What is a well defined web analytics strategy?

By: Garry Lee | October 14th, 2009

I’ve just read the latest blog from Eric Peterson about a recent Forrester report on the use of free web analytics. If you haven’t read it, the nature of Eric’s words are that he doesn’t believe the claim that 70% of companies report having a ‘well-defined analytic strategy’. In the midst of various responses, including those of Bryan Eisenberg it became clear the issue was not the 70% claim, but what is a well defined web analytics strategy.

I know from personal experience that what I and other practioners would call a well defined strategy is not in place in 20% of companies, let alone 70%. I have however been into many initial meetings where the marketing managers and executives in question felt they did indeed have a well defined strategy until we dug a little deeper.

We could talk for hours about what makes a good strategy but I thought initially I would highlight just a couple of classic ‘mistakes’ where people think they have a strategy. (Note this is intentionally simplified for ease of consumption! Look out for my follow-up blog on key actions for a good web analytics strategy.)

1) “We have a well defined list of reports”
Great, so you have lots of data moving around the company. They might even be read by lots of different people (although I doubt it). But the important thing is – is any action coming from the reports?
A key with any well defined web analytics strategy is that any data and reporting is produced with an aim or end goal. Data for the sake of data is not a strategy. It’s analytics by numbers with no thought.
A well defined strategy is more about ad hoc analysis with defined aims; not regular reports that people take no action from.

2) “We track the conversion on our site”
Good, we are moving in the right direction, you are producing data with an end goal of optimising your conversion.
However, just monitoring your site conversion is not going to optimise it. You need to think of doing more with the data so action can happen.

Do you know what the average conversion is for your industry? Can you calculate a target conversion?
Segment conversion by channel to optimise campaign traffic. For different personas change the process for new vs. repeat customers.
Do you define your conversion? Odd Question? Not really if you consider that a recent e-consultancy report on conversion highlighted over 10 different ways to track conversion.

3) “We track the main process to see the drop offs”
Again, it looks like we are moving in the right direction. We have now moved beyond the basic conversion to look at the detail and potentially spot pain points and then build strategies to improve them. However, even this is of no use as a strategy unless you know how you’re planning to affect the site! Strange statement, but thinking about all the sites I’ve worked with over the years in most cases it takes over a year to make significant changes to the sales process. Whilst it’s possible to change core content pages and even the home page relatively easily, changing the secure section through which people purchase is often not so easy.
Moreover analysing the website for a project when you have agreed to change the process is fine; doing weekly reports on the process might well be meaningless.

There are many other mistakes which I have seen at least once in the last three months that I’ll cover in more detail in another post. Mistakes include:

“We follow our offline KPIs online”
Great, so you follow slow moving trends instead of instigating hyper speed optimisation!

“Each of our dedicated business units has their own web analytics strategies”
Really? So you have no joined up strategy controlled centrally? The consequence – each business unit is pulling in a different direction.

“Our media agency control our web analytics strategy”
So you are letting someone you pay tell you how much to pay them!

In the meantime, if you want help in putting a web analytics strategy in place, please drop me an email at blog@redeye.com and please do follow my random musings on twitter.