A few weeks ago I was invited to talk at a meeting of Scottish Web Folk (web managers at Scottish Universities) on web analytics.  The actual topic was my choice, anything that I considered useful and relevant given my knowledge and experience with web analytics.  I sent around a short questionnaire trying to understand what the attendees use web analytics for, if they believe they are using to its full potential and if not, what the barriers are to this occurring.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, they are facing many of the same issues as those reported by large organisations with e-commerce websites.  The key issues are:

• no clear objectives from stakeholders
• lack of time
• lack of support of internal stakeholders
• insufficient knowledge of how to use web analytics data to make business decisions.

Given this, I aimed my presentation at addressing these issues, hopefully providing practical suggestions for actions that can taken to make web analytics more actionable within their organisations.  This presentation that I gave can be found below.  While it was directed towards universities, I believe the suggestions would be relevant for any organisation.