Want to Avoid Making Costly Mistakes?
Filed under: Analytics, Audits on Tuesday, May 13th, 2008 by Joy BrazelleIt may be time for an analytics ‘check up.’
Many marketers I talk to have inherited an analytics package either from a previous employee or from another department. Most assume that everything was set up completely and correctly and that the data is good. Of course, why wouldn’t they assume this?
In my experience, this is a very dangerous assumption to make - especially if you use the analytic data to make decisions about media spends, conversions, and user experience. I can’t tell you the number of calls I received when I was at ClickTracks about ClickTracks being ‘broken’ because it was not reporting traffic to a certain Web page. 99% of the time a simple ‘view source’ would uncover the problem that the java script had never been placed on the page.
Many other things can cause the numbers to be off - profiles can be incorrectly configured, the code can be incorrect or completely missing. If your analytics are log filed based, referrer and cookie data may not be captured (unless someone has changed the default settings). Traffic could be overreporting by not filtering out all spider and bot traffic or underreporting if, depending on the product you are using, a profile or configuration is not set up correctly.
It is definitely worth taking the time to make sure that everything is set up completely and accurately. As an added bonus, you may find that there are features or reports that you never knew existed because they had not been enabled.
If you don’t feel you know enough about your analytic product to do the ‘check up’ yourself, please feel free to contact us to get started with an analytic audit.
