Yeap. You'd rarely see a drunkard hung on a lamp post because he needs the light. Usually the case is to support, to get some stability.
Often is the case with most businesses. Analytics is reporting and thats about it. It's not used for illumination. How do we solve this problem? Or where is this problem rooted.
The Process is too Complicated?
Hmmm. Lets go over the process.
Identify all KPI's that has a direct impact on business bottom line.
Conduct an Audit to understand if these KPI's are being tracked, implement tracking as necessary
Look for insights that can help you optimise your KPI's
Test and validate these insights and implement them to get results
True. Its not as simple as thinking something and just doing it. Spray and pray is called spray and pray for a reason. You are completely blind on what results you will get .
Support is easy, Illumination is Hard?
If you have sat down with a question (What behaviours results in a higher retention on my website?) and have looked through data finding an answer, you know its not open your analytics tool, few clicks and you have it.
You definitely need the patience to run multiple queries, compare all types of segments and find an actionable insight. Nothing good comes with ease.
Where do I start?
The best place to start is by building a measurement framework. If you do this step right the rest of it should be a piece of cake ;)
Let's learn by breaking down the following example.
As a business what do you want to achieve. At a very high-level a business can only do three things.
Improve Revenue
Decrease Cost
Improve Customer Experience
Talk to your entire csuite. Ask them how they are achieving each of these elements. What have they already done? what are have worked? what are we doing currently? whats the plan for the future.
Our 1st step is figure out our business goals. Let's take an example where your CEO says he wants to decrease cost.
What is going to be your objective?
Your objective is how you would achieve the goal.
If you want to decrease the cost, you need to bring down your cost per acquisition. In a digital context this would be the best way for you to bring your cost down.
Now what are the KPI's we can measure to make sure that we are on the right track?
Cost Per Click - The cost of a click to bring traffic to your website
Time to Conversion - how long it took for that traffic to actually take the action you wanted. buy something, subscribe etc
Once you have this framework you can start collecting data.
Now you have a few key metrics to continuously optimize for, and when you want to get an insight you exactly know what metrics and KPI's you should start looking at.
There is one difference between winners and losers when it comes to web analytics. Winners, well before they think data or tool, have a well structured Digital Marketing & Measurement Model. Losers don't. ~ Avinash Kaushik