Actionable Analytics

Posts Tagged ‘reporting’

“But after observation and analysis, when you find that anything agrees with reason and is conducive to the good and benefit of one and all, then accept it and live up to it” Buddha (Hindu Prince Gautama Siddharta, the founder of Buddhism, 563-483 B.C.)

Embrace action

Web reporting

It never ceases to amaze me how many people seem to miss the real point of web analytics. They say that we must interrogate the data in order to understand what is happening, or that we need to break it down to get to the bottom of it, or summarise it and extract it and manipulate it and evaluate it. Once we have completed these tasks and filled our brains with everything we can possibly know we will at last be full of knowledge and our analysis will be complete. Job done!

Excellent, you are omnipotent. But now what? What are you going to do with all that knowledge, and why did you even want it in the first place? These are the real questions of analysis!

Web analysis

When we’re talking about web analysis, everything that I described above is basically reporting. It might be super-intelligent and insightful reporting, but it is nevertheless a report. The analysis comes when we work out how to use our knowledge to improve the performance of our sites. Just like the Buddha says in the quote above: when you understand that something is good for you, accept it and live up to it – i.e. change your life, adopt your new outlook, make things happen!

This is a report:

“Last month we had 52,847 site visitors and 359,487 page views, which was a 2.651548% increase on the previous month”

This is analysis:

“If we optimise the calls-to-action on our campaign landing page we could sell an additional 300 units at a ROI of 5.6, what are we waiting for?”

If reporting is a rear-view mirror, then analysis is a steering wheel!

What’s the question?

Analysis is answering a question. The formulation of this question is where most people go wrong. As analysts we get asked:

• How many visitors are coming to the site?
• What’s the click-through rate?
• Did it work?
• What’s the path analysis?

These questions can be answered very easily: “2,485″, “1.5%”, “No”, “What do you mean?” This is not real analysis because these are not real business questions. These are real business questions:

• How effective is the website at influencing the path-to-purchase in comparison to other channels, and therefore what is the comparative value of our site?
• Do our email communications cannibalise our retail sales and what’s the overall impact on the bottom line?
• How can I improve customer service satisfaction levels through the website and therefore reduce call-centre costs?

It’s all very well sitting around complaining that we don’t get given questions like this, but this is usually because no-one has thought them up yet, and they need our help in order to do it. As analysts we must help our clients formulate these questions so that we can give them genuinely actionable recommendations.

Meditation

If analysis is like meditation, by all means meditate. But when you’ve finished your profound musing and contemplation and are fully aware, make sure that it changes your life.