You can’t become what you don’t measure

I met with a former colleague the other day who had recently accepted a new web marketing / communications position with a large brick and mortar retailer. As part of her new responsibilities she needed to familiarize herself with the company's website and asked whether I might be able to help her think through an approach she could take to make sense of the company's web analytics data. While she had a sense of the potential of a tool like Google Analytics, she was less familiar with how to use the tool to generate actionable insight.

Think business and set yourself up to succeed

Rather than starting with a deep dive of every menu, submenu and report available in Google Analytics, we began with a discussion of business objectives, site goals and key measures, organizational responsibilities, and the decision making process vis-à-vis the web site. I hoped that this would provide insight into ‘where’ to begin the data exploration process rather than just ‘boiling the data ocean’.

In my colleague’s case, business objectives were unclear – a site that served partly as a corporate brochure, partly as an additional platform to distribute an on-line version of their print flyers (their primary marketing vehicle is via print advertising distributed to households) and partly as a source of content in subject areas adjacent to the products they sell. The problem, we discovered together when looking at the site and the analytics data, was that for these objectives there were no goals being measured and that what was being measured did not align with their objectives.

When we discussed who was responsible for prioritizing what was posted to the site, the answer was clear – it was a marketing responsibility. But while the marketing department was responsible for site content, they had no involvement in the web analytics process, nor did they look at any web analytics data, nor even generate basic reports from the analytics solution. So how did they make decisions about their site? The words ‘it looks good in the browser’ seemed to convey the decision making process. In fact, web analytics is a foreign concept to the organization.

The conclusion that my colleague and I drew was that currently, she had no immediate way to tell whether or not the site was ‘successful’ and that a process to fill the gaps both in the data and within the organization needed to be initiated. At least now she had a starting point to turn the process around.

The next time you look at your website, ask yourself if what you are measuring helps you reach your goal of what constitutes a successful site. If you can’t put a measure to success, how do you know when you get there?