Aussie Web Analyst

I blame running a footy club.  Too much of my spare time went into not only playing and training for sport, but organising and calling and arranging, that I found writing blog posts too much work.  But the season is over, the presidency will soon be passed on, and it is time I found time to return to writing about my thoughts and experiences with web analytics.  I think the writing forces me to think through what I believe, hopefully this will lead to new ideas for me.

The last 9 months with Logan Tod has been very interesting.  Learning how to use HBX and Omniture SiteCatalyst and increasing my knowledge of Google Analytics.  Focusing my attention on looking for insights in the data which can be used to recommend improvements to websites or marketing.  Broading my experience with the range of websites that I have worked on and the nature of the work.

I still like to keep it simple though.  I think with the vast amount of web analytics data available for any website, it is easy to get lost in it.  And if you dive in too deep too quickly, it can be difficult to find anything as you are surrounded by too many pieces of data.  I think it is best to start simple, with the key actions or conversion points on the site, the top line metrics.  An understanding of these will generally lead to fairly basic questions about the performance of the website.

But answering these questions will lead to more and increasingly more complex detailed questions about performance and an understanding of the factors that truly are impacting on the performance and success or otherwise of your website and business.  The data itself and an exploration of it can lead you to map out what is important to know in order to make improvements.

One of the more frustrating parts of learning HBX and SiteCatalyst was the discovery of the basic reports that I feel are missing.  In particular, there is not a simple report that gives visits (or even responses) by traffic source.  Having to try and pull data from various sources into a single excel report (as the alternative) is painful with question marks over the accuracy.  SiteCatalyst has the option of Unified Sources via a Vista Rule, this needs to be mandatory for anyone using SiteCatalyst and I wish it came out of the box.  While I have various workaround for HBX, I finally came up with a version using multiple segments where I am satisfied with the accuracy, but no where near the ideal solution.  All tools that I have used need to work harder on getting the balance right between reporting performance and allowing analysis.  I know analysis leads to insights leads to recommendations leads to improvements leads to more money but simple performance reporting highlights where and when the analysis should occur.

Anyway, likely more on that in the future.  I might need to be careful or it could be too easy to write about the philosophy of web analytics ahead of the practicalities of it.  And I need to get a new simple WordPress theme.

Tags: Google Analytics, Logan Tod, Omniture, Web Analytics