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Finding insights through analytics

On February 28, 2011, in Blog, Strategy, Web Analytics, by
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The statement of 2011 is that “data is the new oil” and there is no doubt that being able to create and act on data insights will be one of the key abilities in order to get ahead of the competition. In reality this is nothing new, but in the last couple of years the webanalytics has been acknowledged by more and more companies as a crucial part of their business.

At the same time as we are moving towards a world where web analytics become a must have on all websites most companies still are far away from truly understanding how to mine the data and how to create actionable insights from them. One of the main problems could be that the web analytics evangelists out there today do not agree between themselves neither.

On one side the web anaytics tool providers often argue strongly in favour of their tools and on the other side web analytics “gurus” argue that the analyst is everything (ie the 90/10 model).

Both arguments, however, are truths with strong modifications. Without the tools the analyst is nothing and without the analyst the tool is nothing. The wrong tools or the wrong people will also create problems.

The first step in arriving to the point where you are become a leader in data intelligence and decision management is to understand the condition for deciding which people to hire and tools to choose.

This condition maybe the most critical part of the three factors that contribute to insights. I have chosen to call it environment.

Environment decides the needs and availability of data based on the type of company, service, strategy and purpose.

Not all companies need the same type or amount of data. On one hand too much data will often lead to clutter and lack of ability to convert data to insights and actions. On the other hand lack of data might make you miss out on opportunities and threats that can have large impact on your business. Deciding what is more and less important is the first step to healthy digital data intelligence.

With the strong focus web analytics has received lately one often forgets other just as important sources of data such as adservers, business intelligence, crm, social media monitoring, competitive analytics, user testing and so on. All of these can be equally important sources of insights and real insights are almost never generated by one of these alone.

By tapping int the right sources you can get the insights to make decisions that will increase the results of my investments and help me make the right decisions for my company.

So how do you arrive there?

I do not offer a silver bullet that can solve this for you, only this advise: True insight lies in the between. It is not solely created by a tool or an analyst. It is found by creating a perfect balance between environment (information needs and availability), people and tools. By studying the environment and pairing the right people with the right tools based on needs a company can truly move from data collecting chaos to insight driven communication and decision management.

If you do not know how to get there you can hire an optimisation or web strategy consultant to help you, but it is important that you dedicate time and resources to find and understand the data that will help your company grow and prosper.

Cheers :-)

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Dear visitor – you are being tracked

On January 25, 2011, in Blog, Web Analytics, by
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A heated debate has been raging through many parts of the analytics world lately. This time the topics are not related to data analysis and it is not web analysts and online marketers debating. The debate is about privacy on the web and it is the world of online marketing and web analytics against the views of politicians and data privacy advocates.

The debate is about the right to collect data about the visitors on a website or service using IP adresses and cookies. The debate started in Germany where there has been a ongoing debate whether or not it is allowed to use Google Analytics to track visits on a website. The issue is that Google Analytics stores the IP adress of the visit and IP adresses are considered private by German law. Website owners using Google Analytics were threatened with large fines if they did not remove Google Analytics from their sites.

Google and the German authorities manage to arrive at an agreement last week, so the Google Analytics users of Germany do not have to worry. What they should do however, is to add a IP masking to the GA code and placing a link to the Google opt-out site to avoid any possible issues in the future.

In the wake of the Google Analytics debate in Germany, a debate that made headlines in Norwegian newspapers, a simliar debate has arisen in Norway. This time it is not the collection of IP adresses that is the issue, but the use of cookies in tracking and marketing solutions. To meet new demands in the EU legislation Norwegian legislators have suggested to add a paragraph in the Norwegian law making use of cookies illegal unless the user has approved in advance. This has caused strong reactions in the digital marketing community as such a law would effectively put a stop to most solutions that analyze traffic and increase user experience by targeting content to the users interests. It also appears that the suggested addition to the law had not been sent on hearing to anyone working in the digital marketing community. It still remains to be seen if this law is approved.

To me the debates are not that interesting. There are easy ways around all these issues. What is interesting is why we are having these debates. The answer of course is the lack of knowledge of this field among politicians and privacy advocates. At the same time as they are fighting to aviod a cookie being embedded in their browsers they are sharing their lives on Twitter, Gowalla, Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace, FourSquare and hundreds of other sites where actual private information is shared, stored and made available to companies and people all over the world forever.

If there was a more common understanding of what was made available of information about users through web anaytics tools and marketing platforms, I believe that the worries of privacy would disappear. The users should instead be made aware of the consequences of the sharing they are doing every day on the web. Try deleting personal information from Google.

The challenge for the online community is that the only way the politicians and privacy advocates will understand and realize that tracking and use of cookies is not dangerous is to educate them and give them understanding of the media that internet is. And we will have to seek them out and help them understand. They will not come to us.

Until then maybe all websites need to have the following message pop up when you arrive to the site:

Dear visitor – you are being tracked. We are not doing this because we want to spy on you but because we want to make our website better suited for your needs and to give you the best possible experience of it. Our goal is that you are happy when you leave our website and that you easily managed to do the task you came to it to solve. If we remove our tracking it is impossible for us to provide you this service. Do not worry about your privacy, we do not know anything personal about you, to us you are just a number. And if you do not want the rest of the world to know everything about your life, stop sharing it on Twitter. Have a nice visit!

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Introduction to winning KPIs

On December 29, 2010, in Blog, KPIs, by
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Introduction

The phrase Key Performance Indicator, or KPI for short, has one of the most commonly spoken words by strategists, managers and analysts in internet departments all over the world. Yet most have a very vague understanding of what a KPI really is.

The most important thing when deciding to define the KPIs for a website or online e-Commerce is to get a good understanding of what this metric is and how to use it. In this introduction I will give a quick overview of the subject. In later posts I will follow up with more in depth information on how you can define the KPIs for your site.

To the people who are looking for a top list of KPIs they can use for their website, I am sorry to disappoint you. You will not find that in this blog.
Top lists of KPIs is not the solution to find the indicators that will give real insights into the performance of your site and provide you with a tool to truly harvest the maximum results.

Winning KPIs

More than just reporting results the right KPIs are used help point the way to the right decisions. They represent the key indicators which give you insight into how your website, campaign or e-Commerce is performing and which actions can be taken to improve results. KPIs are the indicators that are so important to your website that you will want to follow them up on a daily or weekly basis.

In his book ”Key Performance Indicators”, David Parmenter differentiates between KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) and KRIs (Key Reporting Indicators). He defines the KPI as a metrics that gives us the information we need in order to correct or improve the development.
The KRI, on the other hand, looks at what has happened and which results we have achieved.
It can be debated whether or not his views on KPIs are directly applicable on web, but his definitions are useful to keep in mind when you begin your research to identify which KPIs to use for your website.

The correct set of KPIs depends a lot on the website and they do not have to be very complex. For a blogger or content website visits, bounce rate, time on site or page views can be fully functional KPIs, whereas a SEM manager at an e-Commerce site might be more interested in Average Page Rank, CPO, ROAS or CTR.
Choosing the winning KPIs for your site requires a clear understanding of the goal of your site and research into the triggers that give the results you need to achieve that goal.

In short, the first two steps into defining the right KPIs is a search into the core of your activity or website are:

  • What is the goal of my website?
  • Which actions do I need to take to achieve that goal?

It is always good to follow up your answer to these questions with a second question to control your answer, the question: Why?
With your answers to these questions fresh in mind you are a large step closer to defining your KPIs.

In the following posts on the subject of KPIs I will look at why it is so important to find exactly the KPIs that work for you, how to define the correct set of KPIs, how to use them and some examples of KPIs used for different types of sites.

Cheers!

/A

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