Avinash Kaushik recently ran an informal contest to find out what report people would choose if they could only have one Web analytics report. The winner of “the best Web analytics report” was a report showing “sources by state, compared to last month.” Based on her business, a locally owned company that competes solely in her geographic service area, it is a great report. For other businesses, it may not make sense. This makes picking one “best” report difficult since it can vary depending on the business and the focus that the particular analyst has.

For example, one Web analyst may be focused on the external sources of traffic while another is focusing on how the site converts visitors. These two Web analysts would undoubtedly come up with different reports that they felt were the “best” analytics report. Since Avinash’s contest wasn’t specific to a particular industry or the type of analysis that a Web analyst was performing, it makes it very difficult to pick only one report…and would still be very difficult even if you had additional guidelines.

If I were to pick just one report, I would probably pick traffic sources in relation to the site goals – which after reading the original contest post is the same as what Avinash picked. I would take it a step further and add some context to the report. In order to do that, I would compare the data to the previous days, weeks, or months depending on the time period being analyzed. That would give context to the report by allowing you to see the trends for each of the traffic sources.

It would require dumping the exported reports into Excel and creating a pivot table based on the data. Making use of dynamic charts would allow you to get a great visual of how each of your traffic sources is performing over time. You’d then be able to understand the specific sites as well as the types of sites that drive quality traffic and develop a plan to try to leverage those sites for additional traffic. Because you’re trending each sites performance, you would also be able to see the results of your efforts in gaining additional quality traffic from the sites that you’ve targeted.

While it’s not advisable to look at just one report, the contest that Avinash ran gives some great insights into what Web analysts deem to be the most critical data. These reports can give a Web analyst a great starting point from which they can then begin to dig deeper into the data to go from understanding what is happening to fully understanding why it’s happening. Just make sure you don’t get sucked to deep into the data and end up with data overload.

Filed under: Analytics on Thursday, July 10th, 2008 by Nate Linnell | No Comments
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