July 2006

Metrics 101: Don't Divorce Content
from Analytics

If content owners don't work hand in hand with your Web analytics team, your website will turn into one big waste of time and money.

By Bob Kane

 This article is the second of a series.
Read the first installment.
Read the third installment.

In the first installment of Metrics 101, Bob Kane examined the fundamentals of Web metrics. Once you've figured out what to measure, however, you need to understand what those results are telling you. If you're like most companies, you might be doing this in a way that wastes time and valuable resources.

How it Goes Awry

Analytics are complicated—due to the nature of the tools and reports, and the fact that using a Web analytic system isn't anyone's primary job function—so companies usually hire an outside vendor specializing in Web analytics to measure and report the numbers. What typically happens is that every month, this company prepares an activity report for the previous month and sends it over to the appropriate stakeholders within the organization. The stakeholders look at the numbers and try to make sense of them, they ask questions, they get unsatisfactory answers, and finally they let it go because they have to focus on their actual job responsibilities. As a result, the analytics don't inform the communication efforts, no one understands their customers' Web behavior, and valuable resources are wasted.

Here's the rub: The vendor you hired knows how to count page views on your site, but the company doesn't know about your customers, your messaging, or your content strategy. If the people who are trying to analyze your site performance don't know crucial information—when you published a piece of content, where you published it on your site, or what other content was running on the site at the same time—they can't provide you with anything other than a list of numbers.

Tap Your Team's Knowledge

Perhaps an article was pulled early for a late-breaking company announcement. Perhaps a problem with the content management system prevented content from showing up on the site. Perhaps a piece was targeted at a lower trafficked site section because it was a message to a particular audience sub segment. Or perhaps a particular piece received an exceptional promotional treatment, which resulted in higher than normal traffic. All of these explanations are reasonable, but your Web analytics vendor won't know any of them.

So if you want a meaningful communication program, you need to have a feedback loop in place that involves both the content creators and the Web analytics team. These teams can both report results and put them in context with analysis that takes the above factors into account.

Management should never receive a report of Web analytics without some accompanying analysis from the content owners to put those results into perspective. And just as the Web analytics team doesn't know the specifics of the content you're publishing, the chances are that management also doesn't know the specifics of content. By publishing numbers to management without analysis, you run the risk of an executive saying something like "looks like your program is tanking."

Process Makes Perfect

You need to have enough time in your process to follow these basic steps for preparing a metrics report suitable for public consumption. While these steps may not work for everyone, they are a starting point when pulling together Web metrics.

1. Identify those pieces of content you wish to report on for a given time period.
2. Ask the Web analytics team to collect the results for the content for the given period.
3. Ask the content owner(s) to review the results for anomalies and inconsistencies.
4. Instruct content owners to provide feedback to the Web analytics team on results to rerun/validate. Have them provide guidance on other factors to look at, such as page performance of referring pages.
5. Have the Web analytics team provide updated numbers/results from input of content owners.
6. Draft analysis documents to accompany numbers from the Web analytics team.
7. Give the analysis to the Web analytics team to review and ask them to provide feedback to content owners.
8. Instruct content owners to incorporate feedback and publish results to interested parties.

As you can see, this process is more involved than just collecting and publishing numbers. But with the added sanity check and analysis, you will have useful feedback to help make your online programs meet your marketing goals.

About the author:

Bob Kane is Tendo's editorial strategist.