Analytics Love: Rekindling the Romance

Sometimes I feel like a marriage counselor. People ask me all the time how to sell the idea of web analytics within the organization, how to rekindle the enthusiasm that everyone felt back when they first signed on for web analytics.

As with any relationship, enthusiasm for web analytics doesn’t grow on its own, and it can’t live in a vacuum.

Often, what I see happening is that marketers begin generating reports and then don’t do anything with them. It’s like they’re expecting that one day, the report will jump up and do something, without any marketer involvement. When the needles don’t move on the reports, the love begins to die. But it’s not the fault of the analytics.

So consider these few simple ways to rekindle the love:

Step # 1. Remember what started the romance

When you implemented a web analytics program, you likely considered your key business requirements and looked at the business questions you were trying to answer.

Take a look at those questions again. What is the data telling you about those questions? Come up with a hypothesis, then run a test.

For example, was one of your goals to improve conversions? You might hypothesize that you have too much content on your home page. Maybe reducing the blocks of content to bullet points will help improve conversions.

Step # 2. Quick wins

People inherently gravitate toward success. After looking at your key business questions and coming up with a few hypotheses to test, pinpoint one or two of those things that are easy to implement and that might help you get a quick win.

Make it simple. Figure out what you may be able to do better, test it, and then measure it. Once you have a good success story, people become keenly interested.

Suddenly, instead of trying to force analytics down their throat, they’ll be coming to you.
The relationship will blossom.

If you don’t recall the business questions you were trying to answer when you implemented a web analytics program — or missed that step altogether during the implementation — give us a call. We can help you outline those questions, based on both your industry in general and your company specifically. We can also help you understand how to look at the data and come up with actionable steps to answer those questions.

• Matt Belkin
• 0 responses
•  Web analytics

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