Quick Start Guide to Online Analytics

The tide is starting to shift from the days of “Mad Men” to the days of Madison Avenue meets Wall Street. We’re seeing more reliance on data when it comes to advertising, marketing, and communications. We have more and more tools at our disposal to help us with the metrics, whether they’re free like, Google Manager, Ad Sense, Analytics or whether you pay for them like, Omniture, WebTrends, Radian6, and Coremetrics. We now have so many ways to track and measure that we get lost in the numbers, ROI, CTR, CPM, CPC, CPO, ROAS, Bonjour, Adios, Guten-Tag, Buongiorno,… what? I got lost, what language are we speaking? Big corporations and small businesses alike need to show ROI, but with so many things to track your ability to do so can quickly turn into garbage in, garbage out.

Another challenge is analysis paralysis. Where to even start? Whether you’re a big company or a small company, there are two things you need to do immediately….1) think about how to match your goals with your metrics, ok stop thinking…. 2) start doing. Once you’ve thought through your goals and determined metrics to match the goals, then get out there, you can tweak the report later, but do something!

The important thing is to have solid goals and to be able to show metrics that tie back to those goals. The experience of presenting to the execs will be much more positive if you can correlate goals with numbers than if you dump a whole bunch of numbers and data in their laps without any meaning. The data, numbers, and algorithms might make you look like you can do differential equations in your sleep, but if you can’t tie the metrics back to the goals and explain it, you’re report is worth the paper it was printed on.

Like with most marcom plans, you start with determining your goals and defining your audience. Once this is thought through, consider which metrics match each goal. You need to define what success looks like, your metrics need to be able to tell you if you’re hitting that mark. When it comes to metrics you want to be able to see the overall picture; therefore, you need to know the what, the why, the where, and the how. In other words you need quantitative, qualitative, listening, and engagement metrics. You can’t rely only on clickstream data (page views, unique visitors, visits). Relying on clicks data won’t give you the full insight. By choosing metrics that measure quantitative aspects, you begin to see what your customers click on. By choosing metrics that measure qualitative aspects, you begin to see why your customers do what they do on your site. By choosing metrics that measure listening aspects, you begin to see where your customers are talking and where your reach is actually reaching. By choosing metrics that measure engagement aspects, you begin to see how you are joining the conversation. Each type of the four metrics described then feeds into your outcomes metrics (the so what? Metrics), and this is the Holy Grail. This is what your execs drool about. Outcome metrics consist of conversion rates, ROI, revenue….bottom line, which in turn equals money. (In the Quick Start Guide below, example metrics for each type are listed, this is not by any means an extensive list, just a sampling.)

Next, choose which media channels best suits your goals, but strongly consider what vehicles your audience uses currently and what tools that they are willing to try out. Most people want to jump to the vehicle selection because it’s the sexiest, from Facebook to Twitter to Wetpaint and it just keeps going. But if you don’t consider your audience and “where” they are or what they’re willing to try, you could find yourself using a tool all by yourself with the crickets chirping. If you have an audience that happens to still be using the mimeograph copier and you’d like to try to gently “push” them into the 21^st century, try the crawl, walk, run approach before jumping head first.

When it comes to choosing your web analytics tool, Stop! Instead of going out there and buying some whiz-bang-boom product that is going to cost you an arm and a leg, start with Google Analytics. Get a feel for what you need and what your reports should look like. Understand the data. Then once you have gotten the basics down and have started producing reports that show numbers that you can tie back to your goals, if you still need more data then consider buying a more robust, customized tool. You may find out that a free tool gives you exactly what you need.

So now you have your metrics lined up with your goals and strategy, your final deliverable is your story. Yes, story. You need to understand what your data is telling you, and better yet, you need to be able to put it into words that a group of execs are going to understand. People relate better to stories, so if you can tell a story with your data, if you can explain it in terms that people can understand then you’ve accomplished two things 1) it means you, yourself, understand the numbers and they aren’t just numbers that were spit out by the tool 2) you’ve taught the execs a little about online analytics, why they are important, and how they are helping the company and the bottom line.

Finally, rinse and repeat. Or it’s more like, rinse, tweak, and repeat. As your numbers tell you the story, review and revise your goals, as needed. As you revamp your goals, don’t forget to continue to revisit your metrics!

Below is a Quick Start Guide to get you going…

Quick Start Guide to Online Analytics

· Determine Your Goals

o What does success look like?

o Are you trying to build a community?

o Are you trying to convert?

o Are you selling a product?

o Are you creating buzz?

o Are you wanting more readership?

o Are you selling more advertising on your site?

· Determine Your Audience

o Who are your customers?

o What is their motivation?

· What Metrics Measure Your Goals (you need to answer the What, Why, Where, and How questions)

o Quantitative (the what)

· ClickStream

· Site Overlays/Heatmaps

· Bounce Rate

· Referring URLs

· Keywords

o Qualitative (the why)

· Customer Satisfaction

· A/B Testing

· Surveys

· Usability Testing

o Listening (the where)

· Sentiment type

· Positive and negative attitudes consumers express

· Demographic

· Location, gender, age

· Competitive analysis

· Share of voice

· Crisis management

· Conversation volume

· Topic frequency

· Campaign Analysis

· Level of influence (# blog comments, # Twitter followers)

· Message reach (# of sources covering topics and # potential page views)

· Virality (# of different entries around same topic within time period)

· Conversation buzz: (# of responses to blog posts)

o Engagement (the how)

· Adoption

· Bookmarking

· Tagging

· Collaborative Filtering

· Rating

· Voting

· Commenting

· Content Creation

· Uploading

· Blogging

o Outcomes (so what?)

· Orders/leads

· Revenue

· Conversation rates

· Problem resolution

· Disruption

· What Media Vehicles Are you Using

o Choose your vehicles that your audience uses.

· What Web Analytic Tools

o Start with a free tool to get perspective and insight.

o Tune and tweak.

o When you are more familiar, if you feel you need a more robust tool pick one that serves your needs.

o If you don’t need all the bells and whistles, there’s no need to spend the money on tools that aren’t providing you the numbers to meet your needs and tell your story.

· Let the Numbers Tell the Story

o Fully understand what the numbers are telling you

o Use the data to teach through storytelling

· Rinse and Repeat

o Actually rinse, tweak, and repeat

References

(n.d.). Retrieved from Engagementdb: http://www.engagementdb.com/

Clifford, S. (2009, May 31). Put Ad on Web. Count Clicks. Revise. New York Times .

Ghuneim, M. (2008, March 28). Terms of Engagement: Measuring the Active Consumer. Retrieved from Wiredset: http://wiredset.com/root/archives/008589.html

Kaushik, A. (2007). Web Analytics An Hour a Day. Indianapolis, IN: Wiley Publishing.

Vittal, S. (2009). Listening Metrics That Matter. Forrester.