Three analytics you'll meet in 2.0

Are you ready for Web Analytics 2.0? It's okay to wince at yet another 2.0 buzzword, but open your eyes just wide enough to scope the opportunity. Like many retailers, your Web analytics past may have left you drowning in data, buried in reports and puzzling over generic key performance indicators that have limited application to your own unique business problems.

Take another look. The next generation of Web analytics is less about reports and more about actions and outcomes. It's about what happens on your Website, but also about why. It's less about waiting for an elusive “big win” to justify expensive software and more about investing in people and a series of changes that can make a real difference to your Web business' bottom line.

But what exactly is Web analytics, anyway? According to the Web Analytics Association, it is the measurement, collection, analysis and reporting of Internet data for the purposes of understanding and optimizing Web usage.

Before you hand this article to your engineer or data cruncher, hang on: Programmers and analysts play a vital role here, but so do the marketer, merchant, or owner. Remember, Web Analytics 2.0 is about people — all kinds of people.

Another definition: People are the intelligent, irrational, distracted, and determined folks your site needs to serve for your business to succeed. Some of them are clicking through your Website, others are sitting in the cube near you. Sadly, this special interest group — people — has been historically underserved by Web analytics.

For years, Web analytics software vendors chased marketshare by offering increasingly complex tools with more and more features — these were the reports that eventually buried their customers. To be fair, it was often the customer who asked for the latest report, hoping that one more fix might finally lead to insight rather than to the frustration of plenty of data but no clear course of action.

A related challenge, and one that remains, was the lack of trained analysts needed to extract value from the tools that companies purchased.

The past two years have seen notable changes. Google rocked the competitive landscape with its free Google Analytics software. While large multichannel retailers often still have sound justification for purchasing a premium tool, there's no question that “free” commands attention. (Google has now introduced a multivariate testing tool, too. Like Google Analytics, it's free with an Adwords account.)

Also significant, Web 2.0 technologies have diminished the primacy of the page view and other key metrics in first-generation Web analytics. With rich Internet applications, entire visitor sessions can occur on a single page, and with RSS feeds, your customers may read pages of your content without ever visiting your site. Cookie deletion and Javascript breakage have always been challenges to metrics accuracy — and they haven't gone away.

These three factors — too many reports and too few analysts, a credible free tool, and disruptive technologies — drew the curtain on the first generation of Web analytics. Now let's meet three people who can shape the outcome of the next generation of Web analytics — in your business.

Iintroducing the decision maker. The first person we'll meet in Web Analytics 2.0 is you. You might be the owner, site manager, or the vice president of e-commerce who signed the check, but let's assume you're the person who decided to launch (or fix) a Web analytics program in your firm and that you're interested in extracting maximum value.

To guide your program to success, start by looking away from the screen — and all those reports. You need to answer a vital question, and then ask a few more.

Answer this question, in 15 words or less: Why does our company have a Website? Your answers may look something like this:

1. To sell product
2. To generate catalog requests
3. To collect e-mail addresses
4. To answer customer questions

Of course, your answers may vary — for instance, you may be a lead generation site, or a customer service site. The point is to isolate the critical few business outcomes that spell success for your site. As a leader, your responsibility is to keep your Web analytics program laser-focused on attaining these outcomes.

Focus your team by asking the right questions. What are the key business questions you need your Web analytics program to answer? (Hint: They must have true potential to influence your desired outcomes.) Sample questions:

• How does our Website affect sales in our call center?
• Which of the articles in our help center are really helping conversion?
• Which of our online marketing channels are most efficient?
• Would a Flash demo help us sell more of this new product?