On The Trail

I just finished watching the archived version of Jupiter’s recent webinar titled How to Drive Business Success with Web Analytics: Best Practices and Proven Strategies. Eric Peterson of Jupiter Research and Matt Belkin of Omniture were the presenters.

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As usual Eric Peterson was excellent. He discussed staffing levels (from 1/2 position dedicated to Web Analytics at a minimum, increasing with the number people who use the web analytics data in the organization). These numbers are fairly sensible and wildly out of line with where most companies are today. Today the standard practice at many companies is to purchase a solid mid range analytics package and then assign no one to use it. Peterson points out the absurdity of this — you can’t expect to get results unless someone is in charge of getting and acting on the information the tool outputs. Of course, this was my favorite part of the talk since, well, looks like demand for people with my experience will be pretty good for a while.
He also spoke about how to get people to actually care about web analytics information. The 5 points he laid out bear repeating:

• Make it palatable. In other words put it in a convenient, readable format that is easy to access.
• Make it about business problems. Interpret the numbers so people readily understand why they are important (and why they can help the company make money)
• Make it everybody’s problem. Involve everyone with a stake, particularly IT and management. Communicate the results effectively.
• Make it about people. He re-told a story from Sam Decker of Dell where he showed a picture of a full football stadium, then shrunk it down and duplicated it 10 times on the next slide. He said that is a half million people, that’s how many folks abandoned their shopping carts last week. That’s a lot of people, and they’re all struggling to spend money on your web site. How can you help them do it?
• Make it worth their while financially. People work better when they have a good incentive.

Matt Belkin spoke for the second half. He stressed the importance of using key performance indicators (KPIs) and talked about important KPIs for various types of websites. Eric Peterson’s Book has much better coverage of this material, and you could get through a good chunk of it in the time that Belkin talks. That said, he did give a good intro to the material. To his credit he stressed that the analytics tool doesn’t matter much (he works for tool vendor Omniture), it’s really how people use the information produced.