Your web traffic doesn’t matter

“Excuse me,” the business owner says, “then why did we just invest the time &/or money &/or people into our web analytics tool if we’re not even going to use all of this great traffic data we’re getting? Without the comprehensive dashboard you send me every day, how else am I supposed to know if our website’s performing well?”

“Simple,” the analyst says, “you hired me [if the owner was indeed smart enough to hire you!]. And surely you paid more for me than for your tool, correct [if, again, this is an insightful owner]?”

Sure the owner’s heart may skip a beat upon hearing this, but how often have you seen their eyes glaze over when you spout off a variety of fancy metrics or acronyms (i.e. “KPI”) that you’ve so carefully gathered?  How often does he ask for an update without even looking at that well-designed dashboard?

And therein lies the opportunity…moving from an endless supply of clickstream (i.e. traffic) data to determining and answering questions that ultimately matter to the owner, sales staff, and marketing team as they serve their customers via a website or expanded web presence. And of course, this is done by finding key ACTIONABLE insights that bring useful results, and at the most basic level, answer such questions as:

• Is our social media campaign working?
• How is our new product selling?
• Did people watch our video or download our white paper?
• Where should we allocate our online dollars?
• And perhaps NOT so basic but clearly a driver — How is this benefitting the company’s bottom-line?

Of course there is the technical route to get to these answers, of which I am continually learning as I go along, but likely (a) the owners don’t care HOW you get the answers, and (b) these questions can’t always be answered with just a simple, automatically generated response as might be found in your web analytics tool. Rather, they require a deeper quantitative and qualitative analysis of the customer’s interaction with your web presence, focusing on the underlying customer needs and behaviors that ultimately drive any website changes.

This sounds like a daunting task when taking “aggregately”…but as with any iterative process, small wins can lead to bigger wins. When working with a client, this doesn’t mean “winning” by telling them what they want to hear or solving their greatest business problem right off the bat, but it DOES mean, at minimum, earning their trust with proven results, however small. As the trust builds, so can the scope of your efforts and the deeper-level recommendations you can provide.