by: Rich Julius (guest blogger)
For years I’ve cautioned against using web statistics as a web marketing measurement tool. The truth is, most web statistics aren’t actionable, and what isn’t actionable is fairly useless.
You can GET more now from stats …
In the old days, a web statistics report gave you a bit of demographic information about browsers, countries, and those ubiquitous “top 20 entry pages” and “top 20 exit pages.” Marketers, whose job is to know how their online campaigns are faring, used to be obsessed with “hits” and other equally useless numbers. And that was fair enough, since that was all they got.
Today’s web statistics packages are much better, in that you can point to specific landing pages and watch the traffic on them, and more or less count the number of unique bodies that hit each page. Of course, this assumes that you use unique landing pages for each campaign, which I would argue is a requirement in today’s interactive marketing world.
Google Analytics is one of the best statistical packages I have used, so I’m not shy about plugging them. They bridged two key gaps:
- Making the analytical reports reasonably easy to set up
- Providing results that are fairly easy to interpret
They also integrated with AdWords, providing additional insights about your pay-per-click campaigns.
These are key issues—there is no point in collecting metrics if no one knows what data to collect, no one can interpret the reports, and no one will act on the results. IT folks don’t always know what the questions are that the data needs to answer. Marketing folks don’t always understand how to translate their analytical needs into click-paths and meta-data. Sometimes you need an information architect to act as a go-between.
… But STATS alone aren’t the answer.
The real question is, are your web site visitors just statistics? Or are they people and accounts you actually care about? Do you want to know what they are doing on your site? Do you know why they abandoned that cart, where they need support, and why they just left for a competitor’s site?
Statistics software will tell you about general trends, and are useful in the face of nothing else, but they provide very little that you can base a decision on. They may suffice for mass-marketing, but for B2B and account-centric B2C businesses, they are all but useless. (Ever wonder why your sales force doesn’t ask for web stats?)
So, what is my audience really doing? New trends in webstats.
For many years I have relied on “page dotting,” a technology that lets you identify each visitor to a site, watch their movements through the site, and track their actions even on future visits. This is built into StageOne, my favorite web CMS system, and provides terrific insights into how pages and campaigns are functioning.
At Online Market World last week I came across a company called TeaLeaf that does Customer Experience Management. While I don’t know much about their product (yet), I certainly appreciated their core message: you need to know what visitors to your site are experiencing, and in order to do this you need to track the actions of individuals. TeaLeaf tracks pages and application logic to discover every obstacle—they can place a “trace” on tasks a user performs to see what is and isn’t working.
Bottom line – you need to know what your audience does, not how many of them there are.
Knowing what your users are experiencing is knowledge that you really can’t afford to live without. As Richard Saul Wurman (the “father” of information architecture) wrote in Information Anxiety, “Facts in themselves don’t solve the problem.” You need knowledge to solve problems, and knowledge comes from:
- understanding what it is you want to measure,
- creating the systems to measure it, and
- reporting back the results in a way that you can understand what happened.
Only then can you make course corrections to improve the user experience and achieve higher business goals.
Original Post: http://www.achievemarketleadership.com/?p=173
Rich Julius, Partner, Crimson Consulting Group, Interactive Services, is an Information Architect. He recently designed the localization and global publishing strategies for Cisco’s technical support web site, resulting in Cisco’s first LISA Award for online global Web support excellence.
Rich served for 8 years as president of Specific Impulse Inc., directing the information architecture and web development practice recently acquired by Crimson. Rich’s bio.
