Anyone whose job it is to make sense of your analytics data and present it to the stakeholders in a way that is easy to understand knows that it can be a big challenge. Everyone wants data, but unless they understand what they are looking at they will not take the data you give them and use it to help the business make more money. Sure you can create a dashboard in your analytics tool for each stakeholder that shows the relevant data for them, but these usually fall short. The dashboards often give you basic charts, but they do not give a good visual representation of the data over time. Looking at the trends for each metric that is important to your business is vital and having the ability to compare metrics in a chart is where you really can begin to gain some great insight.

Take your top landing pages as an example. It’s easy to look at your top 25 landing pages during a month and each of their respective bounce rates as the raw data is usually only a couple clicks away. That will give you some great insight into what your true “homepages” are and if they are “sticky” pages that keep visitors on your site. But just looking at a report that lists those numbers is not enough; you really need to be looking at those same pages over time. By doing so it will allow you to see how pages trend over time as well as how the changes you make to certain pages affect their bounce rates and hopefully improve the “stickiness” of the page. That can be tricky to report on since your top landing pages are going to be changing from month to month, and so copying and pasting the monthly or weekly reports together does not work. Luckily Excel has pivot tables and dynamic charts.

These are two excellent methods to present your data in a manner that is easy to look at and understand while not requiring much time to produce. After the initial setup, all the work that is required is simply dumping the raw data into an Excel worksheet and updating the pivot tables that are contained in a separate worksheet or separate workbook. The screen shot below shows what the end result would look like with the pivot table and the dynamic chart.

It is currently showing the previous three months worth of data in the pivot table, but visually it’s often better to just show the most recent month and then show the rest of the data in the chart. This makes the data much more visually appealing which is extremely important since many of your companies stakeholders are likely to get glassy eyed if you give them a spreadsheet full of numbers.

Below the pivot table is the dynamic chart that shows the trend for both the number of entrances and the bounce rate for the currently selected entry page. The example only shows three months worth of data, but as the dataset grows trends will begin to appear. This makes it very easy to look at a chart and quickly see how your top entry pages are performing. You may be wondering how this chart is going to really help since it’s only showing one of the top landing pages. Well that is what makes a dynamic chart really cool. Instead of showing all your top entry pages and their bounce rates in a jumbled mess on one chart the dynamic chart allows you to show one at a time. Next to the chart is a scroll bar that allows you to cycle through each of your top entry pages and see a visual trend for each one. The chart below shows the trend for the top entry page.

If you look at the scroll bar in the next chart you can see that it’s now scrolled through about half of the top landing pages. Each time you click the down arrow it will populate the chart with the corresponding entry pages historical trend.

Pivot tables and dynamic charts can be used in the same way to present your other key metrics in a manner that is easy to look at and understand for your stakeholders. You can create a whole report that takes very little time yet provides a powerful visual representation of the data that’s important to each stakeholder. Now your stakeholders may actually embrace the data since they no longer have to stare at endless amounts of numbers and try to make sense of what they mean. No more logins to dashboards that never get used or Excel spreadsheets that just sit on their desk or in their email because they do not understand the data. You can now give them a report that is visually appealing and easy to understand.

The next step is to get them from understanding the data to taking action based on what the data is telling them in order to make positive changes that will increase the bottom line for your company. That will take time and training. However, if making changes based on the data and not on impulse can be ingrained in each stakeholder it will be amazing to see the increase in performance that your company will realize from your site.

Filed under: Analytics on Thursday, December 20th, 2007 by Nate Linnell | 1 Comment
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