Reporting vs Analysis

I promised to share what we learned at eMetrics with the consultant community and those of you that read our blog. I’ll start today and will do more in the next little while, but it has been extremely busy and it seems that when you leave the office for 3 days and you come back, you are 6 days behind. I am not sure how this happens every time :-).

One thing I’ll start off with is the important of the analysis. When it comes to web analytics, a lot of the time we tend to focus on reporting and we kid ourselves by calling it analysis. No matter what tool you use, be it Urchin reports, Google Analytics, ClickTracks, or whatever, they key thing is not to print a fancy report about the top visited pages and brag to the customer about how many visitors we drove to these pages. Rather, you’d want to look at the top visited pages and see how many of these pages are leading to conversion. What good is it if we drive 10 000 visitors to a page and that page has a 95% bounce rate! (i.e. 9 500 visitors left the site without visiting other pages)

So as marketing consultants, we know the goals of our clients and the goals of their websites, so we drive traffic to their websites. The next logical thing is to analyze what takes place on the site, analyze the traffic source, and then improve the overall user experience which will naturally lead to achieving the objectives of the site owner.
In June, I’ll be covering more on analysis at the Web Analytics Webinar Series on www.e-nor.com. Be sure to tune in, and if you have any specific questions, a scenario, or a general comment, I’d love to hear from you. Just post your comment here or e-mail me directly.
For those of you in or close to Dublin, Ireland, I’ll be doing my Ambassador Training Workshop on May 24 and 25, and plan to focus on analytics. So sign up today I’d love to see you there!