Is there such a thing as “too much information” on the web?

Yes, and no.

As I am immersing myself in the field of web analytics, I have been playing around with Google Analytics on a friend’s website, a Spanish-language social network. This site has as many entry and exit pages as there are members – thousands. Plus, the main conversion that the site owners are looking for is new members registrations, but the traditional methods of funnel “leakage” and atrition have proven to be difficult to implement.

Obviously we are still playing with the appropriate reporting method for the key performance indicator’s that are important to the site’s success, and with thousands of so-called “landing pages,” I have become slightly overwhelmed in filtering through the data to understand which measurements are relevant.

Obviously the web is providing marketers and managers with more business intelligence than EVER before, but companies likely don’t know what to do with this mass amount of information. While analytics appplications like Google Analytics and WebTrends are  relatively “easy-to-use,” it takes an experienced analyst to clearly define and disseminate the appropriate site statistics, trends, and information in a way that provides managers and site owners with key, actionable insights.

This is the basis of The Big Book of Key Performance Indicator’s by Eric Peterson of Web Analytics Demystified, a purchase prompted by my own frustrations, especially as it came with a set of “plug-and-play” spreadsheets that I hope will better focus my work in a way that leads me to the correct conclusions about improvements to my site.

As Peterson says in the introduction:

“For nearly everyone, the “right” reports are the exact reports they need to succeed in their job, nothing
more, and nothing less, presented in language that they understand…[these reports] are specific to the
business, the line of business and the stakeholder and need to be individually deployed.”