Why Analytics is a Discipline
Filed under: Analytics on Tuesday, January 29th, 2008 by Joy BrazelleWeb analytic technology has been around since the early 90’s. Over time the technology has become more sophisticated moving from focusing metrics like ‘hit’ and ‘page view’ to understanding the difference between a visit from a spider and a ‘human’ (well, their computer). And now taking it even further the ability to segment traffic and integrate with other systems (import campaign data or other CRM information). The amount of data available is almost endless.
The most common approach to analytics in a company was to assign a person, maybe a marketing person, maybe an IT person to be in charge of the analytics. Typically this person would figure out how to run a report that contained the relevant, generic data like visits, unique visits, hits (useless) and repeat visits. Then they would schedule this report to be sent to everyone each month or maybe even each week.
And each month or maybe even each week lots of people would receive this information maybe glance at it or maybe not and delete it. This is really not a valuable use of web analytics.
Web analytics can give you such important information. It can tell you if you are wasting your money on PPC, irritating your visitors with your site design or doing a great job of converting new visitors to customers. But you have to know what you are looking for.
Web analytics is complicated. Many marketers are not analytic by nature. Many IT folks who have been tasked with being the web analytic owners are not marketers by nature. So what is there to do about this? Unfortunately for some, there is no easy answer. There are two options. You can outsource all of your analytics or you can take the time to learn and interpret the data. This is where it becomes a discipline.
More on this next week.
