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Guest Blogger: Lee Isensee (@OMLee)Hello Web Analytics World followers! It is a great honor to join our friends and competitors on the Web Analytics World blog, there have been some fantastic posts and comments here thus far and we hope to continue the trend in our own little corner of the site.
When Manoj originally approached Unica to blog on the site there was an immediate interest amongst multiple people within the company that wanted to reach out to the community so we have decided to take a bit of a team approach to engaging with the community here. Every two weeks or so Unica will dip into our pool of energetic marketing professionals and have them address topics that are either “hot” in the market or issues that they are continuing to hear from other industry professionals, customers and/or prospects.
As with any successful blog, we hope this does not become a one direction conversation – no one likes a preachy vendor. Therefore we are asking you, our fellow web analytics enthusiasts, to comment (good, bad and ugly) about what you are reading and in response we will do our best to be as frank and honest with all of you.
With this being said, I wanted to keep our first blog short & sweet and with what, in my 10 years of experience in this industry, I consider one of the most frustrating points of a “successful” web analytics deployment. This question is something that, in all my years consulting, customers and prospects always avoided or at the very least had a hard time defining.
“When deploying solution X, what are the ‘business must-haves’, ‘business needs’ and ‘business nice to haves’ that will help the team influence the success of our company?”
This simple question harkens back to the fundamentals of actionable web analytics and KPI‘s which is; for any report you consider important, if the numbers go up or down, what are you going to do with that information that will influence your business. Many times organizations get caught up in the feature / function specifics of a particular web analytics solution or the pretty colors or the simplicity of the interface.
At the end of the day, whether the application creates a graphic that blows your CEO’s hair back or offers data in a basic text file format so that it causes even your most technical statistical analyst to fall asleep at their desk, what is the importance of the data that you are looking at?
Given this topic, what are some of the most interesting ‘must-haves’ that you have seen that ended up cluttering your web analytics solution?
Thank you for checking out our first of many blog posts and have a great web analytics day!
