However, in recent years there has been a dramatic shift away from this model. The traditional set-up of websites, micro sites and banner ads is increasingly being replaced by a new breed of apps, networks, engagement platforms and digital tools. Interrupting people with overt sales messages is out of style. Most of the time these things have almost nothing to do with the actual product the company is selling.

But how then do we measure these new experiences? The old model of reach, click-through and conversion isn’t really any different to direct-mail and was easy, but our brave new world often has very little to do with that old model. In order to understand how to measure this we first need to look at what these tools actually are and why they came about in the first place.

[N.B - I have never directly worked on any of the case studies I use in this post and use them only as examples or for hypothetical ideas]

The need for branded utility and customer engagement

Branded utility, and indeed the whole ‘customer engagement’ movement is born out of the increasing commoditisation of products. In the old days the only sources of information available to customers were advertising (and sales) and the advice of a very small peer-group. This meant that marketers had full control over who knew about their products and, more importantly, what they thought about them. This one-way communication to a captive audience allowed the ad-men to conjure up a complex meta-narrative of value and meaning around essentially rather dull products. People weren’t loyal to a product because they loved it, it was because they were brainwashed into believing that their lives would be so much the worse without it.

Skipping forward to the present day: in a world where information is available before we even know we need it, and where brands live and die based on the the ebb and flow of social media sentiment, we no longer need adverts to tell us how to think and feel about products. If I want to know which mobile phone provider is right for me a focused 20 minutes on the Internet reading reviews and asking my friends will form an infinitely more genuine and useful opinion than an ambiguous TV advert of people rolling around in fields of corn.

So marketers no longer control the message, and therefore a product is merely a product. Other than the actual efficacy and quality of the product itself our ability to influence people’s purchase decisions is very quickly vanishing. This is the central business issue behind this new move towards customer engagement online: as someone who works for an agency I get to see this first hand in the challenges presented to us by our clients. At bottom they all say the same thing:

Help!! We need to be more than just a product!

How to be more than just a product

“Stop interrupting what people are interested in and be what people are interested in” – David Ogilvy

If brands want to mean more to their customers than just the products they sell, then it follows that they need to develop a relationship with the customer over and above the experience of that product. This means doing and being something else in such a way that the brand itself becomes a meaningful part of our customers’ everyday lives.

The most famous and most often cited example of how this can work is Nike Plus. Nike sell running shoes, which people probably buy once or twice a year and which they probably never really think about when they’re wearing them to run in. Nike Plus transcends the product by providing a unique service which enhances the entire experience of running. It’s completely relevant to shoes but it isn’t shoes, and it allows Nike as a brand to own running and not just running shoes. This therefore becomes a platform whereby Nike are continually engaged with the running community and through which they have an immensely valid stage on which to communicate to this community about products when it’s appropriate.

Another excellent example is Charmin’s Sit or Squat mobile phone app, which allows a user to locate nearby public toilets when ‘caught short’. It even allows you to upload photographs and rate/review different locations. Obviously this has nothing to do with selling the product directly in the traditional sense (features and benefits), but at the same time it is completely relevant to toilets and therefore toilet paper – it’s a genius piece of advertising which the ‘audience’ keeps with them and uses again and again.

Lastly, there is one more example of this which I am sure will be familiar to readers of this blog, and which may come as a surprise – Google Analytics. At first this might seem odd, but if you think about it GA is actually one of the cleverest engagement platforms in existence: it’s free and ultimately exists to benefit Adwords revenue, but what more effective way could there be to engage, captivate and learn about businesses regarding their use of the web?

How does branded utility differ?

If we want to develop a framework for this stuff which differs to the usual model, we first need to understand how it differs in concept. Here are the key pillars:

Product disassociation – traditional advertising almost always points directly to a product. Even if we can’t measure the sale directly as we can with on-line conversion, it is generally possible to show some correlation between the communication and it’s impact on sales. However with branded utility the picture isn’t always so easy. What actual impact on Charmin’s sales does the Sit or Squat app really have?

Quality not quantity – branded utility is all about relationships, engagement, loyalty and advocacy. Unlike traditional advertising, it doesn’t necessarily matter how many people see the app or service, it only really matters how many people find it useful; feel an affinity to the brand because of it; and talk about it to their friends. Whereas hateful and irritating TV ads can still create positive brand equity through recall, it simply doesn’t work like that here.

Marketing as a service – increasingly people expect something in return for receiving messages, and not only where branded utility is concerned. SAAS tools like Spotify, which allows a free version with ads and a paid version without, has created a popular belief that advertising is a choice – if I have to see it then I want something in return. This is another reason why branded utility is increasingly in demand for brands. Marketing must offer a genuine service in order for any message to be accepted by the consumer.

Advocacy is more than a passing comment – in the digital age it isn’t enough for people simply to tell their friends about your product in the pub. True digital advocates are somewhere slightly closer to a mobilized sales-force; they must be proactive in sharing their experiences and bringing others in to the fold. This can only happen if doing it is easy, meaningful and if they have the right tools to go about it.

Measuring and optimising branded utility

Ultimately, branded utility differs from traditional advertising because it is about creating and driving owned and earned media, which behave incredibly differently to bought media and all the models of traditional advertising. But how then do we measure these strategies?

Aligning corporate goals

Very simply, why the hell are you even doing this really? What exactly do you think it will achieve in terms of profit, retention, sales blah blah blah. If you can’t align the initiative to what it is ultimately supposed to do then your measurements won’t offer any true value in terms of how effective it is for the business. Start from the most obvious and top-line corporate goals and trace these down to your metrics for the initiative. This will become more apparent in the following sections.

Differentiate impact and effectiveness

The natural tendency with branded utility is to measure it like a website. Let’s take the Charmin app as an example. Depending on how it was tagged we could tell how many people download the app; how many times they use it and for how long; to what extent they share, upload and rate content; and also perhaps what they think of it with the aid of some qual research. We can also identify key behavioural goals which in some way mirror a ‘conversion point’, thus giving us a kind of funnel analysis.

However, all this tells us is what the impact of the app is. We can track lots of data on how well it works and how much people love it as a toilet app, but this doesn’t tell us whether it is effective a as a brand communication. It could be number one in the iTunes app store and raved about on national TV, but does this really mean that people will buy more toilet paper? This is the effectiveness of the entire initiative and relies much more heavily on controlled qualitative studies and business modeling.

Build a measurement framework

Create a framework for the metrics you will report on, and ensure it reflects the distinction between impact and effectiveness described above. I have written more extensively on how to build a measurement framework on another blog post, but I have also sketched out a brief hypothetical example based on the Charmin example here. This is, in part, based on Forrester’s general framework for measuring engagement, which fits very nicely with this type of digital activity

Beware correlation and causation

It is amazing how many mistakes are made regarding correlation and causation in web analytics, but it is especially easy with branded utility. For example, take the example of Mazda’s online community forum for MX5 owners, which is certainly a form of branded utlity. They would be interested in to what extent people who use the forum are likely to renew vs. people who don’t. This is easy to do: take a sample of user-drivers vs a sample of non-user drivers and compare the renewal rate. However, this is incorrect. People who use the forum are already more engaged with the brand than people who don’t; this is the very reason that they find it and sign up to it. So the fact that they are more likely to renew could have nothing to do with the forum at all. The real question is: what is the incremental value of the forum or, more clearly: how many people renew because of their experience on the forum. This is not as easy to answer.

Don’t be afraid of intangibles

The answer to the above question cannot necessarily be answered with straight data, and will seem like an intangible business question, but unfortunately it is exactly these kind of questions which we need to answer to address the effectiveness part of the measurement. Rather than go into detail here, I will point you in the direction of a fantastic book: How to Measure Anything by Douglas Hubbard – if you haven’t read this I strongly recommend it. It will enlighten you about just how much of the supposedly unmeasurable can indeed be measured.

In brief summary

The digital relationships we have with our customers are changing. The old advertising and sales modelsdon’t apply in this new world. Embrace the future!

Further reading:

Contagious Magazine Special Report – Branded Utility

Brand Utility – a neat presentation from brandutility.net

Branded Utility Day at Ogilvy – presentation on Youtube

Another branded utility slideshare presentation

Brand Utility, the blog

Or, is it both? Does it rely on some kind of balance between the two?

I initially started pondering this after reading Steve Jackson’s Cult of Analytics. The book primarily describes an organisational structure and process that can be used to put web analytics at the heart of an organisation. However, it goes much further than this in that it attempts to create an intensely rigorous system of scorecards that can be used to police the delivery of this framework. I also noticed similar thinking in Akin Arikan’s recent call to create an expert system for web analytics, which argues that web analytics should operate much like the field of medicine or mechanics, with concrete processes followed to the letter.

I can certainly see where they are both coming from, but something about this whole thing just makes me feel really uncomfortable. It is undeniable that web analytics is a form of science and computing (it’s got the word ‘analytics’ in it for a start!), but something inside me constantly cries out “no, there’s more to it than that, web analytics is about creativity and intuition and sales and the passion for opportunity!”. You might need the science and the tech in order to understand what’s happening, but can this ever really tell you what to do next? Doesn’t this require a fundamental and intrinsic understanding of business strategy that can’t be reduced to statistics and data; or made into some kind of rules-based process?

But if this is true, and web analytics is a balance between science and art; analysis and intuition – then today the field seems woefully lacking in the art and intuition. But why is this?

Web analytics has a ‘tech’ heritage, but does this fit?

Web analytics originally ‘emerged’ from the field of IT, and was later integrated with the field of business intelligence. This produced a group of people with a huge amount of technical and analytical knowledge, but their role is to report things to other people. They don’t typically get involved with what that information is used for.

But web analytics IS the use of the information. You can’t divorce the information from what it needs to be used for. Anyone who has witnessed first hand an organisation where reporting is handled by IT and optimisation by marketing will know exactly how disastrous this can be. Separating the two creates an uncrossable chasm in the middle. You either need one person with both skill sets (unfortunately quite rare), or a well managed team with both camps working together.

Web analysis is not the same as traditional data analysis

The word ‘analysis’ in web analysis persuades most companies that they should fill their senior web analyst positions with hardcore data analysts. Some companies even go as far as employing people who have previously been analysing things like meteorological or geological data sets. However, whilst it is important to have at least some hardcore stats knowledge in a team, it isn’t necessary at the senior level.

Web analytics tools are easy to use, at least from a functionality perspective. The vast majority of the stats and number crunching has already been done by the software. Anyone who has crossed over from using something like SAS to something like Site Catalyst will understand this. It isn’t analysis in the same sense; it’s report viewing – so the ‘analysis’ is in fact the interpretation and translation of the reports into action, which starts to get much closer to marketing and general business performance than any kind of traditional analysis.

People only see the means, not the end

If someone came to your house to sell you double-glazing and spent an hour showing you the tools they planned to use, and talked about how the plastic was manufactured, you wouldn’t buy the windows! If, on the other hand, they talked to you about the reduction in noise, the increased warmth and the lower fuel bills that you would get, then you would be more interested, right?

For some reason, we have an endemic problem in this industry whereby people obsess over the analysis and data, and not the benefits of the analysis. This results in a perception of web analytics as boring and difficult to understand. If you are presenting recommendations of analysis to senior management, do you really even need to show the analysis? Web analytics is decision support, not a sleep-aid!

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The problem then it seems, is that you often have senior people who are too scientific in their approach and lack the spark of commercial intuition and business acumen that can drive truly actionable analytics. This was less of a problem in the old days of data analysis for direct marketing because there were clearly defined process frameworks through which marketing folk could receive standard reports and make decisions based on those reports – but, and here’s the crucial point, there isn’t really anything standard about digital marketing!

I have always said that, one day fairly soon, the word digital will cease to exist; it’s a term used to describe the fact that some things are analogue and other things are digital, but already there isn’t so much left that can reasonably be called analogue. Therefore, if digital marketing simply becomes marketing, and digital business simply becomes business, and these things are as data-driven as we all hope they will be, then ‘analytics’ is a huge central discipline to an entire business operation – to reduce it as a discipline to a fixed process is like trying to create a fixed process for all aspects of the management of a business. Is this possible and, even if it were, is it not suffocating to the organic growth and development of the business?

On a final note, I was curious to see that Avinash Kaushik’s new book, which I haven’t actually read yet, holds the strap-line “The Art of Online Accountability and Science of Customer Centricity” – I wonder what, if anything, he has in store for us on this question?

What is web analytics anyway though?

The real root of this issue is the fact that many companies fail to see what the real goal of web analytics is. They see it as something extra that might be useful, but only when they get around to it and when they don’t have anything more important to do. In the mean-time they carry on as normal; churning out emails, scheduling site updates, adding and removing things to the home page – all based on gut feel or, as Avinash Kaushik likes to put it, the HiPPO (Highest Paid Person’s Opinion). What they don’t understand is that all this stuff they do and web analytics are actually one and the same! Talking about performance marketing not only makes web analytics seem less geeky, it brings to light the fact that our ultimate output IS marketing.

Performance Marketing is a much better clarion call

The specific client I was talking to had exactly this problem; because they didn’t understand web analytics they just couldn’t connect it mentally to their own jobs. In this situation it’s no good talking to people about maturity models or measurement frameworks, or trying to train them on tools, because they still won’t get it. You need to educate them about why they should even listen to you and, more importantly, you need get them excited about why they need to be involved. This is how I went about it on this occasion:

Step 1 – Show them why they need it

The client was under immense pressure to deliver results with a reduced budget, and couldn’t see any way of doing it. They dismissed all notion of ‘web analytics’ because it sounded expensive, time-consuming and like something that wouldn’t deliver immediate results – i.e. they didn’t get it. The first step was to try and show them (without talking about analytics) that they needed to be cleverer about their marketing:

The Need for Data-Driven Marketing

This chart is specific to this client’s market and situation, but what it actually says isn’t so relevant. The key point is that mass marketing is no longer effective, even if you have got the cash for it. Customers are more individual than they use to be, and so you need to get closer to them and have more genuine conversations with them.

Step 2 – Make the connection

Nobody can really argue with what you’ve just said, and then the line of argument progresses in this fashion:

1. The ability to be pro-active and to successfully affect consumer decisions is reliant on the ability to listen, learn and to communicate genuine value through intelligent dialogue.
2. In an online environment listening and learning is achieved through web analysis, measurement and research; understanding how customers currently interact with us and how they want to interact with us.
3. Intelligent dialogue is achieved by optimising the customer experience in order to communicate our message in the most appropriate way, based on what we have learned by listening and understanding.
4. The process is only possible if the data, tools, capabilities and the methods for using them are available and tuned in to what we want to know, and so careful planning is required in order to ensure that insight can become actionable.

This describes holistically the whole process of marketing based on listening, which can also be called performance marketing. Then you can start talking about how to enable them with the ability to actually do it. At the heart of this is the ability to streamline and simplify the flow of data so that decisions can be made:

Enabling Performance Marketing

If data and tools are faster, easier, better and generally more efficient at providing meaningful insight, then your staff are able to spend more time generating action based on that insight and less time trying to work out what it means. This, in turn, means that more attention can be focused on optimisation and improvement initiatives that drive increased performance; and the final result of this is that dialogue and relationship with the customer becomes more tailored, more meaningful and more effective.

Now you can talk about analytics!

Only then can you start to have discussions about maturity models, vendors, internal or external consultants etc etc. It might still be a very long slog, but at least your client (or boss or whoever) can understand what the end game really is.

The way to get out of this is to set good, robust goals for your KPIs – ones which are achievable and based on sound insights and benchmarks. This isn’t just a ‘nice to have’, it is the foundation of a good web analytics measurement strategy or the downfall of a bad one if it’s missing!

Why goals are so important in web analytics

To illustrate the importance: imagine that your website drives offline sales of retail products. Recently you have gradually but consistently improved visitor numbers and congratulate yourself that this will mean more sales in stores. However, unknown to you the market for your particular product has just exploded and there are floods of eager new customers looking for ways to buy it, almost all of whom end up at your competitors. The ultimate effect of this is that you rapidly lose market share in the stores, but of course you never see any of this because you’re too busy congratulating yourself on your 2.3% increase in visitors.

To simplify this a bit – imagine if you owned a shop but never ever left the building or looked outside. You might think you’re doing well because your 10 average customers a day is more like 12 these days, but what if in reality the street outside was teeming with thousands of people and all the other shops had mile-long queues? Would you still think you’re a success?

So, goals – they’re really important! Here’s some tips on how to set them and use them:

How to create goals for your website KPIs

Creating a goal for a KPI is simply about asking first ‘where are we now?’ and then ‘where do we want to be?’ – there are a variety of data and insight sources that you can use to do this. In an ideal world you will use all in combination:

Corporate goals – This is so obvious that it shocks me how often it is ignored by web analysts and even marketing folk. Put very simply: how does your website relate to the overall goals of the business, and what does it need to do to help achieve them? For example, if you have a content site that makes money through ad revenue, how much ad revenue do your shareholders want/need in the next year? You can easily work backwards from this to understand what your goals should be: if you need an extra £85K revenue, how many additional visitors do you need and/or how many extra pages do you want people to view? Simple!

Competitive benchmarking - how do your competitors perform against the same KPIs? Whilst this can be difficult and sometimes impossible to find out, what information can be got is insanely useful. Ideally the data should be linked to corporate goals: if you know that your arch nemesis achieves 5 times the traffic that you do – but you also know that they target a larger and less profitable market segment than your strategy dictates – then you can use your market share estimates to work out what your traffic should be, rather than blindly trying to follow them on a pure number. Good sources of competitive data are commercial providers like Compete, Hitwise and Nielsen; as well as free tools like Google Trends. Failing that you could just ask them. You might be surprised how open they would be if you offered to share your stats in return.

Targeted improvements - Sometimes you just want to push yourself. Even if you have great competitive benchmarking, why stop at matching the competition? Push yourself further! This is about understanding what is achievable and stretching yourself slightly beyond it. Very useful if you have staff that work to bonus targets.

Common sense – if you know your business very well and have a good gut feel about where it can go, you might be brave enough to just use your intuition. Be very careful with this though, an unachievable and unrealistic target is often worse than having no targets – it will lead you on a wild goose chase!

How not to benchmark your performance

I have often seen people set up KPIs and then monitor them using a statistical method called standard deviation. In simple terms this is just a way of making sure that your KPI figures don’t fluctuate dramatically; i.e. they don’t deviate from the average in a given period. If the number improves you can learn from it and roll with it; if it declines you can understand why and rectify it. Whilst this has it’s uses on a day-to-day basis, this is a disastrous way to handle goals. Why would you not want to deviate from the average (mundane)? What else is business except the striving for improvement? No brainer!

Further reading

Avinash Kaushik on benchmarking, goals and more

Coremetrics on industry benchmarking

The Big Book of KPIs by Eric Peterson

The concept of ‘drowning in data’ cannot be understated when it comes to web analytics. Apart from the sheer quantity of information available, the situation is worsened because the tools we use are so terribly fast and effective; it has never been easier to slice, dice and peel (?) your way through such huge mountains of click-stream data. But just because it’s there and easy to access certainly doesn’t mean it’s easy to make sense of. I believe most companies that fail in this arena do so because they simply don’t know what to look at, but rather flail around in the data following endless and infinite pathways that, whilst ‘interesting’, ultimately lead nowhere fast.

This post describes how to get your head above the water and start swimming in a straight line. The answer lies in what I call a ‘Measurement and Optimisation Framework’, which might sound complicated but is, in fact, simply a strategy for: what you should be measuring; how to do it; and what you should do with the information once you get it.

Developing a Measurement & Optimisation Framework

The process of developing a measurement and optimisation framework is simply about answering 3 key questions:

1. Why does my website exist?
2. How can I measure the success of that existence?
3. What can I do to make it more successful if I find it isn’t achieving what I want it to?

For very simple websites (such as a personal blog), you could probably get away with just spending an hour or so thinking about this. For more complex business sites it could take some time! Following is a brief summary of the top-level part of the process through which I would typically take a client in order to get this up and running:

1: Define your site’s KPIs

How can you fix something or make it better if you don’t know what it was meant to do in the first place? Not setting proper objectives and goals is the most serious and fundamental mistake anyone can make, and not just in web analytics!

Most companies fail to do this because they assume that they intrinsically know what their site is for and what needs to be done to improve it. Take the example of a site selling CDs – it’s for selling CDs, right? What could be more complicated than that?

But, think about it for a moment, who is it trying to sell CDs to? Is it trying to achieve the lowest price possible or is it selling at a premium because it caters to a niche? And where does the company want to be in 5 years time, and what does that mean in terms of the brand that needs to be built? Is it important that people tell their friends about it? Oh, and how does the profitability work? Do we need to reduce the cost per sale by increasing the number of repeat buyers and therefore reducing media spend? And what about our other sales channels? Sales on the web cost much less than those that go through the call centre, so do we need to persuade some of those customers to get on-line? etc etc etc…

The point is, what your website means strategically is not necessarily all that easy to articulate. You need to get a really firm grasp on what your companies corporate goals are and work downwards. For big companies this generally means using something like a Balanced Scorecard approach. The system you use isn’t necessarily important, the point is that you align the goals of your site with the strategic goals of the company or, better still, the strategic goals of your customers!

2: Set targets

Once you have defined how to measure success (your KPIs), you then need to determine what that success IS. Again, this goes back to your corporate objectives: if your site is there to generate advertising revenue, how much revenue do your shareholders need next year? And what does that mean in terms of the number of visitors you need and the number of pages they need to look at? This is how you set targets.

Even if you can’t get anyone in your company to give you these targets, you should make them up yourself! It is incredibly difficult to optimise something to work better if you don’t know what ‘better’ means. If you are not able to prioritise which areas of the site need the most attention at any one time, you will drown – and you cannot do this without a sense of the goal for each KPI. Just do it!

At this point in time you might be able to produce something like this:

Typical Web Analytics Measurement Framework

[Please note: I doctored this a lot to protect the identity of a client, so it won't necessarily make complete intuitive sense and is provided more as a visual example]

3: Guide your analysis with a KPI dashboard

Now you know what your KPIs are and how to measure them you can produce a dashboard report showing where they are against where they need to be. This is incredibly important because it is the guiding light of your analytics and tells you exactly what to look for. If, taking the example KPIs in the chart above, I produce my weekly or monthly dashboard only to find that my unique visitors are dangerously below target but that all other KPIs are OK, then all my analysis for that week/month will be guided by a very specific question: what drives unique visitors and how can I improve the volume?

By investigating this you might find, for example, that you have saturated your search market and therefore need to optimise the site for different, non-branded keywords – or that the TV campaign you tested sent lots of high quality traffic and should be repeated. The point is that, without the KPIs, targets and the dashboard, you have nothing to focus you and, more importantly, have no solid way of telling your marketing director why they need to spend more on TV!

4: Optimise, optimise, optimise!

Remember finally that web analysis is not about understanding, its about doing. If you think your job is to report figures to someone else so that they can make sense of them, then you are not an analyst. The output of everything you do is about making changes to your site, media strategy, internal processes or whatever. Analysis and optimisation are essentially the same thing!

Empower yourself!

So what’s the benefit of all this? If it isn’t already obvious think about these two possible scenarios in which you are presenting your ‘analysis’ to your wider team:

• You hold a meeting in which you present 30 charts of data from your analytics tool, moving through geography, time on site, hour of day, browsers, screen resolution and lots of other fascinating charts. At the end everyone agrees that it was really interesting and goes back to their jobs.
• You hold a meeting in which you state that you can make the company an additional £1.5m per year in sales revenue and then proceed to present a road-map for implementing changes to make it happen, with a full ROI justification of likely costs. You get promoted and paid more!

Which one would you prefer?

In seriousness though, this is a very common example of the way many companies view their websites. Personally I think it might come from too many years dealing with traditional offline media – “if only we could find a way to get people to look at our bill-board for longer, and pay more attention to it!” But beware…

The danger of dwell-time

In most cases measuring dwell-time as ‘engagement’ (or even at all) is not only wrong, but is frankly dangerous. Just a few of the reasons for this are as follows:

• A lot of your visitors are at your site because they want to get something done, quickly: place an order for something they decided to buy last week; find your address; get help; and so on. Why do you want this to take longer? If you ran a supermarket you might want people to spend longer browsing the aisles, but would you want them to have to queue for longer at the check-out??
• I might spend 2 hours ‘engaging’ with every aspect of your site, but that might be because I despise you and am learning everything about you so I can destroy you! This is extreme, but the point is that engagement isn’t necessarily positive engagement.
• Most companies find, if they run the analysis, that people who buy things spent longer on the site than people who didn’t. This leads them to think that if they can get people to spend longer on the site then they will surely buy more stuff. This is one of the biggest errors I see in web analytics, and not just regarding this example. People who buy things don’t buy things because they were on the site longer, they were on the site longer because they were in the mood to buy something, or because your site was relevant to them. Simply getting people to stay on the site longer doesn’t change their state of mind, and by obsessing over it you ignore the real underlying drivers.
• If what you really want to do is get people more engaged with your content, and get them to think positively about it – why not just measure that? Do a survey or run some focus groups; ask them what they thought and, if they don’t like it, ask them why not and how you can improve it. This kind of brand engagement is a deeply emotional and qualitative thing – how on earth do you expect to correlate it to something so cold and bland as the time they spent on your site?

But there is something more fundamental underlying all this. I think in most of these cases companies (especially non-ecommerce sites) are unsure what their website IS; what it means to them strategically and, more importantly, the role it plays in the overall journeys taken by their different customer segments. How exactly do you want the content on your site to influence your customers’ behaviour? Do you even know how your customers are using the site at the moment? Until these questions are answered (quantitatively and qualitatively) you will never be able to meet them in relevant dialogue through your site. And if you really think this through, and then think back to the concept of pure dwell-time – how absurd does that sound now? It’s like locking the doors of the shop and not letting people out!

But we are trying to achieve something, so what is it and how do we go about it?

Nevertheless, websites do have a communicative role to play. Our visitors need to be influenced, motivated, persuaded, dazzled, awed – not just to make them buy something, but so that we become part of their lives in whatever way is relevant to them. So how do we do it? Well, unfortunately the answer to this question is deeply unique to every single business – you need to go on your own voyage of discovery in order to understand exactly what ‘success’ and ‘performance’ mean to you and therefore how to influence them. However, here are some tips to set you off:

• Push the site itself (and especially anything to do with click-stream data) out of your mind temporarily. Work out who your customers are and why and how they want to interact with you as a business. Similarly, work out how you want them to think of you, and what role you want to play in their lives. Now, in the middle of all this – what does/might the website mean to them; how does it help them; what would make it important to them? If you have the budget I would strongly recommend this being a major research project.
• Remember that you don’t just have one type of customer, and even similar customers want different things at different times. Segment your customers by who they are and what they want to achieve, and make sure you understand the above question according to these different types of customers. What role does the site play for them at the current stage in their journey with you?
• Ensure that your objectives and KPIs reflect this understanding. If by engagement you really mean that all visitors successfully completed what they came to do, then ask them whether they did or not and use this as a KPI. If the journeys and tasks that people want to perform are totally different, then you need different KPIs.
• If things like dwell-time are still relevant to some of these journeys then use them, but remember and take heed: these are indicators of other behaviours or attitudes. You cannot influence this metric directly. Know what drives it!
• Never rely solely on click-stream data as your source of insight. Sometimes it is easier for continual reporting if all KPIs are based on click-stream, but if this is the case then you need to make sure you explain and drive these metrics using other, qualitative sources of data. Click-stream is the what, not the why!

Above all, remember that your website is not and will never be a ‘pamphlet on the web’. You might think of it like this, but your customers most certainly don’t. These days brands sink or swim based on how effectively they ‘engage’ with people through digital channels, but this ‘engagement’ is a million miles away from ‘dwell-time’!

“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.