At 10,000 feet, Web analytics attempts to answer questions about what your Web visitors are up to, and why your organization should care. This post aims to examine the who and how of Web analytics, including the rewards and barriers to action. It also provides some practical tips on where to start, along with ideas on what a model dashboard could look like (because presentation matters).
From the point of view of Web visitors, Web analytics attempts to answer questions such as:
- Why are they coming?
- Where are they going?
- Where are they coming from?
- What are they doing?
From the point of view of the organization, questions cover:
- Why do we care?
- What are our goals?
- Is it working?
- What should we do?
The problem and challenge are that Web analytics provide an overwhelming amount of data. Frankly, it is overwhelming. The data is rich and deep, and only a click away. But what does it mean?
THE WEB ANALYTICS ACTIVITY CYCLE
In an ideal world, the Web analytics activity cycle has four parts.
Discovery. First, it’s all about discovery. In other words, what is the business/Web mission, purpose, and/or goals? How mature is your Web analytics team – the who, what, and how about your program? A good discovery session also explores the organization’s pain points and challenges – do you have agreement on priorities?
Translate Goals into KPIs. After you’ve gotten your team on the same page about these issues, it’s time to translate your Web goals into Key Performance Indicators, or KPIs, as they are commonly called in the industry. I’ll discuss some of my favorites in-depth in this post. There are some interesting resources available to explore what others use, including the KPI Library.
Set up and Configure Tools. With your KPI picks in place, it is time to set up and configure your tools. A good starting point is Google Analytics, paired with a heat map tool like Crazy Egg. If you are feeling green, Google Analytics offers some good online training. There is also a helpful screencast, produced by Beth Kantor, that describes how to use Google Analytics, which I recommend. To connect with vendors and practitioners in the Web Analytics space, consider joining the Web Analytics Association, which has begun offering a Web Analyst certification exam and provides regular Webcasts for its members.
As a Web analytics manager, be prepared to provide training to your team on the basics to set clear expectations. Also, be sure to get a historical baseline so you can compare your growth to something real. When configuring your tool, make decisions about whether to count internal traffic or configure the analytics platform to exclude internal visits and only count external customers.
There are numerous handy tools for Website analysis available, some of which are free, while others charge thousands of dollars per month for vibrant data streams. What has been a real game changer, however, is Google Analytics (formerly known as Urchin before Google acquired it). When Google released the free version to help create a class of informed customers who are (hopefully, from Google’s perspective) purchasing ads on the search engine, it unleashed the ability for any website owner to see an incredibly deep amount of behavioral data about online visitors. The Google Analytics dashboard provides insights into site usage, a geographic map overlay, content overview, and traffic sources, among other features. In fact, the map lets you click into a state and even view which cities are sending visitors to your pages.
Analysis. The last and most crucial part of the activity cycle is the analysis. Simply sending a spreadsheet or dashboard link won’t do if you are serious about KPIs. Instead, pay careful attention to trending data — specifically, comparing current data with baseline data. Establish your insights from the data, weigh the impact of making changes, and manage for both quick wins and long-term focus.
ADOPT AN ACTION ORIENTATION
Before we proceed, it’s essential to address the elephant in the room. You must recognize and grapple with analysis problems. What are you measuring? Is it subject to misinterpretation? Or do you struggle with a hurricane of demand for data that swamps your ability to analyze, to begin with?
You may also suffer from some management headaches. Your executives may have low engagement with your activities. It’s possible that your approach is to provide them with steady reports via email, but there is often no action taken on the data. Missed opportunities are frustrating. And suppose you are ultimately responsible for web analytics. In that case, you will have to set priorities for your staff’s time and resources, because nothing is ever available in unlimited supply, despite good intentions to deliver the gold.
If you run your Web analytics work out of your marketing department, chances are your job is very complex. A McKinsey study reveals how these marketing managers/executives allocate their time to various web-related activities. “An explosion of customer segments, products, media vehicles, and distribution channels has made marketing more complex, more costly, and less effective,” the authors wrote. The time study shows that each day, your web-related activities include:
- 15% – on Web development and maintenance work
- 10% – on search engine marketing
- 5 % – on search engine optimization
- 5% – on email marketing and direct mail
If you choose to focus your limited attention span on Web analytics, rewards await.
You gain a deeper understanding of your site visitors. You can improve user experience. You have the opportunity to make informed decisions and optimize resource allocation. And you get the ticket to a greater return on your Web investment. These rewards come only if you have adopted an action orientation.
An action-oriented approach to your KPI program begins with developing your selection criteria. The KPIs must be relevant, timely, and instantly applicable. Resist the urge to showcase everything and start small. For example, just five data points — traffic/reach, search, satisfaction, actions, and outcomes — can be a satisfying beginning to your work. Once you have the KPIs locked in, the next critical step is scheduling reports. I recommend at least quarterly. Reports should also be tailored to the audience in mind and edited for their specific needs and attention span. Finally, do not neglect meetings. Sending out an email link will not suffice if you want to establish a reputation for taking action.
The action orientation follows a cycle of its own: identify the problem, the metric, and your hypothesis; fix the problem; test the fix; analyze the results; and take action to modify the fix as needed. Then the cycle starts anew.
MAKE THOSE KPI REPORTS AUDIENCE-CENTRIC
Making your KPI reports audience-centric is one key to success. At the AF Portal, for example, we identified three key groups that needed regular KPI reports.
The first group – senior leadership – received a culled-down executive-size report of no more than three metrics. The idea was to have everyone on the same page with something that was easily digested and summarized and could fit on an index card in a pocket if desired. For our executive KPIs, we selected reach, search, and satisfaction.
The second group was content managers for the 20 Major Commands at the USAF. These team members were responsible for the growth and maintenance of the AF Portal, as well as its adoption at the headquarters command and the various Air Force bases within that command. They also worked to disseminate policy, seed adoption, and all the other day-to-day operational details of running their Intranet. For this group, we identified seven KPIs that mattered. They would get these metrics on a routine schedule. These KPIs included the first three the executives got, plus four more: top entry (to capture popularity), feedback, page influence (to get at top editorials/stories), and savings (to monetize the top ten downloaded documents, which helped the team get their arms around return on investment and changing the business of publishing content).
The third group was the AF Portal team, responsible for the day-to-day operations of the enterprise effort. Here, team members got all seven metrics that the Content Managers got, along with three more: adoption (to capture registered users), loyalty (to get at time per page and trends) and help desk (where we pinpointed the metric to problem types only, although other help desk metrics were circulated to another team more focused on that part of the effort).
In identifying the KPIs that you will share across your organization, it is vital to link it to strategic questions that get at the overall goals and challenges your organization faces and answer the burning questions you have about whether you are effective. For example, a set of conceptual KPIs for one organization included the following five:
- Reach: Does our audience know about us?
- Relevance: Are we providing what our key audiences want?
- Packaging: Is the information we offer in a consistent and usable format?
- Access and Collaboration: Are staff experts made available and used?
- Quality: Are we delivering a superlative Web experience?
LEAP INTO THE FUTURE
If you are in charge of your organization’s Web analytics program, and you want to leap into the future, you must negotiate agreements and hold routine voice-of-the-customer meetings. The agreements should cover the format of your reports, who owns which metric (spread the love!), and an agreement on the audience segments that will receive your metric reports. The meetings will be critical to your success. Do not fall into the rut of pressing the send button and thinking your job is done. Hold meetings at least quarterly with all the relevant stakeholders invited.
One final aspect of your job that will impact your success is how you present your data—style matters.
It is essential to include trending data, allowing users to compare results over time. The report’s goals should be to make the data actionable, hold owners accountable, enhance key takeaways, and spark discussions that will help you and the organization make informed decisions about how to manage your website. I have found the best format to reach these goals is a quad-chart style dashboard. This is a tip I picked up at a Web analytics conference from a presentation led by Avinash Kaushik, then with Intuit and now with Google.
Avinash’s model dashboard is easily created within a PowerPoint slide. The headline is the name of your metric. At the top, you include a red-yellow-green dot to show the health of this metric, along with the name of the person in your organization responsible for managing the health of this part of your Web operation. The quad chart itself includes these four parts: in the upper left, you present the data in some chart format, ideally. In the upper right corner, you explain in plain English what that data is telling you – your insights. In the lower left corner, you write your bullets for what you are recommending as actions based on the data’s story. And finally, in the lower right corner, you remind the team of the actions you said you would take at the last meeting and the current status of those changes and action items.
I really like this dashboard format. It simplifies the data into a comprehensive storyboard that helps the team discuss it and take corrective steps if necessary. It holds the owner’s feet to the fire – nobody wants to be a red dot for long. And it helps everyone see clearly what the to-do list is (or can be), new and old.
PUT YOUR KPI QUAD-CHART INTO ACTION
At the AF Portal, we began by surfacing the key questions we wanted to use the data to measure.
- Are we focusing on the right content? Which top-level navigation button gets the most clicks?
- What is the status on migrating applications (a key business driver for the AF Portal – that applications move to a common platform for which the AF Portal was the presentation layer)?
- Are we focused on applications our users care about?
- Are the complaints about the search justified?
- Of all the new functionality we are introducing, which features are getting used and where must we focus our outreach efforts?
Our KPI on traffic and reach answered question one. We presented our team with the top six tabs, using unique visitor data and page view data, in both raw numbers and percentile format. The results showed that although most of the team’s effort went into building out the organization pages, the top visits to the AF Portal were on the customizable workspace pages, followed by the LIFE pages, which HQ managed. The first time this quad chart was introduced, the action items focused on seeding discussions about how the team was “flying blind” in managing its resources and expectations for growth before receiving regular KPI reports.
A second KPI, focused on traffic and applications, helped us address our question about migrating applications. By clustering applications into master categories based on application type – self-service, mission-based, training, or content-related – we were able to highlight the success of the drive toward self-service applications as a replacement for many walk-in and phone-in services at the USAF. The need to examine the way the feedback loop operates with these self-service applications was also brought into focus by the data showing their popularity. Regarding the training application group, the need to simplify and unify how users found these tools was an active discussion item that emerged from the presentation of the data.
Looking at the search KPI was also instructive. Because the AF Portal employed a distributed publishing model, we were able to isolate the business unit that owned the content appearing in most searches and work with them to optimize the search results. The results validated that search quality was a valid complaint and spurred action to give better tips and training to the content manager community.
Our metric on adoption showed the raw tally of how many users subscribed to various new features on the AF Portal platform. Marketing was inconsistent: some new features received no promotion while others were released with great fanfare. The need for more consistent and comprehensive outreach on these capabilities came into focus. Additionally, it sparked a discussion on tracking measurable goals for adoption and the need for a comprehensive communications plan. One diamond in the rough that we saw, which was not adequately embraced at the time, was Really Simple Syndication, a relatively new concept at the time.
SUMMARY
When starting up a KPI program, Web Analytics managers can easily drown in an ocean of data. A well-constructed KPI effort is your lifesaver. If you are already in the game, this post was designed to suggest some new tricks to add to your current metrics routine.
What KPI program are you ready for? Whether a novice or an old hand, this area of website management promises to continue to develop and mature.
NOTE: All of the quad-chart style dashboard slides covered in this post are illustrated in my Slideshare KPI presentation embedded below.
