Do you ever think that all of the hours you spend compiling analytics reports for your website are wasted because nobody reads them?
You’re probably right.
Just because everything is measurable, doesn’t mean you should report on everything.
Your audience will become overwhelmed with reports that they can’t translate into anything actionable.
Before you share analytics reports with the entire management staff of your company, take time to think about which reports will actually matter to them.
Establish Key Performance Indicators for each department. Make sure your website has the information and interaction necessary to help each department measure how they’re doing based on those KPIs. Then, share the analytics specific to those KPIs only with those who care about them and can take action.
Your Customer Service Department probably doesn’t care that your website has received 250,000 unique visitors so far this month, unless you can also show them that last month the site only received 120,000 unique visitors. And, this month the visits to the FAQs page was 75% higher than previous months and submission to your Contact Us form were 90% higher than previous months.
If you’ve established that your website’s goals include reducing costs associated with your Customer Service Department, this report would actually be meaningful and actionable to the Customer Service Manager.
Instead of thanking you for your report and tossing it into the trash, he’d engage you in a conversation about beefing up the FAQs to include answers to the questions they’ve been inundated with recently.
Not sure where to start? Here are a few resources I’ve found quite helpful.
- Web Analytics Demystified by Eric Peterson
- The Big Book of Key Performance Indicators by Eric Peterson
- Web Analytics: An Hour A Day by Avinash Kaushik
- Occam’s Razor Web Analytics Blog by Avinash Kaushik