11-Jun-09 10:00 PM  EDT  

Does your team spend more time using the web analytics solution than making optimizations? 

Six months ago, your organization decided to go for a sophisticated web analytics solution. The implementation was carried out under the supervision of a product consulting team. The Product vendor suggested your organization to send their employees for 1-week training. Your management decided to send 1 representative from each department i.e. Online Marketing, Merchandising, E-Commerce and Operations. After going through a grilling 1-week of training, your team comes back to their individual departments with 1 question in their mind i.e. What's Next?

While, your management is thinking about, how to create a culture in the organization where, more and more employees participate in creating opportunities for optimization, and help us in achieving a 10-15% increase in the site revenue.

The team starts using the tool based on the training provided by the vendor but, despite of spending 3-4 Hrs/Week for 3 months, no significant lift in the traffic and revenue was observed. The management is confused and frustrated with the tool capabilities but, not focusing on important aspect i.e. how the tool is being utilized by individual departments?

Here are certain questions; I would recommend management should ask their individual departments?

• What % of time your employees spend in observing the basic clickstream metrics i.e. Visits, Unique Visitors, Revenue, Orders, AOV, Basket Size, Average Selling Price etc.?
• What % of their time they spend in reconciliation between in-house transactional system and the web analytics solution?
• What % of their time they spend in reading and interpreting the data?

You will be surprised to know that, more than 90% of your team time gets spend towards above activities instead of focusing on following areas, which have a potential to create opportunities for optimization for e.g.

• Try to understand the Pathing Behavior of your online visitors.
• Keep an eye on the return frequency of your online visitors.
• Check the bounce rate on your key landing pages.
• Look at the navigational behavior of your campaign visitors and segment it based on different channels so that; you could smartly optimize your marketing budget
• Measure the value of your key landing pages and check their contribution in the conversion process
• Calculate the lifetime value of your paid search keywords and check the trend month over month. May be you are wasting too much money on your paid search channel and all the credit is getting cannibalized by your super affiliates or organic channel
• Your marketing initiatives may not be driving the incremental sales month over month but, they might be contributing to the store sales. So; keep an eye on what % of your online traffic is engaging with the store locator?
• Check the % of Null Searches happening on the site and identify the search keywords and the referring pages.
• Is your team spending the entire focus on a 1-2% of your online visitors who are entering in to the conversion funnel rather than, understanding the behavior of remaining 97% visitors, who are not even reaching your shopping cart? Is there is a mismatch between your visitor objectives and the merchandising strategy?

As always, I appreciate your comments, feedback and ideas for the new post. Please let me know, how your team is spending their time using the tool?

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For additional information on this Web Analytics article, please contact:

Sushant Ajmani
(610) 551-9118

Source: Sushant Ajmani

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