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Business Process and Web Analytics - measuring your success

Web analytics has always seemed to be a source of mystery and confusion for many people. As always to the non technical person, it is a morass of meaningless numbers that seems to have no relation with the business, but have this nagging feeling that it really is important. The technical types who enjoy digging into numbers - and I am one of them - can find all sorts of fascinating information from these metrics but  can rarely link them to the business processes that they describe. The real danger is in letting the numbers person determine the web analytic parameters to measure. There has to be a balance between the business and web analytics componenets so that the numbers will produce viable results.

Managing a successful business means that there are key performance measures established, tracked and most importantly acted upon to improve the business. If your business has a dependency on your website to promote, sell or otherwise improve your bottom line, then linking your business measures to web analytics is critical.

No doub Google Analytics has come a long way in allowing the lay person in delivering meaningful ( or a at least pretty) set of numbers regarding your website performance. Unfortunately unless you customize your reports to meaningful measures, it is very difficult to implement actions and improvements from the generic Google report.

So what can one do? The steps are

  • Know what your objectives are for your business and  how the website will contribute to that success.
  • Identify the business processes that link to the website and your overall business success.
  • Establish business measures that link to that success, such as increased revenues, more sign ups etc
  • Establish a benchmark so that you have something to measure against
  • Then extract the numbers that will reflect the desired performance measure ( needless to say this is the hard part)
  • Start tracking, establish patterns and then
  • start innovating and changing different elements of your website, marketing strategy or usability of the website.
  • Optimize your website and business processes to meet your business objectives.

I am sure that this appears to very high level and begs the question how do I really do this, and there is no easy answer other than follow a successful process and persevere. The end results will be worth it.

Web-Insight has been involved in website redesign for many years and applying a well defined and tested process for web strategies including business performance measures. Our experience has shown that much of the problems that organizations have is by skimping on the front end strategy and analysis part and going directly into the  web coding and visual design.

You can avoid many problems by linking your busines process to your web analytics and benefiting from your website.

This entry was posted on June 10, 2009 at 11:24 am and is filed under web communications and Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response or trackback from your own site.

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4 Responses to “Business Process and Web Analytics - measuring your success”

  1. Valeri says:
    June 17, 2009 at 3:06 pm

    I agree. I’ve done numerous web analytics reports for clients. What sometimes happens is they mistake quantity for quality, especially in terms of page views. Just because you have a lot of page views doesn’t mean visitors were satisfied with the information they found on the page. They may have kept coming back and clicked around the site because the navigation system wasn’t clear and they had to randomly search the site to find information.

    Simply having the numbers isn’t enough. it’s what you do with the numbers (and your website) that really counts. If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it.

  2. Peter de Gosztonyi says:
    June 17, 2009 at 3:41 pm

    I have also encountered clients who collect reports but ultimately don’t have an action plan for the metrics, and it looks good but without a cause and effect approach, little gets done to really improve the customer experience ( and your bottom line).
    The other interesting pattern is that people have a tendency to blame their analytics program as not being good enough. When in reality if there are sufficient parameters to sort the data, any program will do as long as one uses the same program for analysis of the data.

  3. Valeri says:
    June 17, 2009 at 9:46 pm

    Usually the action plan is to report to senior management that the site is getting visitors and page views and is therefore relevant. However, the missing piece is the user experience. It would be better if companies spent their budget on measuring the user experience and creating a sound web strategy based on user data, as opposed to taking the volume based approach to the success of their website and analyzing a bunch of numbers that are open to interpretation and could lead them in the wrong direction. (I just finished a report for a company that used both WebTrends and Google Analytics. Each tool returned different metrics. Just goes to show you that software can’t be trusted.)

  4. Peter de Gosztonyi says:
    June 17, 2009 at 10:50 pm

    One of the key recommendations we make is to NOT mix or compare software outputs as each have different algorithms to screen out search engines spiders and other unwanted visitors. The important fact is that the data is relative, not absolute, so it is important to establish a benchmark and then compare the results to that benchmark. It is the incremental change that provides the real information. Similarly on a website with lots of traffic, one can establish control lines or identify trends and relate those back to specific marketing actions ( such as a newsletter) to see the impacts of various actions. Stick with only one analytics program and use it to track your business measures that were establish as part of the web strategy ( based on user experience)

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