After a few days of sunny and picturesque touring of San Francisco , I somehow pulled away to attend probably the best produced digital analytics optimization conference, eMetrics. I was especially keen on this trip as I had not attended last year, so the anticipation was high! …and I wasn’t disappointed….
Golden Gate Bridge
View from Presidio Park
The one-size fits all approach to evaluating social media efforts is broken. Most products focus on aggregating raw numerical data such as followers, fans, mentions (volume) and click activity. These numbers in isolation are misleading and do not help you evaluate or properly justify your social marketing spend.
Since it’s important to better understand where social efforts are succeeding, web analytics must focus on tying those social media interactions to actual business value. Business value would relate to interactions that are significant and related to your business needs. (See: Unilytics KPI Karta for information about building well designed Key Performance Indicators that will provide feedback directly related to your business needs and goals.) How can we identify and segment the raw numerical data for social media and derive real value?
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Why do audits happen?
Web Analytics Audits often happen because of mistrust of, or confusion in, the report data. Often organizations invest considerable resources in their web analytics system, only to find out that there are problems with the numbers. Numbers may not make sense, or can be awkward to justify. Let’s review what should happen for an audit to be effective and handle all problems.
What happens in an audit?
On the technical side:
On the business side:
What are the results?
Once the audit is completed, we compile a list of our findings, completed configuration changes, future configuration changes, code changes, and other expectations. The results of the audit set the stage for next step recommendations, governance updates and overall strategy for future initiatives.
Another week and another great seminar! This time we were in our hometown, Toronto….thanks to our Toronto attendees for an enjoyable seminar filled with great questions and ideas! The audience was quite diverse with folks from finance, travel, government, media, technology and a few others. For those who couldn’t make it, you can access our slides with the link below. Peder, Unilytics president, started the talk by professing our mantra for 2011 – web analytics is not about reporting but OPTIMIZATION!
Unilytics has been taking the message of optimization on the road to eMetrics in San Francisco and Toronto, Webtrends Engage, Unilytics’ seminar last week in Ottawa, and our seminar yesterday in Toronto… finally we are turning some heads! The inspiration for our new mantra is the result of too many organizations who are merely collecting simple out-of-the-box reporting. These are the same organizations that invest a great deal of financial and internal resources on their analytics but make no business decisions, website design enhancements or marketing improvements based on their web analytics results. Paradoxically, they’ll quickly admit that online marketing is highly strategic and corporately paramount.
For those who think optimization is daunting, it really isn’t. The first step is to build a set of Key Performance Indicators (KPI’s) that address your organization’s web and business goals and objectives. The next step is to configure your analytics reports to leverage your KPIs and to train the consumers of said reports how to apply the knowledge derived to make effective business decisions. This step – report interpretation – is the biggest gain in successful analytics. Ongoing web optimization will require continual monitoring of your reports to ensure you are meeting your KPIs.
You can find some of this info in our slides, or you can feel free to reach out to me and I’d be glad to have a conversation with you.
The link to our slide presentations is here: http://www.unilytics.com/slides/TorontoSeminar2011-Slides.pdf
Don’t forget to follow us on Twitter: @unilytics
Thanks to all who joined us for yet another exciting analytics seminar in Ottawa! Our customers have asked us for a while now to do another one of these educational sessions; the last one we did was 18 months ago but with software development schedules, a full consulting calendar and other attention grabbing tasks we just didn’t have the time.
The good news for our attendees is we amassed a wealth of experience and knowledge in digital analytics and we were able to impart that to them. The good news for us is that we got to meet a lot of very passionate people and a highly mature audience about analytics. Analytics is growing! Our talk included an overview of the state of web analytics, log file management, SharePoint analytics, improving 1:1 marketing, social and a demo of Webtrends 10. We also discussed automated dashboards and that still grabs all analytics producer’s ears; the need to automate the collection of data from disparate sources and significantly, view all analytics KPIs in one place so they can determine how well (or not) their digital marketing is performing within 30-60s is heavily sought after. And we have an app for that!
Thanks as well to the great questions like Kerry from Irdeto who inquired about social media tracking and strategy– that continues to be a prominent topic. With a new focus on social and mobile, Webtrends 10 will allow for greater social measurement of Facebook such as tracking for pages; enhanced measurement for FB apps; and complete data from Facebook API. Now all you have to worry about is the strategy for which we can offer some helpful ideas about. On the mobile side v10 will measure and compare apps and mobile sites on all mobile platforms with plans for iTunes App Store download reporting.
We’ll be in Toronto on May 26th delivering the same talk so if you are in the area please feel free to join us: http://www.unilytics.com/seminar2011.shtml and if you are not let us know and we’ll send you the slides. Also, we’ll be tweeting from the seminar so check that out (@Unilytics) and feel free to send us your questions!
Until next time….
