The goal for every company should be to have web analytics in-house, lead by a team that is empowered to do true analysis by looking at the data end to end and incorporate both the what (quantitative) and the why (qualitative).
The analysts should also be marketing savvy, not just focused on the data. The true value of web analytics is about understanding user behaviour; it’s more than just data…in fact, it’s primary purpose these days is to help optimise your business. An analysts’ role is to make the connection between the data and the business. And because user behaviour is driving the data, a marketing connection must exist.
Long term, the role is definitely in-house for the following reasons:
- Any worthwhile implementation (a strategic implementation) of web analytics has got to integrate with other sources of data in the company. Core data will come from other parts of the company such as interactions that happen on the phone, financial data, customer segmentation models etc. Most consultants outside the company won’t have access to this data (perhaps they should but it is really hard).
- Contrary to popular belief, decision making is not a structured process. Decisions are made in meetings and hallway conversations and 1:1 meetings. In all of those cases it is tribal knowledge that is critical. Tribal knowledge is about knowing what is going on in the company; it is knowing what happened last year; it is knowing there is some weird testing going on etc. All of this critical context is something that generally only people in the company have access to, due to their network. And it is often tribal knowledge that bridges the gap between reports and action.
Some companies have reached the full in-house model. For many though, it’s a journey that must be undertaken.
So what follows is a plan to help get your new-born to maturity.
Stage one – your new baby
You are just getting started but at least you have some support from senior executives.
What do you need?
- Web analytics tools implemented.
- Show some quick wins (a.k.a. insights) and begin to convert the masses.
What’s your role?
- Find the most senior person you can and ask them to be the sponsor – you will need them championing your efforts later.
- Don’t expect perfection out of the box…web analytics takes time to achieve results. It takes time to fully customise it to your needs. You’ll make mistakes along the way, but that’s ok.
What’s your consultant’s role?
- Talk to the digital channel owner a lot and some key stakeholders internally (and maybe externally) about their use of data.
- Help you find and implement the best platform for your needs.
- Teach you not to make mistakes (like measuring hits or top exit pages or daily unique visitors).
- Do lots of training sessions and dog and pony shows around your company (makes you look good and shows what’s possible).
What should you be careful about?
Most of what will be done in this stage will be thrown away later (or at least modified), but that’s ok. Make sure you set that expectation with your stakeholders. During your first phase, choose people who have data affinity and who are your friends (so they’ll stick with you through the birthing pains). Don’t over-stretch and give 500 people login accounts to your new web analytics application.
What do you pay consultants?
- Small dollars, more frequently.
Stage Two – toddler to teens
What does it look like?
You’ve got a few converts. You’re generating reports that some people are using but you’re drowning in questions – most of which remain unanswered. Some people have started to complain that they don’t know what action to take. The VP of Marketing is wondering why the site keeps changing but the analytics tool is not telling them why conversion rate is dropping. Oh those terrible twos and beyond.
What do you need?
- Consider hiring a dedicated web analyst to be the in-house resident expert, someone who’ll collect tribal knowledge and be on the beck and call of the VP.
- Customized and segmented dashboards for your business (because you have realized you are unique and standardized KPI’s from books don’t do you much good).
- You find lots of data is missing (or you suspect is inaccurate) and the tags are not quite right, and the digital channels have progressed faster than you’ve kept up. You will need an extensive effort to update your tags and collect new data to fill the data gaps and help answer the questions.
- Consultants to kick it up a notch.
What’s your role?
- Help fill the analyst position as soon as you can (look for acumen, curiosity and simple web smarts).
- Have the consultant spend a lot of time on-site talking to the people who run your businesses and to the people who run your digital channels (don’t forget, it’s not just web these days…consider your mobile apps, mobile web, and socials channels too).
- Really figure out your digital strategy. You need to know your audience segments, your communication goals, your conversion goals, your KPIs and targets and your key segments.
What’s your consultant’s role?
- Really understand your business and your business success criteria and bring their business acumen to the table (vs. tool expertise in Stage 1).
- Help you create those aforementioned customized dashboards that incorporate core financial or other goals for key metrics to show real success. Metrics on these dashboard will be segmented for your core acquisition and retention strategies and should include customer segments, marketing campaigns, PPC/SEM, Direct Marketing, Affiliate Marketing etc. to make the dashboards personal and yours (segmentation capability is critical here).
- Help you put standards in place to capture meta-data that you need to do optimal analysis (meta data around campaigns, products, customers etc.). The consultant has to help you nail all the data problems (either missing data or bad data) in this stage.
- Teach you how to begin to get insights for yourself.
What should you be careful about?
This is a very painful stage for you and your internal stakeholders. You’ve got more data than you can digest and yet it means little. Be patient. You should begin to bring reporting in-house now because it will be cheaper for you to do (and a great way to train your analyst) and you really want to focus the consultant on doing true and powerful insight analysis (and teaching you that as you move from toddler to teen).
What do you pay consultants?
- Medium sized dollars, less frequently.
Stage Three – the wild youth
What does it look like?
Web analytics is being accepted as a business decision making tool. Dashboards and key metrics are well received. Your segmented conversion rates have improved. You now need to kick it up a notch. You hear a lot of questions about why website visitors do what they do but you can’t answer the question (you have tried to answer the question with the tool but are consistently frustrated).
What do you need?
- Tools to slice and dice the data. Tools to do ad-hoc, on demand, conscious stream of thought analysis.
- Experimentation, testing and behavioural targeting expertise, to realize you are wrong about what your customers want.
- You need to start moving into collecting qualitative data (for example surveys or usability), to realize you are wrong about why your visitors come to your website and what they can and can’t accomplish.
- Help creating a strategy that will integrate all the new pieces of data you will capture and provide actionable insights. After all, there’s no point collecting it if you’re not going to use it.
What’s your role?
- Expand your team in the company to get other bright people involved on analysis and optimisation.
- Find the right consultants who can help with audience-based segmented testing and behavioural targeting.
- Identify decision makers who get customer centric marketing and cozy up to them (you’ll need their sponsorship).
What’s your consultant’s role?
- Bring tools and expertise to the table for these new things you know nothing about. For example, if you engage with Test&Target they will teach you the benefits of segmented multivariate testing; they will suggest initial ideas you can test and then they will help you run those tests; they’ll help you understand the key differences between tools like Test&Target and Google’s Website Optimizer (for example, the way the tests are run, the segmentation capabilities, the targeting capabilities and the limitations).
- Help you understand that testing is about having a decent content strategy. Help you to create a content strategy, a homepage strategy, a testing philosophy and creating an optimisation culture within the organisation.
- Knowledge transfer (because soon the general ideas won’t bear huge fruits and you’ll have to bring business expertise to the table) and implementation best practices.
- Help you integrate your various data sources (online and offline) so that you can do clickstream and conversion analysis for terrible survey responses or figure out the true impact of your experiments/tests across a range of segments and metrics, such as customer type and average order value and revenue.
What should you be careful about?
Start with modest goals and don’t underestimate the immense resistance you’ll get from your company culture and the HiPPO’s (HIghest Paid Persons Opinion). It’s very hard for companies to truly have a customer centric mindset and at every step you should be prepared to massage egos and re-frame things so that they let you bring the customer voice to the table and not just kill it because of their HiPPO opinions. Create case studies when you do a great test or find out a huge nugget of information via the research work, make business users heros and put the spotlight on them (it will pay you back big).
What do you pay consultants?
- Big sized dollars, a fair amount initially and then only periodically.
Stage Four – they’re all grown up
What does it look like?
You have truly implemented something akin to Nirvana. You don’t have enough people to do the analysis work. Your company wants the web channel to be the essence of its competitive differentiator.
What do you need?
- New and different ways to capture data.
- More people.
- Create self sustaining processes that feed active decision making.
What’s your role?
- Chief Cheerleader.
- Find the right talent.
- Find insights, be a catalyst for change
- Find uber consultants who really don’t do much work except come talk to you and give you ideas.
What’s your consultant’s role?
- For the new technologies you are trying you will need help in understanding them and instrumenting new ways of capturing data.
- Bring truly radical outside perspectives (that only a few consultants in the world have) that will both energize you and provoke you, but will also help influence strategy (vs. KPI’s or page design).
What should you be careful about?
You are going to be in very rarefied air, make sure your organization has the appetite for risk and they back you. You will make more mistakes here (but you will also win big), be prepared for it and make sure that that is ok. Your personal job is to motivate your team and keep the organization on the right track as time and people evolve.
What do you pay consultants?
- Significant dollars but infrequently.
Wow – doesn’t that all sound easy? It is absolutely achievable in every sense though.