and bounce rates for each city in the United States.
- Quite simply, you may only have one set of reports and you can’t build new ones at all.
In the real world practice of web analytics, you need a web analytics tool that has the ability to build as many custom reports as you want when doing analysis, to filter, add metrics, to use dimensions, do AB tests, and save all that stuff until your heart is content so you can meet business goals. You can’t be restrained by the inability of your current tool to create custom reports. If you are you may have outgrown your web analytics tool.
I’ll post part 2 this weekend as I recover from the jet lag… Part 2 is up, click here to view it!
