There’s a set process you go through when evaluating a businesses analytics function, including tools, tagging, reporting, organisation, integration and skills. One of those the significant challenges any organisation needs to overcome though is what the analytics function actually does, how well embedded and integrated it is and the value it adds.
It is often the case that the web analysts spend more time reporting than they do with analysis, which doesn’t really add a huge amount of value. Blind reporting helps no-one, you just end up with a sea of meaningless data and in the wrong hands it can give a misguided sense of security.
Analysis should provide and business meaningful and actionable insight that the business can use to influence change. Providing a report on the number of visitors, page views, bounce rate etc. is interesting however these are not necessarily KPI’s. Without changing the organisations perception of a reporting only analytics function, the analysts are never freed from what is perceived as their core responsibility, this really starts with working with the organisation to understand their key performance indicators and influence change through reporting and valuable actionable insight.
Actual analysis is a fundamental part of any web analytics function, it should never be a compromise of reporting over analysis. There are always reports to run, but these should be automated, put on dashboards and minimised so that they are a small percentage of your overall time.
Analytics is also less about the tools, although you need a best of breed analytics tool such as Omniture, WebTrends, Coremetrics and Google Analytics, but about people and educating the business about the value you can add through analysis. As a business or an analyst, this really needs to be a day one exercise – evaluate the health of your analytics function and influence change with the stakeholders. In real terms, a small change in conversion rate will make a lot of difference to the bottom line. Analysis will help you achieve this.
It is my view that the best performing analytics functions sit within marketing organisation, have full access to the full business key stakeholders with a close relationship with them. As a successful analyst you need to understand the marketing programs, business drivers and initiatives.
