Step Away from the Data!
Filed under: Analytics, PPC on Tuesday, July 29th, 2008 by Joy BrazelleMany marketers are responsible for providing management an executive summary of the Web stats each month. The summary probably consists of:
Visitors
Unique Visitors
Top Pages
Top Referrers
Possibly Top Paths
Chances are it takes a little time to pull the data together and format the report nicely. Chances also are that if you stopped sending the report, everyone may not even notice.
Sure, looking at the number of visitors can be interesting, especially if there are big changes. But, this type of data is pretty useless to upper management, especially since there is so much more meaningful information available.
So what is a successful marketer to do?
You need to take a step back and figure out what is important, figure out what to measure, and figure out how to measure it. Today, I’ll talk about what to measure. Next week, I’ll cover the how to.
Each month the executive summary report should answer the following questions:
How is the Website helping or hurting our business?
Why?
What is going to be done to either help more or fix the problem?
To do this you must align the goals of the Website with the overall company goals. For example, an e-commerce site’s goals should be:
New sales
Repeat sales
Increased dollar value of order
Increased dollar lifetime value of a customer
Referrals
Leads
So, the report should include this topline information, in addition to year-over-year (or month-over-month) changes with an explanation of why the situation is improving or not. If the situation is improving, campaigns with an extremely high ROI should be highlighted. And, if it is not improving – briefly describe what is going to be done to change this (e.g. stop spending money on non-converting PPC campaigns).
A report filled with meaningful business information in business terms that management can relate to will be much more appreciated than a less meaningful lists of stats.
