BA 4 Module 1
BA 4 Module 1
BA 4 Module 1
MODULE I
All this what data is missing the why. It’s important to know what happened, but it is
even more critical to know why people do the things they do on your site. This is the
prime motivation behind redefinition of web analytics.
For thorough web analytics, we need to include not just the why but also key questions
that can help us make intelligent decisions about our web presence.
Web Analytics 2.0 is:
the analysis of qualitative and
quantitative data from your website
and the competition, to drive a
continual improvement of the online
experience that your customers, and
potential customers have, which
translates into your desired outcomes
(online and offline).
This definition is specific, it’s
modern, and it results in rethinking
how to identify actionable insights.
Figure illustrates Web Analytics
2.0.
Now let’s look at each element briefly
The What: Clickstream
• If you have a web analytics solution hosted in-house, then the what is collecting,
storing, processing, and analyzing your website’s click-level data.
• If, like most people, you have a web analytics solution hosted externally or hosted by a
vendor, then the what is simply collecting and analyzing the click-level data.
• Click-level data is data you get from Webtrends, Google Analytics, and other
Clickstream tools.
• Clickstream is foundational data; it helps you measure pages and campaigns and helps
you analyze all kinds of site behavior: Visits, Visitors, Time on Site, Page Views,
Bounce Rate, Sources, and more.
The How Much: Multiple Outcomes Analysis
Everything you do on your website needs to deliver against these three Outcomes,
regardless of whether your website is for ecommerce, tech support, social media, or just
general propaganda.
The Why: Experimentation and Testing
Mostly the websites are designed as per the likes and dislikes of the most influential
persons in the organization. These persons may not have the idea of what customer
needs and wants. Still their opinion is final in designing the website. This is a wrong
approach.
By leveraging the power of Experimentation and Testing tools such as the free Google
Website Optimizer or commercial tools such as Omniture’s Test & Target, Autonomy’s
Optimost, or SiteSpect, you can change your strategy.
Rather than launching a site with one idea, you can run experiments live on your site
with various ideas and let your customers tell you what works best.
The Why: Voice of Customer
Common web analytics tools or CRM tools can give you data about your own website
only. You have very little information about your competitors.
On the Web, though, you can gather tons of information about your direct or indirect
competitors! And usually that info is free!
On some websites, you can type in the URL s of your competitors and within seconds
compare your performance with theirs. You can see how long people spend on your site
vs. theirs. You can see repeat visits, page views per visitor, growth, and so on. (
www.similarweb.com).
That’s the power of Competitive Intelligence data. Knowing how you are performing is
good. Knowing how you are performing against your competition is priceless—it helps
you improve, it helps you identify new opportunities, and it helps you stay relevant.
IMPLEMENTING WEB
ANALYTICS 2.0
You need to make two critical changes to succeed in the world of Web Analytics 2.0.
The first is a strategic shift—a change to the mental model you apply.
The second is a tactical shift—one that will challenge your current thinking about tools
and how to use them.
The Strategic Imperative:
The biggest challenge to changing our web analytics strategy will be to evolve our mind-
set to think 2.0.
In the world of Web Analytics 2.0, clicks don’t rule; rather, the combination of the “head
and the heart” rules. When you are ruled by the head and the heart, you care equally
about what happens on your website as you do about what happens on your
competitor’s.
All the while you are automating as much decision making as you can to eliminate
reporting and even some analysis. Your world is one of continuous actions (that is,
surveys, testing, behavior targeting, keyword optimization) and continuous
improvements, where customers, not HiPPOs, rule.
The Tactical Shift:
The second change, is to
embrace the concept of
Multiplicity.
Under this strategy, every web
decision-making program in a
company will need to solve the
Five Pillars: Clickstream,
Multiple Outcomes Analysis,
Experimentation and Testing,
Voice of Customer, and
Competitive Intelligence.
Figure 1.5 shows the approach
your tools strategy must take to
meet the need of Multiplicity.
Bonus Analytics:
Two tools at the very bottom of Figure 1.5. are bonus items.
For large companies, both of these tools are almost mandatory. Neither measures what a
traditional web analytics tool does, so there is no overlap, but each brings its unique
strengths to the business of web data.
Maxamine gives you critical data relating to search engine optimization gaps, missing
JavaScript tags, duplicative content, broken website functionality (broken links and
“bad” forms), security and privacy compliance, etc.
Coradiant gives you critical data, down to an individual user level. You can find
problems on your website quickly.
With Coradiant, you can also understand why, for example, your conversion rates are
down. Is it because suddenly your cart and checkout pages were slow and not making it
to your customers? Or is it because of 404 errors on your important pages?
These are key questions that traditional tools have a hard time answering.
FOUR STEP APPROACH
FOR
SUCCESS OF WEBSITE
• Large number of free web analytics tools are available. However, it is critical to choose
the right tools for the success of our website.
• Choosing wrong tools can take us in the wrong direction and damage our website.
• It is also important that we don’t waste time in trial an error.
• We tend to pick tools like we are picking a marriage partner. When we choose wrong,
we don’t want to accept it.
• Websites are massively complex, and although tools can capture all that data, they
don’t actually tell you what to do.
• Most web analytics tools in the market, even today, simply spew out data. Lots of it.
• We now have t o deal with quantitative data, qualitative data, results of our
multivariate experiments, and competitive intelligence data that might not tie to
anything else.
• One of the most powerful ways to convert data into insights is to keep up with the
“tribal knowledge” in the company: unwritten rules, missing metadata, the actions of
random people, and so on.
• To solve these four problems, you need an analyst. Invest multiple times more in her or
him, or more of them, if you truly want to take action on your data.
• Otherwise, you are simply data rich and information poor.
STEP 1
SELF ASSESSMENT
Use the following three questions to prompt the critical self-reflection that should help
you pick the right Web Analytics 2.0 tool.
Q1: “Do I want reporting or analysis?”
Organizations should sincerely identify their expectations from Web Analytics 2.0.
They may either want just the compiled data in form of reports (not analyzed) or they
may want readymade analysis of the data.
Some of the reasons why organizations may choose only reports are as follows:
(i) Decentralized decision making: The organization is structured so that lots of
different leaders make decisions, and their buy-in is required for any action. These
leaders need data that they can process, not analysis that tells them what action to take.
(ii) Company cultures: Does the company have layers of management? Is it matrixed?
Paperwork driven? Often the culture dictates checks and balances, with multiple
oversights and the need for proof. This kind of culture requires a supply of information
(data).
(iii) Availability of tools/features: A number of tools are geared toward reporting and
not analysis.
(iv) History: Older companies historically have worked by people publishing reports
and data.
(v) Propensity of risk: Does your company empower risk taking? Or is taking risks a
career limiting move? Doing true analysis means letting go of some control and trusting
people who know how to do their jobs. If your company’s culture does not encourage
that then you need reporting.
(vi) Distribution of knowledge in people/teams (tribal knowledge): I f you really want
to analyze data, you need to know the context to make sense of the numbers. If
information and execution are isolated in your company, no amount of empowering the
analyst will help.
If your analysts are not plugged in, the best they can do is provide data to people who
might be plugged in (ideally the company leaders).
(vi) Availability of raw analytical brainpower: Bringing it back to the 10/90 rule, if you
have invested appropriately in analysts, then it makes sense to choose a tool that allows
your company to do true analysis.
If you are choosing a web analytics tool, you should take a hard look at your company,
its decision-making structure, and its needs.
Then be honest and decide whether reporting or analysis provides the most benefit. If
your company really needs robust reporting, choose a tool that does that.
If your company thrives on analysis, then choose accordingly.
Q2: “Do I have IT strength, business strength, or both?”
Some companies are good at information technology (IT), and others are good at
business (marketing, analysis, and strategic decisions). A very rare few are good at both.
If you have solid IT and business strength in your company, then you can go at it all by
yourself, and you’ll be fine. Someone in the company, in the worst case, will have the
part-time job of assuring that technical issues happen as expected.
If you don’t have solid IT strength (IT folks who know and get web analytics), then
you’ll have to add an external partner. Many authorized consultants or one-person-army
folks outside your company can do this for you.
One last reason to assess your IT strength is if you want to develop your web
applications in-house and not with an application service provider (ASP).
Q3: “Am I solving just for Clickstream or for Web Analytics 2.0?”
It is a question that tries to judge what you are solving for to help you understand the
level at which you are approaching the solution set. This question is all about knowing
whether you need a tool to help you “understand clicks” or whether you need a tool to
do a lot more.
The question helps you crystallize your short-term and long-term goals.
No one can predict how the world will be in three years, so buy a tool today that will
serve your needs along that two- to three-year horizon. On the Web, everything changes
too fast, which makes any other strategy imprudent.
STEP 2
VENDOR ASSESSMENT
If you are selecting a fee-based web analytics tool for your company, the following
sections give you 10 questions to ask.
Q1: “What is the difference between paid tool/solution and free tools from Yahoo! and
Google?”
You want your fee-based vendor to provide specific and tangible examples of reports
and metrics that the free vendors don’t provide. A good analytics vendor will have a
crisp answer that focuses on their best features, reports, metrics, integration points, and
so on. Data privacy and customer support is offered by free tools also.
Each company needs a unique solution. You should carefully consider the fit of those
tools for your company.
Q2: “Are you 100 percent ASP, or do you offer a software version? Are you planning a
software version? ”
Currently most analytics vendors, whether free or fee-based, provide an ASP-based tool
with no software-based offerings. Some vendors, such as Webtrends, Unica, and Google
(with Urchin), offer solutions you can buy and implement in-house.
You can also ask the vendor about first-party and third-party cookies, including which
type they use as a default as well as the pain and cost of using first-party cookies.
Q8: “What features do you provide for me to integrate data from other sources into
your tool?”
you execute the Web Analytics 2.0 strategy you’ll have to integrate different sources of
data to get a complete picture. You need to determine how easily your potential vendor
can work with importing outside data.
Q9: “Can you name two new features/tools/acquisitions your company is cooking up
to stay ahead of your competition for the next three years?”
This is a forward-looking question. You want to know whether your vendors are
worried about tomorrow (a good thing) and what they are doing today to deal with
future challenges. Their answers will give you a sense of how much they know about
their own position and that of their competitors.
Q10: “Why did the last two clients you lost cancel their contracts? Who are they using
now? May we call one of these former clients?”
You want to be confident that you are making the right choice, and there is no better way
than to learn why each vendor recently lost someone’s business.
STEP 3
TOOL ASSESSMENT
(PILOT TESTING)
These are the key areas you want to evaluate during the pilot:
Usability: Determine the accessibility/intuitiveness of the tool. Establish whether your
target audiences (for example, business, data analyst, and IT) can actually use and
customize the tool set and reporting or whether you must get dedicated resources to
create the necessary reporting and dashboards on their behalf. Get a feel for the extent of
training needed.
Functionality: Test the functionality in realistic business situations: does it really do
what it said on the tin? Can you use out-of-the-box reports/features and page tagging, or
do you need to customize and extend data collection to meet your needs? (You may need
to run a handful of scenarios with vendors.) Ascertain what is of actual value to the
business.
Technical: Understand the effort to implement, configure, and customize—get a feel for
the actual implementation plan. Determine any unexpected overhead on your
environment. Test potential interoperability with your other systems/data sources.
Response Determine the level of response for both the ASP and software solutions
(performance, ability to handle the volumes, availability of reports/data, benchmarking
exercise).
Total cost of ownership Identify any additional costs that will be incurred for your
business that are not obvious in the vendor’s proposal (additional administration,
licenses, and so on).
Apart from checking the above factors you need to ensure the following:
• Test the tool for enough time (minimum six weeks)
• Perform similar tasks on each vendor’s tool.
• Check the tool on large sample data not only 6 week data.
• Try different segmentations possible on the tool.
• Understand how search analytics of tool works. How it identifies organic and paid
traffic.
• Test support quality across tools and also try to reconcile numbers across tools.
• Allow different staff members to use the tool – interns to VPs.
• Check how easy it is to create customized dashboards and customized versions of the
same reports for different business units or to add computed metrics.
You don’t have to do everything on both of the previous lists. Pick the most relevant
factors to your company, and give each a weighting so that you can go through your
most important criteria during the pilot.
STEP 4
FINALISE SLA
(SERVICE LEVEL AGREEMENTS)
A service-level agreement (SLA) is a contract between a service provider and its
customers that documents what services the provider will furnish and defines the
service standards the provider is obligated to meet.
The vendor may charge additional amount of fees for the SLA needed by you. For that
reason, it is critical that you thoroughly consider your needs and then ask for what you
need—and decide the price—during contract negotiations.
Above points are critical while negotiating a big contract, but, even as a small or
medium-sized business, you can use the previous information to understand the deep
nuances that go into buying an analytics tool and be prepared.
T h a n k Yo u ! !
Important Questions
• What is Web Analytics? What are its benefits?
• Explain the “Paradox of data” and the need for Web Analytics 2.0.
• Differentiate between Clickstream Analysis & Web Analytics 2.0.
• Write a note on various tools available for Web Analytics 2.0 and their utility.
• Explain in details the 4 step approach for successful implementation of Web
Analytics 2.0 / ( 4 step approach for predetermining the success of your
website ).