May

17

A [hopefully] clearer picture of the future analyst

Filed Under About Web Analytics | 2 Comments

Thanks to everyone who read last week’s post “I don’t want a web analytics job.”

A dude in Ottawa replied to me that he wrote a follow-up post, and I think it’s very good, but I have a few follow-up notes.

Atlanta Analytics posts are all about fanning the flames and pushing for change in this industry by getting you thinking; not giving anyone a checklist of how to get there, which is first, impossible and second, assumes my audience is less capable or creative than I imagine you are. We are adolescents, as an industry, and need to realize that what we see today — how companies are structured and what roles exist — isn’t what the future looks like.

But that future won’t change much unless we usher it in the right direction. The future role of an analyst isn’t a CIO. Maybe a CEO at best in an SMB environment — they will be the ones starting and/or turning these online companies around. But probably (especially in a big company), it’s going to be a VP-level digital strategist of sorts, but one who is hands-on and must exit of his digital cave every now and then. The best outcome would be taking the job of running the entire site over from the CMO, maybe creating a new position of CWO, who is a person who “gets it” on all fronts. Those people do exist. They are the future of current-day analysts and other rare positions that are unspecialized by nature. I can’t think of a more concrete and actionable recommendation than that (maybe not concrete, but that’s about as much direction as is possible in changing our world). Let’s get there.

Getting traction with web analytics is hard. Winning a gold medal is hard. Getting a business built is hard. Everything is hard. And I really don’t care. And am I am saying web analytics is beneath us? Absolutely! It is! Who in the hell wants this job after they’ve done it for a while? We all want the job to evolve. We want to be involved. We want to get a piece of the action. And no, that doesn’t require us being executives, but it does require us to move beyond reports, tests, etc. and learn what’s really happening in the business so we can come up with recommendations and own them all the way to the end, rather than passing them off to someone else to manage. We want to get out of the weeds (and let the future of the industry get into them), and start to take this incredibly-rare, unbiased, multi-discipline understanding to its logical application.

If you do not aspire to be an executive (or close), holistically managing the site, you will be an analyst forever. If you aren’t spending more time learning about what generates cash flow than you’re spending learning what generates page views, you are getting passed. It’s perfectly fine if you love this job and want to stay right where you are, but be aware that you are only of marginal value to a business. This job is worth a million-dollar salary, easy. But only if we get to the real world and own this set of skills. Really own it and its implications.

We spend a lot of time talking about executive buy-in, convincing organizations to be data-driven, etc., and how hard it all is. And it’s true. It is hard. But until we can get a CFO to attend eMetrics and not want to hang himself in his shower after a day of sessions, we are not there. It’s great for us to refine our skills (and eMetrics is a phenomenal learning opportunity), but there are two sides to the job, and two languages we need to learn. We are incredibly skilled at our own language, but incredibly inept at the language of business, resource allocation, process management, operations, etc. where our findings really have application. This is the language that will create change. Is inept too strong a word? Maybe, but the analysts on the front page of the WSJ are not of the web variety, yet.

Let’s get there. There isn’t a “road map.” There isn’t a list of instructions. It’s going to require you to get creative with your executives, because every business is different. And believe me, if there was a list of instructions, you’re not going to get that million-dollar paycheck. Ever.

Apr

22

A Better Definition of Web Analytics

Filed Under About Web Analytics, Practicing Web Analytics, Web Analytics in Business | 9 Comments

In my presentation yesterday (thanks to everyone who came!), I mentioned a new definition of web analytics after seeing how lame the definition on wikipedia is:

Wikipedia: “web analytics”

Web analytics is the measurement, collection, analysis and reporting of internet data for purposes of understanding and optimizing web usage.

It’s not that this definition is wrong. It’s more or less technically correct, but it doesn’t focus on output, value, the weight of the actions associated (measurement, collection, analysis, reporting), and it’s just that it’s not marketable. For the purposes of wikipedia and the fact that the definition has to fit tools, people, an industry, and a practice, well…I can live with it there. But I was disturbed that “analysis” was only one of four verbs that fit the description, so I was hoping for an inspiring definition of “analysis”:

Wikipedia: “analysis”

Analysis is the process of breaking a complex topic or substance into smaller parts to gain a better understanding of it.

Fail. I’m equally disappointed in this one. While this may again be true from the analyst’s perspective, I don’t think it captures the output or the value of analysis at all, nor does it accurately describe the true conclusion of analysis. Yes, analysis may consist of breaking things down into smaller pieces, but that is not what helps us understand things. The understanding comes once you begin to realize the ecosystem that is in place: how these various smaller pieces interact and influence each other.

And the real output of analysis is communication in simple terms, not understanding. It’s the spreading of understanding, in our business. It’s wonderful for us (the practitioners) to analyze and understand things, but completely wasted if we’re not able to convey this understanding to others in a variety of simpler languages specific to the audience.

So, here’s my new and improved (at least according to me) definition of web analytics that we analysts should use to market ourselves to executives:

Web analytics is an unbiased discipline that actively finds and validates business opportunities by studying the habits and behavior of users, competitors, and trends in the “big picture”.

This describes what web analytics is in terms of output and value (and process), not just in terms of execution. The reason I don’t like the wikipedia definition is because it does not touch at all on context or purpose, and to me almost comes across sounding like on-demand operational overhead, rather than a proactive, value-generating process. The context/purpose of web analytics is its service to a business: the identification and validation of business opportunities (both for the web and in other areas). I completely disagree with the notion that the output of web analysis is always web-centric, so I see no reason whatsoever to say that the purpose of web analytics is optimizing web usage. The output can be thousands of things from offline advertising, to pricing, to shipping carriers, to CMS re-evaluations, to compensation plans, to organizational charts and workflow and process, and on and on. Most often, the output probably will be web-centric, but defining web analytics as web-centric makes us far less valuable than we are capable of being.

Sorry…sometimes I get a bit over-passionate :)

It also includes the analysis of competitors, which Avinash has covered in incredible depth (listen to him!), and of course a constant ear on the rail of the big picture. The “big picture” really describes the greater ecosystem of both the Internet and your large-scale business tides. Without paying attention to the fact that the housing market is tanking, that twitter has exploded as a news source (or untamed brand trashing arena) in your industry, or that the price of production at your company has increased 20%, all of this “webby” stuff we bury our faces in all day really doesn’t matter. We are accountable to context, and this “big picture” view is where stuff like @comcastcares comes from, or should come from, at least. Juicy stuff.

Finally, saying that web analytics is for the purpose of improving/optimizing web usage or specific offline changes is really only a small part of the story. As I wrote in a Search Engine Land post, “The Real Value of Web Analytics,” making your site a better, more conversion-prone web asset is a wonderful outcome of web analytics, but the problem is that most companies are completely paralyzed by operational inefficiencies and departments that don’t work as a team. The best possible output of web analytics for most companies is what happens when they watch themselves struggle to actually execute.

Just like how doctors can put a dye in your blood to see valve issues and leaks in your heart, you can watch your company execute and see the issues in your processes and teams, which can teach you how to improve your company. When you can improve operations, you can improve your web site at the speed of light, and annihilate the competition.

Give it some thought. And write some of those thoughts here in the comments!

Jan

8

What is web analytics?

Filed Under About Web Analytics | 2 Comments

So it’s always one of those unanswerable questions: “You’re a web analytics person?  What exactly does that mean?”

Well, I did my best, and it only took me a few hours. Take a moment to read through the web analytics page, where we discuss what web analytics “is”, or what it really should be.  It’s long, but I’d love to hear your thoughts and feedback,so we can come up with a short version to tell our friends and families who say, “Evan does Internet stuff…I don’t get it.”

The important thing to remember is that we’re generalists.  Web analytics people simply cannot be specialists: it clouds the analyst’s judgment.  But being a generalist doesn’t mean that you can’t be good at many things.  In fact, it means you have to be good at a lot of things.  Think what would happen if your doctor wasn’t good enough to recognize the difference between a bruise and a tumor.  He has to know enough to point you in the right direction, and being a web analytics practitioner places a lot of burden on you to know a great many things about usability, design, information architecture, marketing, search engine optimization, the financial fundamentals of your business, and more.  Sometimes you might not be able to solve the problems on your own, but without you, the company may have never even known there was a problem.

So please have a read through it and let me know what you think.  We’ll get started soon on more of the juicy “make you an analytics ninja” content, but I’d love to lay out a good footing for what we’re hoping to do here, so please contribute if you think anything could be better.  There is very little content out there about the fundamentals of what we do, and that’s exactly what businesses need right now: without a basic and fundamental understanding of the value of web analytics, we can never hope to execute on all of the cool things we’ve learned.